 This is the fourth out of five conversations that have been taking place over the course of this festival. The motto of the festival this year is failure and we're trying to explore the importance and meaning of it for the creative process but also the challenges and pressure that come along with the expectations and the end-of-threat of failure. About half a year ago we organized an event here at the Siegel Theatre on the current state of contemporary dance in New York and together with Atre Zechari and Tommy Kriegsmann we invited about 13 choreographers to present them when he has those. Kate Watson Wallace was one of them and she talked about care and care for yourself and for your community and we thought that that would be a perfect response to how to create space and that embraces the creative process and also the experiment. So it's my great pleasure. We asked Kate if she wanted to present to do a panel about the topic of care and it's my great pleasure to introduce Kate Watson Wallace. Hello. It feels funny to use the microphone. But anyways, welcome. Thank you for coming. So I'm really excited about this conversation. I've asked three colleagues here, Marissa Perle, Coriolan House and Luciana Pachugar to just come today to talk a little bit about their own artistic practices in relationship to ideas of care. And then just to have an open conversation at the end of that about what that actually means now in New York as artists, as dance artists, as artists working in the body in relationship to self-care and also in relationship to creating a larger culture of care. So so much to say about this, but I think we should start and they can tell you a little bit about themselves and present on the work and we're going to start with Marissa. This feels really official, even though it's really a handful of us that are here. And I was wondering if there was a way that we could dim the lights a little bit. Yeah, that's good. Okay, now I can see everyone. And could you bring up the screen? Oh, no, I meant can I play video from the computer on the screen? I could use this as a moment to say that I don't know the name of the tech person who's behind there, who's during a form of labor for all of us right now by doing all of this in a rushed way, probably 12 hours all day today or longer. So a form of care is being able to recognize everything that has to happen for us to be here. One of them is Kate, one of them is Adia, one of them is this person up here. This is my website, basic thing, my website. But I just wanted to talk a little bit about care in the context of how I make my work and how I see making work. So in my bio I talk about pretty much how I feel that function is form. And so as a person with a disability, I use that as a form. So the way that I function in my body is also a form in my work. And I do see identity as as formation and as a form for work. So all of the performances are about to see this evening with Luciana as well. I would encourage you to think about how the identities of the artists might themselves be a form. And how are you and your identity understanding that form? And how are you not able to because of your difference? That's a question I would ask. I wanted to play a few minutes of this performance that I did with Greg Bordowitz. We were commissioned by the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act to create a performance for the Chicago Humanities Festival last year. And it was about the intersection of disability and AIDS survivorship to actually pass the ADA. And so we came together to talk about our difference and whether or not we actually felt held by the labels that we are given. But what we did with each other was we had conversations with one another and then we swapped. So he performed being me and I performed being him. So I'm going to play the first few minutes of that, which is Greg being me. I was rehearsing earlier. Okay. How do you identify that term on the basis of trauma? And I've survived multiple kinds of traumas. And that means that there are things about me that are unique to having lived through those things that are different than maybe those who haven't. And then there's like a way like, you know, in your real survivor way, you have to keep going no matter what crazy thing is going on with that. But I don't believe in it if it means that I'm expected to perform a certain way in the world or show certain traits. So what you do for yourself as a survivor, you do for your own self care? Yeah. And because I want to. Now because the world is dictating to me how I survive or when I survive. And so what are some of the strategies you've developed for surviving? I immediately went to something perceptual and not like practical on a body level of the way that I never take anything for granted people about what they're in a world is like or what they struggle with. And I am a hesitant because I don't want to judge because of how deep they know the things that people can carry the people who seem the least affected or something like that. So there's that. And then there's I also feel freedom to choose how I'm going to navigate things from day to day, like, like how I have it my body, how I have it my pain, whether I use a cane. The attitude of that at the moment, how I had a gender on a given day, how those things intersect when I need to say no to something, how to watch the world happen sometimes without feeling like a player in that world. That's the beginning of that list. What does it feel like to watch the world and not be a player then? I mean, like one thing that I have struggled with forever is like partying, like I'm dancing, for instance. It's usually like all the strength I have to make it to a show at night and then like everyone wants to go out and part of me wants to go out because I like to dance and I'm in pain. So I have to decide whether it's worth it for me to try or because maybe the party won't start for another two hours or do I just need to go home and then I get to hear about how everybody went out. And so and so and so and so and all of the things that happen at night that people do and I don't get to do that very much, you know. Yeah, mostly that. So that's something about me through gray. Then I also just wanted to share this funny little lecture performance