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    2024 vilnius shared document

    2024 vilnius shared document

    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.

    📖

    last updated:

    2024-11-05 (added link to sensing, feeling, and action)

    final update in place

    previous update:

    2024-11-21 (reading list)

    2024-09-16 (anatomy section)

    2024-09-09

    📖

    password:

    vilniussummerdanceintensive

    website:

    https://pavleheidler.com/2024vilnius-d

    icon

    table of contents

    • greetings young padawan
    • 2024-08-29
    • procedure
    • monday
    • tuesday
    • wednesday
    • thursday
    • friday
    • content/references:
    • reading list:
    • conversations
    • videos and quotes:
    • anatomy

    procedure

    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.

    content/references:

    hands, vilnius © 2024 pavleheidler
    hands, vilnius © 2024 pavleheidler

    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)

    ‣

    videos and quotes:

    📖

    Bogart 2007, p. 95 (and then, you act)

    “I own an old Tiffany clock, inherited from my grandparents. It is a clock that must be would by hand once a week. One day, in my haste and insensitivity, I would the clock too hard and it broke. My hand had not sensed the millisecond that the winding had reached its limit. I executed the move and plenty of feedforward—intent and will—but experienced very little feedback. I turned it too aggressively and the mechanism broke.

    The French director Ariane Mnouchkine proposes that an actor needs to be ‘concave and convex’ and describes receptivity as active. The mark of a great actor is the ability to balance feedforward with feedback. An actor with a lot of feedforward and not enough feedback comes across as aggressive and invulnerable. Although we may be impressed by their prowess, ultimately it is hard to find empathy or interest in their situation. An actor with too little feedforward and an excess of feedback merely seems narcissistic or lethargic. Again, you do not care about them. An effective actor extends out into the world and at the same time allows him- or herself to receive impressions back and be charged by the experience. as an audience, we viscerally live through the actor’s sensual taste of the moment’s returns.”

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    Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

    You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

    📖

    brown 2017, p. ?? (Emergent Strategies)

    “What is Emergence?

    ‘Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions’—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. There are examples of emergence everywhere. Birds don’t make a plan to migrate, raising resources to fund their way, packing for scarce times, mapping out their pit stops. They feel a call in their bodies that they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other, each bringing their adaptations. There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other. (Responding to destiny together.) Destiny is a calling that creates a beautiful journey. Emergence is beyond what the sum of its parts could even imagine. A group of caterpillars or nymphs might not see flight in their future, but it’s inevitable. It’s destiny. Oak trees don’t set an intention to listen to each other better, or agree to hold tight to each other when the next storm comes. Under the earth, always, they reach for each other, they grow such that their roots are intertwined and create a system of strength that is as resilient on a sunny day as it is in a hurricane. Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance. But each seed can create a field of dandelions. We are invited to be that prolific. And to return fertility to the soil around us. Cells may not know civilization is possible. They don’t amass as many units as they can sign up to be the same. No—they grow until they split, complexify. Then they interact and intersect and discover their purpose—I am a lung cell! I am a tongue cell!—and they serve it. And they die. And what emerges from these cycles are complex organisms, systems, movements, societies. Nothing is wasted, or a failure. Emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. It’s all data.”

    📖

    Moten and Harney 2013, p. 26 (The Undercommons)

    "[...]: it cannot be denied that the university is a place or refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gipsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university." (emphasis added)

    24:26 “Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”

    📖

    Haraway 2016, p. 16 (Staying with the Trouble)

    "The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who wrote The Gender of the Gift based on her ethnographic work in highland Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), taught me that ‘it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).’ (4) Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking practices. She embodies for me the arts of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode. It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

    Strathern wrote about accepting the risk of relentless contingency; she thinks about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds. In 1933, Alfred North Withehead, the American mathematician and process philosopher who infused my sense of worlding, wrote The Adventures of Ideas. (5)

    SF is precisely full of such adventures. Isabelle Stengers, a chemist, scholar of Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, radical thinker about materiality in sciences, and an unruly feminist philosopher, gives me ‘speculative thinking’ in abundance. With Isabelle Stengers we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. In the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s philosophy, she maintains that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences. This is what she means by cosmopolitics. (6)”

