m/evolutions

a note from an old dear one in response to my performance with ADM (later renamed The Exponential) earlier this evening

2009-08-09T00:46:00.000-07:00

"long have i waited for tonight,
years,
to hear you sing,

i had no expectation
of the sound that is,

...

- some stimuli can be so
overwhelmingly beautiful
that they confuse the brain about through which
receptor they are actually being received

your voice
is sweet
and commanding.
you have a beautiful tone and control
and your voice communicates something
ancient and sacred,
and touches the listener (i don't think its just me)
very deep

once heard an actor
speaking of
playing the role
of a
powerful person

the mannerisms of
powerful people

he said
that they
didn't do
anything in a hurry,
they are never rushed

i guess we might say that they are patient

i wonder if your singing is making you more aware of your power - and making you more patient?..."

Death and Refinement

2009-06-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched these movies, which blurred harmoniously together through my intermittent dosings and dreams of Pema Chodron's Compfortable with Uncertaintly
and Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. The gist of these beautifully done films is that in order for an organism to refine it's physical form, along the way a great many cells must die and are programed to do so when signaled. Then the organism absorbs the dead cells and metabolizes them for energy to live. It's why most of us humans don't have webbed hands and feet by the time we're born. Those cells were programed to die and fueled our bodies' development.

This is a clear physical world example of an order that, I am becoming increasingly aware, exists on all levels of life including the psychological, emotional, and cosmic. In order for a being like me, for instance, to refine my life so that I'm living as the essence of me, I have to become aware of the baggage I carry that is nonessential. I must stop identifying it as a part of me, allow it to die and feed myself off the substance. To be more specific, just as my body signaled active cell death in most of the webbing between my toes (if you are familiar with my toes then you understand why I say most) and used the metabolized the dead cells into energy for developmental processes, I can metabolize my baggage. I can build my awareness that the stories I've been attaching to my memories my whole life, and the resultant cycles of thought and emotional response are not me. I can see the pain body that has grown from the fuel of stories for what it is and use it to fuel my presence in the here and now.

The pain body has been growing from the fodder of my memories, hurt feelings, and the cycles of thought/pain that have been chasing their tales around my psyshe. Everyone has different examples. Some of mine include My mother couldn't love me enough to raise me so no one will ever love me , or on days when I missed the school bus and had to walk from CTA pink skinned white folks scared me and called me foul names so whenever I come across them I feel uncomfortable, hated and resistant to whatever they say to me, or A man became belligerent with my partner and I on the eL and crossed into our personal space so we summoned our own rage as forcefield and he did not touch us so I have to walk around using rage to keep myself safe. These stories can go on and on and form the contents of my pain body. I can discipline myself to see it for what it is, something other that my Self/Truth. I can discipline myself to identify my emotional responses and thoughts as what they are, things that I experience but that aren't themselves me. In so doing I can stop growing my pain body and signal it to begin it's death. I am fortifying my presence here and now with the awareness that the the contents of these stories are not the contents of my Self, nourishing myself with the substance of the dying pain body.

Programmed cell death and instigating pain body death. The dead substance fortifying the living. Death that allowed the pairing down of the organism. Refinement. Getting down to the essence. My ego finds some satisfaction in my evolving awareness of the fractals that make up the universe. I'm just experiencing it all and learning to be present. Thanks for reading.

My new Special Friend

2009-06-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

Oh how I love you
let me count the sips
I love you to the depth and breadth of my thirst
Your glaze like the sea
Sapphire swimming in cobalt with flecks of sky and jade
brightening around the lip and darkening into earthy bark around the edge before the plunge into my oolong tea

I have fallen in love with this tea cup. This cup is a perfect fit for my palms to wrap around and raise to my ready lips. This cup has no ego, no pain body, no emotions whatever. It is calm, peaceful, inanimate. Though this is my favorite cup, if I should decide to pick another cup for my next refreshment, this cup won't mind at all. It will wait peacefully for me to come back to it, or for someone else to come along and fill it up. And that's fine with me. This cup is so lovely, I wouldn't want to deny anyone the experience of indulging. Oh, I do love this cup! I'm delighted to have come across it. And, though I am enjoying it immensely, I realize that it isn't really mine. At some point the owners, for whom I am house-sitting, will return, or the cup will crack or break, or be stolen and taken for ransom or become lost in some other way. I will cherish the memory, but I will not be broken. I will collect my delight, and move on, as one must do in this turbulent world.

