New Series Forms: In-Bodying the Field

New Series Forms: In-Bodying the Field

Where is that X in the YOU ARE HERE? In your head? In your body? And how well acquainted are you with that body, anyway? Is it a vessel, a medical diagram, your home? For most of us the body is inextricably bound with the location of who we think we are. And although body is usually the core of our primary relational-field we only know it by bits and pieces of medical needs or encounters with physical intimacy, both good and bad. Is our body contained inside the skin, and if so then what is outside is other? How well is this knowing the body working out for us? How is your identification with body aiding or hindering the greater journey? Would you like to find a more coherent way to live in your body as integral to the greater whole?

In January 2022 Studio Anavami will begin a series, Mark-Making: In-Bodying the Field, Exploration of the most Intimate Field, with the intention to explore our identification with the body. We will be using mark-making as medium to explore the unconscious beliefs of our inherited self and mark-making as conduit to explore the learning-body as process. Each session we will be initiating experientially into of the functions and relationships of different aspects of body-ness. These are some of the things that we will cover in support to develop curiosity, creativity and a new sense of coherence in relation to identity: yielding, gravity, biomorphic expression, landing and locating, participating with our organizing intelligence, proprioceptive awareness, boundaries, edges, thresholds, patterns and process. We will use a variety of marking approaches with basic water-soluble marking implements as well as mark transfers, printing, subtraction of marks and invisible marks. This exploration will allow a deeper level for those involved in the last few years and an introduction to participants who are coming to know this approach.

We have been taught conceptually to be artificially alienated from the biosphere that supports us. This separate-self has us viewing the body as a machine metaphor where we tend to think in separate parts like liver, arm, mind, but this is not the whole picture. Body is a dynamic system for which we barely have the descriptive language to express, let alone understand how all the pieces fit.

As we mark with, into and through the body we begin to experience the physical us as no longer just an object. Nora Bateson comes to our aid in articulating a concept of this kind of function with the word symmanathesy, a living system highlighting expression and communication of interdependency. In particular she says that what is key is the phenomena of mutual learning. In this series we will explore marking as a conduit for communication, information exchange and expression—a mutual learning through mark-making.

The components in Mark-Making: In-Bodying the Field support this marking adventure begins with yielding. Yielding often misunderstood as a passive surrendering or a ‘doing nothing,’ is a responsive relationship. It is a physical expression of and support for emotional and social bonding first experienced in relation to the body of mother and earth. It is our first experience of gravity that we will also explore as a radical way of perceiving the body through experiential knowing. We will overcome the remnant of the body as mechanical apparatus and let go of the separation of the mind, releasing our old language to build a new vocabulary.

We will embrace Body as symmanathesy and allow for a new kind of body organization as it refers to living systems. Systems which emerge from the communications and interactions, a relational response, in what Nora Bateson calls mutual learning, boundaries are interfaces of learning. It is so complex that there are no parts and wholes.  At one point she says, Art may be the only way to truly describe living complexity.  

Marking approaches thus facilitates a deeper experience of expression, communication and mutual learning where the body is not a vessel but a fluid element in the cosmic ocean that we are. There is an archetypal and mythical dimension developmentally which resonates with our egos in function and dysfunction shedding light on new possibilities for understanding a greater context. We have become a definitive force on this planet and need to create an opening for coherence rather than separation. This series of marking from the body is a way to become intimate with ourselves, not as object but as constantly moving process. In mark-making we begin to create a different relationship to matter and therefore to everything, animate and inanimate.

Through marking the insights and new connections have a somatic anchoring in the body so it would seem that the body is the best place to begin the query of new realities that may be covered by old beliefs. January will begin Mark-making: In-Bodying the Field with the Marking Vocabulary Sylllabus is a prerequisite for Janurary. Let me know your interest.