-401-1-May-September

I talk about studio sessions with Ingrid during the third semester here where she was helping me remove blockages in the body that get me stuck when I'm dancing and improvising. In this case it had to do with not allowing myself to give and receive love because of an issue with my mother growing up...something she could see in me when I was dancing. Ingrid has been my mentor for the third and fourth semester, and she mentors me as a director and performer but also from her work as a parapsychological medium.

The main themes that I explain in the video that I took with me into the 4th semester are masculine and feminine energies and to have a mind like a child. I connect the work with Ingrid to another healer who also pointed out to me that I need to balance my masculine and feminine energies.

For the 4th semester then, these two energies became a focus for me as well as the archetype of the child...because in the third semester i was trying to approach both sides from my child-side, or innocent like a child who learns how to be a man or a woman.

Around minute 4:40 I mention Annie Sprinkle (sex worker and educator) who speaks of orgasming with the heart. I find this profound and something to work on.

Questions, Desires, Ideas In the Works...

Candomblé
24 August

Don Hanson is a spiritual teacher, and I have taken a few workshops with him called "Transforming Cellular Memory" where we speak out loud to the "Great Spirit," or universal intelligence, to help us burn up layers of fear, shame, etc that we have accumulated during our lives.

I had a private session with him at the Tanzkongress on my birthday.

A major image I took from this session (which is mentioned after around 40seconds) is burning up a birdcage. It's like I am afraid and/or stuck to be a free bird who can fly out into the world. I'm afraid still to live my life fully and follow my desires. The bars of the cage are things like fears, shames, fear of poverty (as a struggling artist), internalized homophobia, etc. So I was asking the Great Spirit to help me burn up each daily bar of the birdcage that keeps me repressed and oppressed.

For my 401, I want to do this work on stage somehow...to be free or to break through limitations.

Also the issue of trust comes in at the end. I say "trusting the fountain" which means to trust that my life will unfold as it should...a trust in divine timing and manifestation...so that i don't have to rush or force myself or fear that I'm not enough or doing enough.

For my 301, I asked Alessandro Ubirajara to give me inputs and proposals for movement through materials. By being busy with dancing with materials I could worry less about "if I'm doing well" and focus on the material I'm engaging with.

I was particularly interested in how my dancing and the different materials (paint, fabric, etc) that Alessandro proposed created different dances and visual expressions that I could not foresee.

I asked Alessandro to continue this collaboration into the 4th semester. He had an early idea that in the final show I could take a paint bath as a transformative event. That, and he could do live painting during the show so that my dancing is translated into another medium through another person, and then I can dance his sketches back...

I saw Diego Oliveira's show in Studio 14 as part of the SNDO graduation works from that year. I sat in the front row not knowing what to expect, and I was profoundly inspired. For the whole hour, him and two others danced to 90s house music...songs that are engrained in me, eliciting an early memory of the desire and love to dance. His piece is called "Existential" and it's about this exactly...the desire and love to dance and connect to that spark.

For my 401, I want to do what he accomplished, but in my own personal way. I find that much contemporary dance performance and especially Berlin gets too conceptual and loses the body in its basic need to dance and have fun and feel. I want to dance...simple yet powerfully...like the NIKE slogan "Just do it".

Here, I'm just dancing, taking the energy the show gave me and expressing it out in the studio.

I did art modeling for a week in Bad Bevensen, and I had some strong realizations, observations, and impressions from the experience of holding still while others sculpt and sketch my figure. I was generally thinking ahead to choreographing for the 401, and I was thinking of my body as material to be shaped formally, but also of presence as material...which is much more subjective and dependent on the situation between audience and performer. Here are some sketches of reflections:

Modeling for others to make their sculpture, sketch or image is a similar work to performing for an audience who makes their meanings. These artists are mostly trying to replicate my body in their mediums. An audience is trying to connect or associate or make/find meaning from my body.

