For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-‐ wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-‐breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
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B’fhéidir anseo tá mé saor in aisce. (A study in the possibility of the sensations of home) I lie under the blanket of the forest I lie in the shield of heather as a ram inspects my feet I am here I walk up the steep bank carrying my wares Handmade twine as treasure My House I build My body A Shelter I will rise with the sun and Fall between the stream and gorse Perhaps here I am free. “As we become a more transient society, we tend to define home by the accumulation of possessions as much as by place.” (Busch: Geography of Home) Can performance / walking / ritual and entering a dialog with landscape through conscious body awareness become a platform for deconstructive ecopsychology.
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How to become a part of this earth the metal compositions of blood rust, skin, iron, bone. rot, decay, birth and growth. the gift of pen and paper the gift of a seed. The gratitude of seeking to understand place through experience.
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This workshop has been developed from an experience I had in Poland submerged deep in the forest, attempting to become a part of the forest, attempting to find home. In this short workshop we shall explore a sample of practice based methodologies to explore notions of home as different internal and external states in relation to landscape; using the concept of home a means to explore how we relate to social and ecological concerns within our environmental frames of reference. The goal of this workshop is to uncover spaces of experiences and transformations of bodily states, which raise questions about physical and m ental conditions through the lens of ‘home’ as a self tutored concept. Constructing a simple dwelling place, this can be fictional or actual, a shelter to explore ideas of habitus guided by what it means to simply exist in a landscape. This workshop provokes the wider issue: How far can performance and artistic occupation subvert or alter an experience / reality of the fabric of a site? Working with the body as form, archive, sculpture and social concept, this workshop will explore how ‘home’ can be a lens through which we can better understand our relationship to both self and landscape. Exploring aspects of Butoh performance and somatic embodiment to explore primal states of being in this unique setting. This work will embody a meeting of mind to landscape, a ritual performance which seeks to explore the notion of capturing a state of being. We shall leave Dartington Hall grounds where we shall begin with a series of body awareness exercises and take a route to North Wood; for the workshop we shall explore a place within North Wood that will act as our studio and home for the duration of the workshop. Mud; flowers, trees, sky line, skin, breath and muddy toes. How quickly does a space become home?
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Overview “Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?” (Perkins) This workshop is designed to create a process in which participants evaluate their embodied relationship to landscape and explore the medium of free association writing and drawing to create unique cartographic narratives of their experience of specific aspects of landscape. Creating a unique immersive process to reconsider the personal etymology of home in relation to current life states, this sensitive process allows a place of grounding and rooting to concepts of person hood and identity. Routine and habit often tend to lead us away from our core, spiraling outwards or so far inwards we forget to move in way that nourishes and nurtures our connections to the core and ourselves. This simple yet deep natured movement based exploration is designed to explore the connection to both the body and the worlds in which we live through a series of exercise which can then be adapted by participants into their everyday routines. In this delicate state we shall explore touch, memory, smell, sound and texture; seeking to reignite the living ecology of body in place, a search to enable each day to become more enriching, we begin simply to attune to both our bodies and each other and the place we are in. This sensitive space will explore the body’s connection to the earth, the seasons, the weather, the landscape which we collaborate with on daily basis. Encouraging participants to gain a sense of active responsibility for their daily experience of the body in landscape. “As we become a more transient society, we tend to define home by the accumulation of possessions as much as by place.” (Busch: Geography of Home) “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” ( Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes ) •
What makes you feel at ease in landscape •
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Does home have a smell? Talk about the taste of home. • •
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What allows you to feel “ at home”
What is the texture of the notion of home.
Can home be fluid? Are you at home in your skin?
Nourishing, grounding, homing, tuning, sensing, feeling, being. Being in the now. Let us begin with a sense of perspective: Powers of Ten: A flip Book by Charles and Ray Eames… From the self, on site; to the country, maps of the earth, maps of the sky, then back to molecules, blood and skin, molecules and atoms: how can we see the body and how does this affect the way we interact with ourselves and landscape.
