THE ENHAMPMENT

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Fall of 2011 was a very hectic time. Occupy Wall Street began on September 17^th, but I didn't actually know what was happening until about halfway through the semester. From then on I went down every break throughout the year, and ended up getting pretty integrated into the movement.

Once I had started getting involved with Occupy, beginning organizing Occupy Hampshire and planning the November 17^th Day of Action which was a Walk-Out, Speak-Out and Teach-Out rooted in Occupy Colleges which was orchestrating nationwide calls to actions so that colleges could still be a part of the movement.

Flyer for the Decolonize/Occupy Hampshire 

College March 1st Day of Action

Decolonize/Occupy Hampshire Teach-in

Occupy UMass Amherst Bank of America 

Shutdown November 17: RAW FOOTAGE

Decolonize/Occupy Hampshire Occupies PVTA

Decolonize/Occupy Western Mass Speaks-Out 

in front of Amherst Bank of America

More videos:

Hampshire College Professor Margaret Cerullo speaking at the November 17th Day of Action

Hampshire College Professor Chris Tinson speaking at the November 17th Day of Action

Check out Decolonize/Occupy Hampshire's LiveStream Archive →

Participating in Occupy Hampshire was kind of my method of staying in school at a time when it had become so difficult to do so knowing that something like Occupy Wall Street was going on internationally. I was so jealous that I couldn't be living there full time right in the middle of the action. So I followed it I followed every single thing every single day. I was taking six classes and auditing a seventh and yet, Occupy Wall Street still became my job.

I started a blog called The Enhampment, a twitter account and Facebook account in addition to bringing  together those interested in Occupy from the five colleges. 

And I put everything into it. At first organizing with Occupy Hampshire was wonderful because for the first time I saw all of the activist groups on campus in one room. Every group: the International Socialist Organization, the Anarchist Network, environmental groups, Students for Economic Justice... It was just so beautiful and it would have been wonderful it it had been able to continue.

I was the type of person who had always dreamt of this type of social movement occurring but never actually thought it possible. Even my college applications were about the fact that I never thought that my generation could care about anything at all ever again because in my experiences (particularly during high school) I was so aware every day that we were a nation at war, and I just couldn't understand the lack of awareness and anger regarding that.

At the time I considered apathy and ambivalence to be a hinderance to a potential movement that was actively opposing the continued historiography of the current post-Racial climate of our society which challenged potential alternatives to America's current status as an intentionally segregated superstructure.

On “THE DEEP ORDER CALLED TURBULENCE: The three faces of dramaturgy” by Eugenio Barba. (via The Performance Studies Reader)

of historical narratives of war. It concludes that at least as far as the InterWar period in France goes, the schoolteachers were the creators of history.

The emphasis that French schoolchildren were exposed to as a result of the nation's insistance upon memorializing the war through practices such as Armistice Day, inspired a performance I devised at the end of the MADE-IN-FRANCE program in June 2012.

The trip to France was a pretty intense process. From the moment we arrived we were on the move, straight to final performances which concluded in a hurried journey back to the US.

The performance took place on a diagonal from the corner of an old stone French building that had been transformed into a dance and performance space. With dim lighting L'entree Deux Guerres exposed the listenings of a little girl caught up in a historical moment of war and silences. Inspired by Trisha Brown's Accumulation with Talking, I interjected random spurts of text such as “Now, Now, Now” and “This is it! This is it!” This refers to a Trisha Brown quote that really inspires me and relates to my spirituality:

“Ca y est, Ca y est, Ca y est Ca y est: C'est tout. C'est tout que je sais.” in other words:

“This is it. This is it, this is it this is it: this is everything.”

In my opinion I see a serious correlation between the views of my choreographic muses such as Trisha Brown, William Forstyhe, Katie Martin, Susan Sgorbati, etc. and the buddhist spiritualities which I have come to follow this past year. **expand and transcribe or insert forsythe ++ write on dynamics of ambiguity.

