Teaching Practice
My performance and activist practices have always been in dialogue with the community through regular live encounters that aim to foster an emotionally visceral and anti-colonial relationship between the body and its empirical history. These encounters have happened in the form of workshops, regular courses, and activist interventions. Below are three examples of how I currently deliver this practice.
ACCESS + ETHICS STATEMENT
As a white, queer artist I am intent on facilitating an anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-imperialist space. While I do not believe in completely safe or accessible spaces, I do believe in safer and more accessible spaces, and each encounter is an opportunity to reconsider the ways in which barriers exist. Accountability practices are central to the way I facilitate experiences, and I welcome dialogue throughout from the participants as unforeseen problems may come up. However, it is also important to note that I am an artist and activist, but not a therapeutic practitioner and not qualified to facilitate such a process. While these practices do not avoid the topics of trauma and healing, on the contrary, it is also important to remember that these are community spaces and that prior self care and individual responsibility are important factors when entering a space where difficult subject matter may be touched upon. While often impossible to predict the various triggers that may occur, boundaries and social sensitivity are also part of the learning process and I ask participants to be open to navigating this together, as I also continue to encounter new questions, difficulties, and areas of growth in the process of teaching.
Performance Strategies for the Activist Artist
This workshop is done as a longer session over the course of at least 3 days in which I share my performance making methods with the participants.
We will first work together on the means of writing and developing a concept of their own political and artistic interests with an attentive consideration for ethics and accountability as an essential part of this process. I will explain the method through which I decide how to shape my own urgencies into performative proposals and the editing process I go through in order to arrive at an empirical perspective that has larger political relevance without relying on appropriation or co-optation. Participants may decide if they wish to work in groups, duos, or alone depending on the intersection of their urgencies.
We then migrate to doing. I will offer a series of body research and writing tools to instigate the creation of a comprehensive archive of different actions and self authored texts for each participant's concept. We will also think further through the ethical ways of using sites of reference and inspiration from other artistic works, visual political phenomenon, or historical imagery. The participants will work through this material within the group, sharing and discussing the research in order to understand its impact, deepen its relevance, and transform its function.
The final stage of the workshop involves the composition of a performance draft which will be shared with the group.
Image: Ebullient Films
Archiving the Body
"Archiving the Body” is an artistic approach to the body as a site of memories, of historical counter-evidence, a living archive. This practice looks at the body as a site of repression and carcerality in the nation state, and provides tools to research what the body knows, remembers, and feels outside of those impositions. The body is proposed as its own source of critical evidence in the lived experience of each person, a site which must be excavated and utilized in order to resist an oppressive social order.
The workshop brings the autobiographical into politically active critique. We will work with both movement improvisation methods and writing prompts as collaborative tools. Beginning with individual research, we will move into duo and group work as the workshop progresses, questioning how our individual histories can maintain their integrity, while also transforming through the act of collective resistance and community building.
No dance experience is necessary to attend, although some experience of being in the body through a somatic practice is generally useful.
Image: Rudi Berr
Improvisation and Instant Composition
This course has been developed in dialogue with my decades of experience in the field of contemporary dance practices, and the improvisatory and compositional tools I continue to use when researching the body. The course aims to inspire emotional and physical promiscuity in the body and the development of an intuitive personal movement language.
The course begins with a 40 minute warm up in which we begin with a particular theme that will take us through the rest of the session. The warm up takes us through the entire body, beginning with self touch, descriptive imagery, and an awareness of the space before developing into fully visceral movement language that responds to an audio-visual guided experience. The 40 minutes begins in stillness and ends in a dynamic embodied experience.
In the last half of the class we continue to develop on the theme of the day and the language discovered in the warm up. Through a series of tasks, the participants will work both individually and in groups to develop instant compositions and the capacity to choreograph the body in space as an intuitive and emotionally sensitive community practice.
Image: Amanda Lacson
