Borders Resurfacing: River Freewrite

August 9, 2017, 1:50 pm, San Lorenzo Park.

the sun beats down without breeze, legs too warm in sweatpants, tiny yellow amaranth seeds clinging to my shins, evidence of where I’ve been.  the rapid sound of Spanish: I look up and see two men rolling by on their bicycles, chatting as they ride.  I wanted to walk along the river today, not on the raised concrete paths and pedestrian bridges like freeways that shuttle more privileged bodies above working class POC communities, but close enough to touch the water. 

I hate myself a little now, how my skin pulls and shrinks away as I sit on the dried up grass next to a homeless encampment in this city park.  how easily I empathize with the Chinese who once lived here, who were once seen as trash, unwanted, dirty, littering the riverbanks, and how hard it is for me to exhale and relax on this riverbank where people make their home.  I unpeel my burrito, and the salt overwhelms my mouth, lips and face purse tightly, unable to taste anything but discomfort.

the signs warned me not to leave the paved path, but I ventured among the late summer plants, green and dried out and taller than me.  deep purple brushes rising with strong straight spines, small pale bursts of lavender and white, a glory of dandelions.  the insects were huge: giant fireflies buzz-sailing through the brush, a miracle of a yellow butterfly so close to my head.  ducks with brown tufted heads and drab bodies, dipping and feeding, tail-feathers in the air.  I was alarmed at how low the water was after just one week: rocks exposed in the riverbed, resembling the Salaach more now.  the strange phenomenon of the current flowing both ways, a two lane watery highway around a rocky divider.  traces of people, but uglier than the stray crushed can and burnt rocks of refugee fires at the Salaach.  a stray black shoe with a sensible heel.  newspapers.  cardboard arranged carefully as a bed.  shampoo and juice bottles and cans of chicken soup.  faded sweat shorts, wadded up and dusty with river sand.  a pair of sturdy black sneakers, placed carefully in the shade of a shrub.  and a book with a red cover: North Toward Home.

whom do we think of as disposable, as dirt?  migrant bodies, homeless bodies, refugee bodies?  as I tread through the plant-life, causing small quivers tremors disturbances beneath my feet, picking my way between mud and slime and scrappy wildflowers, what keeps me from seeing this river -- and its people -- as beautiful? 

Borders Resurfacing Assignment #5

Further develop an existing assignment, could be yours or someone else’s.

DUE: Sept 1

Babli's Creative Response #4: Borders Resurfacing, Audience Water Score

Here a trial of a water ritual score (rough - transitions/logistics/flow not worked out yet:) for a local Salzburg audience, assuming that we are in the same room with Tomaz (which is unclear).
Imagine the audience is divided in two groups from the beginning. We are in a big hall (Blackbox without seats of risers.

The audience would first have been invited to dance along following patterns of dots in the floor, so everyone or hopefully many people would be in the middle of the dance floor, moving together.
At the end of this they would be seeing a home-video or live-feed style projection of us/some people including us gathering buckets full of water at the river Saalach.

There will be lots of big buckets of water on either side of the big hall (where the groups of audience would have been respectively and requested to go back to the side they were last on).


Steps of the ritual (parallel on bot sides, with different instructions in one step):

Step 1 - Handwash: There is a large bucket/Tub of river water with a scoop set up, as well as an empty bucket/tub. Audience instructions:
Handwash
Take the scoop and scoop out water out from the one bucket/tub
Go over to the second bucket/Tub and let the water run over your hands into the emptier tub (NOTE: Mid-November- water cold!)

Step 2 - bottling: There is a row of buckets with water and empty little bottles that can be closed.
Audience instructions:

Fill one of the little bottles with water.

Step 3: Memory. Stand in the center of the room and hold the bottle. Remember 3 situations: MAYBE HERE GROUP "RAVE" Has one or two different questions.

1) people trying to cross a national border (for different reasons) are prevented from crossing
2) a moment when you were not allowed to cross an external border (political/social)
3) a particularly beautiful moment of spending time at a river (preferably Saalach or Salzach)

For each of the above memories find one word that captures the memory.

Go to one of the tables in the room, write your three words on a piece of paper and attach it to the bottle.

Step 4 - Exchange: find another audience member and give them the bottle.
For the person receiving the bottle: go to one of the two standing mikes in the room, and read the other person's three words into the microphone.

Shyamala's Creative Response #4: Borders Resurfacing, Audience Water Score

Photo credit:  https://www.facebook.com/FamilyDanceJam/?ref=ts

This water/ritual score for audience participation (or maybe just a workshop) is inspired by Family Dance Jam by Ilaan Egeland Mazzini and Barbara Dilley's 5 eye practices.
  
Before starting, if small group can check with participants if they are OK with touch before exercise.  Also, can Let them know if anyone needs, they can step out at any time and observe.


Set up:  make sure plenty of open space in the room, a microphone would be handy with larger groups, make tape curves and lines on the floor line in the picture above. 