NOTE: the solo was improvised every night. This was the second time that I have improvised a performance that the audience believes is structured. I believe this in contrast with the structured improvisations which have been set such as the Yuna dance and the End of Time dance (although in the spirit of Trisha Brown, Katie Martin and William Forsythe often look to be improvised) with actual improvisation which is coming from the heart. 

On “History and the opposite of forgetting”: the Limits of Memory and the Lessons of History in Interwar France. By Mona Siegel (p. 770)*

France in 1923 was obsessed with remembering the First World War. This led *Gaston Cle/mendot to propose ‘the total suppression of the teaching of history in primary schools.’ This stems from the common positivist belief that ‘history is a science capable of narrating and, consequently, of facilitating human progress.’ When the overall sentiment of the French nation was “We need to forget,” a movement arose to conceptualize and implement a ‘unifying national memory.’ For example, schoolchildren were encouraged* by their teachers to reflect upon their time spent between the wars through writing and the arts.

Reading this article by nite-lite in Me/isey, I began to sense a definite connection between education, memory, and history. From this I developed the following research question: Are history lessons capable of immortalizing war for generations to come?

When last members of the generation of 1914 began passing away, it became critical for French educators to shape and define a history of the war. Much like to the reflective homework assignment previously mentioned with regards to remembrance of the Great War, French schoolchildren ‘became active participants in public rituals commemorating the conflict’. This information sparked my second research question, What is the relationship between collective memory and national history?

In “Les Lieux de Me/moire” *Pierre Nora argues that the connection between memory and history was disintegrating under the weight of France’s Interwar period. He held remembrance had become an introspective act; one that is no longer primarily concerned with conceptions of national identity. “Memory is always suspect,” says Nora, “in the eyes of history, whose true mission is to demolish it, to destroy it.”

During the Interwar period, scholars began to wonder what kind of impact cultural artifacts have on individual consciousness. Through analysis of the way the Great War was represented in public spaces like schoolyards and by means of holidays and commemorative memorials; Pierre Nora studies national memory along side historian Henry Rousso, also of France. Both were in agreement, at the time, that history is a manipulable foundation holding the stability of national memory in its great chalk palms. Nora and Rousso were not alone in suggesting that memory is no more than the definitive, autonomous action of the individual. Thusly the recollection of each individual lies within the sociocultural context of one’s first-person perception and perspectives of their own personal lived experiences.

This leads me to my fourth question, which asks whether or not "‘collective memories’ really have such an autonomous existence, or do Nora and Rousso, among others, overlook ‘the fact that collective memory ultimately is located not in sites, but in individuals. This connection to an individuals ability to make sense and/or peace with the past is at play with the concept of “collective memory”; in which the accumulation of “*individual recollections and public representations of the past – shapes a social group’s sense of shared experience and identity.” The development of which, is “an ideological process,” wherein “the negotiation of beliefs about the past entails a fundamental desire to influence power relations in the present.”

In the case of Interwar France, what was widely-regarded and cleverly-disguised as a patriotic period of mourning became a “secular competition for cultural authority” (p. 774) If history is the flotsam of individual experience, it would need to be transmuted by way of reliable and accredited sources. But when the authority to record the past comes from specialized knowledge, you end up with a scholastic history that is heavily influenced by the textbooks of schoolteachers, whose nationalism and acquiescence to the state is of particularly high demand – especially in close proximity to periods of war.

Indelible (adj.) = 1. Impossible to remove, erase, or wash away; permanent 2. Making a mark not easily erased or washed away 3. Unable to be forgotten, memorable.

