Since time immemorial, caves, both natural and built, have provided potent spaces for dwelling, meditation, refuge, and creativity.
Cave Forms is a transdisciplinary dance inquiry that emerged in 2014 from Margit's exploration into "caving" as a way to replenish life forces. Cave Forms refers to a constellation of aesthetic/artistic investigations, and “caving” to the receptive and incubatory practices that focus specifically on nourishing the person in their environment, -- and the two streams have developed and intermingled throughout the arc of the work.
This project has developed through multiple collaborations with manyfold people, and would not have been possible without the collaboration of cave hags Frances Rosario and Mara Poliak, as well as the Point Reyes sessions with Asia Wong.
An ongoing project, Cave Forms has expanded into multiple community-based, personal, collective, and cultural art inquiries – events and practices that discover the vividness and togetherness that unfolds from the fecundity of caves. Some of these projects include the collective liberatory and aesthetic research of the Cave Coast Continuum; the development of learning method, based on the streams of cave art research, aka “Caveagogy”; experimental lectures on “How to Incite a Vivid Archive,” and Cave Forms workshops shared in places such as Austin TX, SomaFest LA, Sonoma County, Point Reyes, and numerous workshops at the homebase, Temescal Arts Center.
As I started to develop the practice of Caving and watched it develop aesthetically thru Cave Forms, I found a set of processes growing that were generalizable for a creative live art project. Inspiration / Felt Sense > Idea > Experiment > Practice > Practices > Indexing > Performances > Rest Cave Forms specifically has felt so slow, so deep, so powerful, that we have likened its ride to a whale in the ocean, with most of its experience underwater, and every once in a while coming up and spurting out into the air. When an art project is given the space, time, and context to grow beyond a singular set of events, then the ideas that emerge can be generalizable, and pedagogical tools and practices.
The more we slowed down in the caves, and the more I made space for slowing in the arc of the piece, the more the arc of the piece emerged as an arc, with nodes along it explicated and named. At some point in this slowing process, it became clear to me that art is odd in the sense that there is so much shared inquiry and research, and then the ideas and growth that come in a project “end’ somehow when the project does, and a new project begins, with what was learned composted to help grow the next one. This is an important process, and from the slowness I felt the importance to extend some of those spaces where one switches to a new vision, and let the ideas simmer, compost, and grow even more. So then, the proposition arose: what if the ideas that grew had space to be cultivated and explicated? The movement operations and scores, the ideas, the practices, they all began to take more form, and could be figured and formulated into something more like a pedagogy, and in this situation, more aptly a caveagogy. Through mapping, through teaching them in various contexts, and assemblages, Cave Forms and Caving began to emerge as approaches for learning, that could be applied to making art, to nourishing life, and to one’s creative evolution. The caveagogy is growing still, slowly.Some of the most salient aspects of Cave Forms are the ones that can continue beyond the project. Cave Forms has become a set of pedagogical practices, or in its own language, caveagogical skills that can support creative process, practice, and praxis. The basic actions that are the foundational research, such as caving, working with sensation and design, with the inextricable relationship of mover and viewer, with the potency of opening and closing of the cloth, can be used as a set of elements to develop an artistic process, dance, and presencing in art and daily life.
