The W/hole Whole Master's Thesis

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.