French children born after 1918 with no personal recollection of the Great War became the premiere audience for textbooks that made the war so tangible and alive that they were outselling literature intended for post-graduate sales and readership. (p. 774) Whether through narrative, by word of mouth, or in books and on film; the inescapable visual stimuli of tarnished historic landscapes, unemployable veterans and grieving loved ones made it so “even the most resonant of national memories could not withstand the debilitating effects of the passage of time.” (p. 775) This raises issues of (evocation), imagination and recreation seeing as “children in Interwar France were surrounded by artifacts and memories of war, but the artifacts were not their own creation and the memories were not their own.” (p. 775) Therefore I ask: how were they to sort out the meaningful from the mundane? The True from the False? And also: how did war narratives relate to them, not only as individuals but also as participants in a national community? (p. 775) Students were expected not only to “accept shortages and losses of loved ones,” and to “develop a love of their invaded fatherland” but also to always put French heroism in contrast with German barbarism when constructing their own taut and intersectional narratives of the war.

“To forget German atrocities would be to fail the memory of those who died for us,” said schoolboy Gaston Mulocheau on April 8, 1918. Gaston received a spelling assignment with the text – “Villages: burned, pillaged, alive or deported. The generations of the future must be impregnated with the lasting thought of the suffering stoically accepted by the French of today.” (p. 780) It comes as no surprise then, that Gaston would subsequently remark, “France must remember.” (p. 781)

National “concern about the eventual collective memory of the conflict (p. 781) led to the explosion of Leurs Crimes, recounts of the atrocities of war committed by the Germans, and the systematic insemination of a doctrine that warned “forgetfulness would be complicity.” (p. 779) Nationalistic and militaristic propaganda distributed through scholastic textbooks and a general mediatized saturation of war imagery, ritual and rhetoric vowed to keep the patriotic promise that the children must know and the children must remember.

In 1914 it was suggested that every school in France “inscribe somewhere on its walls the names of former students and teachers who died in the war,” in order to, “comfort families of the deceased.” Thus the classroom became a sanctuary of remembrance, intended “to serve as a moral lesson to children who would write, sing and play in the symbolic presence of the dead.” (p. 782) They “hung lists of names of the dead in old oak frames, making makeshift memorials with a tri-color ribbon which make public their support of the nation’s heroes.

They didn’t retroactively name it the Great War for nothing: for its scale and death toll left the French citizenship with the deep and lingering sensation of mourning and melancholia that often results from and/or brings about (depending on your discipline) – lapses and losses of a social group’s individual and collective memory.

This leads me to ask a question of you: “Of all your memories, which has left you with the strongest feeling of joy or sadness?"

A Brief Interruption: “Haunting You to Change”

In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination Avery Gordon asks, “What are the alternative stories we ought to and can write about the relationship among power, knowledge, and experience?” and “What is it to identify haunting and follow its trajectory?” (Ghostly Matters, pp. 23-24) In the words of Avery Gordon, “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.” (Ghostly Matters, p.8) Gordon’s argument is reminiscent of the distinction between mourning and melancholia that David L. Eng and David Kazanjian make in “Mourning Remains.” Gordon, Eng, and Kazanjian all suggest that history does not disappear, it only accumulates.

Eng and Kazanjian build upon Freud’s conceptualization of “mourning” and “melancholia,” describing mourning as “a psychic process in which libido is withdrawn from a lost object. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once. Instead, libido is detached bit by bit so that eventually the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to move on to invest in new objects.” (Loss, p. 1) This is contrasted with melancholia, described as “an enduring devotion on the part of the ego to the lost object. A mourning without end, melancholia results from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal.” (Loss, p. 3) The haunting that Avery Gordon discusses in her work is inextricably linked to this ‘melancholia’ that Eng and Kazanjian describe. Gordon seeks to create a counter memory in order to overcome systemic injury. Modernity has brought with it “violence and wounds, and a case of the haunting reminder of the complex social relations in which we live.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 25)

Rather than analyzing the world from the sociological imagination, Gordon suggests that literature may play a key role in documenting the role of ghosts and memory. While social science is bound to academia’s rigid interpretation of facticity, literature has more space to take into account the human experience of being haunted. Literature has the power to evoke a universally human feeling in a way that sociological inquiry does not. “In the twentieth century, literature has not been restrained by the norms of a professionalized social science, and thus it often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 25)