Rest in peace, brother Michael.

2009-06-26T01:17:00.001-07:00

JSun challenges me to write the story of how to turn someone into an empassioned wreck. I have trouble with this. It's completely against my...

2009-06-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

...principles. I believe I succeed only in writing how to turn someone into a passionless shell--also against my principles.

The term "day" in the following narrative is meant biblically.

Day 1: A smiles at B. B smiles back.
Day 2: B smiles at A. A walks away.
Day 3: A brushes against B, pulls B to look close into A's eyes.
Day 4: B glances nervously at A.
Day 5: B kisses A. A kisses back.
Day 6: A and B fuck each other mercilessly.
Day 7: A and B fuck each other mercilessly.
Day 8: A and B make love.
Day 9: B smiles at A. A acts as is A and B have never met.
Day 10: A calls B and professes love.
Day 11: A tells B they should stop seeing each other.
Day 12: B fucks A mercilessly. A enjoys every bit.
Day 13: A does not call of correspond with B.
Day 14: A and B profess love.
Days 14-17: unknown
Day 18: A says goodbye to B, and disappears from B's life forever.

Demon description from CRY rehearsal freewrite

2009-06-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

There's a demon who doesn't want me to have anything, who throws my possessions and connections in the swine troughs and tries to feed me a vacuum, tries to disappear me. There's a demon who wants to frighten me away from being alive, to dry me up, to place me in his mantle piece collection--another glass woman in a perpetual disaster drill crouch. There's a non-being, a nothing, a blind spot that tries to force me to sin (defined: harm myself (defines: neglect to cultivate all what's Godly about me), to scare me, to blind me, to cast me away from myself. It's the mind fighting to be in charge without the groundwork of instinct or the fuel of intuition. There is a demon who seeks to confuse, to trip me up from my expanding spiral, to shrink me into a kearnal of dust like burnt corn ash stamped into the dirt of a dead field.

love story free written in CRY rehearsal

2009-05-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

Love fooled Somebody into thinking she was dead. She curled herself up real tight and concentrated like, off in a crevice of a shadow, in the dusty attic where spiders propagate inside the no flow part of Somebody's pericardial tissue. She formed herself up into a hard knot and Somebody forgot how alive she ever was.

Somebody walks around with a hunch, unknowingly trying to cradle love with the inside of the underside of his shoulder. Somebody feels the pain of trying to stretch love against her will, before she's ready, when he opens his heart up in the morning; feel a a twinge like a laser prickin' him deep past his armpit and someplace he can't quite sense, right in his chest.

Somebody resolves to take a deep breath and stretch through the twinge,and love sighs and uncurls a little. Somebody jumps rope, plays hopscotch, plays dance dance revolution. And love--well she shakes around, has to stick out her hands to keep from bumpin' against the inside of Somebody's ribcage. She gets a tickle from the air touchin' her newly unfurled surfaces and lets out a laugh that's more like a dusty chirp from a voice long quiet.

And Somebody hears the chirp someplace in his spine bones, a little buzz that reminds him he's alive.He's confused by the sensation. In his confusion Somebody looks out through his eyes into Somebody Else's eyes and catches a little twinkle of chirp in that confused son of a bastard, too. And Somebody and Somebody Else stare at each other, confused and buzzin' and chirpin' and not wondering what it all means.

How do you kill love...

2009-05-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

Is a recurring question in JSun Howard's current performance process, Cry.

Today's answer:
By thinking it unworthy of everything you've got.

my first attempt to describe ADM

2009-05-11T09:18:00.001-07:00

A resonator is a liminal sphere with sensitivity to frequencies the musician chooses to channel, the earth being a macro resonator. With each of our resonant instruments--drums, strings and gourds, skeletal structures, etc--ADM creates a sphere of resonance together in which communications beneath and beyond the realm of language are fostered and take life.

ADM May 2nd

2009-04-27T21:42:00.001-07:00

what ADM performs

improvising like the alien shaman human creatures we are!

when this Saturday May 2nd 8-10pm

where Central Park Arts Artist Collective, 1252 N. Central Park Ave (not the same as central ave!)

who Margaret Morris on vocals
        Brian Murry on percussion and turntable
        Ben Perkins on Rudravina and Sibahar
        +++ possible surprise participation

how much show up and talk to people

how I'm feeling today...

