mayfield brooks: improvising while Black at GIBNEY

mayfield brooks
(photo: Amar Puri)

I spent some time this week drifting back into that intriguing realm that Reggie Wilson's Danspace Project platform opened a few weeks ago (Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance). Back with native people of stolen lands and enslaved people of the Middle Passage, back beneath the physical and psychic layers that make up present day Manhattan--this time, though, instigated and guided by mayfield brooks who calls her/their dance practice Improvising While Black.

With the three-part IWB: Dancing in the Hold, brooks opened a new series at GIBNEY called Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), curated by Marýa Wethers as a place of "intersection among blackness, queerness and indigeneity." This series will continue with performances by jumatatu m. poe (Apr 19–21) and I Moving Lab (Apr 26–28).

The design of brooks's IWB: Dancing in the Hold breaks the framework for presentation. It is not one thing; it is different things. People gather not to just watch people do stuff but possibly do stuff themselves. Anything originally planned for one point in time might easily show up in another. And we all bring ourselves to it because it can't exist without us. In essence, this truly is Black space.

IWB: Dancing in the Hold is a performance in three parts investigating mayfield brooks’ ongoing project, Improvising While Black (IWB), which uses dance improvisation as a tool to create atmospheres of care and inquiry while listening to ancestral whispers of the middle passage.

Part I, P(a)rLAY, is an invitation to Black-identified artists to participate in an improvisational dance workshop and performance exploring IWB’s improvisatory techniques including speaking in tongues, wandering practices, somatic awakenings and partner work.

Part II, Dancing in the Hold, is an evening-length performance exploring underwater textures like shipwrecks and contaminated seaweed while embracing Black queer ancestors, Black rage, brilliance and joy.

Part III, Process(Ion), is a durational performance installation exploring gestures of Black revolt, poetics of oceanic abyss, spontaneous readings of Afropessimist scholarly texts and a procession to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

P(a)rLAY was my second time taking a workshop with brooks--the first, hosted by Movement Research at Abrons Arts Center. Once again, I was amazed by how one gifted teacher's gentle invitations can quickly lead to profound revelations.

brooks has been spending time visiting, contemplating and drawing inspiration from the nearby African Burial Ground memorial. We visited as well, on a windy late afternoon, the twelve of us, and took away impressions for the work we would do together back in the Black Box studio. We also wrote letters to ancestors known and unknown, and learned meaningful things in the writing that perhaps we would never have attained any other way.

I will not be able to attend the durational event, Part III, tomorrow. However, I did return to GIBNEY's Black Box last night for Part II, Dancing in the Hold. I witnessed the entirety of it through a shroud of silver. Because I was a spirit. Because brooks asked nicely. Because two of us from the P(a)rLAY workshop showed up/said yes. So, into the depths where inky dark and screams and whimpers are broken by bioluminescence. Where a switched-on, unrestrained brooks is joined in liberation by South Africa's outstanding Mlondi Zondi.

It's late in the day now, but tickets might remain for tonight's show. Try for them!

For information and tickets for mayfield brooks's events tonight and tomorrow, click here. For information, tickets and series passes for Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing), click here.

GIBNEY
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
Subways: 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N/R/W to City Hall; 2/3 to Park Place

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Zahava: Exploring the shamanic way of dance

Zahava

Dance as Shamanic Ceremony:
A New Offering to the Dance Community

 

from Zahava

The most curious, loving, and courageously adventurous dancers are starting to gather at the free Intros to Dance as Shamanic Ceremony.  We start by what we are most passionate to explore in the next phase of our dancing.

I felt very disconnected from my trained body, within a dance culture that valued me for things that were not related to my soul.  My metabolism, my body structure, my willingness to follow instructions through fatigue, my willingness to compete, all gave me mobility in the ballet culture. I found myself in this culture because it was one of the few options for me as a young white American girl who wanted to dance!  I have watched the impact of this culture on my body, in my friends (many of whom have stopped dancing but have not completely healed their relationship to dance), and in the current generation of professional dancers.  This is a crucial time for transformation on the Earth and it’s showing up everywhere, including the dance world.

I remember wondering how I could love something so much, rehearse hours each day, and yet see that when the audience showed up to the performance they could not connect with us.  The new course that I am offering explores dance as a source of deep connection.  I remember how awkward my dancer friends and I used to be improvising in clubs.  It’s intimidating to move how you feel in the absence of choreography when you don’t know how you feel.  The course includes feeling our soul instincts and expressing them fully through improv. 

I remember how many of us lost our menstrual cycles as young women because we did not have the body fat to support a baby.  The course gives us the opportunity to become profoundly present to the needs and desires of our body, as our primary intuitive instrument.  The pleasure we can create in our dance sets a pretty high bar for the pleasure we create in our sexuality, our career, our homes, our spirituality, our families, and our community.

I'm offering this, not only to heal the relationship individual dancers have with dance.  It is also to create more trust, wholeness, and love, in the culture of dance training as a reflection of the values we want to live by in our society.  We can train our bodies to do so much in addition to triple pirouettes and ponches.  We can train our bodies to be the perfect instruments for our souls and to transform what is not LOVE.  Forgiveness and compassion start in the body.

Standing still has become a tremendous experience with the growing awareness of the energy system in my body and it’s relationship to the Earth, in partnership, tribe, and ancestry.  Dancing from this full place is the most enlivening, grounding, pleasurable, and purposeful way of being in “here.” 

