greetings young padawan

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.

As I started working on this document, I got excited. Excitement expanded time. Then I got interrupted, and I had to rest. Then I had to go to work again. Then I got sick. After a couple of days of fever, I am now deciding to share this document with you in the state that it’s in today. In the top right corner, you’ll see the date on which I’d made the most recent edit. Once the final update box is checked, the document will remain unchanged.

If anything comes up while reading this document, before the final update box is checked, like a question or a comment, send me an email! Maybe you’re curious about something we did, maybe you want more information on a certain topic. Voila, I can play this game through September. Then I’ll have to stop.

all my love

pav

monday

1. opening circle;
2. Julyen Hamilton, ME everything that I can touch (what I can choose), I the untouchable (what I cannot);
3. dive;
4. reports;
5. nervous system (records, organises, stores) i.e. is in touch with the receptor, receptor is in touch with the world (cellular life).

ideas for tuesday:

• what does it mean that the receptor is in touch with the world? what does it mean that the cellular is in touch with the world?
• cellular presence, cellular breathing. the egg.
• how do we perceive time, muscle spindle. pressure.
• being in time, being as time, being time. to be. am.

proprioception / interoception / vestibular

tuesday

i document today’s procedure in a message to a friend whom i met years ago when teaching at the program she studied at. at the time, we conducted many experiments in the dark:

“i’m so sleepy, my eyes are all blurry.

we’re in a basement and, for the most part, tripping balls. today’s class, what the fuck was that. we spent half of it looking at sensory-motor and the muscle spindle, then i shut the lights off, covered everyone in three layers of tatami mats and told them stories about the muscle spindle and why, in BMC®, the spindle is considered to be the proprioceptive organ associated with the sense and sensing of time.

we were working on the AM part of I AM AN ARTIST. being, to be. being in time. time because time came up yesterday. because we were looking at how I, the phenomenon of self?, emerges, just like matter does, in time.”

british council We use the indefinite article, a/an, with singular nouns when the listener/reader does not know exactly which one we are referring to.

We also use it to show that the person or thing is one of a group.

wednesday

1. we held hands and remembered;
2. we spoke about what feels;
3. reviewed sensory + motor, added somatic VS autonomic, looked at the skeleton, reviewed the meninges;
4. yield, push, reach, pull, against the wall + with another person;
5. stacked bodies to laugh on tatami mats;
6. integrated with a sensory motor dance;
7. jeanette winterson (panfictionalisme) + karen barad + staying with the trouble (what world worlds worlds)
1. languaging as fictionalising;
2. materialising as fictionalising;
3. what you measure with determines what you can measure;
4. materialising world-making.

ideas for thursday:

5. the sun practice? should i dance?;
6. performativity, how do we code meaning into gesture? how do we code meaning into symbol? (artist as symbol);
7. standing in front of the crowd.

thursday

1. performed The Sun Practice;
2. introduced the theory of performativity, meaning as potential;
3. looked at intra-action, entities (identities) as non-existed until co-created within the event of intra-action;
4. stepping into the spotlight exercise — in 45 minutes, only 3 persons got to step into the spotlight. the conversation was flowing, poignant, delicious.

friday

1. proprioception and imagination;
2. working with imagery, affect, material;
3. action and imagination — how to facilitate;
4. what happens when it’s escaping one reality;
5. dream work;
6. facilitation, queerness, what if people who don’t identify don’t come—communication, co-creation;
7. collective library of somatic performance;
8. practice and performance.

things to document:

relating to the letter:

the way i understand it for myself, BMC® is a non-invasive critical and embodied knowledge-making method or methodology.

2024-08-02

this letter was written in Kleines Kafe where the palm reading scene from Before Sunrise was filmed, it was read last on the Friday afternoon in place of goodbye and good luck

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 this week 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, quite the contrary. Critical means informed, empowered, sitated, oriented, self- and co-regulated with the World. I with you good relationships and informative, encouraging, and enerous examples on your way. Strong sails and long keels with get you across the wildest of the oceans safely.

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 and a festival we’ll be participating at later this fall.

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.

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)