I've been doing recently called Despair Solo, having to do with some of these themes. If I can see what I'm doing, if you're seeing me over, can I just present? So, you know, I'm trying to make the connection between choreography and disability and I'm trying to make a connection between the form, the function of my body, the form of my work, choreography as a form. And what I can do if I can't like move the way a dancer is expected to move. So I just wanted to like show how arbitrary some of our thinking is in the world about what choreography actually is, which you can read up here. A choreographer is one who creates choreographies by practicing the art of choreography, a process known as choreographing. That's terribly enlightening for all of us. And then I just, you know, actually the definition of this word is dance writing. So what it means to put a form of the body into language and what it would mean to read that body, like reading a language. So if you think about it like that, some languages you will be able to read because you share that and some you won't. Some bodies you will be able to read because you might be able to relate and some you won't. But that doesn't necessarily mean your inability to read that body renders the body invalid. And then I just wanted to close with, I was invited to give a manifesto for a different kind of panel over a year ago by Eva Yaa Ascentua. That was based on a manifesto that Miguel Gutierrez wrote in like 2002 for the movement Research Performance Journal. And I came up with a manifesto called I Want, I Vomit. And I Want was just like a list of things that I want in the world. And I Vomit was like a list of things I'd vomit on about how the world actually works. But I opened the article with these words. I love your body, I love your body even if I don't understand it. I love your body even if I am afraid of it. I love your body even if you don't love it. I love what you are showing me even if I hate it. Because you are here in front of me. Because you have chosen to be this, to move like this. Because you chose this life and so did I. And we create this space for each other to exist. This is Greg's book. So anyway, I'm just going to end with that. And thank you. So I'm Cori Owinghouse and maybe we could bring that link up that I sent you. Thank you. So I'm going to read a little bit and introduce you all to a practice I've been developing called Clown Therapy. And I'm just going to allow this to play as I talk. Feel free to look at this and not at me at all. Alright. So Clown Therapy has been a practice that I've been developing since 2014 with two of my very dearest friends and collaborators, Neil Beasley and Ava Schmitt. And when we first started working together, we approached these practices not as rehearsals. No money is exchanged during them. And I was playing with modeling these practice sessions after some of what I had witnessed in the New York City Underground. Oh, maybe we could turn the volume off on this, actually. She's attacking me. So part of what I had modeled this after were some of what I had witnessed by going to open sessions in the underground house community and thinking of creating different kinds of spaces of social practice where people can come together and self-organize and essentially practice whatever form they're engaged in. And so Clown Therapy for me is a little bit of a group therapy practice, meant in somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek way, but also in a kind of deeply genuine way. I think of it as kind of a portraiture practice. We do a series of self-portraits for one another that play with the idea of this shape-shifting nature of identity and personhood. And we work with costume and dress up as a kind of wearable sculpture. And there's something about working with costume in that way that allows us to feel concealed and that invites a space for misbehaving. And so Stream of Consciousness becomes this navigational lens that we use to enter all of our sessions. And there's two ideas from Clown that I've kind of loosely borrowed for this practice. And one is the idea of using a dog brain or a soft brain. And that goes in keeping with, you know, playing with aspects of humor and parody. And also something that emerged for me was myself as a child playing drag. And so entering into these pleasurably regressive states and allowing whatever repressed voices or identities were not allowed to exist, to come forward. And in that way playing with identity as a kind of fiction and moving along these slippery spectrums. And so one thing that started to emerge as we were working together is we started to name some of the states that were coming out of our movement portraits for each other. And so I'm just going to read these as a kind of list. Scary happy clown, needs not be met clown, shade clown, grotesque clown. And then we start to mix these states. So things like disgruntled mellow clown, giddy gloomy clown, baby work drag clown, can't be bothered clown, lost distraught clown. And this one is particularly, I have an affinity to this one, toxic sugar clown, socially awkward no filter clown, no boundaries clown. Okay, so you get the idea. Another thing we did is we printed a list off the internet that was called an inventory of feelings list. This was kind of strange. We started playing with entering into these different states and playing with mashing them up, very much looking at spectrums and ideas of contradiction. And something that I love is this idea of disaffinities. So I think the portrait where the girl was attacking me with her chair, that was this sweet sugary, sweet girl who was enraged. And that comes a lot. That's my toxic sugar clown. So, all right, so then just kind of on another note, this morning as I was preparing to come here, I was listening to the radio and I was in the other room and I overheard someone saying, at the end of the world, there's just going to be rats in Twinkies. And what was interesting for me about that is my grandmother, every day for breakfast, I had a Twinkie and Dr. Pips from the Piggly Wiggly in Texas. And she just passed away, she was 94. And my father passed away in a town where there was only a liquor store and a Wonder Bread factory. And I grew up eating spoons of white sugar from a box with dark