According to Gordon, “Haunting is a part of our social world, and understanding it is essential to grasping the nature of our society and for changing it.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 27) In this way, the authors discuss the various ways in which melancholy inspires action. “Ghostly matters are part of social life,” says Gordon, “If we want to study social life well, and if in addition we want to contribute, in however small a measure, to changing it, we must learn how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts, must learn how to make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult and unsettling.” (Ghostly Matters, p. 23) Gordon, Eng, and Kazanjian all have a desire to be future-oriented. They beg the question, “What can we do with loss? And insist, “Ruptures of experience, witnessing , and truth are, indeed, a starting point for political activism and transformation.” (Loss, p. 10)

“It is peace we are celebrating, not the war.”

On November 11^th, 1918 when the guns finally fell silent, the question arose as to how reconcile with such widespread catastrophe. Are 36,000 monuments enough to “allow an event, which had monopolized your waking hours for so long and which still remains present in your thoughts, to recede into the past, facilitating the appropriation of memories into discourse? (Pp. 783-784) As the following quote so emphatically illustrates, “No clear consensus as to the meaning of the Great War can be derived from these blocks of stone, except for a profound sadness at the scale of the nation’s loss and a shared sense of common sacrifice.” (p. 784)

The slogan of le onze novembre (also known as ‘Armistice Day’) would have been, “It is peace we are celebrating, not the war.” (p. 785) At its conception, this yearly veteran’s holiday transformed the commemoration of the dead into a series of rituals involving a short speech, the laying of flowers at the base of the nearest monument, a roll call of fallen soldiers from the local area, and a moment of silence to reflect on the experience of unfathomable loss.

French schoolchildren between the wars had become the embodiment of the Nation’s future. (p. 786) Many felt that in order “to avoid the return of war, future generations” would “have to learn to hate it.” Le Onze Novembre was intended to “help children realize the horrors of war and the importance of working to preserve the peace.” (p. 786) The occupation* and bombings were such traumatic experiences for those who remembered it that it created a situation in which it became impossible for students to forget exactly what is that they “must remember.”

Collective memory became a vast stone block listing off the cost of victory and the horrors of war for the nation’s future leaders. “The elders’ memories harbored stubborn silences; they did not necessarily obey the rules of chronology and they did not always readily mediate between the personal and the national.” (p. 788) It comes as no surprise then, that the younger generation born after 1918 would be haunted by the complexity of a history within which they could no longer sort the real from the political imaginary. As the Interwar Period drew to a close and the older generations began to grow older and pass away, their lived experiences were buried within them. Thus when memories of November 11^th ceremonies began to systematically replace the reality of the nation’s tangible lived experiences, the French schoolchildren’s’ fragmented visions of a Great War they had never experienced were all that remained.

CONCLUSION

Building upon the previous discussion of the potential transformative nature of mourning and melancholia, I ask: "Is history a science capable of narrating and, consequently, of facilitating human progress?" If the answer is yes, then it would seem appropriate to conclude that history is in itself a living document that exists betwixt a constant state of war between nations.

In order to walk through the evolution of the aforementioned theory, this paper sought to investigate six research questions:

Q1: Are history lessons capable of immortalizing war for generations to come?

Q2: What is the relationship between collective memory and national history?

Q3: Do 'collective memories' really have such an autonomous existence, or do Pierre Nora and Henry Ruosso, among others, overlook 'the fact that collective memory ultimately is located not i sites, but in individuals?"

Q4: How were the children of Interwar France to sort out the meaningful from the mundane? The True format he false?

Q5: How did war narratives relate to the children of the Interwar Period, not only as individuals but also as participants in a national community? (p. 775)

To help facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to this research, this paper included an article on the phenomenology of mourning and melancholia. In Ghostly Matters, Amy Gordon postulates that the impact and aftermath of trauma in the form of mourning and/or melancholia may in effect lead to political transformation. This relates to my current divisional inquiries in Movement Epistemology, which question the varied implications of man's ability to engage in the art of action-taking.

