Yesterday’s symposium opening was a thankful warm-up as I think towards the prospects for today. Arriving, really arriving, for a conversation about interdisciplinary collaboration, plunging into the gathering together, receiving information, and sharing across our mem-branes is a process to grapple with in itself. I describe myself as an architect and a conversant around dance that engages site and process and I am arriving from California. This is an amazingly vibrant community to come into and witness. It is thrilling to think about reflecting back to this community and think about taking away a socially embodied sense of the workings to my spaces. I hope that this writing (during and after the symposium) can add to/begin to encapsulate, spread apart, and distribute the knowledge and intensity of working around the ILAND practice that is manifested through this symposium.
We used a lot of words in the warm-up day. (except that one…) This was an extremely welcome focus laid out by Phil Silva, Executive Director of ILAND as facilitator of the Open Space Discussion: Moving Forward with Science and Performance. Language, discipline specific terms, these are important ways of communicating within our disciplines that can keep us from hearing or collaborating with other disciplines. Setting things apart, and bringing them together. The discussion really turned into a workshop around how to notice and develop common interests of engagement through overlap in terms and describing how the disciplines do not do the same thing where terms are missing. Finding where the conversation is interesting and necessary for both disciplines is a way to build collaboration. The beautiful thing is that this is an on-going discussion. This can be done again and again to keep referencing the ways in which we are moving the conversation, we are communicating with, and conversing with each other.
Narrative context: we were (and will be again today) on the 5th floor of a New School building at 65 West 11th Street. This is a beautifully renovated gathering room that, despite sitting in for already 4 hours, was only made known to me through the practice of an ILAND method in the PLENARY period. To start the gathering, after welcome remarks by Founder/Artistic Director Jennifer Monson we used an ILAND method to move and engage with the space and with each other. This was not a meet and greet or an ice breaker. It did that too, but it was an incredibly quick way to be completely in the process. We researched through our own movement intuitions and through crossing paths and clustering we were able to transfer perceptual information about space time and embodiement.
Kate Cahill (previous ILAB resident and now Board Member) and Eliot Maltby, Board Member, offered their work around the ILANDING, an iterative matrix and selected aphorism to afford the elastic presence between residencies and between ILAND and the related community and general public. Thankfully they are going to post a link to their presentation. It is too important to pass off a summary right here. Can’t wait to talk more about it!
I will have to come back to writing and reflecting on the so much more that has already happened: the landing into the New School through Ivan’s Senior Seminar class with a rehearsal and a performance of a new score by Ben Carson. (So much more to say about that work.) Really great talk by Ben about Radical Empiricism.
And the presentation of the most recent ILAB residency PARK, really left me thinking about ways in which we receive the landscape and the incidental practices of documentation that are not part of a method. The video of the wandering across a landscape made indeterminate by the literal accumulation and burial of a very human practice (making and processing ‘waste’) will stay with me as a way to reflect on the process of marking invisible time.
Scales of involvement. (How does this work at a scientific level. How does this work through an art/movement practice process. How does this work in ILAND? There have now been 11 residencies with 26 residents over 7 years. That in itself is an elastic body of reflection and engagement over time and multiple spaces.)
The City/Urban environments. We are going to talk a lot about this today in the morning panel. Very excited! But the city as a collaborative partner and an indeterminate process to be a basis for process practice was initiated.
Making the process visible. (documentation?)
Simultaneous reflection (intuition and improvisation.)
Position of self as researcher, artist, in relation to systems.
How are we going to talk about indeterminacy. We’ll see what happens today. Looking forward to more making sensable!
Gretchen
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