greetings friend,

When referencing this document, please remember that all depictions of anatomical structures are approximations of averages, and are all necessarily reductive. The aim of collected visuals and descriptions is to provide you with orientation points, and support you in navigating through your experience (-ing) and your research (-ing). Anatomy, as is embodied by you right now, is an emergent* phenomenon, a material expression of your and your ancestors’ continued intra-acting with the world. It is currently evidencing results of a process that has been ongoing since the literal beginning of time.

From what I can tell, most artists I admire agree that the motivation that moves one towards creativity comes from some unknowable source. What I had hoped to do with this workshop is give some examples of how it is possible to recognise, orient towards, and move with the unknowable in a critically-aware way. Critical here does not stand for negative or antagonistic. Critical stands for informed, empowered, situated, oriented, self- and co-regulated with the World. I wish you good relationships and informative, encouraging, and generous examples on your way. Strong sails and long keels with get you across the wildest of the oceans safely.

Thank you for your generosity, commitment, and patience. It was a true honour working with you.

till we meet again, pav

*Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (link)

procedure:

1. opening circle,
2. dive,
1. cerebrospinal fluid;
2. gravity;
3. cellular breathing.
3. experiment no. 1,
1. clarity;
4. lunch
5. experiment no. 2,
1. clarity with added experience;
6. closing circle.

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction

In our work we’ve touched upon the characteristics of a practice I call The Process of Materialisation of Fiction.

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction is: a developing answer to a continual questioning – and is: a self-reflective dance practice. This practice suggests a way in which to study the ability of the individual’s nervous system to translate information (back and forth) between the “felt,” “sensed,” “imagined,” “immaterial” and the “materialised,” “physicalised,” “moved,” “spoken,” “performed.”

In as much as the “felt” and “sensed” etc. is “inwardly oriented,” and so functioning in the realm of the invisible: the “intimate” or the realm of “internal dialogue;” so is the “materialised” and “physicalised” “outwardly oriented” i.e. “performed,” visible to the scrutinising gaze of the public eye. How these two worlds relate to one another is the question around which this practice is danced.

2024-08-29

i first started writing the following to add to a travel grant i was asked to hand in on behalf of a choreographer i am working for. writing this, i experienced a moment of clarity, which is why i’m sharing the text with you, as an example of dancing clarity in writing.

i like to say that my job is to make people's dreams come true.

whenever i say that sentence, i am reminded of my training; it's like something in my mind softens and i become conscious of the brilliant, relational sensitivity of my cellular existence and/or consciousness; social components of life recede in that moment, allowing bodily materiality to step into the spotlight and so transform or influence the way i can relate to others or participate in this world. it is through this process–of saying and remembering what i think my job is–that i keep becoming a dance artist.

i say 'dreams' to capture something of the range of interests and capacities i've encountered working as a dancer in the field. at one end of that range or spectrum i find something like a concern with prestige, at the other the inexplicable urge to love a seemingly random and irrelevant abstraction. a choreographer like Cristina Caprioli, whom i worked with for a better part of a decade, has required of me to hold that whole spectrum in my imaginary at 15:49h on a Tuesday afternoon as I moved along the paths determined by her materials, looking for ways to become the one who’s going to show her something that, up until that very moment, she'd only ever seen in herself.

which is where ‘truth’ becomes interesting, doesn’t it? because, of course, when talking about ‘dreams coming true’ we’re talking about something subjective, not objective and definitely not reasonable. artists, traditionally speaking, do not deal in reason. ‘reason’ is not of our lineage and was never meant to be our responsibility; we’d never have come up with ‘reason’ on our own. what artists do and have been doing, the way i understand it, was evidencing all the different ways bodies in this world are able to perceive and make sense of their environment, their experience, their relationship. artists are like gardeners of alternatives, tenders of options, committed to protecting the complexity in texture and range of what it could mean to be alive.

QUALIFICATION ≠ EVALUATION

reading list:

nonfiction

Artistic Research in a World on Fire by Lucy Cotter (link)

And Then, You Act by Anne Bogart

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (link)

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stephano Harney

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad

12 bytes by Jeanette Winterson (essays)

Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway

Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado

This Life by Martin Hägglund

Everybody by Olivia Laing

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde (essays)

The Privilege of Partial Perspective by Donna Haraway (essay, link)

Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk

anatomy

Sensing, Feeling, and Action by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (link) !!!

A Journey to the Centre of the Cell (essay, link)

The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio (feelings)

The Second Brain by Michael Gershon et al (“gut feeling”)

fiction

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Parable of the Sower + The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin

Earthsea Chronicles by Ursula K. le Guin

conversations

2023 merehobbyists in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2022 The Supergiant Star Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2019 sappho’s conversations (to Vimeo)

2018 The Event Horizon Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2018 The Event Horizon Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2018 sappho’s conversations (to Vimeo)

2015 The Moon Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2015 The Sun Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)