2009-02-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

Photoghrapher: K LEo

I hate dance, really...rant

2009-02-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

I hate dance, really. It's like a terrible irresistable lover, the kind who sends pulses up my chakra chanels with a slight touch, and leaves me bowled over in grief moments, days, years later, over and over in cycles. The kind that turns me into a sugar daddy, supporting her with all the time any money I can muster, and then plays coy with me, becoming totally illusive so I have to roam empty spaces throwing powder everywhere, as Terry O'Conner has described, until my invisible lover gets revealed. I hate dance because, after all this, and sometimes injuries, and soreness, and and and, it isn't even capable of communicating the depth of what it is in any fully consciously recognizable way. It is NOT a language. It is what it is, and subject to interpretation or not, vacancy, despite any clear intention or action on it's part. It cannot stand alone and fully transmit it's beingness in a way that is totally processable in the cerebrum, speakable, recognizable in today's rational world. Because of this, and other needs that are hungry to be fulfilled by my performing self, I'm wanting to build something equivalent to a multi-ring circus where the rings are interconnected and dance manifests in only some of them. But dance is so hungry and demanding of attention that it's hard to begin to cultivate nearly as attentive a relationship with the others. I have to sneak to do it. If only there was some sort of couple's counseling. Knowing dance she would surely entice the counselor and soon we'd have a family of three. There's no getting around her, so I may as well introduce her to the others. I hate her because I know she'll try to force them to supplicate themselves to her and they'll have to fight hard to have their own ground to thrive on. After all, she's managed to become a main component of my identity for the past near decade. She won't learn to share easily. Really, I love dance, but it's a tempestuous love that I often try to run away from. Perhaps we can learn to live happily in a balanced polyfaithful family, but it will take work, and many more blog rants like this one to get there.

Performance forms list

2009-02-03T19:20:00.000-08:00

Compiled by me, Brian Dailey, and Angela Gronroos

-lec dem
-post show discussion
-slide show
-telling ghost stories
-workout class
-church
-any sort of class
-court
-camp fire
-infomercial
-commercial
-cooking show
-political rally
-community organizing meeting
-interview
-photo shoot
-wedding
-live customer service (eg. front desk reception, cashier)
-job orientation video
-tour
-stewardess air safety presentation

"The Point"

2009-01-14T21:59:00.000-08:00

After a week's worth of process I performed it at the Judson Church as a part of Movement Research's works in progress series 1/12/09
Process/Performance notes

So, the talk with the audience about the tiny inter-human affections that manage to save our lives felt very warm, like hanging out with a large group of intimate new friends, like I got to hold each of their hands. There was something very satisfying in that. The movement aspect has been the biggest struggle so far--stalking in and out of the studio, beginning some physical search for a search, and throwing it all away mumbling and cursing to myself "What's the point? Goddamnit, what the hell is the point." Around the same time I started laying around often with a kittenish new person, and appreciating those little things. After one of those mumbled questions to myself I had a flashback to a kiss on the forehead and figured that that answered something, though it illuminated nothing about the movement that I sense is becoming somewhat impatient waiting for me to find it.

So, on stage I burped out little bits of movement, excused myself and carried on a monologue which was very much an energetic exchange with the audience, about loving gestures, interspersed with the breath patterns of dying, crying, laughing, and ordinary respiration. This is my first time feeling that it was absolutely necessary to finish a draft of the sound score before fully being able to conceptualize the action. So I made a draft of a sound score, something I've done but never in my dancemaking practice, and found the performance from there.

What next? Maybe time to watch the video. Maybe not before more ruminating and possibly more action to do with the self argumentative digging for movement.

Dance: Hah! Good God, man! What is it good for? Absoluely nothin? Hmm

2009-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

So what's there to say about contemporary dance that possibly makes any difference to anyone? Does contemporary dance make any difference to anyone besides the people making it and their friends who are also making it? As someone who makes dance, becomes cynical about the whole world of it, walks away, and repeatedly finds myself coming back to make more, I have a kind of bias. It isn't a gooey sweet unconditional love, but something in me. For better or worse it's a need. Compulsions aren't easily explained, and there's no reason for me to try. What I really want to look at is the thing I feel compelled to participate in.

