LIVE SPACE
Live Space is a place for writing and images about current projects and ideas. It’s the vivid grove’s blogosphere, a place to work out ideas & share with whomever wants to read, to embody language + culture.
3/22/24
Steve Paxton, New York Times
I wanted to take a moment to honor Steve Paxton, who died on February 20 at Mad Brook Farm, VT, where he had lived for so many decades. He was an important teacher, both in movement as well as in life. Steve was a beautiful mover, startlingly thoughtful, a mischievous and kind person.
I have had the fortune to be in the presence, study, and friendship with Steve and Lisa Nelson through study with Karen Nelson, Joan Hanna and Scott Smith in the 90’s on Vashon Island, WA. Through them all, I was opened into a way of practice and collective culture that expanded my notions of “dance” into something more expansive, more like rigorous study and playful exploration through dance in life and on land. Meeting Steve then connected me to a view on movement research, work, the sensing of form, dialogue, and collective care in ways that were stimulating, emergent, thought-provoking, practical and inspiring. The formations of creative work we shared, and Steve’s way within them, taught me much about what is possible in world-building together.
I appreciated so much the inquiry and experiential-based study, as opposed to the kind of thinking that is entangled in institutions. It felt like a light opening into possibility and cultural change. It matched my worldviews.
Through Steve, of course there is the staggering lineage of Contact Improvisation which streams through so many people, and it underlies my movement always. However, I have found resonance through Steve’s Material for the Spine, as well as through conversing with him around ideas, and hearing his stories. Steve’s perspectives could curiously change the angle on what I thought to be true.
Material for the Spine (MfS) was something Steve created once he realized that he couldn’t / (or no-one could?) teach improvisation; it is a movement technique that draws from, to, and through the subtle sensing of our center, and offers a kind of physical toolbox that can powerfully enrich a dance practice. MfS so often comes through my body, actions, and consciousness, not only in dance spaces, but also most any time I swim, or stretch an arm, or walk consciously, or meditate. The set of practices have a brilliant, down-home elegance (like Steve). The images within it are so clear.
There is so much I know about Steve’s life through the public, the media, through stories, and then through witnessing his incredible composure on stage, for example in PA RT and Nightstand with Lisa, in Goldberg Variations, as well as through community-based encounters such as those rare duets at Breitenbush Contact Jam, and more personally, in conversation at the table in the kitchen, by the fireplace at Diverse Dance on Vashon, and on. This spectrum of access is a testament to an ethic of democracy, integrity, and openness that was imbued throughout the culture of art Steve co-created; at its (multi-)center, there is a quality of sharing.
On Rest, Race, Resistance:
In my own life experience, the social and physical re-learning that came to me through Steve, as well as Lisa and other movement mentors, has always included slowing down, pausing, learning about the quieting of space in our bodily imagination, and with Steve this extended to sleep, and this access to spaciousness was not just in the studio. This has been important on a somatic level for my capacities to face the weight of cultural conflict and change, and for my own development in aesthetic and cultural research.
It’s important to mention alongside these experimental movement forms that invoke rest, that there are black-led rest practices such as The Nap Ministry and Black Power Naps, whose work is rooted in Black Feminist Liberation. When speaking about rest, it feels necessary to mention how rest is inextricably imbricated in our racial and social body. Who has access to rest and when? For whom is it actually supported? Legacies of oppression are carried consciously/unconsciously through any movement lineages, especially those that are formed through white bodies; supremacy culture affects people’s capacities and consciousness, always. The very forms that offer support can also surely perpetuate these very systems of inequity; it’s how they are used, shared, understood, and practiced. It’s an interesting burl: rest and resistance; how can these two seemingly opposing practices conspire?
