Interviews & Conversations

OCTOBER 30, 2011 (MG)

In thinking about the class I led last Monday at Art Workouts, questions at end:

I thought to myself, how to lead people through something that would offer them a sense of themselves, multi-sensorially? Building off the research questions that Abby and I are in as teachers and as co-conspirators in the experiment for this session, I let many of the ones between us so far enter into my construction of the class, and through our recent performance research in letting-it-go, I simultaneously let the preparation and the questions all go when I taught, and let it come from all the conditions that led up to making our environment be as it was in the room together. It is a mysterious thing to be-in-the-teaching-moment, to really let the people and the work we are doing together open up within myself so that I can somehow be a curator for our collective ideas, like a filter with its own motor, some kind of glow-in-the-dark fish.

I worked with the question, how to continue with this desire to make a bridge from a multi-sensorial experience into the making? A way I thought to do this was both analogous and experiential: work with the sensation of skin (in many forms), and then work also with the skin as the thing which forms, as that magical organ that is a transmediation between interiority and exteriority (terms which are just signposts for the directions of attention?). We worked to effervesce our skin. We used our practice text found in the basement of Bookends in Florence, MA written the same year of the first Love-In at the Haight. Make skins get very alive as a surface and a place for interaction, and as a place to sense oneself. Then, with this waking up of its sensing itself (and of course all the other senses that interact with the haptic: vision, smell, proprioception, and on and on…..), we could maybe understand from this experience what form itself was, what it meant to contain, what it meant to compose the being in space and in environment. That to experience form would possibly teach us something about form and forming. I brought in a version of a friction dance off of a class I took with Karen Nelson at SFADI back in the 90′s I do believe where my duet with River was revelatory. Bringing sense to the conversation when it started to feel like we could become talking heads. Work with the materials and make them ours, now, with love and respect from where they came, with honor for my teachers, and to the moment. All these tools I have had the pleasure of gathering over the years from so many places in my movement practices where we deeply get into the sensation, the design, some outpoured here into the skin of Monday Night Art Workouts. It felt necessary at some point to explicitly bring in some aspects of the research of Lisa Nelson’s Tuning, like if we didn’t we would be missing the compositional key. So she arose.

There was this incredible paradox that came through in this felt analog of skin to performance skin (In my quests I have come to understand that all conscious embodied experiences have at least some paradoxes embedded into them). This time this one of waking up the skin as a surface shows how it is not really a separation at all..but more like a way to actually sense the inner and outer landscapes more fully, and as connected. Interpenetration. Intertextuality. Permeabilty. Body-as-environment.

When we watched one another, it was from having reversed and used our sense memory to restore our positions from the week before as a bridge. We let ourselves notice how we organized ourselves to listen. We reversed sides of this, and let it deteriorate. I used the questions that arose in out of the evening’s discussions that were salient for what we were building together: from Milka’s presentation about sense memory from her book report and reading, from Ali’s infiltration of the relationship of sensation and place, and Mara’s image of sensation as language, how I interpreted this as dub. And so many more bodies brilliance, what the physical research of each Workout participant brought into the space.

Gratitude for everyone’s willingness to come along for the ride, for the 5-minute presentations. For the class that proceeded led by Abby to be a kind of foundation, and the years of our work here and how it is continuing to get richer.

So, if I had any questions as grist for the mill for the next class in the series, it would be: How do we get out of the way to support the participants to sense themselves? And is how is this a bridge to an investigative view?  How to more explicitly research the sensations of the mind? How do we challenge ourselves to stay with the material already with us, to build deeply from the arc already starting? And how much to depart from all of this so we can offer a tapestry? Maybe the question is- what is the function of tapestry, and what is the function of bricolage? How is it worth exploring this skin to performance skin further? How do we take instructions from what the presentations of the students bring into the mix? How do we fully allow ourselves to be in a research together, as a fluorescent school of creatures?

Whole body.

ABBY AND MARGIT MUTUAL INTERVIEW, SEPTEMBER  2010

Abby-

In the last series, we had the intention of finding theory that came from the performative and practice-based experience. What rose up was “the organic beast” – would you speak about this phenomenon and its roots and consequences?

