Seminar 7: July & August 2020

Approach

• Weekly group meetings on line and final COOP gathering in flesh (Berlin, August 2020)
• Opening tea: 1 hour of one-student-tutors-exchange for 5 students in a relaxing atmosphere, with common reflections and feedback.

Monday, July 6th 13:00 - 15:00

Dear performers of the living,

it has been a good moment with you today, joining thoughts together.

We were continuing resonating along

Bigger narratives and their influences:

• We questioned the role of science-fiction,
• what message they want to transport,
• and how they transport mythologieson in alternate ways.
• One example was the Matrix and Animatrix.
• >> A main common point of these films we talked about are the relation between the "human" and "non-human".
• >> In that frame, here is one research of Luis Chude-Sokei, a professor of African American Studies, as well as editor in chief of the amazing Black Scholar Journal.
• Luis Chude-Sokei is among futher topics researching on science-fiction, as you can listen to in this conversation with him. In one presentation he gave at SAVVY last year, he invoked a theater play on that topic: R.U.R. from 1920. Through that play, the Czech word "robota", meaning "forced labour" was introduced to the English language and became "robot". The play talks about the revolution of robots, and, as Luis Chude-Sokei mentioned last year, it was emblematic for the reflection on the Transatlantic slave trade, and the way the revolution of enslaved persons had been perceived. In fact, in retrospective, the word robot became a word for the enslaved condition.

Also, our way to communicate in and with technoloy was further reflected.

• What are the bounderies, how do they shape our approach towards each other? What go through technology (the voice, the words)?

Let us know how you would like to come together next time,

we want to give you the space to shape our meetings, so that we get closer to an understanding of performing-living from your perspective and your way of shaping things.

You can propose for us to sing, to read commonly, to play a game, do a meditative storytelling...

Opening Tea:

Our café is still open. Please let us know some three days in advance when you'd want to join, so that we coordinate. We look forward to having a tea with Gabi this Friday!

We especially encourage line, Flip, Nine, Raul, Rosa, and Özgür, who have not yet seen it, to come and have a cup of tea/or coffee/or ice cream.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

we wish you sensing days 🌻🐝

Bode & Arlette

MEETING IN FLESH (Berlin): 4th - 8th August

SpiRituals 

What is a ritual? 

What makes a beginning, what points an end? 

A journey of performing the living, taking its end to its beginning. 

In SpiRituals. 

During these final days of Performing the Living, we will look into your travel, from the beginning to the closing cycle of common learning, which closes with an opening to your reflections and practice, moving you into your next level of living your performance. 

During this closing cycle of reconnection, our colleague Moniloa Olayemi Ilupeju, performance artist and member of SAVVY Contemporary, will move us together to the cycle’s connecting points, enhancing our observance  

The closing day of Monilola’s session will be a celebration, moving the full cycle to the core meaning of a cycle: in a give and take, we will do an offering to the living experience of our research and shared pathways, at the connecting points of our crossroads.

Monilola will wander and wonder with us, bringing our ways into the resonating airwaves, while asking: 

What inspired your work, as a personal SpiRitual? 

04.08. 

Transition evening

- final project ideas, to connect with exercises, tell the students to bring a recipe from their past for the 6-7 August session with “Olayemi”. Also tell students to be ready to present final projects on 6-7 August

05.08. | With Monilola and Lynhan
Morning 

- Visiting the Exhibition “The Faculty of Sensing” in Braunschweig.
Accompanied by Monilola and Lynhan
-> first encounter of Monilola
-> reconnecting with Lyn who joined for the chapter in Epen, in January.
-> Akinbode is part of the group exhibition co-curated by Bonaventure 

-> Students will have no concrete context on Monilola during that day. They will know Monilola as “Olayemi”, who is a friend of Arlette

Afternoon
- Long Guided Tour of the Group Exhibition.
- Common Reflections, during a Walk and Meal in Braunschweig city, reflecting on the elements of Sensing, as well as the former GDR area Braunschweig was part of

Evening
Exchange on the students work on our travel back to Berlin

06.08 (DAY 1) with Monilola

Morning (Outside in a Nearby Park)

- Breakfast and introduction, explanation for covered identity, exploring of ways of encountering (outside)

- Grounding breathing exercises

- Outdoor walking eye meditation, walk slowly, hold eye contact with one person, then switch, then switch, for 10 min approx.

