Reflections Task 40 and Task 41 – Windows

Dear Maria,

Thanks for Task 40. I was very excited about the breaking of the etiquette and enjoyed doing Task 40 – Together – together. I’m writing this not knowing what was your experience of sharing the task. Find below my reflections and further down Task 41 –

Reflections Together

I will begin with an exercise of recounting what we did for the task. Further down I will respond to the questions you posed in the email I received from you following the sharing of the Task.

Monday 22 July 2018 in front of Leeds University Union

I wanted to share with you my impressions of what we did for the Task. As I write this I realise that this is a ‘meta-exercise’ that acknowledges that although these reflections are addressed to you, they will be posted online for other readers who didn’t take part in the Task. So this account is also for their benefit. More about the ‘meta-level’ later.

3.34 pm we meet and greet outside Union.

3.40 pm we make our way towards your ‘secret spot’ about 15 min walk through the park. We chat on the way about the task and discuss options of how to spend the hour we have there together. Shall we have one task that we both do or do we give each other tasks when we’re there? Are we doing yoga or something else? How will the posting of reflections work when we have broken the etiquette by doing the task together? After some time we agree that as the task is named ‘together’ we should both do the task and write reflections. As we enter a forest-like backyard of the nearby streets you say that, in the light of recent posts about relations, the task should be about the relationship between our bodies, the body and the environment and what it means to take the yoga practice into a non-typical yoga setting.

3.55 pm we set up in a clearing, put our bags down and start exploring the area.

4.15 pm we work individually and in silence. How we do the task has not been determined so it takes a while before I ‘tune into you’ and feel that we are together.

4.30 pm themes of play and imitation of yoga shapes start to occur. We hang out in trees, balance on tree stumps, our hands or bodies meet in short encounters. I cover your Balasana with sticks and leaves. Postures shape and are shaped by the environment as well as by the other body.

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4.45 pm we face each other in the clearing and a series of postures, mirroring and responding takes place.

4.57 pm we meet at the bench and we break the silence with a smile and a quick chat about the small breath of quiet and air the clearing gives the hustle and bustle of surrounding busy streets.

5.10 pm we say goodbye and part on the streets of Leeds and go off in separate directions.

Was what we did yoga?

I began answering this question by writing a long account of what elements must be present in a yoga practice. It sent me back to previous posts (around Tasks 26-28) where we exchange reflections and instructions around the questions of when postures are correct/right or if making your own postures count towards a yoga practice. After some ambling I realise something I haven’t yet articulated to myself. The only element I could absolutely say is crucial for my own yoga practice is intention. It may be important to practice recognisable postures from a yoga oeuvre, to focus on breath, to choose a designated space or props but with no intention to do yoga and relate the practice to ‘a wider belief system’ (as you describe it in your reflections for task 27) there is no yoga. An intention to dedicate your full attention to the body, breath, alignment, space etc and the connections between all of these in the time you spend doing the practice, is the core of yoga. All other elements are important components that materialise the practice but intention is the indispensable thread that joins them together. For this reason, my answer to your question must be… yes!

How was it similar or different from the practice you normally do?

I have practiced in the outdoors, without a mat, in shoes, impromptu, with no particular aim for postural sequencing, in relation to nature before, but never all of this at the same time as we did on Monday. The intention to draw my awareness to the relationship with the environment shifted my focus and expanded my perception of what I believe the practice to be.

What other things did you think/feel/discover during or after the session?

Well, something interesting happened after we parted on Monday. I left the Task with a peculiar feeling that something was not quite right. I had been very excited about sharing a task so why was I left feeling somewhat dissatisfied? The answer crystallised throughout the evening and the feeling of dissatisfaction transformed into a realisation about the project: Only because we met did I understand that the excitement of the project has been exactly in the non-meeting. The project has been formed around the premise that we meet in cyber space in a prescribed format for the blog. By not being face-to-face in the actual physical exploration the emphasis has been placed on the delivery of my exploration to you – the reflections on the blog. I argued in my Task 39 that the body and the ‘doing’ is the pivotal point for this project but I will now challenge this: The body may be crucial for the execution of the tasks but it is how this is represented on the blog in our online meeting that creates the project. This make me think: What if there are no boundaries between the body and the posting of reflections? We present the labour of our physical work in pictures, videos, a mode of writing and ways of addressing each other. What if body and reflections are extension of each other? Perhaps it is not simply that the body is reflected in the blog but that the blog itself forms the body; perhaps the two are reflexive.

