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
My practice does not facilitate safe nor comfortable spaces. While I believe those spaces are important and have value, my practice intends to create rupture between one's body and the narrative one has been given about one's self by the nation and its civilizing institutions. This is not a comfortable process and it's important that participants understand the nature of this work and the important role of their own agency. While no one should or will ever be forced to approach themes or bodily tasks that go against their own boundaries or the truth of their own lived experience, the encouragement to examine one's body, its history, and its narratives is undeniably present and will inform how each person interprets and translates this practice.
I approach this work from position of a white settler, of a homosexual, of a product of an evangelical rightwing upbringing, and of an artist. These are not mere identity categories, easily simplified into a digestible narrative, but ways that inform my body, the perception of it by others, and the way I live that body in the world. It informs the way I speak, my gestures, my relationship to everything around and within me. I am therefore interested in creating a space where each individual brings their own body and its life into a complex somatic reflection that moves away from ideological frameworks and is curious about is felt without the shadow of what's already been crafted for you.
This is an artistic and political experience, but it is not a therapeutic one. I am not qualified to facilitate such an experience and do not propose this work as an alternative to a personal therapeutic process. Rather, this practice is an opportunity for us to learn from each other, to move away from shame and fear, and to listen to what our bodies already know and wish to express about our history, our national education, and what we long to feel outside of ideological discourses that no matter their profession, are inevitably designed to separate us from our bodies.
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
Psychonation, Psychic Body
"Psychonation, Psychic Body” is an artistic approach to the body as a site of psychosomatic counter-evidence to the narrative of the nation state. 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.
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