Through practicing a formal movement technique I faced my own concerns and questions around the hierarchies of embodiment that come with learning a form, which are inextricably enmeshed in US cultural life through our legacies of slavery, supremacy. I have struggled with this alongside the seemingly more “openness” and relational quality of other forms I practice, and include my hxstory of Contact Improvisation here. The requirement for me as a white person with all my privileges in USA 2024 is to not “rest” at a feeling of ease and belonging as a liberatory fact. How do we take the time into consideration with our teachers from different generations and use this as a point of growing? While I don’t find Steve’s works to directly dismantle the structural oppressions of White Supremacy, I have found that the forms he created and co-created offer some rich tools that can support their resistance. And how do I here honor a special teacher by seeing where there is room to grow, both within and alongside the forms that I embody and share?
Over the years, I would intermittently be in touch with Steve by email. I can only imagine how many writings there are in this form between him and the truly staggering number of people he touched. I found a few sentences recently that affected me, which I will put here. As I read them now, they inspire me to go on…. to continue to follow my creative inquiries, to steward his work, to follow new ways of living, and to work with my own signature and continue the study. So, this:
“Margit, your email brings words from you to me, and reminds me that even in solitude I'm not alone. Separate, yet not alone. Keep those words coming. The giving of words, the receiving of words, a quite viable substitute for all the other ways we communicate…”
May we all feel this, even in solitude, separate but not alone.
Steve, Rest in stillness, rest in the ground, rest.
Some Resources:
Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine websiteSteve Paxton’s Gravity
Wendy Perron on Steve Paxton, memorial
Steve Paxton on Zoom - conversation“Conversa com Steve Paxton e Núcleo Pausa - Parte 1 - Sobre Lisa Nelson”
Steve on land and dance - youtube
Steve Paxton and Simone Forti at Redcat (2016)
Steve teaching on youtube
Contact Quarterly, tons of articles by Steve Paxton, one of its founders
photo of Daniel Lepkoff and Steve Paxton, photographer unknown
2/14/24
Wood season has arrived, shown here with an image of sweetgrass on Coastal Miwok land....
From the view of the Elemental force of Wood, spring is springy, tender, and sweet, also with the energy of a teenager, this young yang rising - let's go create, let's envision, reflect back, move, create, write, try to understand, articulate ...If we are nourished enough we can access the springs and sources gathered in winter, incubated, and now we are ready to get some things going....how to do it pleasured, measured, and treasured? If supported by our daily life practices, in right relation, nourished by the soil and toil of collective, it's possible. Here are some ideas to start:
- Sunning meditations regularly ~ receive solar power through the crown, closed eyes, forehead (upper dantien), let is sink in through the eyes through the optic nerves, and spread through the the nerves and distribute, softening through the body, nourishing the nerve streams and sending in to the Liver on the right side of you, inside the lower ribs, warm green light, growing, glowing....for freshness.
- Gently move the joints, whole body movements, spirals, opening the joints. Wood element, in the spring season, is ruled by your springy spongy joints. Spinal Cord breathing in qigong is a great way to bring mobility into the nerve center of the spine... we'll practice these kinds of movements in qigong class.
- Let those joints speak, and say, as Suprapto Suryodarmo would say, "the mouth of the joints" ... open the limbs like windows, and gather them in, folding them when you want to modulate your receptivity with your place, your pace. Breathing in through and to the joints....
I wrote this years ago, how to upshift winter to spring energy, perhaps it would be useful for you:
Upshift to Spring
Some Lunar Dragon Readings
Here are some readings for the year ahead... have you found good ones too?~ In-depth: http://www.tigersplayastrology.com/tigers-play
~ Check them out: (Instagram) @tiffrexrei
~ Based on your animal: https://www.karmaweather.com/news/yearly-chinese-horoscope/predictions-2024
~Based on your element: https://taostar.com/chinese-horoscope-yearly-forecast-2024/
10/27/20
Some Notes this Morning on Racial Accountability
As a person raised with all the privileges of whiteness, what does it mean to use so many tools and cultural practices of Black Indigenous People Of Color for my thinking and reference? Indeed I was raised as a liberal Jewish queer in New York City, so this was actually my approach already from a young age, - dynamic integrative thinking - the atmosphere of the City, and of contemporary secular Jewish intellectual life. In the revelatory racialized phenomena of these times, I feel all the more strongly the necessity to call where culture is bereft and thin, and to give deep respect and honor to the fact that there has been something invisible even to myself how the potency and wisdoms I have been attending to are inextricably linked to humans with rich cultural lives, yes, and also I ask myself how to experience, to receive the depths of the grief that these treasure of ideas and practices are also inextricably linked to histories of genocide, slavery, inequiity and displacement, and that from my position I am in fact accountable. This is not new, but this is necessary to feel and act on over and over again and again today and now. This need be named, understood, and amplified.