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Humans are tuned for relationships. The eyes, the skin, the ears, the tongue and nostril, all are gates where our body receives nourishment of otherness. The landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams, these breathing shapes, our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. The color of the sky, the rush of waves-‐ every aspect of sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was voice. every scrape, every blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body. We live in our bodies and so we know from within the possibilities of our form, even If not externalized. We cannot know with the same familiarity or intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of humming bird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience may indeed be a variant of these modes of sensitivity, never the less we cannot as humans, precisely experience the living sensations of another. How do I write about my windswept knees? How do I tell write about the grazes on my torso where the heather cut? How do I write about the feeling of the cold wind between the fern? How do I write about the walk in silence in forest as I dressed only in hay? Primo Levi writes in Obscure Writing: “So he who writes the language of the heart can turn out to be indecipherable and it is then right to ask oneself what is the purpose of such writing, writing serves to communicate, transmit information or feelings from mind to mind, from place to place, from time to time. And he who is not understood by anyone else does not transmit anything, he cries in the desert. When this is happening the well-‐intentioned reader must be reassured, if he does not understand the text, it is the authors fault not his. It is up to the writer to make him understood by those who wish to understand him, it is his trade, writing is a public service, and the willing reader must not be disappointed. As for the reader – and I have a strange impression of having him alongside me when I write, I must admit I may have slightly idealized 1 him.” You were not present with me under the forest floor, you did not have the same knots of moss, which I have now tied into hair, your fingernails do not contain the same dirt, but I want you to be here. Writing this now for you, I am still there and there, is what remains. Perhaps this text is my realization that you will never be in the forest beside me, and I will never quite be in that state again. Less the screen permits. I build a house as the sun departs the scene, willow, bracken, birch and twine, I rest under
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Levi. P (1985) Other Peoples Trades. Summit Books. UK. P159 Mair. M. Between Thee and Me. Between Psychology and Psychoanalysis. A poetics of experience. Sourced in Crickmay. C, Tufnell, M (2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P40.
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my roof, as the stars dance elaborate waltzes and a wolf howls. I curl to my side, covering my flesh in hay. I know I will return to Warsaw, but for now the only time is present. Here I have no past and no future, I think only of warmth, stability and security in my new home and there I remain. At dawn I wash my face in cold water from the well, I stretch my limbs as the trees do the same. ‘ To be in conversation is surely to live in the open. To be in conversation is to think and feel on your feet and not to speak of prepared positions. To be in conversation is to be who you are as who you are. It is to live in what is not yet in the other And what they are leading you to. It is when centers meet that the world is changed. To live in serious conversation is to live with the converse . To live in and with the contradiction With opposites With the other than we are. To be a place of meeting Not a place of judgment. To be in conversation is to enter into what flows In and amongst and between you. To be present in conversation is to speak of and speak to The world 2 Now.’
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Mair. M. Between Thee and Me. Between Psychology and Psychoanalysis. A poetics of experience. Sourced in Crickmay. C, Tufnell, M (2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P40.
