This week’s Movement Lab we started with giving space for each other to articulate our feelings. Recognising that the feelings each person embodies after a long Monday can differ remarkably between person to person and that one’s “state of mind” will effect how one desires the session to evolve. It has become a reoccurring practice for us to attempt to collectively navigate an agenda that everyone feels comfortable with before beginning the session.
We began thinking of vibration and whilst one person suggested that we could begin with shaking exercises another responded that they would find that a bit too much. When asked why they responded that uncontrolled movement such as shaking could open up feelings that they weren’t ready to deal with at the moment. After talking for a while and giving space to each other we decided to merely open up the floor for each person to navigate as they wished.
Can such questions and openness be applied to other forms of meeting structures? How would it look like if, before each board meeting for example, one was allowed to express worry, exhaustion, joy and excitement? Recognising that the person who entered the space has an embodied past and a future within the structured presence.
To open up the floor for open movement is always curious and in many ways where practices of organic improvisation or leadership begins. To follow each other without a leader and without an end goal, allows for a flow that can be disrupted and then reemerge again. As each person began navigating the space with movement we also collectively opened up for sound. To make oneself heard by for example whaling, singing or humming is challenging. Often and especially in classroom settings we are used to having our voices feel determining and open for collective judgement. Like movement, sound allows the person to make themselves heard and form community with other singers (or singing whales.)
After moving for around 40min we came to a collective embrace, naturally ending the improvisation, and opened the floor for discussion. The discussion was energetic especially as most of us felt an emotional relief from the exercise. The discussion then was oriented around: How can we challenge our classrooms to include the body? Why is it acceptable for those with a distanced embodiment to define ethics? What does it mean to have multiple bodies within our one and can we train our senses to utilize the different “body multiples?”
As a concluding note one of us wrote in our whatsapp group: “I also want to thank for Yesterday. Felt like a human again after long period of “spaciness.” Any attempt to change the structures around really needs to be grounded in our own bodies I feel. Establish safe spaces inside where a different logic can prevail, glad we can help each other with this.”
— Thanks for reading,
Movement Lab
CO-LAB: URBAN TACTICS & PERFORMANCE 