Over the past decade I have been in earnest evolving my relationship with my ancestral, cultural, and constructed lineages. I do not feel a need to identify with whiteness as an identity, nor as crutch, but yet, but yet, my benefit from this very whiteness on all levels of existence - economic, access, comfort, confidence, and on and on - exists in all the cells of my daily experience. So, when I use, or to be more specific, am inspired by - understandings and wisdom traditions of BIPOC people, without addressing the complexities of this dynamic, receiving it, and naming it, I am perpetuating appropriative, implicit ideological, unconscious and harmful operations which is not only violent, it is also is doing a disservice to my own growing as well. This is something to be reckoned with. How to pay honor and continue to grow as a larger transcultural community from a position of care and honor, and to never abandon the weight of it, and continue to ask what could reparations and a radical reimagining be from every angle?
There is something important here to be practiced not only through the potency of writing and conversation, but perhaps even more foundationally from the the subtle and sensing approaches such as working through movement, with “empty axis/empty space” “receiving the atmosphere,” “living measurement” and “tuning” (from Amerta Movement and other places) that could support this as a process. This is one of the many ways I am working in New Landings and I acknowledge it as one very small step, but a valuable angle.
After decades of practices, the practices I have been studying, so many of them either drawn from cultural practices not-my-own, or even fully of other cultural contexts and hxstories, they are integrated into my own speaking-being; this makes these questions all the more felt, and all the more necessary to address.
8/10/20
A 2018 two-week Material for the Spine residency with Steve Paxton leading Otto Ramstad, Kristin Van Loon, Maura Gahan, and Margit brought about a tangential chic dance fashion spot in Minneapolis news here, by Kristin Van Loon.
4/22/20
Acknowledgement
I am sitting sheltering-in-place in an apartment that is on Land
I recognize that for thousands of years this territory was cultivated and cared for by the Muwekmo Ohlone people - past present and future.
The bounty of this place where I live is wrested from the prayers and lives of Ohlone people
They are still alive
Among us
And so often invisibilized.
My own access and privilege can inhibit and shape my relations
My own busyness gets in the way
My sense of purpose, while increasingly honed, can at times detract from being open to possibility, — too preoccupied, distracted and constricted from breathing, from receiving the conditions of myself as part of the body-being-environment. This is a dance, breathing is a dance
As I settle here, as I settle into myself, how does this relate to being a settler?
This is painful to write, to feel the seeming reality and challenge that my own experience of tuning, of awakening is required for decolonizing, and yet, it is this very act of a kind of landing that is the encoding or patterning in some sense of the basis of genocide, landing. My privilege to land, to be housed, here, is linked with inequity.
I am seeking new landings
The experience that moving can bring this into deeper understanding, can bring forth integration, reflection, receiving.
The hidden appropriations, agendas, insanities of the embedded aggressions within any moment of these practices.
Words don’t say enough
The felt experience of finding my own staying, settling, coming home in this body-being-earth
How to even begin to describe this beauty?
How to differentiate between new age idealism and an experience of being in intercultural / cosmologic reciprocity, and what kind of binarisms live within me to create this divide?
When I receive the conditions of the deep commune of all things, those living and those considered-inanimate, only then can I be in touch with true health
The health of one is inextricably linked to the health of all that is
To practice without this realization has the potential to flatten life.
There is a kind of time and care required to be with the dimensions of experience, and feel the spectrum of living communication
And this dialogue with human nature culture spirit that connects all is enlivening in the infinitely faceted experiences throughout this earth.