Looking at the portrait sketches, I realize that I see “me”, but what I see also (though invisible in the way that I am visible) is the artist who draws. I also see the paper and the charcoal or paint, etc as another actor or element in what is present. So the sketch shows “me”, the artist, the artist’s interpretation or perspective or impression of “me”, and the materials that are the concrete results, artefacts, evidences.

I wonder if anyone is psychic or can read energy or auras. Do they include this in their art object?

Besides just the art object being produced, there is a person-to-person relationship that forms just by the mere fact that humans relate to each other when in close, intimate proximity over time. What do they think of me? Do they get an impression of how I am? Do they like me? Does it matter? If they got to know me and didn’t like me, would that affect how they objectify me into their art?

My body is just material in space and time. The artists are looking at formal and practical elements of my physical appearance…the bone structure, the musculature, the hair, where the weight is, the negative space, the textures, etc. They might look to the opaque object which is my body, but they might just focus on the light…their focus might be to draw light, and my body and contours are just a landscape or projection screen upon which light and shadow are cast. It’s not about “me” at all in this case. The focus is the light, and I am just a byproduct.

I had a resurgence of an idea for my SODA research from the first sexy art modeling I did for Alessandro in his room/atelier (I realize I had art modeled for him before). I was hard/erect, and he sketched me naked. It was erotic. A year ago I was wanting to recreate this sexy, porny atelier scene as the pre-show to my 301 presentation which would have been in Studio 1, and I would have been the Fauno (Nijinsky, Allen King in Bruce LaBruce’s graveyard porno, Greek mythology, etc). Now for the 401, I can still imagine recreating this scene. Why?
…
The focus of my third semester research was to be able to dance in the moment before and in spite of thinking that would otherwise halt my movement like judgements, moral and aesthetic criterias, etc. I feel I got to a new place where I could trust myself or at least allow myself to improvise and be in the Now Moving and Feeling Forward. Not that staying still is anti-presence or anti-being in the moment as a dancer…I mean, it’s of course nothing but stated presence and in-the-momentness. However, staying still as a model approaches presence from an opposite angle and to different results perhaps. If my 301 is all movement, then staying still is perhaps, aesthetically-speaking, the antithesis to what I’ve been working on. I guess here the focus turns towards meaning-making and legibility for an audience. Energy can be read by people and especially people like Ingrid. However, this energy might be difficult if not impossible to form into a performance object…without having form that is. Form allows energy to be held and channeled because people can relate to the physicalized formation of energy.

Alessandro took me to the Candomblé center in Kreuzberg because he knows my interest in spirituality through/as dance and vice versa. They were having an open community day ceremony, and we were all cramped into the small studio for a few hours while the drummers drummed and the dancers danced.

Since my 301 and 401 presentations have "Spirited" in the title, it means that an aspect I'm interested to explore through dancing is being able to come into communication and presence with otherness, including non-physical entities. I don't think that I'll focus too heavily on trying to actually call on spirits (because I'm not embedded in cultural practices where that's a thing), but I have my own connection to speaking with non-physical in my own hybrid spirituality and belief systems.

Practically speaking, it takes a long time to warm up the body and soul to become responsive to non-physical. Non-physical can mean "spirits" but it can also mean desire or those energies that arise in certain situations like emotions, etc.

I want to dance to drumming and get into trance states.

Keywords emerging into 401 life:

Threshold --> adulthood

Relationality – Responsivity

Symbolic Sight – Patterns – Archetypes – Contracts

Desire & Drive

Grounding
--Abandon All Hope (from Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron)
--Breathing
--Dantian Focus
--Auras –of all things –soul-->matrix
--Walk with Confidence and a full energy field
--Feet...think of them and notice what they feel and tell me
--Taking/allowing more time

-----All this to connect to source!

Adulthood
Moralism
Accountability –being held to account via relations
Dissolving
Intuition
Self
Consciousness

NOTE: my art responds to what’s emerging in my life and vice versa!

