Writing With and Through Moving//Moving With and Through Writing

A 3 day workshop through Failspace at the Center for Performance Research 

In this workshop, we will engage writing and dancing/moving as 2 related physical practices and inquire into how they might meet and exist in a myriad of fluid and kaleidoscopic relationships to one another. We will listen for how our writing and moving practices are already inherently in embodied dialogue with one another, how they might desire to further be intermingled or parsed out, and how they might hold space for and inform one another. We will actively center our own bodies as teachers, students, movers, witnesses, archives, and archivists, and honor our multisensory perception and meaning-making as physical processes.* We will explore various practices that invite, reveal, and shift conversations between our own nuanced inner landscapes, our outer environments, and those of our influences, lineages, and fellow participants- acknowledging our moving, thinking, perceiving, meaning-making, witnessing, writing, and archiving as inherently collaborative and co-created acts. 

We will spend time each day moving together, witnessing each other move, writing together, reading together, and sharing and discussing our questions, interests, problems, dilemmas, and discoveries. Participants will be invited to share writing in any stage of development, and offer and receive discussion around their writing and moving if desired. This workshop is for people who identify as dancers, movers, writers, and for those who don’t. While there will be some writing prompts offered, participants are welcome to come to this workshop with existing writing or movement they are working with to see how our practice together might shift it or create new avenues into its unfolding. Participants are also welcome to come to this workshop without previous writing or movement and to just see what emerges. 

*I use “body” and “physical” to encompass the interweaving of what others might call body/mind/spirit/memory/culture/imagination, or physical/mental/spiritual/cultural/imaginative. “Body” and “physical” are luscious, inviting, and inclusive words for me. I understand that these words have historically been used in objectifying and compartmentalizing ways in some spheres of academia and elsewhere. I do not mean to discount or skirt around the impact of this legacy of language, I’m interested in addressing it while finding and using language in ways that allow for fluidity and honor complexity in meaning-making. Please substitute the words that feel luscious/exciting/embodied to you.

The Dossier Charrette: a series of working dance essays is inspired by the notion of an architectural  charrette , a collaborative and intense period of design or planning activity, which emerged out of the École des Beaux-Arts in late 19th Century Paris. The word charrette is French for “cart” or “chariot.” Architecture students rushed to complete their work in an allotted time period as professors made the rounds with carts to collect the students’ final projects. This practice came to be referred to as working en charrette, “’in the cart.”

Over three nights, artists Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Angie Pittman, and Edisa Weeks each present their own 10-minute artistic response to a dossier compiled by scholar Prithi Kanakamedala whose research interests include the Black Atlantic, New York’s nineteenth-century free Black communities, and the city’s historic material culture.

The responses are meant to evolve over the course of the three evenings. Each evening is followed by “refraction and reflection” between the artists and Wilson, deepening the engagement between the artists and facilitating engagement with the audience.

Tuesdays 11/7 and 11/14, 10-12pm, at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, through Dance To The People. Drop-in welcome, donation based.

"Mixed Practice/Physical Research" (technique, improvisation, somatics, etc.)//

At the core of this class, we will dance in order to practice and respect individual and collective imagination, perception, and reality-making as physical and sensory processes. Class begins with improvisational and task-based investigations that mine our anatomy and physiology for their poetics, nuance of sensation, and expressive possibility. We will navigate many ‘logics’ of moving- challenging the idea that there is any inherent value to one way of moving over another. Class is taught with the intention to be a community gathering of individuals, we will relish in our own explorations, and identify our own values as we dance with each other, and with attendance to the space we are in. Tapping into the resources we have to share as movers, performers, and humans, we will give ourselves permission to affect and be affected by, to support and be supported by the community that is the dance class. We will dig to uncover why it is we do what we do, in each moment, to affirm the extent to which we have the agency to make choices that are ours, and not solely rooted in conditioning which tells us that we should follow directions or do what we are told to do. We will ask how we can both challenge our habitual patterns and simultaneously dig deeper into them- respectfully investigating where they came from and why they are there. Respecting our histories,while pushing the boundaries of what we consider to be possible, we will aim to expand our sense of self.

Experience Required: This class will be geared towards those with previous dance experience, but is open to movers of any level of experience!

Learning From and Listening to Our Senses: A Physical Meditation Practice

Class description: As our relationships and engagements with phones, computers, and other forms of visually demanding technology increase in our daily lives, I find the need to search for a way to reset, to reclaim my vision for its many other capacities beyond those of reading and looking for the express purposes of identifying, interpreting and discriminating one image from the next. How can we employ our vision without seeing? Through guided but open-ended structures and meditations, we will attempt to temporarily let go of a need to see as we put our other senses to work. We will look at and discuss the anatomy of the eyes and other sensory organs, refine the perception of our other sense organs, and discuss the role our intuition and imagination play in what and how we see. We will see how we can re-engage and repurpose our vision as a collaborating sense rather than a dominant one, exploring all of our senses as guides for engagement with the practice of healthy communication between our ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ selves, and between ourselves and our communities.