A Home Tooning – margit and karen divine a dance

Come be with it!

8:00 Friday, January 20

407 North Street, Oakland CA 94609

Donations welcome. We will provide tea for after. Bring snacks if you like.

contact: Margit margit@physicalintelligence.org * (510) 761-6097

Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/142108919236830/

This event is connected with karen’s workshop, Warm Ups for Tuning taking place January 18 – 20 at Subterranean Arthouse: https://www.facebook.com/events/248739651848285/ there is still room to join! whole thing or single day drop-ins invited

Though the habitat of the piece condensed into a smaller sphere (and because of it?),

 (Ian’s video still)

it busted open….

Here is one image:

Years ago in training with Dennis Leri: he spoke of the cyberneticist who came to the San Francisco ’75 Feldenkrais Training and discussed the ease of writing to be transferred to other parts of the self, that we can write not just with our hands, but that our movement patterning generalizes to places as distal as the top of one’s head, which expressed the holography of human action and neural pathways (is this Karl Pribham?). Since then it incited in me so much experimentation and play with writing through the whole body. And here and now, the sitz bones. Maybe the picture per se is no masterpiece, yet in the practice of making it, some clarity emerged as mediated through both the action of drawing, the clarity of the pathway, and the motor and initiation of the thing. This idea definitely was one of the seeds that incited my research into inscriptions and embodied writing.

The materiality of the bones. The Material for the Spine. Kinematic linkages from vertebra to vertebra to vertebra… The structural intentionality of the livingness of bone. The spongeyness of bones. The spaciousness and spirallic nature of bones. Their bendability.

Rich source for creative research. Bone nerd this morning, for sure.

I am listening to the sound score this morning you have been working on and I wanted to let you know that it is really incredible what you have done – made some of the previous words of Y come alive into a new breath with your own mark so strong and clear. Somehow, through the alchemy of your making, the words have retained their story yet they are taken out of the literal into sound and texture and space. It is very moving, and I look forward to seeing what we are moved to do in the moment on Friday night.

What I am working on is how I am setting up the space. From center to opening….a kind of pulse in the arc of it? Not sure how to achieve it yet, but it is brewing. I want the circle space to be quite small this time and I’ll cover it with aluminum foil. Silver- metal- fall, the chinese energetics obvious, and there are so many associations, like reflection, the mirror, and the mirror pieces I worked on in Troy, like when Eric Hoffsten covered his whole dorm room with foil freshman year – the phenomenon of it was so goofy, and so cool for the punky nerd gothness of it. The idea, then, is kind of funny, and the joke is a portal to a different kind of joke, one that is more resonant with the power of the piece: as a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to eat Ring Dings, and yes, they were delicious with their chocolate coating, and slimy sweet partially-hydrogenated center layer, but it was about the afterwards that mattered, that I would then have in my hands a precious piece of tinfoil that I could work with, clean, and clear. My job was without any question, to smooth it out. This gets at an essence of the purification of metal, but for this Y, what is even more compelling is that the tinfoil is like a tablet for writing, be it making forms or purifications through erasure. I want to set up a construction for Friday where there is a tablet for writing that may not be visible but connects to one of my own ancient first-art writing rituals (Another had to do with Andes Candies, but that is for another time!). The breath and purification, and the contraction and expansion of fall/Metal, associated with breath and elimination (Lung, Large Intestine). We are in the eye of it now, the Y of it.

I can’t even yet deal with the fact of 11/11/11. It is really too beautiful and potential to understand, with the full moon coming up tonight and the Hunbatz Men’s crystal skulls on their way west to LA: http://crystalskullsevent.com/index.html

So, let’s dance and make the music, and see what happens. I am interested in how bright the moon will glow into the space on Friday.

I have been noticing in my own work that there is all this construction and revision and consent and creation and real-time that takes place, and then in the end there is an aspect to making the art where it turns in and has to be offered up for my own vital force, that that indeed is the way to engender the deepest effect, and that for me this is around the writing, and it is through this aspect that the meaning is made, the signature signed, the life breathed into it. As I discovered years ago through my work with inscriptions, this writing is not so obvious and not so literal, rather there is this realm for me called writing, or righting (or wrighting), where the meaning is inscribed into space, into the body/environment. I feel excited to see what can emerge through the foil, and feel further en-deepened through your invitation for me to blog on it all

For those interested, the show takes place as part of MILKBAR 11/11/11. Info here: http://www.milkbar.org/ , and here (facebook): https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=224989264234716

Hugs, mg

Y: pluripotency (Earth) at Highways, SOMAFest 2011

For more info on Y in general: http://margitg.wordpress.com/archive/y/

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 thru 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 let our participants sense themselves? And 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.

