Studio Listening

Tuesday 7^th October

A small practice in a small dance studio looking out to the space between 201 and the Māori and Pasifika studies spaces.

The studio is dark when I enter. The mirrors are watching me.

I swap the curtains over so the university is watching me now.

I notice the large screen on one wall and figure out how to screen the videos I've made of Waipareira stumbles.

I realise I'm tired and I need to digest the morning properly, so I lie in the middle of the space, with the screen at my feet. Immediately my video voice greets me and I'm taken back to a meeting I had beside the awa Ōpānuku, responding to a conversation about an event that aims to open up discussion about biophillic design in the built environment field. My thoughts are reflective of the questions I ask myself from the video.

How am I bringing together a collective of aligned practitioners to work on/through conscious place-source performance practice, in order to support the evolution of our places and fields? Who and where am I in relationship to?

[I am interrupted in this writing, and in the video by my child calling to me... “Mummy! Mummy!”

In the video I speak to the awa... “the rivers need to live in our bodies”...

My daughter asks “Can I do Jazz?!”

I breathe, both in the video and in the studio.]

I think about the quality of the film and how it is jittery and I wish for more of it to be stiller, or smoother, so my body can rest. Other times I am happy to have the sense of my body included in the footage, bobbing, bouncing, tilting.

An image of a bright green leaf amongst the dirt feels satisfying.

Finally I want to move, to awake from the ground, and I notice that I am following my habits of rolling and crawling to evolve into a standing relationship.

This morning I thought about how much of contemporary dance practice is based in martial arts and healing practices. I wondered if the practices I am following can become more disciplined in their form, timing, intention... or that they can become clear about the discipline they contain, to evolve their potential for contributing towards systems evolution....

I go through the feeling of my body, I feel into the memory of wind from Te Atatū, I sense into the patterns of the wind I see outside. I consider how the visuals of the video sometimes draw me in like a child afixed, and other times I can ignore them. I wonder what a durational relational performance of the video archives would do... to me, to others... to the river?

The video offers a surface with rain dancing, kissing it, and I feel a twitching arise, a question of how to flow and be dimpled.

At one moment I catch a glimpse of lichen in the wind as I am wind-ing, and I fall into a lichen body.

Later I remember working with the awa near Piha, discovering that there are layers to the stream, under layers and surface layers. Sometimes they feel like they are working in opposite directions, and I remember the streaming practice that resulted.

I wonder about what the practice of 'stick hunting' might offer. What are the 'sticks' I hunt here in the studio? I think about how the sticks are offerings of restriction and difference, a reminder of the spirals of the ecology we are designed from, an invitation to work with another body that has it's own logic, and how the sticks are potential resources of evolution of capability and capacity. I remember that the best sticks are found in the density of unique ecologies, away from paths that have been cleared of disruptive forces or blocks to the flow of human progress.

Maybe the forest of this practice needs to be denser, and I need to go slower?