The birds, the flowers that have been cultivated in this neighborhood are so close to one of the 420+ shellmounds,destroyed through aggression and neglect
I thank the trees
the sky, all the creatures,
the bay, the mud, the soil, each and every breath
my own wealth and resources are a direct consequence of the disenfranchisement of Black, indigenous, people of color - their labor and care, and the insurmountable violences against BIPOC - individually and structurally.
Sometimes I hide behind my capacity to articulate these kinds of inequitable forces as armor from the deep grief and pain of supremacy and the insidious continuation of the colonial project that i dont even understand how to be in relation to
Sometimes I cant even find the words, cant even speak
sometimes i cant even feel
or sense
and feel completely disconnected from the world around me, feel its so much “easier” to turn away, and can because of my whiteness
white privilege and the insanity of the construction that whiteness is anything at all
I feel joy rooted in my heritage
Being Jewish really isn’t white, - or rather, its all just a construction, and yet social and racial forces make it truly so, that I benefit from this entitlement.
most often I am so occupied with my own ideas and experiences that they occlude my capacity to tune and be present
Occupation as an act of empowerment. Jesus, the Occupy Movement. Whose Land?
There are no illegal on stolen land, and yet all the ways of claiming and reclaiming offer new facets into the neo-liberal project. There is no escape from hegemony - we are all in.
Occupation as an act of un-remembering, as violence
Feel/ing these words
extraction
tears
the waves of settling
the missions
State power
inequity playing out over and over and over
wondering what reparations and redistribution of wealth would even look like
how to contribute to legacies of support?
How to offer without any need for reciprocity
what does non-violence for non-violence look like, feel like?
what are new dialogues, new communions,
New Landings ?
*New Landings is a term I co-created with Suprapto Suryodarmo in early 2017 to address a creative approach to decolonizing and recovering relationship to occupied soil such as United States, in right relationship. Attuning and receiving the constellation of conditions with body-being-environment, to be in dialogue.
4/15/20
As my days get more and more local, yet simultaneously global, I am experiencing some deep calls for repatterning how I live my life and how to be in right relation. This is on several scales - personal, interpersonal, social, global, cosmological. I find myself creating more space for breathing, digesting, and feeling some needs to slow down that seem at a kind of rub with this writing right here, whilst I am working to survive.
Thinking a lot about working with EMF, about the electro-magnetic polarity of yang and yin, about resonances, about the potential for health, healing, for the future and presence of this place called Earth. Wondering specifically, do Taoist alchemical practices such as qigong actually change the frequency of the larger natural world/ the cosmos / the planet, or rather solely the individuals who are sharing a field? Does rebalancing the one affect the all, as we feel how truly we are all neighbors? Do we have the capacity to shift the energetics of our surroundings through intentional vibratory practices, or are we recycling with something larger, in effect, how much am I in flow, and how am I contributing? Do we have the capacities to affect electric fields through harmonizing, or rather are we “offering and receiving” from a singular shared life field? How does a deepening in practice over time affect the larger whole?
Noticing the binary thinking (this/that), often an indication of the potential for split, for disembodiment, the kind of writing that constricts commune. There are so many kinds of writing / of sound body
This is one area of focus while we are in the seemingly limninal times of corona virus and sheltering-in-place.
I wonder this, perhaps part of the larger question, is there ever any change, and how? When I connect with embodiment, this question is less relevant. Whole body movement.
I have so often experiences changes taking so much real time. I have also experienced monumental shifts arising in a moment.
Indeed from an experiential perspective, I feel altered after practicing. In fact, I can experience wildly varied energetic qualities of experiences on Zoom / virtual gatherings can feel drained, can feel energized, effected by the kinds of actions, by my relationship with the screen, how I am enacting looking, and by the lived realities of the communications that took place. I can begin to identify the differences through quality, tone, between what takes place in qigong together in a park, alone by the ocean, with a group online, from day-to-day.... the poignant and vivid differences that come with the intimacies with the conditions of the moment.