First, contemporary dance is an evolving art form. I often wonder if art truly bears any function at all in today's US consumerist culture, particularly something so ephemeral as witnessing a performance, something that cannot truly be bought or sold. The thing is, despite the capitalist paradigm in which the US currently operates, at the crux, we're human beings. There are certain basic things that, unless we are damaged, we value; affirmation, affection, fellowship, trust, touch, discovery, freedom. We have the tools, as a species, to make these central to our experience. The fact of war as a current reality, after multiple millions of years of so called progress, and enough resources on earth to go around, signals a misplacement of our priorities. If we got the world's top psychologists to examine the deep human tendency towards hierarchical social structures, they might come up with a way to correct the widespread syndrome so we could move past killing each other. All we really want is to live free and joyful lives together. War is an extreme manifestation of the lethal side of the human contradiction. The fact that we haven't naturally bread it out over time suggests we're going to have to use the unique gift of human intellect to accomplish a more highly evolved species. Let me repeat, we're going to have to use the unique gift of human intellect to accomplish a more highly evolved species.

Here's where the contemporary notion of art comes in. In my estimation, the most essential ingredient in any successful piece of contemporary art (as opposed to traditional world art forms which have various other practical and social functions) is it's ability to shift the perception of the witness. A successful work of art causes the audience to perceive some aspect of the world differently than s/he did before exposure to the piece. The ability to perceive and re-perceive is crucial to human progress. It is the stuff of revolutions--to see possibilities where none are apparent. To re-imagine the world through a visionary lens is essential to shifting the extant paradigm and creating something more suitable for peaceful and happy existence. (I'm looking forward to my first visit to Cuba in the coming months, a wonderful opportunity to see the fruits of such paradigm shifting :) The current system in the US is such that a thing has to have a monetary pull in order to survive here. Art education is one of the first things to go when public school students don't do well in standardized tests. People are growing up here with sub par critical thinking skills. Society consistently undervalues art, creating a hostile environment in which to grow it. Despite all this, art germinates and manages to live on. Art is a crucial practice in human perception. The transformative experience that constitutes art consumption--a word I use as a symptom of my society--is a necessary exercise for our muscle of perceptive evolution. Just as working out refines the body, consuming art refines the mind.

The thing that brings me back to dance again and again is deep down in it's DNA. Dance can be framed, and reframed, deconstructed and reconstructed in all sorts of ways that may touch the perceptive habits of some, shake others', and leave yet others' quite unmoved. When it comes down to it, the dance that is most affective--smart or not--dives into the ancient and original purpose of the form. The most affective dance work has a shamanistic element. By shaman I am not specifically referring to Mongolian traditional healers. Shaman here refers to traditions throughout the indigenous world of creating and crossing bridges to the spirit realm, communing with ancestors and other guides, and bringing insights back to the physical world often used for various types of healing. This old practice bears a similar function to contemporary art. It grows us. The dance performances that have moved me the most, from Cunningham to an unknown club dancer, have all had some of this. The dancer has a part of her/himself that opens up and crosses over into a realm beyond the mundane, a realm of the spirit. The dancer became the bridge that connects this world and the other. The dancer/bridge then activates something inside the audience--our own crossing over. That is the stuff of a dance that moves somebody. Sometimes it's built in to the choreography. Sometimes it's the way that the individual dancer is oriented to find something divine in the movement. Sometimes the crossing is accidental and fleeting. Once a dancer experiences it, s/he is hungry to return. Once an audience member does, s/he understands the value of concert dance.

Now, if a choreographer ventures to construct the material of the dance such that the bones and marrow and organelles of the work all contain that shamanistic bridge, then it will be there in whatever form the work is ultimately presented. Take that material and deconstruct and reconstruct and decontextualize and recontextualize it in all the ways that make it a satisfying work of contemporary performance, of performance that challenges and shifts the perception of the witness, and you have a yourself a vital evolutionary spiral. You have an art form that moves the spirit to grow the mind to move the spirit to grow the mind to move the spirit to evolve the consciousness!

Dance: Hah! Good God, man! What is it good for? Absolutely Somethin!