And so I return to the ‘meta-level’. Every other week I address my reflections to you: ‘Dear Maria…’ pretending that my post is written just for you while knowing that the whole world (or perhaps just one or two people!) is watching. You describe this space where we meet virtually very accurately in your reflections for task 39 as ‘the window of our imaginary studios’. A window we have created that frames a project which is private yet public, aiming to reveal a process yet showing an outcome within a narrow predetermined format. Perhaps meeting up stirred the balance between these conflicting experiences and displaced the excitement of negotiating their contradiction.

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Dear Marie,

many thanks for agreeing to meet me and following me to the ‘secret location’ (the name of which I don’t know, I assume there isn’t one). As I explained, this place has made a deep impression on me and all I knew when I met you on Monday at 3:34 pm in front of the University of Leeds Union was that I wanted to take you there. Now, after having read your reflections, I realise that I did not only want to take you there,  I wanted to place the project there. As a project ‘Two Trainers Prepare’, strictly speaking, has no place, but a virtual one.

There are two emphases here, perhaps the side of the same coin. We have been doing the project together – on our own, but also and because of this, the project does not have a place, unless you count the myriad places in which the tasks have been undertaken over the year. So, I realise now, that Task 40 was about breaking both of these conventions: we were together and in the same place. And I realise now that it is this ‘and’ that concerns me more than the individual parts of the equation.

This place is not a yoga studio. But it became one between 4:25 and 4:57, if we both agree that what we did was yoga. To me this was the most important part of out time there together.

In his introduction to Light on Yoga, Iyengar gives a number of guidelines as to how one needs to prepare in order to practise yoga. Under ‘Place’ he writes:

8. They [asanas] should be done in a clean airy place, free from inscets and noise.

9. Do not do them on the bare floor or on an uneven place, but on a folded blanket laid on a level floor (1991 [1966]: 36).

Iyengar’s guidelines involve other lifestyle adjustments too: stomach must be empty, bowels should be emptied, having a bath before starting will ease the practice (1991: 35-6). Of course, in contemporary practice around the world these guidelines are being followed to different extents. I doubt the ones concerning the emptying of the bowels are particularly adhered to.

Yet,  guidelines number 8 and 9 have stuck. In fact, they gave us the ‘yoga studio’. The yoga studio, it is important to remember, came after the development of the practice (for the first few years Iyengar was practising and teaching at home). So, at some point, Yoga went inside and purpose built studios began being built around the world. As you attest, yoga is sometimes practised outside too, but this is considered an ‘alternative’ to the established indoor practice. What is more, even when practised outside yoga mats and even surfaces are still in use.

On Monday, the breaking of guidelines 8 and 9 raised for me -again- questions for the ontology of the practice  – was what we were doing yoga?;  its legibility within a social context  – was it yoga for you too? Would it be recognised as yoga by someone else?;  but also the way the physical space structures the practice.

And this is what I found out on Monday: yoga as an established syllabus can and does take place outside, usually under the preconditions I mentioned above, but it does so as an established practice. The relation does not work the other way around. Even when yoga is moved into a different space, not unlike a choreography staged in a different theatre,  and even if the experience of the practice  is different, the practice, i.e. what we identify as yoga,  remains the same. By contrast, what we began to explore tentatively  was creating postures out of the place, the place suggested the practice. Or as you put it: ‘postures shape and are shaped by the environment as well as by the other body’.

I suppose we can envisage the development of a kind of site-specific yoga whereby a place has its own set of postures. Part of the practice would be to find out the postures the place affords.