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Perhaps this conversation began in Poland, deep in the forest as the sun announced the new day and I, dressed only with materials sourced in the forest did my exercises, calmly, a form of serene embodied meditation of the nature of being in place. Perhaps this began in Cornwall, as I lay in the bright red earth under a tress root, as the earth covered my body and I breathed very quietly listening to the coming storm. Perhaps this began in Ireland, as I rummaged pine, bog, heather and oak to make myself a shelter and an outfit made only of what I find. I question writing this now, what is “this”. This is a practice of the ways in which I have sought to become entwined with nature, seeking some deeper connection, awareness and embodiment of the body to land, earth and sky. How to lie on the forest floor and feel quite at home. My work as land artist and choreographer has taken me to very remote and rugged terrain, often experimenting with long periods of isolation and endurance. Perhaps this practice is a test to my own commitment to seeking 3 a home within this earth. Within such climbs I am never quite satisfied to simply walk, practicing my routines of the Four Dignities as regular training, I have an urge to lend my body and awareness to become more finely attuned to the textures and constituents each landscape I traverse can provoke. How does the body become a living archive of the experience of landscape, and how such experience can be documented to reflect the process of the body immersing itself into landscape to construct a meta-‐narrative of terrain. Can choreographic work emerging from the experience of landscape create an archive of a place? How is the experience of the landscape translated into the actions of the body? How can a choreographer create a process, which enables dancers and non-‐ dancers to actively deconstruct their experience of their environment? Will the outcome reflect the landscape in which the body is submerged as stimulus for the process; or will the product, which emerges, become a personal narrative? How can site specific performance become a social medium for the study of the political and cultural shifts of embodied terrain? The silent walk The dawn walk The walk with my eyes closed The backwards walk “ We can see other peoples’ behaviour but not their experience” (R. D Laing. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise 1967)
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Carroll. C ( 2014) The Four Dignities: The Spiritual Practice of Walking, Standing, Sitting and Lying Down. Singing Dragon Press. USA
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Within this choreographic work there exists a deeply embedded sense of questioning what Steiner refers to as ‘ The Foundations of Human Experience” This work intends to deepen both the spiritual and spatial terrain of the earth. The role of the choreographer as educator and facilitator is something I hold very dear; as Steiner highlights; ‘We must be conscious of the great task before us; we must dare not to be simply educators; we must be people of culture in the highest sense of the word. We must have a 5 living interest in everything happening today, otherwise we will be bad teachers for this school’ As both Steiner’s theory and application of educational model indicators, the researcher (teacher or facilitator) must be fully conscious and aware as to the social implications of their task. This means full and in-‐depth involvement with the life world structures that involve them. As Steiner indicates, the self-‐awareness, training, discipline and vigor of a practitioner is essential to the relative communicative success of the practice; ‘we must be conscious down to the very foundations of what we do. We must be aware when we teach children about this or that subject more into 6 the temporal body and in the same time in another direction to bring more temporality into the sprit-‐soul.’ Steiner’s foundation of practice indicates how the practitioner must be willing to see how their consciousness, understanding and general stance towards the process and action (act / performance) of being will shift and dictate all outcomes of their research (he advocates that that the researcher should be an all being all sensing porous creature capable of understanding their position in relation to their immediate and wider context). The process of creating an active choreographic methodology, which systematically affords a safe and malleable platform to analyze the ways in w hich the body exists in 7 the world. This perspective has been largely informed by the seminal impact of John Berger on my practice. In his text Field Berger indicates how the process of looking closely at a field, framing a field as specific event space can enable the observer to learn a great deal as to their own position and relationship to the world. If, for the process of this research, the term field is replaced with public urban space, this text outlines the perspective desired of the researcher and participant to the spaces, which they will encounter. Berger outlines: ‘you are before the field and although it seldom happens that your attention is drawn to the field before you notice the event taking place within it. Usually the event, which draws your attention to the field and almost instantaneously, your own awareness to the field, then gives a special significance to the event. The first event-‐ since every event is part of the process invariably leads to another or, more precisely invariably leads you to observe others in the field. The first 8 event may be almost anything, provided it is not over dramatic.’ As Berger continues; ‘ you relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing in the field. It is not only the field that frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the pre-‐condition for them occurring in the way that they have done and for the way others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by the virtue