Fleshdream

2008-11-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

Photographer: Peter Bazjek

When I made I am another yourself with Onome and Keisha, the process was insanely fast and with very little dedicated dance/performance space for rehearsals. Somehow we put that together in hallways, apartments, and video files. The process had an intense thought--not from the moving body--incubation that was no less close to that most honest place where the best work originates. There were dinners, walks, and reflective purgings that led to the work. Somehow the three of us hit on images, and words that we HAD TO include. We found our urgent needs together and quickly fashioned a performance out of them. We found an urgency that was just at the hot boiling place where performance can spring from the mind but the deep mind, not the one that sits behind the forehead. The kind of talk we did was the kind that comes from the body, though we didn't generate the piece moving. It happened, and I recognize the feeling now. Though I don't have a map to the region, I'm quite sure that I can use my emotional compass to find the way there again and again. It's a place I'm familiar with, and that I have created works in various relationships with. At the time we made that work, quite recently, I was coming out of an angry stupor in which I had completely disengaged from artistic practice for over a month--a very dark time in which I became estranged from my body. Perhaps I'll detail the experience in a later blog.

FLESHDREAM Now, that I'm in the process of crawling back into myself, charting the way to and from that hot real place is not enough. There's a need to use the psycho/social/spiritual/physical nexus of the living body to be in that place and to be there publicly. My departure from my body in the bulk of the making of IAAY was a necessary step because it forced me to disengage with my habits for observing, perceiving, and presenting what I found in the body.

I feel the need just now to defend the RPW ladies against my previous statement about their lack of pioneering spirit. In my estimation, which is narrow given that I've known them for less than 18 hours, a few of those women are absolutely ready to take the kernals of impetus I give them and process them though their inner systems of reactions/responses/desires to give back stark shining moments of honest communication articulated from the place where language falls short. Others just aren't. There is something not quite open in them which it would be a supremely rewarding experience to get to, but we don't have the luxury of that time. Again with the ego, because my name is on the work, there are certain semi-conscious standards that I feel it must measure up to. What I find myself doing is swinging into the place of a micro-manager who narrows the scope of possibilities in what amounts to crafting their improvisations into something human/real/visceral seeming rather than what is actually growing out of them. What I mean to do is point out the possibilities of where they can go because I don't have time to wait for them to embolden themselves to go there. But I'm realizing that sending them into the shell of a place doesn't deeply inform them of where they can go at all. So I wonder if it would have been best to forgo the idea of a "Margaret Morris" piece altogether, and simply give them the space and time to get someplace real, then frame it where it landed. It's too late to turn back now, but I can and will focus my prep time on the framing, so I can give them the whole landscape of the thing. I'm hoping that this is a way that our last week can allow them to grow into their experience within it without feeling pressed or hurried.

Borderlands

2008-11-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

Photographer: Jerry Brown

I have had very few idols in my life. Gloria Anzuldua was one of them. She brought the magic, dangerous place of the borderland, which I have known my entire life, into marvelous articulation in Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza. This place, outside of everyplace, where you can never go home again unchanged is where I live--an educated, post lesbian, Black woman from South Shore (Chicago South side mixed income neighborhood in which people were shot in the alley behind my house on more than one occasion) who is now a contemporary dancemaker equally called by improvisation and choreography. Earlier this evening I meandered into a conversation about performance mode verses ordinary mode. I say meandered because I was busy sweeping the rosy remnants of the evening's last improvisational performance across the floor when the talk started. There were a lot of things said that dichotomized improvisation and set work, and attempted to assign them each with sets of values that don't exist, at least not like blankets. In the course of the conversation it became palpable to me that the place where I feel most at home in making dances/performances (I've started also saying "performances" because there's a set of expectations that often comes along with the word dance that I do not feel obliged to fulfill) is the place where I feel most uncertain.

It's important that I own this now, particularly given the precarious process I'm involved in with the RPW class at the Dance Center. The students have a general desire to know explicitly what is being asked of them. The investigative spirit is foreign to many of them. "Is this what you want?" has become a familiar question, a question I'm encouraging them to ask themselves instead. There is one thing of which I am certain, that I need the space of uncertainly for the experience to grow up and through. A borderland is a hungry, liminal place between societys and with no laws beyond gravity and nature. It's a desparate place where alliances are formed out of physical and spiritual needs, and where you could die if you're not careful. I'm intentionally describing it in this heightened way because that's my interest.