And this brings me to another aspect of being together, which again I was not fully aware last Monday. On Monday, as you suggest, there was a sense of something not being quite right, which I also felt. You say that something about the ‘excitement’ of  capturing and sharing the practice for one another was lost.

Yet, what we gained was that we witnessed each other. I think it was this seeing that lent some credibility to what was going on. I know, and I know this for sure, that I would never go to this place to ‘do yoga’, had we not gone together.  And here is another thought: has the Blog conditioned our relationship to such an extent that when we meet, the immediate propensity, our ‘first response’ so to speak, is to witness each other’s process rather than become involved in it?

Task 41 – Windows

There is a whirlwind of new connections being formed in my body-mind as a result of this physical meeting and your response to task 39. I feel new avenues of thoughts about what this project is (and could be/come) have been opened for me. I want to fuel this by inquiring further into our ongoing question of relations -and windows.

I want to return to the imagery of the window you use in your reflections for task 39 as the starting point. My go-to-book at the moment for creative inspiration is The Place of Dance by Andrea Olsen. On page 41 I discover the useful term ‘windowing’ (used here in a poem by Suprapto Suryodarmo) and a phrase goes like this: ‘Windowing: making windows into your home, your body self; making windows to look out of your home. Which track to choose?’ Inspired by this quote and by the observation you offer in your final paragraph above on witnessing vs. being involved, this is your task:

The blog is a window and in that window you see a reflection of your own body self or your relation to the blog. Considering this prompt what would ‘windowing’ look like? How can you work practically with reflections or seeing through, seeing in/out, light/dark, from this window and at the same time play with ideas of witnessing the process (looking from the outside) or being involved (seeing from the inside). What does the frame of the window look like and how does it affect what and how you see?

I would like you to try and approach this Task from a practical viewpoint. Let your reflections for this task be evident in min 70% doing/practicing/filming/photographing/moving and max 30% writing.

I fear this Task may be a product of the whirlwind in my head as I recognise I may have created one of the more cryptic Tasks of our project. I hope you can keep your head above water! I look forward to your response.

Reflections Task 39 – Task 40 – Together

Dear Marie,

many thanks for Task 39. Below you can find my reflections. Below this there is the description of Task 40.

Reflections – Task 39

I thought you asked me what is my relation to the Blog. Then I read your post again and I realised that the question is far more interesting: how would I dance with the Blog if it were another body? Well, if it were another material body, because, I think, we both agree, that this Blog is a body, albeit an immaterial one. There are three immediate relations I have to the Blog. One spatial, one temporal and one psychological.

Sedentary: the blog sits me down and in front of a screen. It is not entirely the Blog’s fault,  I could be working on an ipad in bed.  Yet,if the source of your frustration is the two-dimensionality of the types of material the Blog affords, I get frustrated with the seated bodily posture that seems essential to using it. But down I sit, thighs parallel to the floor, shins at right angle to the thighs, head in line with the spine and arms resting in front of the keyboard. There is, of course, an orthoperformance to this relation, not unlike the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways of doing a yoga posture. If the blog were a body, we would be dancing a finger dance, I think it is called typing! 

Weekly: The Blog pops into awareness sharply on Monday mornings, time and space needs to be made if I have to post my reflections. During the ‘receiving’ week,  where all I have to do is read your reflections and receive my task,  the relation is calmer, but there is still excitement: ‘what will you post?’, ‘what will you ask me to do?’. As each week we alternate in taking the lead with the project,  there is a  sense of the responsibility being shared (I wonder if there is a similarity here to caring relations: you take the kids one week, I take them the other; you spend Christmas with our ailing mother this year, I will do the next; I take Uncle Bob to the doctor’s, you take him to buy a new hearing aid.) How far can we extend this metaphor of the Blog being something that needs regular ‘checking’ and taking care of? If the Blog were a body we would be dancing a Polka dance, tentatively.