circles under my eyes as a kind of child grump. And so these are things that have really been coming through my body in the practice. Excavating a series of these characters that have to do with having ingested parts of our culture that play with fakeness, sugariness, kind of consuming American ideals of the sugary sweet. My family is from the South, so. And then my partner works with middle school children and has been reading a book called The Good Girl Syndrome. And that's something I've been thinking a lot about. Also in relationship, I don't know if you guys remember that 1954 novel, The Bad Seed. And so Rhoda, eight years old, Rhoda Penmark, eight years old, she has these long blonde braids and she's charming and polite and obedient and well-groomed and compliant and all these things and she's a child murderer. And so this idea of this like terror of niceness. So in this practice, part of what we do is we give space to different kinds of internalized trauma and we enter into our internal states as landscapes looking to find a new kind of body to enter or in form and playing with the idea of entering these forms as a kind of shape or a distorted likeness of a persona we're parodying. And I found this as a way to externalize the array of internalized behaviors, belief systems, oppressive postures, performed identities that we embody and to move into these disjunctive or hybridized bodies where we get to play with ambiguity and irreverence. And I find that there's a kind of relief that starts to happen as we move into these exaggerated silhouettes where humor and wit start to become these strategies for navigating darkness and also creating a kind of distance. And so on many levels clown therapy is this practice of making cartoons. And on some level what has started to emerge is this idea that our authentic selves are perhaps constructed shape-shifting cartoon selves. Thank you. I think I'm also just going to start playing. No, I'll talk in a moment. Okay, after hearing all that I feel like there's so much that you've been talking about already that I can identify with and relate to and how I've been working. But when Kate asked us to do this, I was thinking about the idea of care and curing, healing, and I guess I would start more, for me, kind of describing chronologically how I started to think of or to be more conscious how already making work, being involved in, I guess how are you making art in general, but making dances particularly. There was a point where I started to realize that it was, that really what I was trying to do is a kind of self-healing that within the practice of dancing there is a desire to cure oneself or kind of exercise this kind of, just to use the language of disease because the idea of caring somehow takes me to health. So the idea of health not as a way, not as a balance, cleanliness and this kind of puritan idea of health, but more the idea of being ridding oneself from something that feels toxic or that doesn't feel good, that feels unnatural or not connected. Anyway, I'm not going to try to define that. Dancing feels to dance the practice of being embodied. Dance has turned more and more for me to just the practice of being a body and the questions about that kind of how you were saying about function and form, I guess. So I started to become more conscious of the fact that for me dancing wasn't about creating a thing for people to look at but actually about a practice that is more therapeutic as well. So in terms of making something and its relationship to an audience, I mean there is the practice in the studio like you were showing and how that notion of thinking of, or not just thinking but practicing dance as this healing thing shifts the relationship with the dancer for me and the relationship. I was from the get-go being a director of choreographer. There was something in that really power dynamic of dancer to choreographer that I felt a discomfort with and the power structure of that and that there was something within it that was too similar to something that I was trying to undo through dance meaning there is in society a kind of hierarchy where the one in power tends to be the one with the idea, the one that is more rational, less embodied or I mean I'm simplifying but there is a kind of structure within our society like that. And I was making dances where the dancers were wearing navy blue uniforms, I was making this relationship parallel between the dancer being the working class like the dancer being the one that is lesser or less valued, gets paid less, has more ton of jobs in order to be able to dance, gets injured, etc. to make the work happen. It's kind of a factory worker in the sense of the model of making dances, of the making dances model. So there's a discomfort in that when I start being a choreographer because I'm against, you know, like when you talked about the labor involved in it, you know, so there's this within our own bodies there's that hierarchy of like what do we value and how do we care, how we even ourselves we, you know, won't listen to the, you know, like you were talking about like do I go out, what's better for me, do I go out dancing or do I care for my body and go to sleep but like what's more caring? I mean we have this, there's this within our, in our own self like what am I going to value more like finishing that paper and turning it in or sending that email so that I make it into the world of dance I get that gig or whatever I'm more, you know, more recognized or am I going to go to sleep or take my, you know, do what my body needs or what I'm really needing right now is to talk to a friend like, you know, like there's that in the personal realm but in terms, in the studio I was dealing with this in relationship to me as the role of choreographer and the dancers so slowly through the years that just started to go through a whole transformation that started with this kind of representation where I would put the dancers and myself all in this worker's uniforms and we would do the same and we would kind of, I was doing like the performance of the exhaustion and the labor of the body and then, but slowly it's just with each work it started, all of that started to fall away and it ended up all feeling like a representation of ideas so where I've arrived is where