My interest in in what the emotional and physical bodies do once they reach their edges, their own borderlands. It's ironic that Columbia picked me to work with this bunch. How do I get to this place in an authentic way in only six more rehearsals, and have a piece to show for it? It's possible that some people will feel alienated by/in the process, and there isn't the time to take care of them an any emotionally responsible way after rehearsal because another group needs the room, and many of them have other rehearsals to run off to. The best I can do, if I can be honest with myself enough to relinquish my egos massive desire to make a "good" piece, and go there with these young women, is to encourage them to process their experiences alone and together on their time outside of the studio. Now I'm off to plan the journey of tomorrow's rehearsal, much of which I'm sure my intuition will guide me beyond once I'm actually in the room. We have to continue from somewhere.

haiku 1

2008-08-16T23:33:00.001-07:00

Photographer: Mike Caffrey

Today I put my
body on and found that dreams
clothed in flesh breath well

yes and

2008-08-15T20:11:00.001-07:00

Photographer: Mike Caffrey

note to self

2008-08-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Photographer: Bob Randall
Creativity can be encouraged and explored. The more we explore it, the more bountiful we realize it is. An open hearted investigation of the mind reveals the spirit that it serves. There is an infinite well of creativity for all. Unfortunately, in attempt to preserve socially normative constructs, parents and institutions perpetually train that beautiful shit out of most of us at early ages. I, for one, am not having it. I'm in a conscious process of breaking down the walls this conservative culture has built inside me, and mining the luminous bits to build my lighthouse.

important notes

2008-07-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

"God don't make no junk..." "...Shut up and be beautiful"

rubbish and angels

2008-05-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

Hi my loves! (WARNING: Ridiculously long email with sappy ending below. Read at your own risk!)

Wow, you wouldn't believe how much I miss you guys! I am in NYC surrounded by a few friends (and a some non-friends) and would give anything to sit over tea with you all and talk about life, dance, spirit, politics, whatever...

Anyway, though I'm a day late and a dollar short, I thought I'd share Margaret's request for LOH process memories with everyone.

1. I remember we began by writing in journals/notebooks about something...sorry I don't remember the prompt for that writing...

2. I remember writing our daily processes on the walls on huge sheets of brown paper. More specifically, I remember the topics, "How do I know I exist?", "How do I heal?"

3. I remember the Bill T. Jones-inspired "floating the tongue" exercises where we would say what our bodies were doing as we did it; and that developed into not just say what we were doing, but saying that we were what we were doing (i.e. I AM the arm that is swinging, I AM the ribs that are shaking..."); and that moved into the "I am the dust. I am rising from the dust..." poem.

4. I remember the awesomely violent, improvised duet between Margaret and Cara. The violence that was most notable to me in that improvisation was not in the "violent movement" itself, but in the hostile ways you acknowledged/didn't acknowledge each other's presence.

5. I remember Angie and I playing with images of violent postures that we'd seen/been exposed to. One was one of us lying on the ground with the other person twisting the 1st person's arm behind their back (police-style) and stepping on their back to keep them down. We also did an exercise where there was a standing person and a floor person, and the standing person had to whatever it took to ensure that the floor person would not get up to standing- the aim was to keep them down. (Was the kicking born out of this day? I can't remember) That was a hard day of rehearsal for Angie and me because we had to inflict violence on one another, something so out of character for us both. But check out how that ending duet turned out!

6. I remember Cara and I making an entire duet based on flying (I think), that "Slow Motion" song, and something else I can't remember. We fragmented the song, translated portions into French, and used it as text to our duet. (Man, I wish we'd videoed that!)

7. At a point, I remember you, Margaret, deciding that the piece was going to be a series of vignettes. We were at Silverspace and were split up into our respective trios, duets, or solos. Emily read a graphic account of an African woman's rape and torture during wartime in a cheery voice as if it were a bedtime story. I read text that you wrote involving an angry, enslaved woman, shrapnel, and the devil's abacus.