Mutual: The Blog is like a window. Digital technologies, especially those involving screens, are often likened to a window (see for example Galit Wellner’s title A post-phenomenological inquiry of cell phones, 2015); they afford looking out and looking in. By posting the entire project on the Blog, we decided to share it with anyone that might chance upon it. Anyone, might look in through the windows of our imaginary studios. We are also, however, looking out. We refer to other people’s work, we share links with colleagues and friends, we develop a repository of the entire project, to remain after the project is gone. There is another thing that windows do though: when it is dark outside and there is light inside, windows reflect back the life that takes place in the rooms they are windows of. My relation to the Blog is reflective and reflexive. Before anyone encounters the posts, the Blog reflects back to me my relation to a form of practice that has come to define me and through it my relation to myself. Often these reflections take me by surprise, sometimes  they confirm what I thought I knew and yet others they lead me to stuff I do not even know are there. And maybe these ‘stuff’  – realizations, insights, pains, frustrations – were never ‘there’ but only emerged out of the relation.  I wonder how long  they will last for. If the Blog were a body, we would be doing the mirror exercise.

Task 40 – Together

Your task for this week is to meet me at 15:30 in front of the Union on the University of Leeds Campus. Breaking with etiquette, for this task we will work together.

Reflections task 38 and task 39 – A body of work

Dear Maria,

Many thanks for task 38. Below you will find Task 39 – A body of work.

Reflections Relations

This task is clear and to the point and completely central (I feel) to what we’re trying to do and for that reason I have been a rabbit in headlights trying to work with the question. ‘How might a relational yoga practice be represented and disseminated through language and imagery?’ No matter how I choose to respond I will not do the profoundness of this question justice. How can I create images that represent not the postures but what happens in the relation between them? And how can I talk about the relation without reducing the experience of it to a simple word play?

Here are some tentative reflections:

Imagery

Layering the images in goes some way to answer the question of a relationship between postures, between the body and the space etc, but it is still flat and two-dimensional and too literal. The postures – although now in direct relation to  one another – are still fixed and static.

Language

 

SIRSASANA                                                    SAVASANA

 

Virabhadrasana classic Virabhadrasana correct Virabhadrasana athletic

 

 

TRI     KO       NA    SA     NA    TRI    KO     NA     SA    NA   TRI    KO  NA   SA  NA  TRI   KO   NA    SA     NA    TRI     KO    NA    SA   NA   TRI    KO   NA   SA   NA    TRI    KO

 

Task 39 – A body of work

At the end of your reflections on task 37 you state: One thing, however, becomes clear: my injury reveals the very thing that was taken for granted in the task and the photos: ability. I wanted to add to that: the body is taken for granted.The body – and its abilities– are the pivotal point for this project even as sometimes the written reflections and visual outputs take centre stage. This insight is not ground-breaking on paper either but nevertheless one that affirms my experience that Two Trainers Prepare is not a ‘project posted on a blog’ but an exchange between two bodies.

These thoughts lead me to an idea for task 39. For this task I want you to think about relations not just in asana but in a wider context of this project. We have worked together two people in a pair, that is one relation. We have worked individually with our surroundings, that is another relation. There are numerous other relations to mention but I want you to focus one particular one… We have used reflections and writing and uploading and posting and created a more intangible relation with something that is not physical: the blog. I want you to explore ways that the outcome of the project (the blog) can be considered a tangible element in your relationship with it? Where is the blog and how can you work with the proximity/distance between you? Is the blog a deposit of written material, photos and videos or do all the tasks and reflections add up to something more? A body of work?

Imagine this: if the blog was another body how could you dance with it?

I look forward to your response and to seeing you in Leeds very soon.

Reflections on Task 37 and Task 38 – Modern Relational Yoga

Dear Marie,

many thanks for task 37. Below you can find my reflections and below this the instructions for Task 38.

Monday: I am excited and inspired by the pictures you post and look forward to doing the task (which I am not sure exactly what it asks, because I read the instructions very quickly).

Tuesday: I do understand that the task has to do with some form of re-construction, re-staging, adaptation. I am thinking about the re-creating of past choreographies and the function of scoring. So, the photos are my score and I can change anything I want in the composition. A little something nags me, but I am not too preoccupied with it: I have never done, or be taught,  Natarajasana, the posture you are doing with the diggers. I will have to find a way to somehow address this.