- Bring a recipe of the past, short words about why they brought it along + discussion

- Choose 2-3 recipes to cook together, go to the store, buy food

Afternoon (At the Students’ Residence)

- Cooking together

- Eating lunch on the terrace + discussion

Evening
- Final works presentations and group discussion

07.08 (DAY 2) with Monilola

Morning (Outside in a Nearby Park)

- Breakfast

- Grounding breathing stillness

- Various Performance exercises

- Gesture exercise: choose a gesture; opening and closing a book, dressing and undressing, laughing, drinking water, raising your hand, make a sound, repeat until the action becomes dematerialized. 

- Discussion: What is a ritual? “I see performance really only as working with a set of intuitions...making decisions from the heart and mind that bring me closer to myself, god, everything, that is, was and will be.” 

Afternoon

Final artwork presentations and discussions

Evening (Students’ Residence)

- Dinner
- Reflections on time in the program, What is an end?

- Graduation party, Rituals of Celebration: cycle’s ending and beginning 

- Goodbyes.

Seminar 6: June 2020

Approach

• Weekly group meetings on line
• Opening tea: 1 hour of one-student-tutors-exchange for 5 students in a relaxing atmosphere, with common reflections and feedback.

Dear Performers of the Living,

We hope you are in good health and energy.

Much like the month of May, we will continue our weekly sessions enriched with a series of exercises (individually and as a group) as a method to prepare ourselves for these reconnecting moments,

Furthermore, we will continue to support your inner connecting points to open up through inner circles formed by one participant + Bode and me as if we'd have a tea together, through which we can quietly talk about questions which accompany your studies.

Below we proceed with framing our encounters in reference to our weekly emails.  

Thursday 11^th June  13:00 – 15:00

Dear group,

we hope you are all well.

It was great to hear from your gathering around photographs. 

This week, we give you the time-space to contemplate on your each research topic you would like transposition into the final project. 

For this, we send you an excel list in which you can enter your ideas:

Performing>-<Living Final Project

For June 11^th , each of you would be given the space to present your ideas with your topic. For this, you can give us tasks ahead, and be the moderators of our circles.

Maybe some of you already have one idea that would like to present? Let us know about it, so that we can reserve the slots soon ahead. 

How about you present your game to us, dear @line kramer ? And you can talk about your mapping research, dear @Hubert Gromny ... 

line will take us on a card game. Please find the instructions below:

Card Game: based on cartomancy and ornithomancy. 

I sent you the board game: "Goos-Bumps", and its rules. For Jose an Nine it is  maybe good to read in a bit.

I will explain the whole game and its foundation tomorrow so do not worry if you haven't got enough time.

I'm now busy trying to bring the board in a web-cam-situation, so we can see who plays what. From Jose and nine I

ask to have 2 of your favorite dice. Because I feel you must throw yourselves, the throw has a personal dynamic.

I think I can handle everything 'on the fly', there might be some tinkering or improv. though. So see you tomorrow, looking forward,

In the coming days, we will send doodle options for our next meeting.

Until then, have inspiring days, and please feel free to brainstorm and sun breeze inside the excel list,

your waving 

Bode & Arlette

Wednesday 17^th June  13:00 – 15:00

In this joining, we agreed on deepening our thoughts and research on the notion of future/fortune-telling/chance.

We will be engaging in discussions are the themes of artificial intelligence. invisible existences who feed the visible reality and connections through vibration. 

We are thus remind you our invitation to anyone of you to share an exercise of any kind, please let us be part of. And, of course, the intensity of thoughts comes along well by some nutrition for the senses.

For those who might not be there: please take some time to watch watch a short moment in the Matrix, the encounter with the Oracle: 

Let us share any type of sensing moments, vocalisations, music, anecdotes, memory, vision, wish, dream, and hopes next time. 

Thursday 25^th June  18:00 – 20:00

In this session we are opening up again to a student led possibilities giving space to witchcraft, the ancestral roots or reggae, fractals and Goddesses to inform our collective discussions. 