Kiss, mg

Abby: Well, as we began reading in the first session, we came upon some revelatory writings by contemporary philosopher Mark Johnson. He writes about contemporary findings in neuroscience and biology that support something which we, as movers, have known … the idea of embodied cognition. The idea that thought, perception and the creation of meaning are rooted in physical experience, and the acknowledgement of this by neuroscience (as the daughter of a scientist I am always relieved when there is science involved) kind of blew my mind.  I suppose that, as a mover I had known this on some level all along, but I think I was still intellectually attached to the primacy of the mind as the decision maker of the body.  My favorite movement scores were often the ones that either really engaged my mind,  so that I could be intellectually active in the process,  or the ones that “ turned off” my mind,  which I found fun but vague and ultimately somewhat useless,  because if my mind was my primary guide,  if I turned it off I really had no way of tracking my experience or being  present or intelligent with it.

Meanwhile, we also read an article/interview on the autonomic nervous system from the brilliant work of maverick body pioneer Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.  In it, she speaks about the enteric, parasympathetic, and sympathetic nervous systems.  She reworks traditional biology and posits that the enteric nervous system (small intestine) functions not only as a digestive organ, but also is responsible for sensing the “rightness” or safety of a situation. She houses the sensing of self and ability to track moment to moment experience in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is ordinarily deemed responsible for only involuntary bodily functions like breathing, heart functioning, and adrenal activity.  She attributes the tracking of internal movement and energetic processes through the nervous system, as well as the ability to work in a goal or activity based way, to the sympathetic nervous system. In other words, she presents an embodied and experiential framework for a globally housed system for the body’s thinking and functioning. In the same interview, she also talks bout tuning in to the underlying drone of the nervous system …perhaps the bodies vibrational essence…

The combined impact of both of these texts really shifted our entire focus in the class; this was getting exciting.  Where at first we had been talking a lot, looking at interesting artistic work and gleaning  aesthetic and conceptual inspiration from it,  and presenting a lot of complicated ideas for scores and dance-making, now we actually had a invitation to consider reworking our artistic project from the standpoint of a deeply embodied artistic practice.  Frankly, I wasn’t the least bit sure how to begin,  and had some nervousness about what might emerge, but I was intrigued.

All of the sudden, instead of running around barking ideas and frameworks,  we were lying on the floor in the dark,  rolled in blankets for 45 minutes, hardly moving at all!  A big shift was beginning  in our working process.  When we finally allowed space and time to listen to and tune into ourselves on a cellular level, time expanded and became irrelevant. Decisions became clearer.  In a way I like to think of it as taking out the middleman.  No longer did we need to hire our brain to interpret for us, but could let our expression and choice-making arise directly from our embodied experience.

When we began working this way, people got more three-dimensional in the room. Choice-making was more intentional and interesting, and people stayed in their processes for much longer period of times.  I remember Dustin made love to the wall once for a good 45 minutes….

We decided to call this way of working the “Organic Beast” as a way of sidestepping the implied aesthetic of the words “embodied”, and circumventing the cultural embededness of the mind/body split.

The organic beast is awesome.  She is often perverse and hideous,  but simultaneously magical and beguiling.  Conventions about timing, volume, and breadth of action seem irrelevant, and moreover are perhaps even exposed as feeble attempts by the conscious mind to confine experience within  parameters that it finds easily  tolerable,  digestible,  and non-threatening.  The organic beast flouts convention by rendering it inapplicable.

What I also love about the organic beast, something that I think we only just began to access in our last session, is that if all experience is both perceived and interpreted (digested) through all systems of the body,  then the attempt to produce a response or  an action that is “real” is an irrelevant pursuit.  If all systems of the body are working congruently, than all choice-making is equally real.  This is incredibly freeing artistically, as the palate can thus expand to include a choice to mimic a campy top forty song as much as it can include a choice to lay on the floor and moan in a way that vibrates your first chakra.

This is an exciting place to work from!