    ‣

    anatomy

    As you move through different materials and engage in your own explorations, you might discover a concerning degree of variation in the descriptions of properties and capacities of anatomical structures. Remember we talked about flexible terms, using the example of a (neural) pathway, where the word pathway was shown as being used to cover the range between the metaphor of a pathway and the literal, directional input or output of a specific, singular cell. Think of that example when you get disoriented, take a moment, and—when ready—reread the sentence, retrace an image, give yourself a new experience. Alternatively, if a definition of a structure or a property does not make sense, find the one that does. Start with those descriptions, those images that you can make sense of in-the-moment, no matter how basic they may be; work with them, understand them, play with them until they stop making sense. When an image that meant the world to you becomes a bit boring, underwhelming, or simply stops capturing your attention is usually when you’re ready to look for a new image; maybe a slightly more complex image, a more detailed description, or a more nuanced interpretation.

    There are 5 major types of sensory receptors: mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, nociceptors, electromagnetic receptors, and chemoreceptors.

    For description of the 5 types, click here.

    In BMC®, the nervous system (in general) is said to have the capacity to record, to organise, and to store.(1) This raises the question; to record, to organise, and to store what exactly?

    image

    Framing the capacity of the nervous system in such a way asks that the nervous system be considered as active or acting on or at the proximal end of sensory receptors. Sensory receptors are classified as nerve endings that, by responding to environmental stimuli, provide sensory aspects of the peripheral nervous system with content (signals, chemical and electric stimuli, or simply: information) to relay through the rest of the system (peripheral and central). Often times you will find sensory receptors defined as organelles or ‘bodies’ to which the peripheral nervous system is (in some sort of way) attached.(2) Be them nerve endings or bodies to which the nervous system is attached, sensory receptors can be thought of as specialised environments where worldly or environmental factors are translated or transformed into the kind of code that can be processed (and so integrated) by the nervous system. One could think of sensory receptors in terms of an “interface” operating at the intersection of world systems (distal) and body systems (proximal).

    To respond to the question, record, organise, and store what exactly?, we have to acknowledge any and every experience of received interaction that, by the transformative property embodied at the level of the “interface”, is finally registered under the jurisdiction of the nervous system.

    (1) BMC® is not the only format that defines the territory of the nervous system (central and peripheral) in this way. UK’s National Institutes of Health, for example, define the responsibilities of the nervous system (central and peripheral) as inclusive of “receiving, processing, and responding to sensory information”.

    (2) When talking about sensory receptors, we are talking about sensory aspect of the peripheral nervous system. The equivalent of sensory receptors in the context of the motor aspect of peripheral nervous system are sometimes called effectors. Like sensory receptors, effectors can be thought of as specialised environments where information delivered by the nervous system can be translated or transformed into the kind of phenomena that, due to the effect of effectors on their environment (muscle tissue or glands), can be registered in the world or the environment. (#expression)

    image

    nervous system : dependency principle (describe)

    According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, jurisdiction defines “the territory or sphere of activity over which the legal authority of a court or other institution extends”. I find jurisdiction a particularly useful term to-think-with largely due to its positive treatment of limits; read the definition again and see that jurisdiction defines “the territory (limit) over which the legal (limit) authority of a court (limit) or other institutions (limit) extends”.

    Applying the notion of jurisdiction to the nervous system—specifically that aspect of the system associated with recording, organising, and storing—we can now think of the nervous system (central and peripheral) as having jurisdiction over the territory outlined by peripheral nerves, the spinal chord, the brain, and their corresponding capacities or processes, but not (!) over the territory defined earlier as the “interface”.

    image

    What this thought experiment teaches us is fairly simple but fundamental, I think, in thinking about the function of the nervous system. Evolutionarily speaking, the nervous system (central and peripheral) develops the capacity to record, organise, and store within a closed system (or territory). Because it’s developed within a closed system, the nervous system’s capacity remains potential until information is introduced into the system. Without information being introduced into the system, in other words, the nervous system has nothing to record, organise, and store.

    To provide the nervous system with something to record, organise, and store, the “interface” needs to be stimulated. That is to say, the “interface” needs to exposed to or come in contact with the world. By exposing the “interface” to the elements, we are making sure that (new) information is being introduced to the nervous system, and that due to the capacity of the “interface” itself. Remember that we defined the “interface” as describing “specialised environments where worldly or environmental factors are translated or transformed into the kind of code that can be processed (and so integrated) by the nervous system”.