choreography became for me I started to question the need to even choreograph on people like it felt like the form had to be the idea to separate, to me like there should be no separation between the form and the politics of it, the ideology so the form should, the aesthetic and the ideology I'm interested in that relationship between aesthetic and ideology so I felt like to be true to practice what I preach I guess I had to simply practice allowing the, doing a practice together that was a self healing practice so we started to just practice together what I call the practice of being in pleasure so once we started to do that I started to, the desire to make steps and I don't want to, I don't mean it anyway there's nothing wrong with that but the form that it took on was just this practice in the process is the ritual of coming into the studio every time and doing the practice and then the work that is shown to an audience becomes the history of that process of us doing the accumulation of that history in our bodies and as a community so I guess I should show the last so we've been doing that in the street I couldn't find right now one in the street because also then we took it into the street and we would just do the practice of being pleasure in the street but I want to show a little bit of I, we've done it just as a practice without music but then in the last show it's funny because you're right there it's a very, that was the nice part this is a part way into, let me show from a little bit earlier in the piece so the last piece I made or we made together yeah every night is different in the sorry I'm all over the place let me just play some of this oh that's, hold on we started to do the practice with house music with the DJ so it also in terms of like the relationship to care I guess and healing I had my my history of being in New York and dance there was this parallel between when I was taking a lot, studying release technique I guess post-modern technique when I came here for with Tretcher Brown dancers and Petronio dancers and studying Alexander technique and client technique and starting to dance with choreographers and seeing a lot of work and then I would go, it was in my 20s long time ago now in the 90s and I and I would go out dancing to house parties and that's where I felt somehow that there was something where I always felt like this is dance church like that's like dance concert dance and then studies and I study and then I go here and this is where somehow some this I kept feeling like how do I connect this thing you know so there's another so to me there was I feel like the spirit of house music for me was so it just keeps through time this practice of being in pleasure I just call it the practice of being in pleasure pleasure is a complicated word but it's simply that allowing oneself the possibility is the proposition that we make to ourselves that we are already in pleasure so in a way it's like a meditation practice it's just being it's a resistance to producing too it's I feel like like I said I didn't want to make anymore to bridge this gap between ritual and pleasure and the dance is a practice of becoming other than the expected embodiment in this society I guess the dances I feel like dance can be to me can be a practice of liberation of I feel right now it more than ever to it it can bring us bring us closer to a lost kind of magic or mystery or the mythical the mystical this unknowable thing that is being being a body that we study and we research and we figure what's best to eat and what's what's more healthier we study like all the studying of anatomy as an answer to I start to resist and to kind of rebel against in the 90s that I was saying I love those forms the postmodern kind of forms but there's a kind of denial for me there was a denial of a sexuality of the visceral of for me I felt like I was erasing some of my Latino identity not that I'm so interested in this kind of style not as identity pilots but in a sense I think that that's I identify with how you too were talking about this other identity and this shape shifting more way that I feel like that is so much more complex and nuanced that in the memory that in the flesh I mean I often talk about when I when we do this kind of stuff of going into throwing yourself back your tail going into the memory even in the DNA when you were a fish you know when you were an animal and like taking your brain to your to your crotch and where you poop and you like let that guide you I think that's what I also identify with what you were saying I feel like to me the practice of being pleasure is I call it a practice of becoming civilized also and decolonize because there is an assumption of being this body that is a civilized body a way of behaving that is still I find ruled by I think therefore I am which is connected to the power structure of the white supremacist power structure so I feel like in a sense this practice is a way a little humble way of resisting okay that's great thank you so much I feel so yeah that was awesome I think the thing that kept coming up for me as the three of you were speaking was just the stuff around that I think each of you are taking on these radical tactics for survival in a toxic white supremacist culture that we live in and a thing that I'm interested in is how and I think each of you spoke to this a bit but how do these varying practices and ways of thinking and working and working through all of this stuff psychically how does that play out day to day or in relationship to yeah in relationship to day to day in relationship to your communities like how does it spread out or not and how are you thinking about care in relationship to yourself I feel like you each addressed that a little bit but also in relationship to the communities that you're involved in and I mean this is these are a lot of ideas but also in relationship to the market that we all are either deciding to participate in or not so I really want to give this example it's been really it's been on my mind and I haven't really talked about it with anyone but I went to the dance NYC panel discussion a few weeks ago on disability and race and intersectionality and it was hosted by New York live arts so maybe to rewind a little bit is like I've occupied a downtown dance world