Love, Abby

Margit,

What about the embodied voice?  What does the organic beast have to say and how do we get her to say it?  How do we listen to her?

x, abby

Margit: Pretty wild, but this is what came when you asked: my current organic beast is an internal moveable structure – as if wild reeds or living ropes. Please do not take the word “structure” to be in any way fixed, rather it breathes, and through the interaction of its braiding and moving, the beast provides support and power in my dancing. Its image is one of multiple overlapping helix/sinews, each with a potential for sound and color and quality. It has the potential to say many things, really dependent on the context and my actions.

In order to listen, I had to create the space for the image to emerge, a kind of slowing down by providing space, no matter what that speed of the action. Then, I dipped into the well. An image came. It said: “space in the head” when I asked it how to listen to it – I could take this further and see what else the image asks for. This is just the beginning…. *

An embodied voice probably has something to do with a pre-lingual state. Not that it can’t come out in the form of words, in a legible meaning, but rather that it would emerge from sound: the grunts and groans. I recently learned that the way contemporary musician Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) came up with his wild and beautiful lyrics was to make the music first and accompany it with sounds, and then from these, the words came! They would form through the repetition of the inchoate and the tuning into what already had emerged. I love this as a process, as a way of listening and getting the unknown to speak.

I was interested in our last series about conversations we had around sounds and language. Particularly, in one of them, I was working with sharing a series of healing sounds that come from the lineage of qigong. In this practice, one is initiating sounds that have a history of use (what Wittgenstein would call whole-use families…) and by doing so invoke a harmonizing of a particular organ pair and meridian flow. Liver: “shiiiii,” green, branching, sprouting, and on. This is a process of cultivating through intention and action. In our conversation of class post-class, you talked about an experience you had had years before with the sounds and images that came through your dancing of liver (was this with Sarah Shelton Mann?) – not a predetermined set of operations, but rather, color, texture, movement arose… and this seems close to one unique way to find an embodied voice – to source it from the imagination as it crosses with movement, seeing what comes and moving with that.

There are so many avenues, so hopefully this will arise for each individual in a unique formation and a unique set of utterances. And then by working together, we can also pick up influences from one another. As Eugene Gendlin states, “by crossing we create in each other what neither of us was before.”

Having just arrived back from a residency in Minneapolis, I noticed how your way of making sound has entered into my own practice, without consciousness, but rather once it came, I could recognize it – in the form of a rumbling sound in my gut that met the air through flapping lips, like the sound of a kid making an airplane. Soooo Abby! If I repeat this sound for a while, the beast reforms – so visceral, so whole body, a restart of sorts. Yesterday in the Milliken Studio in Minneapolis, I saw huge wings of a bird inscribed in the alterations of the tones of the bricks, so I traced them with my whole body and finger as pointer with pen. I stepped into the image, and become bird-like, became animal-with-pen. The airplane sound helped me recover some energy I didn’t even know I had, so what was more hawk-like grew bigger into phoenix proportions through the power of the resonance of the tones. The only way to match its intensity in that moment was to write in the air and to take off my shirt and release some of the codes (which I guess is a word that means the habitual actions that I come to use in dancing). This is the power-potential of listening to the organic beast – presence in practice, and whole-body action.

So far I have presented multiple sound embodiment possibilities: emergence through tuning and living in an unknowing, an intentional cultivation through repetition, imagery and practice; a wildly personal individual image that arises on its own; and the mystique of shared communication – the communal development of meaning.

I look forward to seeing what and how we take this further in the upcoming series, as we said this is when the work really begins to hum….

*One of the forms I use to engender this kind of knowing is Focusing, initiated by Eugene Gendlin. The image of helix/sinew allies with a piece of the dance lessons I got from Benoit LaChambre in his teachings at the SEEDS Festival|Earthdance this summer. Again, the more the crossing, the more novelty is possible.

MARGIT & ABBY MUTUAL MUTUAL INTERVIEW, APRIL 2010

MARGIT: Abby, what are your current interests in your own performing right now?