Following our session please take some time to engage with Jose's proposed exercise:

On The Movement Of The Sun (2 hours)

If you have time, I would invite you to go for a walk following the sun, just that, walking following the movement the sun and trying to feel which elements in your surroundings are related to the East-West axis and which are not. Taking notes or documenting that experience in some format (photograph, drawing, sound...) could be useful.

Monday 29th June - 13:00 - 15:00 

For this session we will be joined by Juan and Corine - designers of our upcoming digital platform and publication - and think with them on necessary production steps and deadlines. 

Seminar 5: May 2020 (diluted between April & May) 

Approach

• Weekly group meetings
• Opening tea: 1 hour of one-student-tutors-exchange for 5 students in a relaxing atmosphere, with common reflections and feedback.

Dear Performers of the Living,

We hope you are in good health and energy.

Our previous (re)connecting link - Tunisia - has left us impressed: from the inspiring history and landscape, to the encounters - in people, in nature.

With that time-space, unexpected drastic planetary changes coincided - affecting health, economics, and politics. They since have left likewise deep marks.

We wished to visit and revisit these marks with you, to understand where we stand, in our life, in our research.

Mostly, we desired to reconnect as a support in your daily questions, by focusing on how to join your research into daily exercises.

As a method to prepare ourselves for these reconnecting moments, we prepared a list of exercises which we practiced in each weekly session with you starting from Saturday 4^th April.

Furthermore, as a way to support your inner connecting points to open up,

We proposed inner circles formed by one participant + Bode and me as if we'd have a tea together, through which we can quietly talk about questions which accompany your studies.

Opening tea: 1 hour of one-student-tutors-exchange in a relaxing atmosphere, with common reflections and feedback. Opening Teas were initiated on April 14^th and are on going guaranteeing encounters with each student.

>> Exercises

My daily surroundings expressed in a sound (limitations: fiction allowed// without text nor words // up to 2minutes)

While asking myself:
How do I make my day in that sound ?
How does my day transform throughout the sound/ How does my sound transform throughout  the day?

Please send them to Arlette’s gmail account via wetransfer.

Please find 3 hours within the week to perform the exercise.  

Please send it with no one in cc, as from there surprise exercises will pave our common research-exercise-alleys. Of course, as always, the exercise in an option not a must, one expression of the methods of reconnect. We are happy about all of you joining, with or without prepared exercise.

Connecting Research <<

Sadhguru - What to do when it’s quiet outside but noisy within?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD7luG3vd1Q
Pauline Oliveros - Sonic Meditations

https://monoskop.org/images/0/09/Oliveros_Pauline_Sonic_Meditations_1974.pdf

Please take 3 hours within your time to enage with those references, allow yourself to fade in and fade out of them.

Prior to our encounters in May and in order to conceive how to come together in, we engaged into weekly correspondence, providing exercises and setting up group meetings for (re)connecting points.

Below we trace our past encounters and continue framings the ones yet to come in reference to our weekly emails.  

APRIL ACTIVITIES:

Tuesday 7^th April: 17:00 - 18:00 & 20:00 - 21:00  collective listening to concert on air:

https://www.seangriffin.org/full-pink-moon

Wednesday 8^th April: 12:00 – 14:00

Dear group,

Following our sound exercise, here are all sounds detached, which we have (re)connected in that time-space on air:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uKf0n3CWPcMPUkKf5kQedjqpg41i4UEm?usp=sharing

Please insert the name of the Performer you think it comes from.

Please:

leave the sound title as such, and add the performer's name after it:
1_Sound_Performer's name

Please leave a colon for the next one to put a name, if it they think it is someone else's sound

There will be many names appearing after it, it's the spirit of the game!

Let's meditate on these sounds with the names we place next to them...

...Until we reconnect next week... With the enigma stoping out of its environments and traveling to ours.

...And here with our symphony included:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uKf0n3CWPcMPUkKf5kQedjqpg41i4UEm?usp=sharing

Till our next encounter, you can feel the resonance of it traveling throughout your day.