In sum, "the Great War was a national legacy to which all French children were the rightful heirs." (p. 799)

After alll…

What is history of not the act of forgetting?

ANNE BOGART

When you put your life into the service of what you value, that action will engender other values and beliefs. Through engagement, things happen. Movement is all. Keep moving and yet slow down simultaneously. In Latin this is known as festina lente, “make haste slowly.” Inside of this paradox, you make a space where growth and art can happen. Within the framework of art and theater you will find a special freedom and the space and time to explore complexities. It does not cost you anything. It costs you your life. (Anna Bogart, page 2 of And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World)

I chose this quote in the script because at the time, it really summarized for me my opinion towards movement. In retrospect, I would find that it to be a semi-superiority complexed perspective. Regardless it became a mantra that I carried with me on a daily basis. “Festina Lente, make haste slowly,” inside of this paradox, I planted seeds of artistic growth and art at the same time. Particularly in the theatre, we discover the freedom to truly explore space-time continuum of spending a life-time being timed by a tiny rhythmic reminder pushing you to revolt, on and ever onward, to revolt.

The previously posted essay on Eugenio Barba was one I read on my trip to France. Which also inspired the following annotated bibliography:

Building Upon the Previous Discussion of the Potential Transformative Nature of Mourning & Melancholia

Intro

“I always took for granted that the best art was political and was revolutionary. It doesn’t mean that art has an agenda or a politics to argue; it means the questions being raised were explorations into kinds of anarchy, kinds of change, identifying errors, flaws, vulnerabilites in systems.” – Toni Morrison

“Given the methodological ideology encrypted within Morrison’s quote, it is not surprising that a postmodernist such as Anne Bogart would choose to use it to introduce her book, “And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World.”

Q1: When exactly, do you act?

Q2: What are some strategies (advice)/useful tools this provides to the artist?

The following quote appeared in all drafts of the script for a very specific reason. I knew I was onto something:

“When you put your life into the service of what you value, that action will engender other values and beliefs. Through engagement, things happen. Movement is all. Keep moving and yet slow down simultaneously. In Latin this is known as festina lente, ‘make haste slowly.’ Inside of this paradox*, you make a space where growth and art can happen. Within the framework of art and theatre you will find a special freedom and the space to explore complexities. It does not cost you anything, it costs you your life.” (Bogart, 2)

This quote illustrates not only the depth of Bogart’s directorial methodology, but also connects back to previous chapters on Eugenio Barba and Trisha Brown. Moreover, Bogart’s realization that “the outcome of an artistic process contains the energy of your commitment to it, expresses the traditional postmodern obsession with a process that extracts the difficult from the difficult. In my opinion, this quote also brings up questions of physiscs in the formation of a movement. The passages to follow will seek to connect (natural)laws of the universe (i.e. ‘energy can be neither created or destroyed, but never transferred. We’ll also touch upon susan sgorbati’s emergent improvisation and conclude with the role of accumulation and gravity in the clay figure.** To add: “the Key to Dancing is to Allow yourself to Fall”

CHOREOGRAPHY

During the Spring 2012 semester I was also taking a Contemporary/Modern dance technique class with Katie Martin. Concurrent to my research of Trisha Brown, I independently studied Katie Martin’s work. This included reading her Smith College MFA Thesis Impossible Frames in its entirety, and creating an annotated bibliography of its methodology. Once again I could feel in my gut that these conceptions of dance-making would stay with me through my fourth year at Hampshire.

During the Spring 2012 semester I was also taking a Contemporary/Modern dance technique class with Katie Martin. Concurrent to my research of Trisha Brown, I independently studied Katie Martin’s work. This included reading her Smith College MFA Thesis Impossible Frames in its entirety, and creating an annotated bibliography of its methodology. Once again I could feel in my gut that these conceptions of dance-making would stay with me through my fourth year at Hampshire.