ABBY: One of my interests in performing right now is about appreciating and exploring the power of the relationship that is created when there is an audience and a performer. Until just recently, i have been a performer who actually loved rehearsal much more than performing.  I was ambivalent about the contract of watched/ watcher…Seeing and reading about Marina Abramovic’s work lately has brought to my attention the idea that when you add an audience, the performer is suddenly offered an amazing amount of energy, power, and focus.   Much of Abramovic’s work deals directly with this energetic exchange.  I think prior to seeing her work, I somewhat narcissistically felt as if there was something  perverse about what happened when someone watched me on stage.  When I was younger, I was able to get off on this in a sort of dark and twisted way.  To me the audience seemed more of a voyeur watching my oh so intense journey than anything else…When I was working with Miguel on the piece ” Everyone” Miguel came back from working with Deborah Hay and asked us to ” allow ourselves to be seen” I struggled sooo much!  I cried!  I got angry and rebellious!  My whole contract with the audience was, I think unconsciously, that I was not allowing the audience to see me, (but knew they were watching) but then would sometimes catch them ….Allowing myself to be seen took the erotic charge out of  the relationship …it left me high and dry so to speak.  This coincided with me reaching an age where I don’t necessarily want people looking at me in bright light!  If performance was about being watched, I wanted privacy, I wanted out!  So i took a big old break from performing….

whoa. It is intense to write all that.

Realizing that the relationship to the audience in live performance is something magical that creates a magical, electric space, in this age when so many things arevirtual, is an astounding revelation to me. Performing feels like an entirely new experience, and something I want to be completely present for.

So then a second interest of mine right now in performing is how to make my entire self present at the moment of performance.  How can the moment of performance be, not a performance, but an act of presence …..For me the beginning of this journey is about processing some dark shit and bringing it onto the stage, so that it becomes part of my performance experience.  After a career of performing the role of “I am a dancer on stage, see what I can do?”  I would like to present other aspects of my experience ….like rage!

thanks for asking.

ABBY: My question is “what are your interests in making work right now?”

MARGIT: Making work: what I love about this term is that it can be applied to so many different kinds of purposeful activities, be it the making of live art, of an object, of a field of study, of drumming up one’s vocation. Making work seems to be about defining something through the process of the doing; as you do, so you are becoming.

Making work: my fascinations always have a meta-component, and in the case of art, the question often comes up of why do it at all? There is so much struggle in there. A bunch of years ago I found the way to provide a regenerative answer to the nagging question. I pour my whole self into my art, consciously. What this means is, an artistic project necessarily need be fulfilling a variety of realms: artistic interests, a sense of design, intellectual curiosity, physical health, sensory development, soul practice, human connection, all. So, now my work comes when it is an integration of the total potency.  I don’t push it, I see what arrives and follow It. When I can see how these aspects interact, I know I am in It. I am not sure what I am doing is art as much as it is me seeking, and bringing form to my imagination and to the invisible realms. Art is one word which can describe this, and there are others, but truth be told, I feel we need more accurate words to describe our practices. It is very satisfying to be a part of a field, and then there is this aspect that is just the doing. There is in me a part that does not necessarily want to join in. I am choosing to participate right now. It feels right. It moves It forward.

A big part of making work as a dance and performing artist is what it means to be visible, how I shape what I am doing for others to see, and how to be in the presence of others. This comes in so many phases from the inception of the work. In making, I am deciding about a voice, a tone, and a way to be. On the level of performativity, my greatest concern is to see and be seen (scene) simultaneously. This is a vital challenge that is ongoing.

My pieces take many forms, be they straight-up dance experiments, writing, performance lectures, discussions, curatorial projects, and installation work.

My making work these days is a kind of slow build of ideas through the richness of a constellation of questions. I spend time alone investigating and as I can, I work side-by-side with people who inspire me to enliven and help give It form. I like what happens when making work lives in the presence of others. I like what happens to me, all the insight that can come from putting it out. My concern is to create a field of inquiry that can be shared. If it lives in a variety of settings, my expectation is that the contexts can provide another layer still for the work. So it effervesces (is that a word?) amongst its environment and people, developing its life from where it is at.

Right now, I am amidst a project called Y, which is a study of branching, of multiplicity. I am interested in the androgyne as potent characters and symbols of potentiality. The splitting of a cell is the stretching of a polarity to create division- this is the inception of multiplicity! This arrival from singular to more is a place of sex determination, and also an analogue for the rise of language. So, the letter Y has been a symbol both for the Word and the Androgyne, arms outstretched one body into two. You can read a little more about the project at this site:http://margitg.wordpress.com/archive/y/

MARGIT: Now for you: What is something you would like to research in teaching the Monday Night Art Workouts?