Wednesday: I do a bit more reading on the commutation test. It sounds a very interesting methodology. How might the thing, or series of things, I will change in the composition reveal insights about both the original and its reconstruction?

Thursday: SNAP. My back goes and with it all the plans I have for the task.

Friday: I can barely walk or stand. I am medicated to my ears and have no idea how I will respond to the task. Dazed by the pain and the effect of the painkillers, I am thinking about asking for an extension. But this has never happened before. The frequency (yes! the rhythm of the posts) is one of the threads that makes this project what it is. One thing, however, becomes clear: my injury reveals the very thing that was taken for granted in the task and the photos: ability.

Saturday: The pain has eased somewhat and with it comes an idea. What will be changed is scale.

Painting by Margarita Samara

Task 38 – Relations

The last practice I had before I injured myself yielded an insight. Asanas are not postures, they are relations. This may not sound particularly groundbreaking on paper, but it took me nearly 20 years to break the mould of the idea, and practice, of postures and realise that what is going on is in fact relations. What is the difference? Postures are fixed, relations are fluid. Both the translation of the term asana as posture, as well as the photographic representation and instructions of ‘Modern Postural Yoga’ (see De Michelis’s excellent History of Modern Yoga 2004 and Singleton’s Yoga Body 2010), create the impression that yoga involves the doing and holding of fixed positions (even if in practices like Ashtanga Yoga there is a lot more emphasis on the movement between the postures).

Here is your task then: what kind of visual and linguistic representation might we have if we think of yoga asanas as relations? Relations between body parts, between the body and the space, between different weights and pressures, between inside and outside etc etc. How might a relational yoga practice be represented and disseminated  through language and imagery?

Symposium Launch for special issue on Dartington College of Arts

The guest editors of the special issue (SI) of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training on ‘Training Places: Dartington College of Arts’ are delighted to invite you to the symposium and launch event to celebrate the issue’s publication. After three years imagining, planning and curating, the SI devoted to Dartington College of Arts (DCA) will be published in the early autumn of this year and marks the 10th anniversary of the agreement to ‘merge’ the College with University College Falmouth in 2008.

The SI reflects the diversity of art forms, writing registers, pedagogies and images for which Dartington was renowned, and includes contributions on and from: Peter Hulton on context and development of DCA, Chris Crickmay on Arts & Context, Jacky Lansley and Fergus Early on the Dance festival and X6, a roundtable reflection on Music, Gregg Whelan (Lone Twin) on Performance Writing, as well as multiple images and voices included in Donna Shilling’s record of the walk back to Dartington and Kevin & Kate Mount’s timeline photo essay.

The symposium launch will be held on the Dartington Hall Estate on Saturday 3 November from 12.00 – 15.30. The afternoon will include a response to the special issue by Karen Christopher (ex-Goat Island and now of Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects); Thresholds, a group walk around the Dartington grounds led by Simon Persighetti (Wrights and Sites & DCA lecturer); a critical memory project in and around the Dartington estate; and a presentation by Rhodri Samuel (CEO of Dartington Hall Trust since 2015) on Dartington’s plans for the new Elmhirst Centre. More details will follow.

Details of the special issue, the launch event and booking information (cost £10.00) are all available through the link below to the eflyer.

To register your interest &/or purchase a hard copy of this SI (£5.00 tbc plus p&p), please visit:

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/5920/special-issue-final-flyer.pdf

We hope to see many of you in Dartington!

Bryan Brown, Dick McCaw, Simon Murray and Libby Worth

Guest Editors TDPT SI on DCA

Research Project on Actor Training at the University of Malta

Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques (CTATT) is a Research Project that studies how actor training practices are transmitted across cultures, and in this process appropriated and transformed. Recently launched at the Department of Theatre of the University of Malta, the project is interested in both historical as well as contemporary instances of transmission.