Enjoy your evening

Traveling in sound

Enjoy your sound

Finding a rest

In the sunset

Much love,

Bode & Arlette 

Saturday 16^th April: exercise in small groups (please take 8 hours within the day split in morning, afternoon and evening to perform the exercise)

Dear group,

Please find below our upcoming exercise in detail shared to you individually:

1. In a quiet moment, you will read the text attached
2. After reading, you take a time out
3. After some hours you meditate while focusing on a sound
4. Right after, you read the text anew
5. You compose your own text under it,

as a reflection of the first from your research point of view,

with the same length,

and any genre possible: poem, lyrics, essay, parabel

1. You will send both texts on Saturday, 18.04., 23hrs, back to Arlette’s gmail account.

Much love,

Bode & Arlette

Monday 27^th April: 13:00 – 14:00

Dear group,

So far, we all find it a good pace to meet weekly, and continue to start the week together on Monday.

There are two inspirations we wish to give you along for the path into the week. Nothing to produce, but many ways to look at, from afar and close-up:

The Texture of the Text
Regarding the text you received/wrote: it would be an idea to listen to your thoughts on how the text you received spoke to you, and how it found its way to your own text.
For who finds it inspiring, it would be great to do it as a freestyle, a stream of consciousness, in which you listen to both texts and put yourself in the moment of the first touch with it.
When does Time start?
Inside of our research on the cycle, there are various theories and practices on time. Let us think about what waits behind the many calendars humans have created, and upon which we structure our living.
For this, let us all choose a calendar we are inspired by, let us look behind and in front of it, its method, history and continuity.
We can then choose an image which we are inspired by when researching on this calendar.
Next week, we will first show our image, and do a listening to image intro, to then dive into the endless cycle of time

See you there, in the mini-cycle of this week, on our place,

Bode & Arlette

MAY ACTIVITIES:

Monday 4^th May: 13:00 – 15:00

and

Friday 15^th May: 13:00 – 15:00

Dear group,

Arlette is taking the week off to concentrate on other commitments and so will not be joining us. She will though definitely receive a follow-up.

During both sessions we will continue with our main exercise talking, ruminating, about time.

We would start off with each of us talking, mediating, on the concept of time in all her facets and forms. Individual time, collective time. Time under the present Corona umbrella, time when trying to multi task, time when afraid, when under duress, when conversely happy, enthralled.

What is it, can one talk of individual personal time and collective time? Is there now a "corona" time? Does time speed up when we feel hurried, frustrated, angry? Does she slow down when we are happy, enjoying, laughing?

Perhaps some particular forms to think of, the concept of kairos, originally coming from the Greek language, today translated as opportunity. I prefer the term happenstance, coincidence, even going further to the word-form serendipity.

It has just occurred to me that all we do is intimately tied to time. Without her we would literally not even exist. So right now i write you all and in a few minutes will it send off. "Now", "few minutes", "send" - all intimate time forms.

My photographic exercise to you all, is for each of you to submit an image you have recently made, taken. It is up to you to decide what you want to show - something personal, something banal, something everyday. During our two hours together we each upload the image on the teams platform, and I will look at, comment. This is not so much a critical look, but much rather an upbuilding, collaborative effort to dig deeper into our very personal, individual ways of visualizing.

So much for now. Sending you all love and strong energies.

Bode

Saturday 23^rd May: 13:00 – 15:00

We will take those two hours to discuss the photos you contributied on the exercise. 

Seminar 3 & 4: 10 - 17 March 2020

Seminar 2: 26 - 19 January 2020

Dear Jose, Flip, Hubert, line, Rosa, Gabriela, Nine, Raul, Anne & Özgür, 

A warming and strengthening year to you, in balance, hopes, dreams, and realisations. 

We hope, 2019 has left you rested and 2020 has received you well. 

While our journey to re: connect took its first step with its guiding thread – the Listening – with Ola and Kamila making us connect from afar, this second session will join the body to the mind, spirit and soul of our voices. 

Akinbode (who will join again in March) and I have invited SAVVY Contemporary member Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock for this second session, who is not only professionally practicing methods of body-mind-connections but also intensely living them, while inspiring her surroundings. 

To get us going towards the middle, Lyn and me have prepared some elements, for us to bring along (an image, a sound piece, a text). Together with the elements out of our reach and all around us (air, water, earth, wood, fire), they will fill the connecting hyphen of our body-mind. 

We are looking forward to seeing, and especially listening to you, 

Bode (subliminally) and Arlette (locally) 

▪ 26.01. 

Transition evening 

- Connecting with the space and with each other - Listening to images, listening to Tina Campt -> We all bring an image we feel connected with 

▪ 27.01. 