for many many years and it started out actually because I was recovering from an accident and I used a lot of techniques in order to regain strength and get myself upright and not be reliant on pain killers but as soon as I sort of started to get into a place of ability that was consumed by people who wanted me to perform for them in a way that was actually very ableist and for many many years I didn't know that and I didn't have a vocabulary for disability at all or the politics of that or that you could be a dancer with a disability and there doesn't have to be a narrative of overcoming in order to be the thing so I amulated artists and choreographers who did things that I couldn't do or I would push myself to do them at the expense of other parts of my life for a long time and anyway many years later here I am at New York live arts for this panel seeing a bunch of people from another community that I am a part of one that is not a part of the dance world show up at this lobby a bunch of people in wheelchairs with many assisted devices who don't go to NILA to see shows who aren't part of the culture of artists that are presented there are coming in and they are my community in a different world and also it's like NILA's ADA accessible supposedly but it's like everything is kind of not quite right not quite accessible you have to wait to get in the elevator there's all this stuff so finally we're all in a dance studio so me and my Crip friends in wheelchairs who are not permitted into the able-bodied dance world are sitting in a dance studio to talk about disability so that alone for me was just a striking moment where I was like I finally have people from another home of mine in the city in this other home that this other creative home for me but actually we're not at home and that's been a very real challenge for me as I continue to make work in the world to deal with issues of accessibility and funding and visibility because actually most curators of dance in New York don't realize that there are dancers with disabilities and that that is a thing so that you're not somebody who can't do something or you're less than but you're a person who does all of these things in your own form that has an artistic value that somebody who's able-bodied who's a Patricia Brown dancer etc could actually learn something from a person who has a different type of body so this has been in the forefront of my mind and I've been trying to like bridge these worlds increasingly in my work because it's necessary for a lot of reasons and especially to go against like an ableist supremacist idea of what kinds of body are of value and why who belongs who's allowed to survive and be cared for so that's what I'm thinking about yeah I've been thinking a lot about just especially in relationships with the dance world showing up in the body that you are in wherever you're at or wherever the people that you're in the room with are at rather than this like you were talking about mimicking or learning these moves from these able-bodied caregivers so many microphones so I would love to talk speak a little bit to postmodernism because I feel like one of the elephants in the room is that those former Trisha Round dancers and I have a very conflicting relationship to that as another kind of embodied persona I shaped, shipped in and out of and I actually brought something today maybe I'll pull it out this is kind of amusing so maybe you guys know this book Inside the White Cube my ideology of the gallery space so I'm going to read just a little bit from a chapter where this kind of remarkable author Brian O'Doherty who is an artist but also a cultural critic and you know, engaged in his own kind of para-fictional practice talks about modernism okay couldn't modernism be taught to children in a series of ASOP's fables it would be more memorable than art appreciation think of such fables as who killed illusion or how the edge revolted against the center the man who violated the canvas could follow where did the frame go it would be easy to draw morals think of the vanishing in pasta that soaked away and then came back and got fat and how would we tell the story that grew up and got so mean how it evicted everybody including father perspective and mother space who had raised such real nice children and left behind only this horrid result of an incestuous affair called abstraction who looked down on everybody including eventually its buddies metaphor and ambiguity so this is something that's been a very real part of my practice having stepped into the spaces of post-modernism and performed those just these ideals of abstraction and what that does to somebody when you are being watched as a kind of object of study and yet also all of the kind of mercurial ways in which all of the artists that I have participated in from the Jetson lineage also have their own wonderfully contradictory kind of like these aesthetics of refusal they also refuse their own ways that they deny certain kinds of performativity so being in the studio with someone like Trisha Brown in all the ways in which she always was also contradicting the things and the ideals that were being held up but what's interesting is in the last year or so of dancing in that work I wanted to go to clown school and part of it was this kind of impressive feeling of being asked to like wear this neutral mask and to move like rectilinear lines and joints that fold then and extend but nothing else and so on and so on and so anyway after that I started working in clown and then started going into the New York City house community also and studying with the voting community and so it's been this kind of interesting process of trying to understand these like oppressive tendencies of abstraction of being wear upon our bodies that makes me think of because I took in a sense came to New York to study those forms and I remember being really interested in the fact that that was a reaction that was very impressed by this kind of Eastern thinking so there is an original kind of beautiful intention that isn't a fascist kind of erasure but in a sense that I went at a certain point it makes me think of because we're talking also about self-care and I feel in my own you were asking about your own and your community and I feel like parallel to this