WorkExhibition

It’s OK… Calibrating Intimacies 5&6

In 2023 Joy Mariama Smith and I started collaborating, researching intimacy and friendship practices. We shared some first work from this collaboration at Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on Aug 24th and Sep 1st 2023.

This circle, brought together by artist and educator Joy Mariama Smith, explores, together with many others, intimacy and how it is intrinsic to the sacred. Consent practice is at the root of this investigation. What is intimacy and how do we experience it amidst vastness? This is the ongoing research question of this circle, calibrating intimacies.

Imbedded in the research practice of the common or commoning of uncertainties around expressions of intimacy and how it is intrinsic to the sacred. The performers will use the Oude Kerk as the primary site for these explorations. Approaching research on intimacy from a multi-modal place to align with the multiple uses of the O.K. Consent practice is at the root of this investigation. Our method and reason for coming together is to research collectively via discourse, vocalization and movement. The yield of the research is understanding the reciprocal relationship between the sacred and the intimate.

The public manifestation is an invitation to witness/support/immerse/engage with our research. We will do movement and vocal research around the collective space of safety/sacred/sanctuary. We will dance with each other and through each other, we will improvise and choreograph. We will speak without talking, we will make nonsense out of sense making. We will vocalize without being verbal.

I use dance here in the literal, and expansive sense, as well as senses that have yet to be revealed. The dance of relation. Human and non-human, space and body, time and space, person to person. 

The next circle meeting in this series will take place on Sept 1st. Please bring your own headphones in order to listen to the audio recording.

Collaborators/Cohort/Circle
Eroca Nicols (sept 1st)
Paca faraus (sept 1st)
Philipp Meyer-Hege (aug 26th)
Mijke van der Drift & Jay Bernard (aug 26th & sept 1st)
Joy Mariama Smith (aug 26th & sept 1st)
Justin F Kennedy (aug 26th)
Dylan Spencer-Davidson (aug 26th & sept 1st)
Ciro Goudsmit (sept 1st)
Laura Fernandez Antolin 
Alyssa Reiziger.

For more information about It’s OK… look here.

Previous

WorkWorkshop

Age of Majority

Born into a dying future, today’s preadolescents are the first representatives of Generation Alpha – a generation likely to be faced with immense global challenges in their lifetime. Too young to be afforded a democratic voice, but born too late to wait around, many of them are starting to take direct action around the world.

Age of majority is choreographic performance by Dylan Spencer-Davidson, developed collaboratively with Dora (11), Effie (11), Ella Belle (11), Josephine (11), Maida (12), Mila (12), Jordan (10), Sidonie (11), and Deva Schubert. By consciously occupying public space and subtly disrupting social codes, the performers adopt »subject rebel positions« and test ideas around autonomy, self-esteem, identity formation, performativity and resistance.
Premiered at Tropez, Berlin

WorkPerformance

The way I feel under your command

Inspired by J.L. Moreno’s concept of the ‘therapeutic soliloquy’, the performance is centred around an hour-long stream-of-consciousness monologue, in which autobiographical fragments are shared out loud as a means of exploring and processing accumulated experience. The choreography combines dance with exercises from therapeutic practices such as TRE (Trauma & Tension Release Exercises), a practice believes that humans store trauma in the body’s deep tissue which can be released through inducing involuntary tremors.

As bell hooks writes, ‘to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.’

Premiered at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich as part of “Are we bodies?” curated by Vlada Maria Tcharyeva.

WorkPerformance

Soft Shell Hard Core

The artist, alone with their laptop as if in their bedroom, compiles intimate texts from a variety of highly personal sources, with their desktop projected behind them for all to see. Diary entires and emails with friends, text messages and phone notes are intertwined, detached from their original source and set to music, opening up a gateway into a collective subconscious…

Shown at
Ashley Berlin
OUTPOST
FS Liverpool

WorkPerformance

I don’t feel safe to tell you

I don’t feel safe to tell you emerged out of research into psychological and physical therapies, practices and programmes including: Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), Non-Violent Communication (NVC), Systema, and Codependents Anonymous (CoDA).

Two performers enact a ritual of exercises designed to bring repressed trauma to the surface. Inspired by the radical self-analysis of self-help programmes, they set out to ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves’ (CoDA, Step Four).

Premiered at Haus N, Athens. With Jeremy Nedd.