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.
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)
website:
www.pavleheidler.com/2024-skh
password:
observingworlds
most recent update:
2024-12-13
added notes from today’s class and information on muscle protein coordination
2024-12-09
(i will add a paragraph on nerve-combing and nerve-streaming before 12-20. before then, if interested, read the questions below and take some notes. those might come in handy later on, when you read more about the aforementioned techniques techniques.)
table of content
procedure:
DEC 2, Monday
- the synapse;
- starting with the physics of touch (electromagnetic charge, charged negative space) and the hand-to-hand experiment (sensing into the warmth that builds up between hands, sensing into the resistance that builds up between hands);
- speculating as to how that sense of charged negative space between hands could attest to the space that is the synaptic gap;
- meditation, sitting in the synapse.
referenced reading:
“Touch, for a physicist, is but an electromagnetic interaction. A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing it does not involve is . . . well, touching. That is, there is no actual contact involved. You may think you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug. Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or seem to), but what you are actually sensing, physicists tell us, is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. (Electrons are tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms, and having the same charges they repel one another, much like powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them the repulsive force increases.) Try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other.” (Barad 2015)
DEC 3, Tuesday
- the synapse, continued;
- opening dance, how does not doing something create space, or an opportunity, for observation, for something to occur (inref. somatic and autonomic nervous system);
- synapse as a space of regulation, we looked back at the sensory-motor coördination, adding the synaptic gaps into the system: e.g., at the posterior of the spine, where sensory (afferent) nerves come meet the spinal cord;
- nerve-combing.
nerve-combing
One person said, my right leg is in heaven. This is what heaven feels like to my leg.
How did your limb get affected by nerve-combing? What immediate, involuntary reactions do you remember experiencing during the experiment? Or right after the experiment?
One person said, this material really stayed with me. I found myself thinking-feeling back to it through the day. This is not always the case.
What kind of experiences did you have hours after the experiment took place? What thoughts, feelings, sensations came up during the day, or the night, or the next day?
(i will add a paragraph on nerve-combing before 12-20)
referenced reading:
The Conversation Everything we see is a mash-up of the brain’s last 15 seconds of visual information
Lucy Cotter’s essay Artistic Research in a World on Fire
DEC 5, Thursday
- the synapse, continued;
- thinking back to the question of “direction” (does a nerve cell work only in a single direction?), we considered “specialisation” (a cell may be specialised to function or operate in a specific way, which does not mean that it cannot do anything else. the question is, what are the consequences of specialised cells working outside of their speciality?);
- nerve-streaming.
nerve-streaming
One person said, during streaming demonstration—initial sensory, yeah. I don’t know that I feel anything specific. During initial motor—first contrast, they said, WOW and started laughing, joyfully, loudly. I remember appreciating that reaction by saying, now that’s an involuntary reaction.
What was it like to see witness the clarity of an involuntary reaction? What part of it, your experience, was exciting? What part of it, your experience, was humbling?
How did you make sense of your own experience of streaming or being streamed? What did not make sense at first? What made sense afterwards?
(i will add a paragraph on nerve-streaming before 12-20)
one person said… is a poem written from memory. more than documenting what was said, the poem documents what was remembered. reading the poem, one can speculate as to what remembering tells about the one who remembers; about their interests, their capacities, their values.
one person said… is a stylised, subjective approach to documentation.
DEC 13, Friday
- muscle release experiment;
- we briefly discussed muscle structure, and the coordination between actin and myosin (proteins) during a contraction. main focus was on the energy required to deactivate a contraction (ATP) by releasing the actin-myosin bond (see study material);
- using the bar, we conducted the experiment whereby we hung off the bar in a flexed position, engaging the muscles through movement of our limbs in concentric and eccentric contractions. by stabiling our bodies and disengaging movement, we engaged isometric contraction until our muscles burn. at the point of a gentle but persistent burn, we engaged a slow release of whole body into gravity, with the intention of adding energy through the release with which to support the deactivation of actin-myosin bonds, and the reduction of activity in our muscle tissue.
- on the last try (out of three) we added the support of the connective tissue into the mix, where connective tissue and bone worked to distribute the stress of the exercise through the structure.
- in the end, we discussed different hands-on methods with which to support muscle release. specifically looking at the difference between two approaches, (1) direct: supporting the release by engaging with muscle fibre, (2) indirect, contextual: supporting the release by engaging with connective tissue.
muscle streaming
(i will add a paragraph on nerve-streaming before 12-20)
questions?
if any questions come up, please send them to me at
pavleheidler@pavleheidler.com
i’ll respond as soon as i’m able
instagram @pavleheidler
2024-08-29 making dreams come true
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.
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)
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