Author: wasswasswass

Posted on

Yoga and Improvisation

Below are quotes from the book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope.  An interesting read.  These quotes stood out for me as they connected to how I define and think about improvised performance.  Maybe these thoughts will resonate with you, too.

Pg 12 – After a period of intentional disorganization, the self emerges reorganized
Pg 40 – …for I am an immovable cause that moves all things
Pg 42 – We are already inherently perfect
Pg 53 – The dance that results if the interplay of energy and consciousness or what yogis call lila – the divine play
Pg 62 – Unlike your Christian religion, for example, we don’t believe that the problem is sin, or guilt, or wrongdoing.  It’s simply misidentification.
Pg 71 – the text book of immediate experience
Pg 72 – the renunciation of extrinsic sources of satisfaction
Pg 93 – It became alarmingly clear, for may of us, just how much the unconscious sense that “something is wrong” drives our behavior.
Pg 105 – The preoccupying question is no longer, ”What is wrong with this moment?” or “How do I change this reality so that it conforms with my ideals?” but, rather, “What is the nature of this moment-precisely?  How can I examine it more deeply?”
Pg 122 – a nonreactive, nonjudgmental, quality of acceptance…the twin pillars of clear seeing and calm abiding
Pg123 – The mind then becomes an instrument for penetrating into the essence of things, for taking possession of, or assimilating, the real…an instrument of knowing that is nonreactive
Pg 135 – the preliminary practices of yoga are almost all about building the calmly abiding self
Pg 156 – The eyes with which we are seen become the eyes through which we see ourselves.
Pg 178 – “choiceless awareness”
Part 4 – The Spontaneous Wisdom of the Body
Pg 209 – yoga – the practice of being present for experience.
Pg 210 – breathe, relax, feel, watch, allow
Pg 214 – As we become absorbed in the witness, we’re free both to participate in and to stand apart from our experience.
Pg 215 – we must allow the process to happen without necessarily understanding it.
Pg 216 – to notice without judgement
Pg 216 – We can learn to live on the magnificient edge where anything can happen
Pg 228 – three important ways – developing the instruments of proprioception (body awareness), restoring conscious control, to the most refined centers of the brain, and penetrating the deep internal body.
Pg 250 – the mental and physical flexibility to track and adapt to the changing demands and input of the environment on a moment-by-moment basis.
Pg 252 – that yogis experiencing dhyana was primarily attentive to, and occasionally absorbed in, the pure perceptual features of the object of their attention
Pg 255 – “The image of a posture arises spontaneously on the mind.  You wonder if it might happen.  Sometimes it does, following you thoughts; and sometimes it doesn’t.  It is completely beyond your volition.”
Pg 262 – When we have these ideas in our heads of “what is supposed to happen” in our bodies, we very often spend time looking for these experiences and feeling badly or inadequate when we don’t have them.  In the meantime we miss what is really happening.
Pg 266 – to tune out distracting and irrelevant stimuli
Pg 303 – As Robert Frost said, “ Freedom means moving comfortably in harness”

Posted on

**** Hotel

The third iteration of ***** Hotel will be appearing in a couple weeks, at the GOlive Festival in London.

Sadly only four of the stars will be able to make it.  Down 20% from the inaugural performance, but up 33% from the second performance.

I am interested to see how this latest constellation will perform.  Again with a live musician, this time a percussionist.  The first iteration had a musician who, if my memory serves me, was a bassist who used a kettle drum, a piano and a variety of small hand held instruments.  The musician for the second performance is a cellist, Barnaby Tree.  What intrigues me is the concept of melding rehearsal with performance.  As the members of 5***** Hotel live in four different cities, they are not able to rehearse in the traditional sense.  This geographic variation forces the group to rehearse in front of an audience.

When I performed with Nancy S. Smith, in 2008 I think it was, at SFDI, she told me of a rehearsal process with a group of experienced performers.  They had agreed upon a score, which during the performance they all abandoned.  Granted a score can be abandoned and everything is fine, but then there’s abandoned.  Some performers ended up in the audience, some were singing.  This is not to say that the performance was “good” or not, but I am relating this anecdote to illustrate the fact that when the lights go up and there’s an audience, plans and people change.

With the group ***** Hotel, because there is no rehearsal, there is no possibility of deviation.  Personalities and plans can’t change from the studio time to the stage time.  For me, if we are to use the three stages of creation to define an improvisation, this method of performance making is even closer to an improvised performance.

The moments of execution during the GOlive festival will be very close temporally to the moments of experimentation.  The exploration stage has already been completed as the personnel, the location, the time of the performance, the costumes, etc., and the concept (open spontaneously composed performance) have already been determined.  Looking more closely into the stage of execution, i.e., the performance, what will happen in front of the audience has yet to be determined.  So within the execution stage, the three stages of creation as they relate to the performance, will be constantly evolving and informing each other.

To see how that exactly unfolds come to the Lion and Unicorn Theatre on the 26th and the 27th of this month

Posted on

Social Attitude Test

Political Values
Radicalism
96.75
Socialism
56.25
Tenderness
46.875
These scores indicate that you are a progressive; this is the political profile one might associate with a university professor. It appears that you are skeptical towards religion, and have a pragmatic attitude towards humanity in general.
Your attitudes towards economics appear neither committedly capitalist nor socialist, and combined with your social attitudes this creates the picture of someone who would generally be described as a political centrist. 
To round out the picture you appear to be, political preference aside, an idealist with many strong opinions.
This concludes our analysis; we hope you found your results accurate, useful, and interesting.
Unlike many other political tests found on the Internet which base themselves on untested (and usually ideologically motivated) ideas, this inventory is adapted from Hans Eysenck’s own political inventory which was developed after extensive empirical investigations in the 20th Century.
Posted on

Another definition

The choreography of a piece is that which is repeatable between iterations.

The improvisation of a piece is that which is not repeatable between iterations.

Posted on

5 new words

infrapresentationologist –  one who studies what lies below the surface of presentation
maltempotude – the condition of having the incorrect temporal relationship with another
anteformology – the study of what comes before a shape comes into existence
heterokinespherism – the state of existing in at least two different shapes
quasicorpologist – one who has seemingly studied the human form and its potentialities
Posted on

Warhol Quote

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” 
― Andy Warhol

Posted on

Rehearsal Videos

The above are three videos from rehearsals in the Crowley Theater for the third section of Secondary Surface Rendered.  We are investigating the use of repetitive movement drawn from the Re/Wire work to examine and magnify the corporeal kinetic connection between drawing and dancing.