transformation as an artist that I have gone through as a person I guess and one thing is trying to not separate everything so much to have things become the same life and art and not compartmentalize and meditation is something that I feel like is something I can't say I do it every day I strive to but it's something that I feel is a form of self-care and but there's so many ways of doing it right and one somehow I connected with the neutral body this idea of the neutral body or the abstraction of this form this kind of post-modern way of that is more that seems that there's a observation that somehow it's connected to this Eastern practice right of this kind of Buddhist or this kind of thing that seems like you're so elevated that you're beyond emotion or feeling you're kind of beyond that there's almost like this beauty that has this spirituality to this elevated thing that I don't know somehow I feel like I often feel like the idea of abstraction in art is connected there's some connection in there with abstraction and spirituality and some kind of being beyond this mundanity of somehow I want to talk about like you know the flesh and the guts and for me now that I somehow I reacted against that because it felt like it was a lie it felt like just like ballet can be a kind of in position of a kind of truth that seems absolutist and just like this is the truth this is beauty then postmodernism and it's like release you know it can be another form of that another kind of a position like that so I reacted against that but then I find myself being really attracted to Buddhism now at this point in my life because of my own emotional life history issues that I feel like it's something I ended up being attracted to as a form of self-care and but what I realized is that the way it's not a meditation where you're observing yourself breathing work where you're removing yourself from it but it's what I'm interested in is oh how do you become the breathing it's the experiential it's not being a slave to this it's not being it's being aware of it it's kind of like this interpretation of alexander technique where some people studied a lot of alexander you see them and they never bend their spine or something they're like always like so free in their head I don't know most of you know about the alexander technique releasing your head over your spine and I mean I'm not going to define alexander technique right now but what I mean is there's something that happens that it's like the intention and the ideas and the philosophy of something and then it becomes a form and the substance of it becomes taken out of it it's like back use or something I feel like Steve Baxter I heard talked about how even contact improv had become it's like it started as this really radical political thing and now somehow what remains is just this form that's almost like you know right and is there a practice or a way of moving through the world that keeps us in unknowing and keeps us in magic and keeps us in a slippery space of always becoming and what I mean question mark that's what I'm curious about in terms of your specific practices actually is because I think I think there's something that you all are doing that is staying connected to that yeah and also you know like as the form becomes or as the thing becomes solidified does it just become another thing and does it have to do that in order to stay in a radical space I don't know I don't know I feel like you both talked about what I was talking about now that is a non-separation of the form as an object or separate from your life and from your form of yourself your disability becoming your form like you were talking about clown therapy I feel like the way I was working with the group I was working with with the practice of being in pleasure is it's like group therapy it is and I feel like it was like what got me through what I was going through and I don't know it was like I feel often I swear I didn't do that I'm in the mystery this is confusing I think a little bit because because there is what you do for your own self-care and there is of being in the studio as being therapeutic which I deeply feel and I feel for myself that now I have the practice of tending to my pain in the studio and I actually I used to like if I had to walk to the studio with my cane to like get up the subway steps I'd get in the studio and I'd put my cane against the wall and pretend like it wasn't there and be like I'm a dancer now but then I was still in pain the whole time so I was in denial of my body so now I bring the cane into the studio and I'm with the cane and that's how I'm also working with other bodies in the studio that the pain and complexity is real and that can create an aesthetic experience but I wanted I wanted to go back to say even though I might have a therapeutic experience in the studio I might not want to make my performance work therapeutic because of a lot of reasons because I was born into a female body however I don't fully identify with that now so there's always this projection to me at least of being a caretaker or holding a space for people who are having their things projected on me that I'm expected to fulfill which I'm not interested in and then I'm not interested in showing my pain or disability in a way that's going to only make me look like a victim or have somebody pity me or say oh I feel so bad or identify that so it takes time to figure out aesthetically to me what I want to show and what is just for me in the process I mean I have watched you like travel with your crotch over a speaker that I was sitting next to that and it was just like this gorgeous fierce like experience you were you but you were another being you know that was a transformational space and there was no there was no other version of you I was like you I feel a little bit more like I want to compartmentalize some things to make it safe or something thank you so much for being here and sharing your practices with us thank you I just want to say thank you to you guys for being here and sharing your practices with us and thank you to the Segal Center and to Anja and Prelude for bringing a conversation about self-care into a graduate center where that's not really a thing we talk about a lot and especially care and the body is like really not