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.

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.

monday

1. opening circle, something about what i said made everyone present their names and how they got them. most folks knew the origin and the meaning of their name, that surprised me;
2. sensory motor, with curtains drawn. something kept coming up in the opening circle, made me want to darken the room (i also thought one class we should go out to the river);
3. sensory motor, very similar procedure to the first class. there was barely any visible movement here for a whole hour. there was lots of movement in the first class. even through we made the same agreement in both classes, i wonder how much the dancerly prejudice towards somatics influenced what was possible to understand in the second class. do i need to discuss this?;
4. closing circle, most everyone spoke. i showed images of the spine and the spinal chord and the incoming and outgoing branches of sensory and motor pathways. we discussed the flexibility of the term “pathway”.

questions:

1. overwhelm, discomfort; what to do when the experience isn’t comfortable? what is dancerly reflex to stay with the discomfort?;
2. what is a nucleus? what is a cell? if i want to get into the cellular as functioning outside of the jurisdiction of the central and peripheral nervous system.

tuesday

1. naming overwhelm, discomfort;
2. looking at the structure of “a pathway,” looking at glial cells;
3. touch demonstration;
4. touch in pairs:
1. cellular touch,
2. mind of the nervous system,
3. combing sensory,
4. combing motor,
5. mind of fat;
6. glial support, tender pressure;
7. dialoging.
5. checking in with the person asking about her pain;
6. 4 minute dance party.

questions:

1. which books to read to get a sense of structure;
1. the feeling of what happens;
2. antonio damasio;
3. adrienne maree brown.
2. what about pain?

wednesday

1. hands on, cerebrospinal fluid;
2. experiment with drawing materials: central nervous system (inner layer/circle), fluid layer (mid layer), cells meeting the universe (outer layer);
3. visiting the gallery and interpreting the data documented on paper.

thursday

1. evidence, evi-dance, evi-dance-a, evidencia;
2. dancing remembering, dancing not as professional dancing, dancing as an atmosphere, as a sense;
3. sensing one person as part of your landscape, giving yourself to being sensed by another, nobody needs to know who;
4. reflection circle, memory comes up;
5. triads: someone held, the couple’s space held by someone—degrees of support, material immaterial;
6. reflection triads;
7. expression circle.

notes for tomorrow:

1. making dreams come true, dolly parton;
2. be careful what you wish for, wishes are children;
3. the time that it takes — as an example what it takes to make a dream come true. time as a restriction, time as a physiological phenomenon.

friday

1. check in;
2. consciousness of weight, weight of consciousness;
3. storytelling circle;
4. cellular breathing;
5. check in;
6. wishes are children.

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)