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| 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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- 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?
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Freeze to see everyone's group shapes. Last water people join the water into the group shape with the water. End.
- 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?
1. Doesn't seem like the directions are too much. Even the soft focus eye exercise seems to quickly transition into walking exercises I feel like in person they will feel integrated. I always have too many exercises planned anyways and then feel it out when doing it live!
ReplyDelete2. I really love the seeing between and seeing direct exercises. I feel like they get at the idea of connection and potential empathy (especially with the combination of tell a story). I wonder if people need to share something verbally about personal experiences crossing bodies of water prior to moving to get them ready to talk and move at the same time? The most confusing exercise to me is #6. I'm not sure what the impetus is for the bottle of water to move or not move and then the person with the water can cross to another group? I'm sure is one those instances that will read better live than on the page.
3. Connection to crossing bodies of water and connecting to strangers, traveling, immigration. This workshop feels very peaceful. Is this your intention?
4. Exciting! I think this will be wonderful.
What a lovely, complex, layered score. I love how you think about water beyond geopolitical borders to include biological (our bodies) and environmental (the earth) resonances. It reminds me of Annie Sprinkle’s and Beth Stephens’ work on ecosexuality.I really enjoy the community-building aspect of the score, the way the score literally asks people to build bridges with their bodies in connection. And I love how the water -- which is fluid, slips around boundaries -- is the substance that allows people to cross borders, exchange places in the end. Water as passport.
ReplyDeletePoetically, perceptually, I’m drawn to the possible connotations of the eye practices. What kind of violence of drawing lines and laying down borders is enacted by seeing and naming; is there a way that seeing without naming evades this? On the other hand, knowing how powerful naming can be, does seeing without naming constitute a kind of invisibilizing? Does seeing in between allow us ways to work around, through, the discursive and political limitations we have inherited -- not to break these borders, but to flexibly negotiate and wiggle through them? A direct gaze might be associated with fixing, objectifying -- but also meeting, squarely, the gaze of the other. Peripheral vision -- what is out of focus for us, not quite graspable? What do we avoid looking at directly?
I do think the score could be a bit overwhelming or confusing for a participant. Talking while moving is not necessarily comfortable for everyone, and simply doing the eye practices by themselves (without being in physical connection, telling stories, passing bottles) is a really complex experience . I know that certain eye practices (seeing between, seeing without naming) feel almost impossible for me to do while talking. And stories can take a few minutes to tell -- would it be physically comfortable to hold a position for that long while talking?
Maybe it would help to do a bit more scaffolding: for instance, by first leading everyone through the eye practices on their own, sitting. It could also help to have them do free-writes about a memory of a body of water and a memory (or family story) of crossing a border, or just have them tell each other stories in pairs, so they don’t have to improvise stories while also improvising with their bodies and connecting with other people.
In general, the score seems to privilege the positive, except perhaps step 3, where one is confined within lines. I love the emphasis on the positive, but I wonder if it erases the potential violence of border crossings and tightenings? I also think that more information about the bottles of water, where they come from, what histories they carry, could be powerful.