ABBY: One thing that I am excited to research in the ART Workouts is how to integrate an intellectual and theoretical discourse into a class setting that also involves a rigorous and embodied physical practice.

I feel like back when we went to college (100 years ago), I received a very clear message that dance was one thing, and theory was another.  It was assumed and accepted that visual art and filmmaking were deeply connected to theoretical discourse  about art and art making, and even perhaps were crucial to it, but that dance fell into some shady and gauche netherworld  that  landed somewhere  between  the gym, anthropology,  and MTV. I will never forget the reply of one of my esteemed colleagues who responded to my question of “why didn’t you come see my show?” (he chose instead to sit in an east village bar, only blocks away). He replied, “I don’t watch dance.”

At the time, I was quick to nod knowingly, implying of course, how silly of me… dance is for girls and fairies, lets drink some scotch and talk about films….   I tried to study film, but it bored me to tears. I tried to study visual art, but had no talent for it…I read lots of critical theory, but felt like I somehow wasn’t supposed to connect it to my own artistic journey with dance to this body of thinking.

Post- college I came out to the Bay Area, and kept dancing.  At the time (1994) my experience here corroborated the supposition that dance making and critical theory had no use for each other.  I plunged myself into the anarchic, polyamorous, angry, and expressive dance scene that was going on at the time. We talked about our relationships to ourselves, each other, the natural world, the universe, our womanhood, our energy,  other peoples energy,  homeless people, sex and sexuality, the impact of eating ice cream on our health, but never did anyone mention my beloved Donna Haraway, Roland Barthes,  or Fredrick Jameson. In fact, if I tried to go there, people seemed annoyed, threatened, and perhaps  even a little angry that I was trying to show off my expensive education.

So when I went to New York seven years later and began working with Miguel, imagine my surprise when one day, Miguel quoted Roland Barthes in rehearsal!   Each time we entered a new process with him,  he had spent time researching  reading , scouring the crevices of the internet for ideas,  theories,  inspiration,  and precedents…We went to Hollins for a residency one spring,  and I happened to see the notes on the board left over from Donna Faye’s Choreography class.  It read like and introductory course to Modern Culture and Media.  Then I saw the work those girls were making.  Oh my god!  Genius!  Earth changing! Something clicked in my brain.  Good theory makes good Dance!  But I was running too fast –making it to rehearsal, going on tour, running a Pilates studio, and making babies… to do much about it at the time.

So anyhow, now I am back in the Bay Area, and things seem different.  Lots of folks have gone to graduate school and I can see already that the dialogue has shifted a lot.  This is exciting.

I am really working on integration at the moment. I am trying to connect pieces and aspects of experience.

So i think one of the theoretical projects for me of the ART WORKOUTS is to see if we can finally step out from under that ridiculous dichotomy of mind versus body, which i think as dancers we have always instantly recognized as bogus.  I would like to start to really be able to be in a discourse about the nature of performance and reading and performing the body at the same time as we are working to deepen our experience as physical beings.  That these things could be, at the least simultaneous and at the most, synonymous activities!!  Live performance is radical. Embodied presence is radical!!  Perhaps non-embodied presence is too for that matter!

I think you have been thinking this way for a while, but I am apparently a late bloomer….

xo

abby

ABBY:
pick your favorite

Can presence be taught?
What makes a performance compelling to you?
What does your ideal teacher look like and how does she impart her information?
Describe your ideal student. How will your teaching address the difference in backgrounds of the students?
Why are you interested in creating a class that has a cross-disciplinary dialogue embedded in its constituency?

MARGIT: I choose the question Can presence being taught?

