MAKING our way

Context: Since around 2009, I’ve been working with and through a practice I bluntly call nonstopping. It started as an active strategy against creative paralysis, and eventually became a practice of self-amplification and articulation in relation to conditions of the continuous present. Lately, I find the term itself, nonstopping, problematic. I read recently that the earth is spinning faster and we are headed toward a “negative leap second.” In the midst of exponential speed and automatic over production of material making, I think most people just want to slow down, rest, experience sensation, and notice details. But somehow I feel if time, space, and matter are moving faster than we can track, I want to find ways to be more aware and present in that ongoingness. I keep on keeping on with nonstopping because it understands the dance experiment as being on the way and because it persists in amplifying the mobilizing and mutable force of mind and body in the midst of undeniable, uncontrollable change and precarity. I keep at it because it’s an active resistance to other forces (internal and external) that conspire against expression of thought, speech and body.

Practicals: I’ll share different tools and strategies of nonstopping and sustaining attention to yourself, and others, and what is around you, mainly through the modes of moving and speaking. Observing how the complexities of our desires, thoughts, sensations, perceptions are formed and articulated in relation to ongoing shifting conditions and propositions in the continuous present. We’ll ask basic questions like: where am I, where am I going, in relation to whom and what, when and how? We’ll work together in relation, alone together, or just alone, sometimes in pairs, or small groups. We’ll watch, write, discuss, and question. We’ll bring our questions, concerns, and doubts into conscious action and practice. We’ll work with provisional micro-scores to frame and hold attention to our practices. In addition to all that, we’ll use methods of nonstopping as a foundation for making, primarily focusing of the how of how you make decisions and how you get to where you get to in the grappling process of creating.

What to expect:
Folks can expect to move and speak a lot as a mode of creative practice. This workshop is open to all folks of all disciplines and experiences willing to do those things while sometimes or sometimes often not knowing why or what is being produced from it. A willingness to not know and still stay in desire is useful. We’ll discuss and write. We’ll work alone together, together in relation, or just alone, in pairs, or small groups. The practice is built on directives, tasks, tools and strategies for moving and speaking but the ways in which that manifests is self-determined, self-motivated, and self-observed. Bringing something to write with and on is useful since we’ll be doing a lot of writing too.