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1. Invite participants to spread out standing (or sit?)  eyes closed or soft focus  
   -Visualization: notice breath, like waves, notice wetness in mouth, imagine blood and other fluids circulating through your body.  Remembering and honoring: Our bodies are about 60 percent water!  Connecting that water to water outside your body.  Let an image of a body of water rise into your mind that you have a positive association with (could be a river, lake, waterful, the ocean).  Enjoy the memory that you have associated with that body of water.  Start water sounds music?
2. Invite participants to open eyes to soft focus if closed, taking room in without focusing on any particular thing.  Direct participants to begin to slowly walk around room between other bodies keeping soft focus. Whenever want can pause and be still, noticing the movement around you, and then continue.  Take a few moments to whisper under breath the memory of the precious water.  

-Visualization: about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.  Honoring this thought as walk.

3. Without naming them in your mind, begin to see the things both still and moving around you. Notice the shapes on the floor and if you are inspired, perhaps follow one. If you come across another who is moving pause for a minute and if you would like, I invite you connect briefly with a body part (head, arm, knee, back).
4. Seeing between: Noticing the spaces between the lines, begin to find ways to navigate over them without touching them.  If you come across another person think about how you can build a bridge, or a tunnel for others by connecting body parts. If you come across other’s bridges or tunnels go through them.  Feel free to move on if you have made bridge looking for other connections.  keep looking for spaces to go under, between, through.  If you are in a bridge, describe your body of water to someone you are connected to.    
5. Seeing direct:  freeze and notice which lines you are between.  You may find yourself with a specific group of people within the same lines.  Stay with this group and do not cross into another area.  If there are others in the same space you can look them in the eye, make a group shape, by connecting body parts.  Once the shape is built any one may shift positions in the shape by removing themselves from the group, stepping back and looking a the group and finding a new place to reattach.  As the shape shifts slowly, make sure your group stays within the lines on the floor.  As you connect to your neighbors, you can choose to share your water story and/or if you have any water border stories you can share that as well.  
6. Introduce a bottle of water to each group.  These waters have come all the way across several borders from rivers in Germany and Austria, one of which was the site of huge arrival of Syrian refugees.    If you get a bottle of water, carry it preciously without your hands, this is your permission to go cross a line and to another group, take the water with you and present it/offer it to someone else and then take their place in the group shape. If you have a personal story about traveling across a border, share it with your new group.   
7. Freeze to see everyone's group shapes.  Last water people join the water into the group shape with the water.  End.
8. Brief discussion about experience while  allowing folk to write group poetry on wall?  Or make group poetry together one many papers or on butcher paper on wall.  
   
   
   
   
   Questions:  
   
   
   1.  Are the directions too much?  Should I simplify?  for example, I could take the eye practices out?  Is there anything else I can do to make this more accessible to folks?
   
   
   2.  do you see the idea of the borders resurfacing here?  Are there other ways you think I could strengthen the connection of water and borders?
   
   
   3.  Any thoughts about what this experience might bring up for you if you were a participant?  
   
   
   4.  Any other thoughts/ideas?
   
   

Cynthia's Creative Response #4: Borders Resurfacing

For my creative response, I created a water ritual score, which could be done by an audience member or another artist.

Water Ritual Score: Confluence

(1) Gather some water from a local body of water, preferably one that has personal, geopolitical, or historical resonance.
(2) Hold your bottle of Salaach river water in your hands.  As you hold it, notice what images come up -- of natural beauty, personal memories, news images, etc.
(3) Hold your container of local water in your hands, again noticing what images come up.
(4) Pour the two vessels of waters into one container.  As you do so, imagine the histories, memories, and images of the two bodies of water mixing, meeting, blending, and submerging in each other.
(5) Use the mixed waters to nourish a plant, either indigenous to this soil or a migrant plant (transplant).
(6) Watch the plant grow and continue to care for it.


I did this score myself with water from the San Lorenzo River, which as you all know, was formerly the site for the last Chinatown in Santa Cruz, and water from the Salaach, the border between Austria and Germany in Salzburg.  

(1) Gathering Water

 (2) Salaach

I remember dipping an amber Nalgene bottle into your waters, the icicle-like sheaths of water falling fast from the dam, algae slipping between toes. Round smooth river rocks, sunlit skies, waters meandering green and blue, feet teasing, talking, fighting with each other. How close the other side of the border, how seemingly effortless the crossing, un-policed. Stones gathered in rings, charred stone. Blackened vestiges of campfires lit by refugees, small fires of hope, re-homing, unbelonging.

(3) San Lorenzo

today you were sandy, summery, overgrown with yellow flowering fennel, pink spires, the bees crazy with heat and pollen.  a redfaced man asked me for a quarter, blessed me when I said no.  the river was higher today, the stones of the riverbed all underwater.  I remembered the swollen brown winter floods, tree trunks drifting fast and dangerous, onlookers gaping from the concrete bridge.  across the way, a group of latino men lounge on blankets.  I think of the working class Chinese who lived and played on the riverbanks in the early 1900s, of who is seen as suspicious, now vs. then. 

(4) Mixing Waters
 

password: lorenzo

Water Ritual - Confluence

(5) Nourishing Life
I used the Salaach and San Lorenzo waters to nourish a small bunch of wildflowers gathered from the banks of the San Lorenzo.  They included California golden poppies, flowering fennel, and more. The water and the bouquet smell of licorice.

Intermixed Poem (as per Shy's suggestion in the comments):