Roisin O’Gorman, Roksana Niewadzisz, Joshua Wagner
The following extends practices from Green Trainings special issue article “What takes your breath away? Notes towards somatic training in times of ecological crises.” That essay focusses on how evoking our environments as collaborators and interlocutors in performance training through the attentive modes that somatic approaches foster moves towards an open, responsive readiness as a foundational skill for performance training in times of climate crisis. Each of the samples below represent very different approaches to engaging in ‘Green trainings’ where the environment offers site and subject in arts practice-based research in PhD contexts. More importantly, these sites become companions and guides on the divergent research pathways. Both work in different forms but share fundamental embodied approaches to their work where the entry points into the unknowing and undoing of somatic approaches transforms experiential and experimental research methods and outcomes.
Roksana Niewadzisz
“Animal-woman journey(s): Posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales”.
This small sample of work comprises two videos. The first is a series of video-postcards which offers an abstract of the thesis “Animal-Woman Journey(s): Posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales”.
Animal Woman Journey(s):
The project explores that which is often termed the posthuman turn through performative modes. By focusing on non-verbal creaturely life, as recounted and transmitted in zoomorphic folk tales of human-animal transformations, questions of who is deemed human, and by what powers, are brought to the fore. This research project aims to recover, translate and reimagine these tales through a process of embodied and creative research. Folktales are often treated in contemporary society like they do not matter. Despite having been passed down across the generations orally in many cultures, they tend not to be considered knowledge in a world where things are explained only by science and justified by industrial or technological impact. They are often disposable, marginalised, or dedicated to children. They are often changed, softened or universalised, as in the case of Disney Productions, becoming a repetition of harmful patterns (of stories that originally are often anti-feminist, patriarchal and misogynous). But since there is no “proper” version, there is no one “accurate” interpretation, and so this project reimagines the tales once more. This second video is a sample from artistic practice seen as a process of intersemiotic translation to the transformative potential of the theatre and performance for reflecting on ways of embodying other “skins” and stories, through different modes and understanding of somatic and ecosomatic practices, and other intermedial modes, processes and techniques, such as interlingual translation, directing and devising other voices, video-documentation, composition and the haptic.
The second video here represents a re-imagining of the well-known ‘Little Mermaid’ tale. The story came to me when I was on the Italian coast enjoying the view of the sea and open horizon for the first time in months, after the pandemic, but my thoughts immediately went to those who in the beauty of the Mediterranean sea lose their lives in the search for liveable lives.
It resonates with childhood dreams and memories where the mermaid risked her life to follow her dreams, marry a prince, and become “fully human”, not knowing the outcome of this journey, like so many racialized “Others”, dispossessed of their homes, lands, families, language and voice, who attempt to cross the Mediterranean on overcrowded boats and at the mercy of human traffickers. It also evokes the non-human others that inhabit it, who like the Little Mermaid, dispossessed of their voice and habitat, become deprived of their right to breathe. And their bodies dissolve into foam…
Josh Wagner
“Affects of heartache and play: improvisations with grief and forests”
Since the loss of my mother nearly 6 years ago, I have been cultivating an ongoing movement and sensory-based practice that revolves around encounters with forests. Outputs range from writing and photography to film and music/soundscape composition. A number of synergies have emerged from the intersection between the forest-based practice and my process of grief. In particular, I have long been struck by how both, in their own way, effortlessly rupture previously adamant conceptual and perceptive habits, opening new opportunities fresh creative strategies and paradigms.
With grief, particularly concerning unexpected and irreversible loss, emotional and affective intensities can trigger a temporary “short-circuiting” effect, whereby much of what we once considered obvious and self-evident along a wide spectrum of reality principles gets called into question. We may become preoccupied with a reevaluation of even the most trivial matters. One is thrust into a sort of unlearning that imposes a state of instability, resulting in a loss of grounding. I personally recall feeling a sort of regression to childlike attitudes and perceptions—surprised by how much I thought I once knew and adrift on a spectacular ignorance.
Taking one’s creative practice into the forest can yield similar results. The motor memory allowing one to move effortlessly along a hardwood floor struggles to contend with uneven ground and protruding tree roots. Stinging flies and fickle weather interrupt flows of thought and well-laid plans for practice. Not to mention those singular surprises unique to any given day on any given square decametre of forest, involving the intrusion of any number of organisms going about their lives. Ultimately, what gets imposed on the practitioner by entering the forest is the inevitability of improvisation. The more or less idealised geometry of the studio and the carefully blocked geography of the stage give way to the textures and emergences of a living organic world.