What kind of energy does it take to self-produce, or to be a part of a movement of production? I have always associated GSH with Black Arts and as a poet within radical black activism, yet the kind of work it takes to mobilize the environment within which creation takes place is tremendous, be it a national movement, or coalition-building, or a small group producing the Julius Ford/Harriet Tubman Healthy Living Experience, or an independent artist making work.

I tend to be obsessed with this aspect of the picture – not just the thing made, but all the conditions that arise and are composed to make that thing the thing that it is. And the inverse of this, of course, is the power of the thing itself, and what it says. In recent years, I have desired to find the harmony of the content and context, and give equal measure to both. But, indeed, I’m new here, too.

On independent self-production I have recently been blown over yet again by  Pearl Ubungen‘s performance/community arts work in the Tenderloin, SF, just thinking of what it was to make the connections in real time and space, before the comfort of a gated Tenderloin National Forest like we were embraced in through the Luggage Factory Annex and Buffet Flats. What does it mean to make work that interacts with the society within which it takes place, in a real way beyond some lip service?  This takes time and coalition building. Some people are called to make art that at all levels is….understood.  I have felt this through how Pearl works in many contexts, including personally – in a way this is a reminder that art is a framing of our values, and we practice it through how we live. It is an inspiration to witness, and to grow from this. Fortunately, she is not the only one!

As a newbie in the Bay Area, as a white woman with numerous privileges, it is easy for me to  jump into the easier currents of what is, eg: to take the Temescal neighborhood for granted as is without regards to its history and the rapid process of gentrification that scourges neighborhoods and Oakland knows all too well. Through reflections on history, and reflections on the power of community organizing, my continual learning of what I am stepping into is only greatened, and so rewarding. I often think this as I teach qigong in the parks around what used to be Merrit College and Dorsey’s Locker, imagine that years ago the Black Panthers distributed the Red Book, handed out meals, and it is the tip of the iceberg to a huge wave of history and activism as well as personal and social histories in this geographic node.

Our social structures are undeniably unfair, racist, and at times and for many in many ways, inaccessible. Some communities are filled with resources to the point that just to walk down the street is a healing, whereas the disenfranchised are denied even basic goods, healthcare and grocery stores. This is hard to take. Yet, as I write this I see a small opening: isn’t just to walk down the street the healing, no matter what – to breathe through and be part, even if for a moment, of a neighborhood, to circulate and become a little more connected, to sit on the stoop and meet the folks who lived on your block years before you, to be bold to meet the ones you have yet to meet, and learn their names?

In terms of art-making and being a participant in the practice and viewing of it, I am in awe of the histories before me. I see the power of what it takes to make it, and in my days more of dwelling, I wonder why people do it at all. There is this mysteriously jagged and fine line between bringing light into the world through art and doing it from the position of ego, and sometimes it is hard to see what side its on, which side I am on. I asked this question this week, and it grows inside of me: “Can you let go and still stay engaged?”, and somehow this is apt here, in this rambling about art, citizenship, humanness, race, and being situated.

I recognize in others when there is a beautiful synthesis of the power of a voice and all the voices and conditions that brought that voice into being. Sometimes the song is potent enough that it breaks through the exhaustion and sleep and helps us to hear more deeply; this is a kind of breaking away, breaking through that ruptures the everyday, and brings about a consciousness, and it is in this place of living for which I hold immense gratitude.

I don’t want to stop knowing that I am new here, and I look forward to the journey of noticing more and more how I am and can be a part of it.

TORONTO, ON — Scientists have found a control switch that regulates stem cell “pluripotency,” the capacity of stem cells to develop into any type of cell in the human body.

The word pluripotency informed my performance of Y at SOMA Fest. Pluripotency  is the potential of a cell to develop into more than one type of mature cell, depending on environment, aka: that the DNA of a cell can fully transform through the living. This term came up through my performance research earlier in the day in Santa Monica as a source for my dancing –  a question to dance with and a knowing, at the same time.