something that we talk about a lot in this building and I would know because I'm here every day so thank you so much this is radical work I also want to talk about like it's really interesting I've been researching for the dance space project platform which is upcoming through the Center for Humanities which is a center here and I've gotten to do a lot of really amazing archival work in particular on John Byrne who died of AIDS and one of the fascinating things that I found in his archive is that he started practicing releasing with Yvonne Meyer she was teaching skinner releasing without authorization in open movement at PS-122 and he had been diagnosed at the time with they didn't know what they thought it wasn't a grid because he didn't have Carbosy-Sarcoma or New Systems Pneumonia but they thought it was a virus ha ha it turns out it was and he when he started taking steroids and feeling better went into the studio and like danced it the fuck out and then injured himself and then Yvonne was teaching releasing and he started practicing and that became like the major practice for his self-care from there until the end of his life and that was able to keep him moving and creating which also became a very material need for him because he no longer could maintain his day job and this was a time when you could still get grants from an individual artist which he was getting and so his only income was either through like friends giving him money or any grants and so he needed to produce to live and and so then and my understanding of Trisha Brown as well is that like releasing came into her world like via injury and so then like how quickly that by the 1990s this had become reified and ossified as an abstract process practice right for its aesthetic components rather than understood as a self-care practice as a healing practice as a practice for care healing disability illness death right and and has at this point become like a calling card of your like hip credentials right like I'm cool because I know about releasing and I can do it in movement research in church right so I just think that that's really fascinating the way that this this practice has become absolutely disembodied right it's exactly Luciana what you're talking about what we need to bring back to our dancing our full materiality it's become dematerialized as an abstract aesthetic which is very oppressive and I guess I have this question about like whether or not we could rematerialize and re-radicalize release the other elephant in the room is that I'm also an Alexander teacher amazing and it's interesting I mean I this is I think a really important conversation that needs to be happening around the education of any somatic practice I actually came to the work when I was 12 because I had such a debilitated injury I couldn't really walk and I tried many different things and I was lucky enough to live in southern California where there are things like the Alexander technique around and so for me when I met that work it was really a kind of survival practice and what's been interesting is to have had this engagement with this since I was 13 years old and now to have had ways in which I refuse aspects of it and then ways in which I'm still connected to parts of the form and I think one of the things that's really challenging about talking about these kinds of systems of education that also can turn into ideologies or turn into aesthetic practices is also the way I have a few different thoughts when I try to impact them not taking too long is the way also things can become codified as they're passed on and when that wasn't necessarily an intention of the practice and you know from kind of going into Trisha's work and the Vogian community and the Clown community and the Alexander community all these different communities there is one aspect that I have experience that's in common and it's around this idea of emergent improvisational practices and I do feel like there are certain ways in which to sort of authentically enter an emergent system you are entering into the unknown and that that is a practice of entering into the unknown that needs to be engaged to really be able to do the Alexander technique and all these other forms but then over time sometimes these things get historicized in certain ways where it wasn't necessarily intended so one of the ways I've kind of unpacked some of those problematic aspects for myself has been to situate myself in these different lineages so that I can really challenge my own assumptions and the kinds of language I use when I also teach these forms and so on but I think this anyways like a really kind of topic unto itself is really important to unpack I agree I'm glad that the conversation is going here, Cory and I spend a lot of time talking about this over dinner but I also think of improvisation like emphasis on improvisational practice and that as a radical practice actually and this idea of play and that I feel like many of these forms come out of a place of play and come out of these emergent practices that you're talking about and there's a commitment to being in flux and I think in relationship to self-care I'm also thinking about that that is also in flux like how we define self-care might one day or a minute be about going to work and making a certain amount of money so that you can calm your adrenals down you know and put some money in the bank or maybe another day it's like going to acupuncture and other days having sex and other days you know being inside a movement practice but like I think also self-care can get caught up language around self-care can get really caught up especially as it comes in relationship to like the marketing capitalism so I also what if you need to collapse what actually what you need to do in the middle of your Alexander class you know is actually have an emotional collapse because you are traumatized and you are going through something and you're not going to be able to release your way out of it and manage it and then go to your rehearsal and then look beautiful or you know pretend to be white or pretend to be straight or pretend to be whatever the fuck I just yeah it's like self-care can look cute but actually it's not it's not being alive is not cute and I feel like what we're trying to get at are practices that