The truth is, I am not sure what I am asking is known. These are unprecedented times, and all of understandings, be they lineage-based, transmitted, downloaded, emergent, well, never have we been here now.
I am deeply inspired these days by the technologies of real-time in place movement outdoors when it feels possible, qigong, by the potency of somatic humming of Continuum as shared through Teri Carter + Olivia, the pericardial and brain slow wave of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, inclusionary / countersexual genital self-care, Indigenous Climate Action, SURJ racial justice, visionary visual art by folks like Lukaza Branfman Verissimo and Niki Ford, the radical honesty of sex workers, Tuning4Armageddon, movement inspirations through Hana van der Koek, jaamil olawale kosoko, and mayfield brooks, communions with Lisa Nelson, pearl ubungen, and lab/shul, Kehilla, Virtually Yours (Ace and the people!), reharmonizations through BioGeometry, poetics, irresistable, so much light and lift is flowing through and so much sharing time. And so much more. Through all of these, receiving so much change.
It’s almost too much, and sometimes I have found a deep need for silence, for slowing down. Even here in this time where we are slowing down, the internet moves with the speed of light. The pandemic - is it caused by this seemingly impossible but fully enacted reality of connectivity?
All of these ways to shift change me, and I wonder, do they in turn expand into a larger field, and if so, how much so? Is even to ask this question one of colonizing? (How far how much)? What is the mosaic of decolonizing the body-being-environment? Can we reharmonize the boyd-being-environment, and is this a question of agency or hubris?
What is the we I speak of, and what kinds of “we” are needed?
4/12/20
Notes on the hpm (.....) project
There is this phenomenon that we have a body
We are a body-being
We are a body-being-with-environment
and yet, we have this form
It trips me up
There is the constant negotiation of all the borders, of ownership
Where do the stem from? > imperial supremacist heteropatriachal capitalism
or from
HUMAN NATURE, itself?
Are these really the same words?
Human, Nature
and human nature
I want to deconstruct the naturalized processes and yet I also want to be with the natural processes, the unfolding
of the living communication with the breathing of life, itself
Reimagining
Reimaging
Human
Nature
Culture
*
What seems to offer a bridge,
communication
is Vibration
Everything everyone every
Has a vibration
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
an empty axis through the volume of our being
as a way to connect to the atemporality, the all time all place, just Is.
the sense of the place of our being
neither owned nor borrowed
neither originary fantasy nor a better utopia future
N O W
1/29/20
New Landings: Tubaba
Presentation, Sharing Time: Megalithic Millenium
1/29/20
SUMATRA PROJECT
After the Passing of Suprapto Suryodarmo
Lampung, and Srawung Seni Sawah
Batu Brak
Sharing Time, Megalithic Milennial Art,
Tubaba
12/29/19
The Passing of Suprapto Suryodarmo
Hello dear friends and movers of this beautiful wide globe,
It is with a sad heart that I am writing to tell you that dear teacher and friend Suprapto Suryodarmo passed away in Solo, Java yesterday. He had been having some health issues recently, and was performing, teaching, and doing his visionary creating up until the last days of his life. For those that knew him, he passed with his partner Diane and his children Melati and Galih at his side; Prapto left the planet surrounded by loved ones, having effected the lives of so many.
What can I say? He was such a brilliant teacher, a crystalline human, a deeply inspired poet, and a movement gardener supporting so many to bloom in the garden of life. His dances this summer touched me with their power and grace. I was looking forward to getting the opportunity to practice with him next week, and althnough this won’t take place, I feel wild appreciation for all the time with him so well spent.
I will forever be changed, and can only imagine the ways he will live on.
Rest in Peace, Prapto
May we receive the beauty of life, itself!
8/28/19
Wild Goose Qigong
Wild Goose (Dayan) Qigong is a beautiful movement practice that is thousands of years old. Wild Goose is a Taoist Medical Qigong form with direct health benefits. It contains a vast series of sets, with different qualities and movements. There are more energetic movement sets, as well as meditation-based sets of practices.