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Steiner. R ( 1961) The Foundations of Human Experience. Anthroposophic Press. New York Steiner. R ( 1961) The Foundations of Human Experience. Anthroposophic Press. New York P31 Steiner. R ( 1961) The Foundations of Human Experience. Anthroposophic Press. New York P 42 7 Berger. J (1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London ( P199-‐205) 8 Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P202-‐3 5 6
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of their relation to other events. You have defined the events primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is 9 literally and symbolically the ground of the events, which are taking, place within it. Here ( replacing the term field for site) Berger’s text can be used as the means to highlight how this choreographic research in the city can function as means to evaluate one’s own frame of perspective towards their own life world. Perhaps most relevant to the core ethos underlying this work ethos is the seminal practices of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. Fusing techniques of creative writing, ecology, activism, and the social politics of landscape, both authors and their ambulatory practices serve as indicators as to the acute power sustained and detailed observation of the self and the other in landscape can offer a platform of sustained investigation of the relationship between body and place. Wendell Berry articulates, ‘ once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding, dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought that we and our world create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another, that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of the land; that as we and our land are part of one another so all who are living are neighbors here; human, plant and animal, are all a part of one another and so cannot possibly flourish alone, our culture and our place are images of each other 10 and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.’ 11 Drawing from the work of Mabel E. Todd one can quickly see how the practice of walking in place with specific awareness of the body in relation to self and environment can dynamically improve a sense of enhanced connection to place and self. She arrives straight at the point: ‘We sit and walk as we think, watch any man as he walks slowly down the avenue and you can determine his status in life. With practice and a finer discernment will have him placed socially and economically and with a fair idea as 12 to his outlook in life. We judge our fellows much more by the arrangement and movement of his skeleton parts than is evident at once’ As Todd highlights, walking can become mean of psychosomatic anatomical analysis, allowing the human form be vigorously explored as mechanism by which we adjust to the world. Todd indicates that there is lack of genuine understanding as to the power of the body, ‘Our bodies are brought to our attention usually under disagreeable circumstances-‐ when we are sick or injured, and the clothes have to come off to reveal a wound, burn or fracture. We seem messy inside, for when our skin is punctured or torn out runs a scarlet fluid which makes a horrible stain and is offensive… Unlike dogs, human beings form habits of managing their bodies badly, through false notions of holding individual parts. It may 13 never occur to them that mechanically, action and reaction are as persistent in the living mechanism as in that of any inanimate structure.’ This research methodology has
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Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P204-‐5 Berry.W ( 1977) P 22 In Seamon ( 1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld. Croom Helm. London P159 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. 12 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P1 13 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P5 10 11
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served to explore how far the process of landscape ritual can activate this strand of awareness within ones consciousness and expand and sustain such awareness into the process of daily lives. As Elsa Gindler’s research indicates, the cultivation of a heightened sense of awareness of the body as kinesthetic awareness cultivates a platform of a more sensitive relationship towards daily encounter and social practice, ‘we must recognise the connection between breathing and bodily movement, and bring about their correlation. In doing so we begin to understand that demands made upon us by life are not so overwhelmingly difficult, that they can be carried out with greater sense of economy 14 without our maximum effort and turmoil.’ She highlights the need for the body to be a porous vessel, capable, calm and responsive to the demands of our environment. 15 Such relative simplicity of evaluation of movement methodology was also highlighted by Todd who explores through Wendell’s key text of the 1880’s ‘The two accomplishments common to mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend, yet it has been clearly explained and successfully initiated by 16 artificial contrivances.’ Todd explores walking as a task seminal to the understanding of man, a task, however, that is potentially filled with danger and complexity and not to be debased as an innate human function, ‘walking then is a perpetual falling and a perpetual self-‐recovery. It is the most complex, violent and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early stage of life. We find how complex walking is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never fully understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or to overlook the last step on a flight of stairs, and 17 discover with head long violence we have being hurtling ourselves forward.’ I return to standing still in the forest. My feet buried deep into the earth. I am listening to the sound of trees welcoming the light of the day.