are not cute each girl there I thought it was something something I was trying to say in the beginning and I never got to it is that I was for a while and I I'm still interested in the question of how in the this kind of fantasy as a maker of healing the audience too because it's like our practice of self-care but also within that like I mean when you were saying well no I want a compartment like I don't want to that's kind of a self-care but it's also a choice of how to how is the how do you want how do you want your work to function in religion to the audience right so for me I've chosen to to to treat it as with this fantasy I I'm interested in a kind of transparency like I guess in a way what I need is often to I feel like in my survival in my survival I can't it takes too much energy to pretend that I have really clear boundaries because I don't I mean sometimes I'm learning that I have this is too much information but in my personal life I'm learning I need to have more boundaries but I'm interested in continuing to not have any boundaries in my work because there because it takes way too much energy and like it exhausts me to put boundaries because it's really hard for me to do that my my tendencies I just want to be completely transparent you know so in my work I start to be more transparent about the fact that really what I think I'm doing or what I feel like I want to do or it's a fantasy or whatever is to be a healer so that I if I'm really honest with myself I think I'm some kind of shaman or something so when I'm making work so I'm just going to take that role on fully and just become it and believe that I'm going to heal the audience so I don't know I just want to speak about that like the healing that in a sense are we are we not like what really believe that we're doing one way because it's not really it's not just a therapeutic there's something that are beauty in the studio practice but there is a choice of doing it for an audience or having a relationship so what is that relationship is it a market I'm more and more interested although I do need to make some money and put it in the bank to continue to pay rent really like I haven't been able to pay rent this amount for example but more too much information but that's part of self care like the whole thing like how do you it's a survival thing how do you make work I'm not going to pretend anymore I can afford to have this whole process like this so I'm just going to be completely transparent because that's the only way I can keep making work it's just making it work into the fabric of my life otherwise I can have to stop yeah and I think there's a thing around this like emotional laboring associated with all the different things we've been talking about and I think part of what you're saying reminds me of that just this like how do we see when we're doing a lot of extra emotional psychic labor to accommodate I mean especially someone who's in a female body like what does that look like you know that's a whole other conversation but yeah that came up for me too I think we need to wrap up soon ish ten minutes okay I need guys I can't really read that ten minutes yeah thank you very much no I'm really very curious to understand what you're saying I don't know what cute means you have to describe that for me because you don't want to be cute and I think what do you mean by cute like a cute puppy here anyway so I don't know about that but it seems to me that what you're saying is like to have a spiritual help you know because dancing is wonderful just you know to dance and that's I think the closest place that we ever become very into ourselves because we'd fall down if we weren't in touch with ourselves you know when we're dancing I feel that but when you it's spiritual so how do you like this to say taking care of your physical body physical therapy and that kind of and that's where Alexander and all are going to put them to that place anyway I'm trying to understand this is all relatively new to me though I did dance but it was a time and then you dance for others sometimes you say you want to express yourself but sometimes you're expressing what somebody else wants you to express you know it's through your body you're the violin like you know the music is coming through so it's very complex and I just like to clarify a little bit if possible we have like 30 seconds I think I'm really pushing in with that one but do any of you want to I mean I think one thing that I'm sort of gathering from hearing everybody speaking tonight is also just this idea that care doesn't necessarily look one particular way or have an aesthetic and yet being able to enter sometimes into aesthetics where you're following some kind of generative impulse around your own interest or your own creative embodiment is another kind of form of care I know for me clown therapy is one of the ways I take care of my body and it's been an intent what I was showing the video from clown therapy and I intentionally slump and I intentionally let myself do all the wrong things that are not part of the Alexander Technique for example but because it's fulfilling some kind of way that I'm working through trauma I leave and I feel like I've gone to physical therapy so I mean that's just one example but I think what you're saying is that it is tremendously complex and there's maybe not one particular aesthetic or practical way you know etc yeah I'm talking about beauty the way that we culturally take beauty for granted and consume it and what that the way of that I'm talking about whatever the antithesis of that might look like as actually having value any of you have last thoughts I would say really quickly that I think that maybe that it can that to shift towards the practice of dancing as a self care rather than an imposed idea of a way of being that can actually be an injured you know it can be something that can hurt it's when you're trying to put yourself into an idea or a truth but when you're just letting like you were saying sometimes self care is like collapsing so being in the body that needs that needs to be that yeah I in my practice I feel like I'm trying to listen to the flesh the tissue let it not have an idea of not any form letting the thing tell you we need to end thank you for coming thank you for your time