First of all, I would say that presence is a state that one can experience through clear and embodied action. There is a component to presence that is having a layer of observation that comes with the clarity, and from this one can make choices and decisions that are aligned with one’s values. In terms of performance – be it performance on stage or performance in one’s actions in the world (e.g., having to speak effectively, making decisions in the moment) – a person is often faced with adrenaline and can cut off their full capacity. From Bonnie B. Cohen, I have learned that the sympathetic system, historically called fff (flight, fright, or freeze) also includes actions like tend and befriend. There are physical practices that can show us how to live in embodied states, and recognize which of the multiple systems we are enacting at a given time. All this to say, when you have to perform, you may be limiting your options because you are scared. In a strange way, each action is life threatening, as it threatens your sense of self, and can change the direction of your life course, no matter how delicately small it is. Other roadblocks to being present are that you may also just not be focused on what you are doing, or be into what you are doing and not aware of what else is taking place around you.

This term presence is such an elusive one, so often stated, could use a universe of dialogue, and I think it is quite personal in definition. There is a larger social framework, as ever, that plays into a concept of presence. There are indeed tools that can incite being in the mode of presence, and I will address this later. I am not so into ideals, though the failures and attempts bring great information and clarity. I practice thinking from experience, as a way to find what I already know that need be more greatly articulated and therefore will come to know more fully, and to mend the mind/body division that we inherited, as movers and as citizens of Western Civilization influenced by Descartes. Since we thought therefore we were, some of us collectively have been in a long process of recovering becoming. With the division, we (and I know the “we” is loose; if there is any doubt, count my multiple selves) gained an obsession with quantity, diminishing contrast, pattern, and gestalt (thanks Gregory Bateson for the clarity here). So, I speak from this view of monism, the constellation of connections and a wholistic or ecological approach. I do not want to create an illusion that there is this ideal thing, presence, and we try to get there. Trying is imbued with effort. There is always a step away.  One can practice presence, would this be presencing?

I bring up dualism because it is right there oftentimes when one is being seen. Oh, the pain of the separation! Buber spoke of I-Thou, and many lineages have terms to speak of these connections.  Eugene Gendlin coinsbody/environment, Philosophy of the Implicit. Presence is in some aspect about being in the connection, which I have called in the context of my own performance dancing, “dancing with”. You can substitute “being with, actingwith, playing with”. It is not so much about a duet, rather about being in the state of with-ness. I experience this with-ness as a body/environment, as a deep fascial movement, through my proprioception in relation to my own moving parts- in self and with. Without with, I am a spinning top, and as a dancer, I know that state place all-too-well. As a motor-mouth and a hothead, I know that state all-too-well! Practicing presence.

The funny thing about presence is you can practice and it may indeed emerge through practice, yet also it just arises, like gas, rises up through the surface, and maybe you happen to notice you are there. It can just come.

So, how does one teach presence? We can teach practicing presence. There are many tools that help the practice. They relate to physical intentions and attentions, and they relate also to creating frameworks and initiations within an particular run of action. Practicing presence is supported by repetition from consciousness, from living in an action, observing it, and trying again. It seems important to slow down enough to match the movement with the attention as you get the presencing motor running. Really, with practice one can start to develop a context for what it means to be in an embodied noticing of action while it occurs. The noticing is strangely close to judging what one is doing, but realms away. What can take place is from this kind of layer of observation that you can make choices, rather than live in the spinning top.

ABBY: whoa,  I love your response.  holy cow you are light years ahead of me!  That shit about  ”when you have to perform, you may be limiting your options because you are scared, and in a strange way, each action is life threatening, as it threatens your sense of self, and can change the direction of your life course, no matter how delicately small it is.”  Is a BIG DEAL!!!  that explains so much to me about the state of performing and how it can feel so astounding when one can actually be present through that state,  and equally how it can be so devastating when one feels like one loses track of oneself there!

This reminds me of some reading I have been doing about babies and brain development. On some level, as physiological response to performing is probably hardwired into our system from how we experienced trauma in early life. Infant brain research is showing that if the infant is traumatized during the earliest moments of life, before they have much control of their nervous system or bodies, their response is often freezing,  or playing dead.  This may explain a bit the occasional freeze or blank that happens on stage…

A class that practices performing can, in this way, be like a model mugging class.  We can practice choice making and presence from within that adrenalized state.

MARGIT: And find tools to diminish the stress, so one’s state can be clearer and more relaxed, with more space, more breathing. Stress has a function, but with practice and artful skill you can have choices in how you want to live through the moment.