Morning Mind-body-waking-walk through nature 

o With Lynhan from 27.01. afternoon until 28.01. early evening 

Afternoon - Intensity: mind-body-digesting-walk through nature - Practical, common work, interventions: -> We all bring and share a sound piece (whether music, an online video, a public space sound piece...) to talk about what we put our attention to and how we listen inside ourselves -> Yoga and partner practices 

Evening - Massage 

▪ 28.01. 

Morning - Conscious walk through nature, talking about: -> Fear -> The body as an archive 

Afternoon - Practical, common work and interventions - Breathing practices, body practices - Frequencies between us how do we each listen to them and build our awareness upon them? -> We all bring a text we relate to: how to connect to sound images (words, rhythm, pronunciations, voice) 

Evening - “Ultrasanity” and “The Soil Is An Inscribed Body” project at SAVVY 

▪ 29.01. 

Morning - Responding/Recaping: Processing - How to express the perceptions: how to come together next month? -> activities on keeping connected to the topic -> chronicles: sound-image note? 

Seminar 1: 1-4 December 2019

Dear participants,

how have you been, how are you doing these days?

Our minds and hearts are still in these spaces that got us connected with you, and we are looking forward to carrying on these invisible elements that made our way towards each other, by listening to them, and carrying each other with them.

That in mind and heart, it is not an easy task to tell you how we would have loved to be physically present throughout our first session, but that our engagement at this year's Rencontres de Bamako biennial of Photography will beam us right into our challenge: how to make connection a performative act, throughout time-space boundaries?

In that optic, we find it a beautiful way to make presence and connection a performing topic, by travelling through time-spaces, and reaching to you who already fill our hearts.

The historic edition of the biennial, 25 years of Rencontres, and, for instance, the SAVVY Invocations topics - Exclamating, Still! On The Noise of Images - are perspectives we attentively wish to include in the first session, while including you in it, through live or recorded footage. 

Having our colleagues Kamila and Ola of Untraining the Ear physically carrying the session, is an intro we have consciously conceived for the opening of your COOP study. Considering Listening as Method is what we had deeply thought/meditated about in our meeting circle with you during the intro week.

Sound as a connecting element, through original sounds such as the voice, is what we let our minds be driven by with one of the students circles visiting us. It was a great moment when s.o. said to her colleague student that she had never mentioned it yet but that he has the same voice as a friend of hers. It immediately flipped our theories of the original sound, and made us reflect about uncertainties and how to live with them, embracing them, with a changing pattern along the way, that will give to the way its move, with bass and drum coming along.

Considering these elements on the content base, we conceived the format of the first session with sound as a conscience mode we will be reaching each other.

Us being with you in Nieuwvliet and you being with us in Bamako is what we think about, while implying recorded notes of the surrounding atmosphere, that we feel connected to, and that, through this, could be a sparkle of connection we'll ignite at that present moment with you. Water as an holistic connecting element of our world is what we will also bring into the session, with, for instance, recordings of the river, from both shores, Netherlands and Mali.

We are looking very much forward of an intense connecting time, with each of you and commonly.

Bode and Arlette

TIMELINE

Sunday 01.12. 

Transition evening

- connecting with the space and with each other

- Bode/Arlette will connect with sounds and/or videos from Bamako
-> recordings of personal experiences, passengers

Monday 02.12.

Morning 

- Listening/Responding through various expressions
- artists who we engage with in Untraining The Ear

- Students called to bring in their ideas 

- Reflections and practices on listening through voices

- Understand the sounds

Afternoon 

- Intensity: jazz music 

- Practical, common work, interventions with Kamila and Ola
-> go to the sea, listening to nature, how the wind embraces vegetation, listen to the sound of water
-> we’ll have recordings of the Niger river: connection 

Evening 

- Listening

Tuesday 03.12.

Morning 

- Responding
- have open working methods from us and the students 

Afternoon 

- Practical, common work, interventions with Kamila and Ola 

Evening 

- Listening

Wednesday 04.12.

Morning

- Responding/Recaping: Processing
- How to express the perceptions: how to come together next month?
-> activities on keeping connected to the topic

-> chronicles: echoes 

BACK TO INTRODUCTION