8. I remember lots of storytelling. This process made me realize how much I love storytelling. We told stories and listened (the bird story, the stories of personal experiences with violence; me hitting the girl on the school bus, Cara witnessing the fight b/t ppl in her town; Angie watching the crack-lady and the man inch their way down the street, yelling...) and stories we told all at the same time (again, at Silverspace, we were all in a circle and everyone simultaneously contributed things that were emotionally difficult- can't remember the exact prompt for this one either- and a lot of us ended up in tears)

9. I remember the floating, hand-slapping game we did in partners in which the loser had to melt to the ground and get kicked about before starting over.

10. The best memory was balancing the heaviness of the content of the piece with lots and lots of laughter and lovingness toward one another throughout the entire process.

Congrats if you made it this far, aaallll the way down memory lane! Margaret, hope this enhances your manifesto writing. Also- not related- I'll be in town for a quick moment this weekend (Friday-Sunday) for my sister's graduation from Columia, so holla!

So much love,
Keisha
Margaret Morris wrote:
- Hide quoted text -

Hello my angels,
Margaret here. I'm stepping into a new place in my perceptions and interests about dance and preparing to write a new manifesto and overhaul my website.

I need your memories. From your experiences of the Laying of Hands process, I would deeply appreciate if you could send me little notes about what tidbits of things we did were particularly memorable (particularly things that did not appear in the final work). I'm not asking you to rack your brains, just to share the thing that float naturally to the surface in response to this request.

A couple things that surface for me are:

1 accessing the physiology of laughter and crying through breath explorations
2 playing in the shifts between catching and being caught with a partner in one area/moving through space

Thanks and love,
Margaret

PS Angie, how did the concert go? I wanted to go but had a family emergency that thew off my weekend plans.

paysage

2008-04-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

junk mind environment

2008-03-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

questions directives smells metaphors flash
necessary garbage Richard Forman Pina Bausch noise outfits a pair of heels a teddy bear commercials breath and meaningless words this feels different from that my pathway through this is different from my pathway through that the path to that the path inside o that the path as that the path as guts the path in touch with one's own guts the path through guts won't someone please lift me up lift me up now it's different if we do it in the rain blindfolded in the middle of the highway comfort danger rocks and spit build reveal obliterate Ayako space between your balls bells sentiment candles nonsense reality a hard look at the mysterious parts fractal I WANT YOUR ATTENTION don't look at me gesture pause explode unison explosion turn jump direction change invert CATCH ME i want your body support me "be on" me lipstick wine is this too close this this how about now do you like it don't look at me chase now i'm chasing you go go jump roll jump catch me with your face fall with your fall with you chase shoulder tattoo pelvis trace in space retrograde and repeat and repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat abrupt stop grace now grace i catch you music video dog food commercial tampax cigarettes voodoo dolls butcher beef it's different when you do it in the butcher shop when you do it in the hen house imagine cars racing by so close they blow back your clothing cause your toes to curl back in protection but you cant stop don't stop shift direction change change change turn pivot jump land catch me invert i catch you now lets go for a walk

r/evolutions 1

2008-02-06T16:56:00.000-08:00

Love, to love truly is the bravest thing. Love. To love truly is the bravest thing. Love, love. To love truly is to know God.

My Amy
There is a woman named A. A sees that capitalism has infiltrated the American spirit. She listens to the news, mostly paralyzed. Her ability to articulate has been reduced to cuss words, letters, and numbers. Perhaps they are related to statistics. Perhaps she is counting her appendages. She has forgotten about God. She does not bother climbing the walls or shouting.
“Tttttt-two-two (pause) million ttwenty-thous (silence) 11(winces) shit.. Ah, Ah Ah, B-b-b-d-e-5-5-5-groan. Sssssssss77…goddamn!"

Julia’s ReLISH/reLache:
Mine
Relish my experience
My way—the way I like
Oberve desires and impulses
Maintain awareness of internal processes
Be aware of the confluence of trillions of cell activity to make this dance
Know that I have access to my movement from now, then, and soon across distances of
time

Ayako’s 10 night’s Dream:

Be transparent- This reminds me of the conscious practice of experiencing life both in the moment and in the floating place observing the sensory experience

Bringing the awareness to the form of the muscles in the way they connect the extremes of the body to one another makes awareness of the energetic movement within the body/space more achievable. In a similar way, bringing my awareness to my senses, to the minutia of movements within my body and without, brings my mind to the space of meditation.