Shamanic Ceremony is speaking an intention in a charged space such that it’s possibility becomes real to the speaker, the community present, and the universe.  Dance as Shamanic Ceremony is moving our soul inside our body with an intention and we become in that moment who we need to be for the intention to manifest in the physical world.

If you are a professional dancer or have intensively studied a dance form for the past 5 years, this class will meet you at your growing edge as a mover. Experience with improv and contact improv will enhance your journey. If you have a meditation practice, study energy awareness, are on a shamanic or tantric path, then this is your class! Come meet your tribe. All genders are welcome.

Wednesdays, 6pm-7:30 pm
Sept 21, 2011 to April 25, 2012

The Red Bean Studios

320 West 37th Street, 7th Floor

between 8th and 9th Avenues, Manhattan

For more information, click here.

Register here by Wednesday, September 14.

Contact: Zahava@LoveMakingDances.com

Dancers to commemorate 9/11

The Table of Silence Project
conceived by choreographer Jacqulyn Buglisi and Italian artist Rosella Vasta

The Table of Silence Project represents the common threads of humanity which unite all mankind into a single force with common goals and aspirations, regardless of race, culture or religion. Through this event we wish to achieve the dual purpose of celebrating and honoring peace through listening - a united moment of silence - a call for Peace in our world from NYC's community of artists. -- Jacqulyn Buglisi

Sunday September 11, 8:20 AM, ending at 8:46 AM
Josie Robertson Plaza, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Complete information here

Sarah Skaggs Dance
9/11 Dance -- A Roving Memorial
 
An 11-minute meditative dance for large groups of dancers, performed simultaneously on September 11 from Noon to 3pm at multiple locations:

• Three New York City parks (Union Square, Washington Square and Battery Park)
• Washington, DC in the atrium of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and as part of the Arts on Foot Festival
• Shanksville, PA at Memorial Park

In shaping the work, Skaggs was driven by such questions as: What is the function of dance post-9/11? What is the role of the body in an anxious and fearful climate? And can multiple bodies moving slowly in space create a shift in public consciousness?

The project will be broadcast on YouTube following the events. Visit Sarah Skaggs Dance.

Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

Every now and then, an announcement comes along that is way too good to not share. Here's the latest!

A Call for Contributions
Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

archivists: Tanya Rubbak and Adam Overton
at The Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park (Los Angeles)
in April 2011

dear friends,

do you ever feel like you see things that are invisible to others? 

do you ever intuit the presence of other possible realities?

do you ever sense a thickness of energies swirling within the materials around you?

do you ever look at plants and animals and think, “I know what you’re thinking.”

perhaps you’re interested in age-old traditions, but tired of age-old religions?

perhaps you hanker for sacred acts that history has forgotten,

or better yet, perhaps you’ve discovered NEW ways to gently channel the magic in your life?

sceptic or saint, believer or apostate, we’d like to talk to YOU …

about being a part of something very, very SPECIAL ...

The Library of Sacred Technologies

we would like to invite you to participate in our library/reading room in April as part of a residency at the Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park. the space will feature several artists and groups from February through April 2011 as it transforms itself into a church and spiritual center.

our library aims to intercept and illuminate a relationship between contemporary religious and artistic pursuit. we are interested in overlapping the sisterly processes of signification and sanctification, which we view as being innately creative and living in spirit.

with a mixture of found and invented ephemera in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, and articles of faith, the library will capture a communal voice as we celebrate a tradition of religious experimentation in the city of Los Angeles.

Do you hear the call? Will you heed it?

we invite you to temporarily become a best-selling self-published self-helper, a charismatic guru or spiritual leader, a religious anthropologist, or any other type of sincerely mystical dabbler from the past, present or future. we primarily desire text(s) and images to include in printed ephemera, but will consider video and sound documents as well. to whet your appetite, we’ve posted below a list of possible technologies we might be looking to collect. you’re welcome to contribute as much or as little as you’d like, and it can be as [in]comprehensive and [in]comprehensible as you please.

we plan to compile, design, and display these materials for visitors of our Library of Sacred Technologies opening in April 2011. meanwhile, artist-led sermons, services, and workshops based around the temporary observance of [semi-]fictional religious practices will be taking place throughout the month that, with your permission, may or may not incorporate some of these documents. (if you’re interested in leading one of these, please let us know and we’ll contact you as soon as we finish developing a separate call for that portion of the residency.)

here are some starting points for religious invention that we pray you’ll contemplate and contribute:

a religion of the hour

a religion of the day

a religion of the month

a religion of the year

alternative horoscope systems and charts

dance instructions that direct the kundalini or the schizophrenic flow

shaman seances to commune with animal spirit helpers

guided meditations for sudden reality shifts

cures for tardiness

recipes for honesty

maps, formulae and visualizations for time travel

guides to local vortex and portal areas

exorcisms of deep heteronormative conditioning

automatic writing to channel the language of light-beings

alternate creation myths

incantations for accessing the transverbal space of the semiotic chora

harmonic science scores of the ancients that modifies DNA

visualizations for clearing debt

scriptures on radical responsibility

ceremonies that deal with water, driving or synaesthesia

rituals for loss, or lost rituals

prayers and hymns for making new friends

resurrections, fortune-telling, channeling, oracles, predictions and sooth-sayings on the matter of anything you please

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ...

please send your submissions to: sacredtechnologies@plus1plus1plus.org

deadline for text and image submissions is January 15, 2011

deadline for audio and video submissions is February 1, 2011

also: stay tuned, as we hope to convene a couple sacred technology group writing sessions in late December and early January