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Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P12 Wendell. O ( 1883) The Physiology of Walking. Notes in Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P194 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P194 17 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P195 15 16
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As Merleau-‐Ponty indicates, the body holds the human capacity to interact and see the world, how we cultivate our ‘arc’ of interaction is how we will receive and transmit collaboration with our life world. As he outlines; “The life of consciousness -‐ cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life -‐ is subtended by an `intentional arc' which 18 projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation. (1962: 136)” The body forms our spatial, social and cultural disposition, how we continually reveal and tune this body to our various environments can be shifted, re-‐aligning our capacity to connect to our surroundings. As Merleau-‐Ponty indicates; ‘the body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot 19 be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (1962: 146) ‘ We are the mirror. as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are the pain and what causes pain, both. We are the sweet cold water 20 and the jar that pours. (Rumi)’ 21 As Stoller indicates; ‘ To accept sensuousness in scholarship is to eject the conceit of control in which the mind and the body, self and other are considered separate.’ This research takes to it core the symbiosis of the connection of mind and body as the ecology of self and place, forming a cohesive site of collaboration between the two. The body is mirror to all experience, each motion and breath an archive to the experience of the living being. ‘The epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond’s surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the self as ennobled and extended, 22 as part of the landscape and the ecosystem.’
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Cited in Dreyfus. L. H (1996) the Current Relevance of Merleau-‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment. University of California, Berkeley –.The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996) Cited in Dreyfus. L. H (1996) The Current Relevance of Merleau-‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment. University of California, Berkeley –. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996) Stoller. P ( 1997) Sensuous Scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press. Philadelphia Px 21 Stoller. P ( 1997) Sensuous Scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press. Philadelphia . pxvii 22 Shepard P (1962) P 2 In Seamon (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld. Croom Helm, London. p161 19 20
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“ The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (1962: 146) When the body and mind are in active and committed dialog to the projection of the cultural world which the body projects then a more active dialog is possible with ones life world. Seamon outlines: “ Understanding is coming to see more deeply and respectfully the nature of human experience and the world in which it unfolds. The subject of understanding is the everyday met afresh, that world takes on a new and richer facet of meaning, which speaks to the individual’s life. Unlike explanation, understanding does not seek the causes of events, it helps the person see more intimately and lucidly the pattern of his own existence and thereby live better in the future.” “What is 'learned by body? It is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished about, but something that one is and so the body is thus constantly 23 mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces "(I990, 73)
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Cited in Loukes, R. (2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-Hetter(1891-1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-95 p88
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Structure ‘Attention means tension, a readiness to move with no movement taking place, which spells fatigue. Emotion constantly finds expression in bodily position, if not in the 24 furrowed brow or set mouth, then in limited breathing, in tight necked muscles, or in the slumped body of discouragement and listlessness.’ 14h30 : Meet in the lunch room on the Dartington Estate to gather for a short meditation and introduction and body awareness warm up. The workshop will begin with a series of guided movement and body awareness series drawing from Butoh exercises and principles of Tai Chi and walking exercises from The Four Dignities: Walkin: Sitting: Standing: Lying. ‘We no longer lead our lives thoughtfully and sensitively. We become rushed and allow confusions around us to accumulate in such a way that they get the upper hand at 25 very inappropriate moments.’ 14h45: Arrive to North Wood: Score one and dialog in pairs: solo score relating experiences of place and home to landscape of the estate. ‘The two accomplishments common to mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend, yet it has been clearly explained and successfully 26 initiated by artificial contrivances.’ 15h30: Score two and dialog in pairs: writing and sensing score. ‘for us relaxation is that condition in which we have the greatest capacity of reacting. It is stillness within us, a readiness to respond appropriately to any stimulus. As for standing, real standing, we must feel how we give our weight, pound for pound onto the earth, and how in doing so, the feet become steadily lighter, here is a paradox, the 27 weightier we become the lighter we become, the quieter we become. In sitting, we must be upright, as long as slouch we disturb the internal functions.’ 16h00: Circle meditation: Based on Bagua Circle Walking and The Sevenfold Circle and self awareness in Dance. 16h15: Walking and digesting ( pair walking) 16h30: Arrive to Dartington Hall for full debrief.