The dancers and I began working together in October 2012. My choreographic methodology was an investigation of Katie Martin’s Smith College MFA Thesis Impossible Frame

In preparing this thesis, I dived the final product into eight parts: moment one: Wall Street/Catharsis, moment two: The City/ Articulation, moment three: The Commune/Intention, moment four: Occupation/Attention, moment five: Decolonization/Magnetism, moment six: The Police/Attitude, moment seven: Imagination/Content, and moment eight: Debt/Time.

In the process of creating this choreography, these eight pairs were explored not as ‘either-or’ or dualistic constructs but instead viewed as distinct themes upon which a spectrum of movement possibilites were investigated and fleshed out. (Martin, 53-54)

The dancers and I began working together in October 2012. My choreographic methodology was an investigation of Katie Martin’s Smith College MFA Thesis Impossible Frames. 

stream-of-consciousness movement invention:

guidelines;

1| at the start of the choreographic process, aim to channel your intentionality through your body’s physicality and energy level on a day-to-day basis.

2| explore the body’s physical form- how it organizes itself according to the particular physical realities of the moment.’

3| focus your awareness on your body’s natural impulses in order to capitalize on its ‘underlying structural principles, physics, and potential in motion.’

4| rather than being immediately concerned with constructing a detailed order for specific movements, simply allow each movement that surfaces from these physical explorations to be fully expressed until the next action arises, continuing in this manner until these small sequences of movement construction can be accumulated and spliced together to create larger streams of movement phrasing.

5| follow the natural energies and impulses that arise in your body until ‘each string of movement phrasing dissolves or transitions to something new on its own accord.’

6| in this process, also allow yourself to digest what occurred by repeating the particular order of actions at hand, until it is solidified in your muscle memory before moving on to the next movement exploration. (Martin, 55-56)

During auditions I taught two pre-determined movement phrases built upon postmodernist (my muses?) dance phrasework/material to “contain a degree of both finely detailed gestures and nuanced shifts of weight and focus, and at the other end of the spectrum, large, sweeping, full-bodied motions that cut through, attack, and engulf the space around the performers.” (Martin, 58) .

BALLERINA POLICE FORCE DAY 1 - GRIND

After coming up with a base-phrase through -of-consciousness movement invention, we extrapolated upon those concepts until we had several usable dance sequences.

The dancers and I spent the first few rehearsals refining the specific dynamics of each phrase in order to perform each sequence in as perfect unison as possible. This process, which Katie Martin refers to as unison relationship, fosters a connection amongst the movers that helps them to establish a spatial relationship. In Martin’s theorization, what it means to dance in unison is taken a step further by exploring the very essence of what it means to be in a unison relationship with another individual.

BALLERINA POLICE FORCE DAY 2  - END OF TIME

Lastly, the dancing section revealed a deep regard for the sensory intelligence of the body. To quote Katie Martin, “I do not believe I would even be able to consider the kinds of working processes described above without a high level of embodied knowledge.

Within Susan Sgorbati’s improvisational practice “the notion of embodiment arises as a process of centering the body into the present moment of attention and sensory perception, attuning oneself to the body’s innate intelligence and felt experiences. Embodiment reinforces the notion that the physical body is also a thinking body, a concept” postmodern dancers of consider a crucial element to their movement experimentations.

Stream-of-consciousnes movement invention, whole body gesturing, embodiment, unison relationships, and action word variation- these are the primary choreographic strategies that built the scope of forming a movement. “I used these strategies to reinforce and reveal in various ways the ten arenas of tension that initially inspired the dance’s conceptual framework of perceptural multiplicity* (BARBA) and complexity of the moving body: (Martin, 72)

Movement 1: Solo

Abiding by Katie Martin’s choreographic philosophy (as articulated in her MFA thesis Impossible Frames) I decided early on in the process of making forming a movement to create a solo that I would perform within the overall composition. I hoped this solo will stem from a more instinctual and unplanned place; one that would relieve some of the stresses of the group rehearsals that were occurring concurrently. I imagined the solo section to allude to Martin; through a series of movement sequences that evoke multi-directional pathways of action within the landscape of the body and alternately carve a spatial matrix throughout the environment. (Martin, 54)

The primary choreographic theme that propelled this solo into being is the notion of stream-of-consciousness movement invention. This strategy emphasizes an improvisational structure based on instinct that would foster the emergence of movement phrasing and gestural dynamism.

