SUMMARY

This multidimensional project was catalyzed by the death of Margit’s mother, Wynne Galanter, in 2003, and enriched itself through a variety of crossings in the two years that followed. The Whole Whole explores and defines “permeability” as a specific and delicate interconnection of lived experience and the environment. An instance of first-person research, Margit centered the inquiries obliquely and imaginally around the figure of the octopus as a primal originator, possessing glorious permeability of mythic proportions.

The project included a series of movement studies performed nationally; an evening-length performance in collaboration with Jessika Kenney called Octocthonous, presented in 2005 at Chez Bushwick, NY and SOIL Gallery, Seattle; a visual poetry chapbook with DVD; and a Master’s Thesis for study at Gallatin, NYU, entitled “PRACTICE MAKES PERMEABLE: Movement as a Basis for Research.”

This was a long-term investigation that set processes in motion. Motive force was collaborative crossings. Some of the many included: working with Josiah Hincks, Jessika Kenney, Flavia Cymbalista, Jack Mackeral, Miguel Guttierez, advisor Ann Axtmann; The Feldenkrias Method, qigong, Lisa Nelson’s tuning scores, Thinking at the Edge, NYU Grad School at Gallatin; interviews and talks with Lisa Nelson, Dennis Leri, Eugene Gendlin, K.J. Holmes, Daria Fain, Robert Kocik, Sheri Cohen, Marissa Perel, Karen Nelson, Danny Lepkoff, Francesca Castaldi, Song Nelson, and John Dixon; reading Gregory Bateson, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Francisco Varela, Deleuze & Guattari, James Gibson, Lawrence Halprin, Arnie Mindell, Merleau-Ponty, Deborah Hay, Mark Johnson, Kuriyama Shigehisa, Steve Paxton, Henri Poincare, and members of my family in the invisible and visible realms.

The Whole Whole

PHOTOS

MASTER’S THESIS PROJECT SUMMARY

Practice Makes Permeable
Thinking is necessarily a physical act. Improvisation, somatics, & movement research are arenas where people have a forum to engage in original thinking, by developing technologies to attend to their current experience and reorganize previously determined mental and physical patterns (make novel events and situations). In this thesis, I look at Feldenkrais & Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores, as well as my own research project to show instances of First Person Experiential, Embodied Research. Through placing the different forms next to one another, I hope to let the different forms corroborate in a discourse space, as is usually done in smaller, collective environments. I wanted to see how the different forms permeate one another, and let them permeate into academic (conventional, institutional) settings, and let the tools permeate through me, through thinking processes, and the artistic communities and people with whom I encounter. Inside and outside the teaching machine.

Much conventional thought & teaching & research invites the rearrangement of other people’s thinking. I am interested in original thought; what it means to make it, how you make, learning processes, and how it arises. In my thesis, I take some time to reflect on the potentiality and actuality of original thinking. I am interested in first person, experiential, and embodied research. This gets developed through practice, cultivation, & recognition of bodily action in interaction with the environment. When I attend to this dialogue, – that’s an instance of permeability. That phenomenon and state was the focus of my thesis, permeating…

I also have tried to develop a language out of a felt sense and experience of permeability, movement activity, and movement meditation to some extent. This work is aided by the processes of Focusing and the Philosophy of the Implicit, Thinking at the Edge. I am trying to understand and express what it means to formulate ideas by looking at origins, learn how things form, and watch construction take shape.