Many Questions, grammatically incorrect sentences, and stream of consciousness from a recent performance…
A photo from a 1967 performance of Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard”
A few weeks ago I took part in a performance of Anna Halprin’s 1965 work “Blank Placard”, reconstructed by French choreographer Anne Collod. In it, myself and a group of dancers walked silently throughout the streets of New York City for three hours, in the blazing sun, carrying protest signs with nothing written on them. The piece was originally created in response to the Vietnam War. Halprin’s ethos was etched into her movement score: homogenous moving bodies, and a choreography that invited witnesses to offer what they would have detailed onto the signs. Though her intention was to protest the War, she was also slyly dancing around the fact that, at any given moment, there are infinite realities dovetailing with each other: each global crisis is a macrocosmic manifestation of fractures that are also occurring on more local scales: How is the global violence that we are (rightfully) angered at echoing a violence that we may be practicing in the interiority of our own communities, between the convenient lives we conduct and the landscapes that we mine in order to make those conveniences possible, or, particularly fascinating for me, how do global frictions also welcome us to examine the frictions we compound in our own bodies? And to what do we bring our attention, as each of us is inherently geared toward most effectively impacting the causes that we most care about…
This last question is one I keep turning over in my head. As a practitioner of the body, it remains important to bring all conversation back to the responsibility that must be kaleidoscopically lensed on to one’s own relationship with their body, how they move that body through the world, and how they allow/make space for other bodies. Of the aforementioned performance, many observations were made, and I will share two that have been most on my mind here:
In our cultural imagination, most large groups of organized bodies will insinuate violence. Throughout our three hour performance, we were stopped more than six times by police force, security guards, and various other city officials who were responsible for ensuring that public areas remained safe. This had me thinking: Where in our cultural imagination is the space for collective dancing? Why is collective dancing relegated only to performance spaces, dance halls, clubs, and other spaces that exist on the fringe? Why is it that the community body cannot be inherently considered joyful? I know that there are many historical references as to why our imaginations may have been turned against us, and yet – I wonder what our world would look like if we used our bodies to think through the question of: How can we practice, make space for, and allow, the joyful community body?
What is the dance? Is the dance observed by the people who are watching or by the ones who are dancing and clocking the responses of those who are watching? This movement score did not require virtuosic or rhythmic shapes that would exclude any part of the human population. All it required was the ability to walk, silently and meditatively, for many hours. And so, being inside of this practice, the whole world around me became a dance. The responses from the people who were interested in this strange movement score that invaded upper Manhattan: the woman who ran alongside us for five blocks, trying to figure out what we were fighting for without wanting to ask us with her voice; the man who yelled at me “You are so stupid!!! You need to use your voice!! Why is your sign blank?”; the many security guards who talked into their walkie talkies to bring their colleagues to surround the performance; the small children who fell in line because they had not yet been taught to enter the strange is something that should be avoided (thank goodness); the woman who cried at the end of the performance because she had not felt that she had the experience of being part of something in a very long time. The list grows - but that is to say, anytime we take our bodies through the world there is a dance around us and a dance into which we are entering. I’d be curious to have more conversations about how that acknowledgement shifts our participation in the daily rhythms of the communities that we find ourselves a part of.
There is more to say here, about meditation and presence and the connecting of bodies. There is always more to say about how much I believe in small and large practices of shifting consciousness through the body in community environments. That, in this way, we can find our strange practices and new habits of making our way through a world that is becoming increasingly more complicated. However, another realization while performing this piece which was created nearly sixty years ago: Perhaps the world has always been this complicated, we just have the technology to be aware of it now. And so where does that place the body? In our increasing mental awareness, how is it that we might take better care of the information processing device that is our nervous system, that is our heart, that is our memory bank? How might we also make space in our lives and bodies to be better equipped to hold the information we are constantly receiving, and thereby anchor us more deeply into states of caring and…subsequently, states of action?
These are the questions that I am asking lately, and that I’d love to ask along with you. Please write back with any reflections, or join me in class where we always work our way through these questions through the body.
UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Wednesdays at Souk Studio
12 W 27 St, NYC
Second floor
2.30p-3.45p on the following upcoming dates:
July 31; August 21; August 28
SPECIAL WORKSHOP IN NYC AT THE ALCHEMIST’S KITCHEN:
This is a class I am extremely excited about, as it weaves together embodiment practices with my great love of plants, herbal medicine, and community ritual practice.
August 18th, 6.30pm-8.30pm
Tickets and more information here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inhabiting-the-feminine-body-energetic-flow-with-amanda-krische-tickets-954380005287?aff=oddtdtcreator
Soon, an update with upcoming performance schedule. There is much on the horizon, and I am very grateful to keep building together.
With love and gratitude,
Amanda