Qigong, or “the practice of moving energy” is an ancient Chinese self-healing tradition that enriches your vitality and expands your movement and intellectual capacity. Qigong has been known to have curative effects on illnesses, improve one’s sensitivity, physical stability, and offer people greater vividness of spirit. There are a wide variety of qigong forms. Based in Chinese Medicine and the energetic philosophy of Five Elements, and the meridian systems (energetic flows through the body), with Wild Goose, one can cultivate health by focusing movement, breath, and attention.
Some Wild Goose Roots
Wild Goose belongs to the Taoist Kunlun School, and so is also called Kunlun School Qigong. The most famous practitioner of Wild Goose was called Dao An, who spread the form during the Jin Dynasty (265 – 420 A.D.). Because he was a famous and earlier practitioner, he was crowned the founder of the form. The lineage was practiced in the mountains (Wutai Mountain), and then passed through the imperial system in temples throughout China. Later, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the form came through to the family of Yang Meijun. Starting at 13, Yang Meijun studied Wild Goose from her grandfather, and it was she who popularized this magnificent set of practices and brought them into the public. By 1998, she was 104 years old, practicing daily, and living a healthy life.
Website for teachers of Wild Goose through the lineage of Dr. Bingkun Hu
Margit practicing Set 4, Spiral Qigong. Photo by Christina Bertea
Some Options for Studying Wild Goose in the East Bay I offer weekly classes in Wild Goose Qigong, taught as an ongoing series. If you are interested in trying a class or signing up for my mailings, please contact me at margit@vividgrove.org, or call me at (510) 761-6097. My classes take place outdoors in Oakland Parks, as well as in the warmth of local studios.
Some East Bay Wild Goose Teachers:
Dr. Bingkun Hu Berkeley, CA
Micheline Bogey Berkeley, CA
Wen Wu School El Cerrito, CA
Wild Coast Qigong Site has listings of many Wild Goose Teachers
7/15/19
Making sense of the vivid grove site... how to experience the sensation of overview? A stone for each facet of the constellation, suggested by Sade Gryffin ~ Cariad Healing. So, then, it can be held, touched, and therefore brought into sensations of the body-being.
6/20/19
Cave Forms Archive
10/8/14
Show-In 2014 was a process-based arts residency, presented by UC Riverside’s ARTSblock. It was organized by Brianna Skellie and myself. We sent out a call to California artists who were swarming through / near Riverside at this moment, to use the resource of the museum space and work on respective + shared creative practice. We were bequeathed two rooms – a lovely upstairs studio and the main atrium – and incredible tech support. We formalized our discussions with the microphone, and got a lot out of basic activities that engaged the procedures of making work.Thanks to the participants Crystal Sepulveda, Mara Poliak, Mary Anna Lachman, Nancy Popp, Olive Noire, Rebecca Bruno, and Taisha Paggett for joining in, and countless others who tried their best to make it there. We shared space through practice, inter-independently. Personally, I found an incredible support in the format, in our warm-ups together. Within it, an easy expansion of my nascent project arose without effort, that which rarely comes alone in the studio. This was also the first sharing of the nascent Cave Forms
What follows are a few images from the few days, Instagram-style:
ARTSblock, Brianna Skellie, California artists, Crystal Sepulveda, Culver Center, Mara Poliak, Layton Lachmann, Nancy Popp, Olive Noire, process, Rebecca Bruno, residency, Taisha Paggett, UC Riverside
12/26/08
Originary Art Blog ~ “Introduction in”
…did you ever see a dog- which is, as Plato says, in the second book of his Republic, the most philosophical creature in the world- discover a marrow bone? If ever you did, you will have noticed how devotedly he eyes it, how carefully he guards it, how fervently he holds it, how circumspectly he begins to gnaw it, how lovingly he breaks it, and how diligently he licks it. What induces him to do all this? What hope is there in his labor? What benefits does he expect? Nothing more than a little marrow.”
-Abstractor of the Quintessance (François Rabelais)”