Whole-body gesturing was another key choreographic theme for Martin’s solo in Impossible Frames.

whole-body gesturing:

guidelines;

1| question how you can subvert your own tendencies of movement initiation and sequencing.

2| look broadly at how you have choreographed over the past four years; recognize what your natural inclinations are in terms of how and where in your body you tend to initiate, support, and dissolve energy flow.

3| within the landscape of the natural movement sequencing that you are developing through your improvisations; interject unexpected shifts of dynamic and redirection of focus, in order to puncture the fluidity of your natural movement shaping.

4| utilize all possible movement pathways besides the heavily traversed options;

5| find ways to push yourself into physical situations that would be the least imagined or possible within a given context.

6| within this broad idea of carving frames within and around the body, continually ask yourself: What are you not doing?

7| embrace any and all points of the body as potential centers, axes, planes and kinespheres of physical articulation; constructing a serialist perspective against classical ballet’s long-upheld epaulment infrastruture;

8| imagine your body as having infinite centers of gravity and bases of support to launch a particular gesture – initiate movement not only from the most obvious points of origin (the limbs, for instance) but also perceive both gestures and centers of gravity originating from such unlikely locations as the tip of your ear, the side of your fifth rib, and the back of your skull in order to intersperse moments of surprise, counter-intuitive flow, and oppositional dynamic intention within the longer streams of more instinctual phrase building. (Martin, 56 - 57)

Lastly, this solo section will reveal a deep regard for the sensory intelligence of the body. To quote Katie Martin, “I do not believe I would be even able to consider the kinds of working processes described above without a high level of embodied knowledge.”

In this quote Martin refers to the development of embodiment within Susan Sgorbati’s improvisational practice. “As detailed in her Solo Practice, the notion of embodiment arises as a process of centering the body into the present moment of attention and sensory perception, attuning oneself to the body’s innate intelligence and felt experiences. Embodiment reinforces the notion that the physical body is also a thinking body a concept I perceive as integral to any kind of improvisational exploration.” (Martin, 58)

embodied knowledge:

guidelines;

1| when you are creating material in the moment, literally think through moving – experience each action from your own personal, idiosyncratic kinesthesia.

2| unearth physical material that is aligned with who you are as a dancer in the present moment;

NOTE: these actions may or may not be recognized as codified forms of movement.

3| emphasize inner physical knowledge;

4| acknowledge the power of individual investigation and experience; (Martin, 58)

Movement II: Duo

• Duo between I. Buddington & Miriam King
• Short & focused choreographic process

When I first begin rehearsing with Miriam King, I plan on teaching her two pre-determined movement phrases build around the perceptual spectrum of minutiae/scale. Thus the actions within these movement sequences will contain a degree of both finely detailed gestures and nuanced shifts of weight and focus, and at the other side of the spectrum, large, sweeping, full-bodied motions that cut through, attack, and engulf the space around the performers.” (Martin, 58)

Miriam and I will spend rehearsals refining the specific dynamics of each phrase in order to perform each sequence in as perfect unison as possible. These two phrases will then become the foundation for other choreographic strategies that Katie Martin articulated in her Smith College MFA thesis Impossible Frames. The first of which is the basic idea of unison relationship. To quote Martin, “I chose to work with unison for two reasons: One, I believe it is fairly difficult overall to achieve moements of perfect unison in any kind of movement scenario… I was drawn to the challenge of finding ways to align our diverse dynamic dispositions and ways of understanding and embodying movement information. Two, I perceive the idea of unison as a powerful indicator of connection… I wish to evoke a sense of relationship.” (Martin, 59)

In addition to refining phrase material in perfect unison, we are experimenting with the spectrum of unison form. In other words, we are exploring other modes of what it means to be in a unison relationship.