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Todd, M. E. (1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro, USA. p44 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People Whose Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North California North Atlantic Books, Berkeley. p5 Todd, M. E. (1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press, Gouldsboro. USA. p194 27 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People whose Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North California North Atlantic Books, Berkeley. p12 25 26
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SCORE ONE: “ Have you ever considered, how invisible we are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only the voice inside oneself. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss/ we read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound. The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator, the voice of trees, whose rustling means what we say it means. Ah, my unknown love, this is all just our fantasies and we. All ash, trickling down the bars of our cell.’ (Pessoa)
What are your first memories of Home? When you think of Home what is the image that comes to your mind?
Describe a route you walked around a home. Tell me about one place that is vivid when you think about Home. Can you remember the smell of Home What about specific colors? What is your last memory of Home? Can home move with you? Walking with a partner / one has eyes closed / lead them / guide them / listen / share / swap. On arriving to site we will then 8 minutes to make a short improvisation reflecting upon these sensations en site; simple gestures which reflect emotion towards these sensations. This will be a lead exercise reflecting on exercises from the four dignities.
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Score Two: Finding a space / taking the time / Walk / sit / stand / lie / your circle / 8 minutes free association writing / 8 movements / 8 thoughts
Be still.. breathe. let go, the need to do anything. sense stillness, emptiness, at the bottom of the breath, Pause in the turning moment, between one breath and the next, Open the inside of the body, Open the pathways of bone, open the skin, let the body spread open like a sail to the wind. Move into the spaces in and around the body. Sense endings and beginnings. Sense the possibility of movement. Interval, silence, emptiness. Listen to the space between one moment and the next. Let the body breathe, make room, sense the body. Sense the horizon. ‘Body of night, penetrating, assembling and differentiating, debriding, stirring and churning, kneading, this constitutes the work on dreams. Always we are doing prescient work, but with invisibilities, with ambiguities and with moving materials. ‘ (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld) 28 ‘ The human body is vapor materialized by sunshine and, mixed with the life of stars.’ (Paracelsus)
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“ Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine. Thus, sun and moon cling to heaven, and grain, grass and trees cling to earth.’ (I Chin) 30
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Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P182 Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P193 Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P200
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‘ The length of our bodies is suspended in a living and dynamic weave of tissues.’
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‘ Listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms out of silence.’ ( Rilke)32 ‘ be still listen to the beat of your heart let the face/ throat/ jaw soften sense the expression of the face let the face feel the heart let the face and the heart listen to each other imagine their conversation in making or moving send a message from the heart to the face spend time with a partner speak only of what brings you joy what delights and what heartens you? what keeps you warm share It. face to face side to side then move it. move with the delight that warms your heart. ‘33
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Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P210 Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P223 Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P223
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This workshop has been designed to explore the position of home as a means to explore sociological, humanist and ecological perspective. In a time of much unsettlement and fragmented cultural and national identity; the challenge of citizenship is ever more pressing as a political and ecological concept. In search of hope, rooting, consideration and kindness to self and others, this investigation of the concept of home as methodological lens seeks to create a ground of union and contemplation between participants and landscape. “In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-‐arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a storeroom, and it is hard in any case to part from leftovers. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-‐ pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of the intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier state have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.” Theodor Adorno, 'Memento' in Minima Moralia
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As a movement practioner I am fascinated with the bodies connection to the earth, the seasons, the weather, the landscape which we collaborate with on a daily basis. I have founded a collective ‘The Living Collective” who will be carrying out a series of works this year in Ireland, Poland and Scotland; For more information and for potential participation please email beatricemaryjarvis@googlemail.com I have made a series of movement dialogs with landscape, which can been seen on line here: http://beatricejarvis.net http://vimeo.com/beatricejarvis
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