The formal aims of the Project are:
• to create a series of research actions – workshops, residencies, seminars, conferences – that revolve around the transmission across cultures of actor training techniques;
• to reach out to the largest possible international audience that is directly invested in the study and practice of actor training and performance;
• to create and disseminate a body of knowledge related to actor training, such as workshop documentation, recorded interviews, published scholarly material, etc.

In April the Project hosted three actor training workshops with Alessio Bergamo (Accademia di Belle Arti di Frosinone, Italy), Julian Jones (Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, UK), and Jakub Korčák (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague). The practitioners conducted sessions on Stanislavsky’s magic ‘if’ with Theatre Studies students. These workshops were supported by ERASMUS+ funds for Staff Mobility for Teaching and Arts Council Malta – Malta Arts Fund.

The CTATT Project is directed and coordinated by Dr Stefan Aquilina, who can be contacted on [email protected]. For more information about the project, including a series of interviews with visiting practitioners, please visit www.ctatt.org.

Reflections Task 36 + Task 37 – Composition reconstructed

Dear Maria,

Many thanks for task 36.

Blog format

So far it has been mostly an advantage to post tasks and reflections on the TDPT blog where the layout of how we post has its limitations; it has meant that thinking about how the blog entry appears was not something to be concerned about. However, my reflections for task 35 is one of those entries where I feel the blog format restricts my reflections. With composition as the central point for this task, the pre-set font, layout of text and limited ways of adding photos means that there is not much scope to play with the composition. I would have liked to place the images side by side and blow them up much bigger. Anyhow, for today the layout of my reflections below will do.

Reflections on Composition

I did not manage to track down the exact image from Joan Jonas work that you were referring to so I took the instruction from your task and paired it with what I imagined the still image to look like.

Image made on self-timer


Photo by my dad, Niels Andersen

Photo by my mum, Kirsten Hallager

a) The body-in-yoga

The yoga posture I chose for each photo was inspired by how I felt they would work best compositionally in the surrounding environment: what shape would either contrast or mimic the objects in the space, what was actually physically doable and be visible within the frame.

b) The surrounding environment

I did not have time to construct a set-up for the photos and as a result my everyday activities and surroundings had to suffice for photographing myself doing the task. Inspired by the yoga photos by Polly Penrose and other artists (like Julie Blackmon who photographs everyday life in (sur)real set-ups), I used places and spaces that I pass through and interact with daily. I was particularly interested in how the yoga postures were sometimes camouflaged in the untidy and ‘busy’ surroundings yet adding an ‘oddness’ to the photo. It was an interesting process for me to compose the photographs with myself in a yoga posture and relate to my bodily experience of this position in a new environment.

c) The object

The object was not at the forefront of my mind so I would mostly just grab what was there on the scene. Holding an object as part of the posture removed any remaining experience of doing yoga. I was simply posing with an iron, a brick or… a child. I did consider what I was wearing for each of the photos. Mainly that I wanted to avoid yoga wear but again, time limitations meant that I would pose in whatever I was wearing, which then became part of the narrative of the image.

Without having paid much attention to it while composing these images, each of the elements (a, b, c) add their own visual ‘rhythm’ to the images. I was so glad you clarified in your reflections for task 34, that syncopation is not rhythm out of synch but different rhythms  in relation to each other that either compliment or complicate the overall pace. I want to play with this further for task 36.

Task 36 – Composition reconstructed 

I loved the idea of visual rhythm and have in my reflection on task 35 discovered a different way of ‘seeing’. Composition as a manifestation of rhythm between objects, bodies and environment is an obvious choreographic tool where movement is central but I had not articulated to myself that rhythm could apply specifically to images.

For your task 37 I want you to reconsider one or more of the images I composed for task 36 and reconstruct it/them as close to ‘my original’ as you can. For obvious reasons the environment and objects will be completely different so try and resolve the compositional challenge rather than matching objects. Perhaps think of it as a commutation test where you investigate an image by identifying ‘signifiers’ that you substitute with your own environment, body, objects, colours etc. How does keeping composition (more or less) intact but exchanging elements in the frame agitate the visual rhythm of the image? Bring back to the blog the image(s) you create and any reflections on the process.

Enjoy