With grief, as in the forest, one gets torn away from familiar foundations and thrown back to a chaotic, amorphous kind of being. Grief thrusts us into a state of unknowing where one only dimly remembers a time when everything made sense and the performances of life and art felt (comparatively) effortless. Likewise, in the forest, one stumbles swiftly backward out of the ease and habits of practice. Here, the rules and the players are always in flux. Improvisation becomes the norm, and one must contends with shifting conditions whose ultimate motives and causes are a rhizomatic assemblage of multi-species interactions. One is forced to think and rethink, to feel and re-feel, to pay close attention, to respond as a beginner, startled by the unexpected. To grieve with and among the forest compounds these conditions, and we face the unpredictable material world with an erratic body-mind. The resulting negotiation remains open-ended, and the micro-discoveries and learnings are offset by ruptures and reorganisations.
One example from the last few years is a project that emerged so gradually and improvisationally from the practice that, by the time I even started thinking of it as “art”, much of my work was already finished. Each of this sculpture’s primary components were woven out of ongoing narratives in my forest encounters at the time. Its form evolved out of what was found rather than what was sought, and through a reciprocal relationship with its details.
Creative practitioners struggle not only against trained-in habits, but with the self-limiting nature of creative development itself. What begins from inspiration may soon find itself imprisoned in plans or trapped by its own execution. In A Director Prepares, Anne Bogart writes in of the violence of choice, how each decision shuts down possibility and funnels the artist quickly away from freedom and openness toward a more mechanistic relationship with the work.[1] In striving (even in striving for beginner’s mind or ‘shoshin’, ) one eventually encounters the inevitable adversary of expected outcomes, where the image of one’s goal obliterates opportunity.
But in the forest I have encountered less risk of being locked into routine movements or trapped inside a preconceived notion. Nearly all of the outputs resulting from my grief-inspired forest-based practice emerged not as fulfilments of pre-conceived planning and intentions, but gradually and startlingly throughout. Having played the meticulous architect for years, I found liberation in letting go and following the process. This does not mean eschewing detail; instead, the work becomes in a way fractaline and recursive, wherein detail responds to form and form reshapes itself to emerging details. Results may vary, but no more so than in top-down projects. In fact, I’ve found myself far more surprised by results and outputs—by certain elements and flavours that seem to have come not from me but from the forest itself, which enhances a sense of collaboration I suspect but cannot confirm. The forest certainly contributes, with or without intention, and always (at the very least) by creating conditions in which one cannot afford to sidestep improvisation.
We can, out of convenience, think of the sculpture introduced above as an “output”, but in truth these photos are not archives of a final product. Rather, they are snapshots of a phase in development. The work hangs today on the branch of a willow in my old forest space in Kenmare, and each day’s weather contributes to slowly emerging iterations. I have not checked in for a couple of months, and I wonder if it has changed more over this winter than it did over the last. Maybe it has become entangled in vines. Maybe a bird has made a nest of the brain cavity. Maybe the tree branch snapped and it has fallen to the forest floor and cracked and succumbed to colonies of mycelia.
Taking a process-oriented approach to creative practice does not diminish its products, but imbues them with a new kind of life and an ongoingness difficult to articulate in semantic language. Timescales vary in the forest, and certain projects still feel like saplings after two years. There is little sense of beginning or middle, and certainly no end—as in forests, where trees never quite die but transform into new source of energy for others of its kind and splinter into new habitats for myriad living creatures. Here, even the ossified renderings of product-centric work inevitably yield new opportunities for improvisation, as so-called “products” invariably succumb to the flows of forest dynamics. Here, in the tenderness of uncertainty or the intense fractures of grief, one becomes easily infected by a youthful vibrance embedded even (and perhaps especially) in decay, where life and death both follow and precede one another, enmeshing affects of heartache and play.
Author Bios
Roksana Niewadzisz is a polylingual artist and a researcher with an academic background in Theatre, Translations and Art History. Currently she is developing a multidisciplinary practice-based PhD project across the Department of Theatre and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University College Cork for which she was awarded the 2021 Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. For the last five years Roksana has developed a variety of multidisciplinary, multilinguistic performative and audio-visual projects presented during international conferences, symposiums and events, such as: IFTR Shifting Places, ‘Out of Wings Forum’ at King’s College in London, ‘Fabulation for Future’ and ‘How to become a Posthuman’ at the Film University Babelsberg, ‘Performing Translation’, ‘Reading in Translation’ and ‘Radical Translation(s)/Translating the Radical’ at the UCC, 68th Annual AHGBI Conference at the UDC/Trinity in Dublin, ‘Global Water Dances Cork’ and the ‘Refugee Week’ at the UCC. She also contributed with her reflective text to the publication: The Coastal Atlas of Ireland (2021). For over eighteen years she has been developing her skills as audio-visual artist, performer, stage director and actress, training, devising work and performing in several countries and has developed fluency in four languages: Polish, English, Spanish, and Italian.
Josh Wagner is in his final year as a Creative Practice PhD candidate at University Cork College. He earned his Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. In the early 2010s, Wagner co-founded Viscosity Theatre in Montana, US, where he worked as a writer and producer of theatre while simultaneously developing work in film, prose, and graphic novels. His current research concerns forest-based arts practices as they intersect the affects of grief.
[1] Bogart, A. 2001, A director prepares: seven essays on art and theatre, Routledge, New York; London.