Y (Pluripotency) was also led by by the seasonal element earth, and the great history and environment of the gallery space of Highways, LA. I was inspired to be on top of many many names drawn with marker, as I nestled, sweat, and danced to tunes in my white cell after I painstakingly taped it up. Over the hours I spent warming up into the space with the ebb and flow of the other performers and folks that work there, I came to read over and over and learn many of the names, and realized they were all dead, I am thinking from AIDS because of the famous ones. I read them attentively.

As Arawana Hayashi spoke of the traditional Japanese dance form  she practices, bagaku, she told the story that we in bodies as the living have the ability to resonate the environment with our movement, and stomping on the earth helps the ancestors, considered radishes, grow. In bagaku, to dance is literally to nourish the departed, which in turn supports life. Perhaps this is some other inverted/non-linear/creative link between lineage and pluripotency?

video still by David Gilbert
To watch some video clips of the piece, click here

I wonder about that aspect of alchemy/magic how it is timeless in a way, that through our actions we can shift the past (…..) is pluripotency something like that? I feel that some time when I do my movement practices, I am changing the very roots and connections of my heritage. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about this, and how being mobilized for action, all action, indeed was a kind of being independent of heritage – a terrifying concept and yet an empowering one, at the same time. There are so many perspectives: art, science, sacred. It is a thrill to be able to work with the approaches, curate them, draw from them, and live arts seems to provide some critical space for this synsthesis of epistemologies – dance as poetry as research as….

I wrote this and said it to the crowd before I entered into the cell:

This circle is on top of the earth

The earth here in LA is golden

In this room, the circle covers words written on the floor

They are names of the beloved

who are gone.

Let the names rise.  

Y is a piece of ongoing performance research since 2002. More info here. It is currently a piece that takes place in a big cell, a la Daffy Duck, with a sound score both live or recorded by Kadet. Original 30-second dramaturgy came from George Lugg, whose great idea was to let the circle grow from the wall to take over a whole area and envelop. And mysterious influences by sharing studio space with GT. David Hurwith called the big circle environment classical! Upon request, he gave me a 30-second dramaturgy for this Highways version to help me understand earthness in cells, which he described as a gentle pull that draws the matter-ness/that-which-has-weight within towards the center.

Niki Ford and I have been exploring the body-food-earth connection together and presented our fruits, the Invocation Station, on September 11, 2011, an auspicious day indeed. This collaboration was prompted by Seth Eisen, who invited me to present at Buffet Flats – Harvest Moon; he suggested working with an expert, and since the series is dedicated to performance, food, and ecology, who came to my mind of course was my dear neighbor Niki, a food artist, fabulist, ex-Chez Panisse chef,  and with a grand history in performance art! We have been jiving over the past few years in a mutual adoration of the power of Chinese energetics – therefore the relationship of body-mind-earth-plus, and integral to any connections with Niki is the gift of the art of food! Below is a link to the opening of our living installation. This project offered us the opportunity to bring so many aspects of our life to the table, and when this takes place, it is a gift, indeed.

MG + NF at Buffet Flats, video of the opening poem + manifesto

more to follow with this  as we revisit what the heck happened!

photo by Niki Ford

SNAKE CULT:

An Ongoing Movement Laboratory based on Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine

Taught by Margit Galanter

The spine is a physical and imaginal resource for clarity in dancing and depth of power.  In this ongoing experiment, we will investigate the architecture and function of the central axis, as well as the quality of movement that comes from intimacy with our spine over time. The foundational tools for this study will be Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine, along with qigong, the Feldenkrais Method , and improvisational forms.

The goal of the Cult is collective and creative study that enriches our respective practices and brings new and brilliant movement into the dance habitat.

MONTHLY SERIES, Can be taken as SINGLE WORKSHOPS, too * THREE-HOUR SESSIONS, 3-6 PM on Sundays

2012 DATES:  January 15, February 19, March 11, April 15, May 13 * Oakland + SF

For more info, contact margit: margit@physicalintelligence.org * (510) 761-6097

* Single workshops $30 – 50 sliding scale. 

(Pricing set to accommodate for series if you would like to attend more than one!)