Evidences in my life:
-breakthrough with Ahmed re: becoming friends/family differently (no longer a romantic agreement or attempt)

-crisis of being poor and worried about money and my life direction --> then grounding back --> then psychic reading/feedback w/ Ingrid’s session

-seeing patters in others
---Michael with worries
---Alessandro with anger
---Gabriel with comfort zones and judgement
---Pops turning Republican
---Mom’s journey

-ghonorrea and crabs and cleaning

-weather change

JOURNAL

Making Decisions Faster...trusting my intuition and abilities to make front-end decisions in life and especially in creating the show...

---
An idea came for my 401 methodology as I was reflecting on my current stressful housing situation where my housemate relationship completely deteriorated.

To explain briefly without going into the details, I feel misunderstood by my housemate, and I think unfairly and lazily treated. The housemate has a clear perception of the situation and of me, and I find slim chance of having him see another point of view…mine at least. During this tense and stressful process of the relationship and housing situation deteriorating, I’ve observed myself responding differently in quality than previously, and I’ve noticed that I’m a different person. I described to a few friends now that the last years have been a process of rapid personal, spiritual development…maturity let’s say. The last weeks and months especially I have felt like a completely transformed person…like a new level of adult, or what a friend said: “Jorge is adulting”. What constitutes an “adult” for me in this sense is the willingness, ability, and effort to keep moving forward in life (being open to change and adapt myself to changing circumstances and events) and to not get stuck or dwell on unnecessary things like dramas, emotions, patterns of repetitive negative thought. As an example, rather than needing to have the housemate understand me and the fact that they misunderstanding me OR me feeling like a victim, I am moving forward with the next action which is to look for a new place to live and accept that new reality as the reality rather than me trying to hold onto a sinking ship. It’s not avoidance of dealing with difficult issues between him and I in this case because I’ve tried my best to communicate and remedy the situation. Throughout, the deterioration process with him, I’m also diligently taking care to maintain my own dignity and that of my housemate by not saying judgemental comments or anything that comes from a vibration of anger, revenge, superiority, fear. I’m also letting him know that certain comments of his to me are very disrespectful and not ok. Well, he said “FUCK YOU” in one text, so at that point it’s not really worth pointing out, but it did prompt a direct face-to-face talk to say that we have to meet in order to get clear on logistics…basically to reassure him that I’m moving out.

So, getting back to the point…

my idea for methodology for the 401 is perhaps currently a loose one, but one that I want to zoom in on. Namely to challenge myself to make decisions faster as I’m rehearsing and developing dance and art material for the final composition. Usually I like to linger in an open, noncommittal space until things densify on their own, but oftentimes I find that this is a strategy of stalling and not making decisions out of fear. I will try this time in my process to commit sooner and more whole-heartedly to structures, ideas and materials as they arise. This challenge is aligned with my overarching practice in cultivating my intuition, and this practice entails that I react confidently in the moment trusting that my intuition rather than an over-analyzing thought process can navigate me through a creation period. It will be an experiment, and it might fail, but that’s ultimately the point of the 401 opportunity I have before me…to research and present that research. It’s also the purpose of performing arts beyond just entertainment, for me at least.

I was trying to connect to an early idea/wish for the 401 which was largely inspired by Diego Oliveira's performance where the trio just danced for the pleasure of it for an hour.

I was also transfixed by his dancing. I want to be as grounded, sexy, sensitive, tuned in, and as good a dancer as he...in the way that I can be for myself.

I was thinking to ask him to give me some private coaching...if he was in Berlin or if I went to Amsterdam where he's based.

In this video, I'm considering that sometimes what I'm feeling as a performer might not necessarily translate to the experience of an audience. For example, if I feel like something is so emotionally charged and interesting, the audience might not see it if what I'm feeling is not put into a form from which an audience can have their own associations, etc.

So here, I'm lightly thinking about finding a natural movement that comes from inside and making it bigger than what "feels" natural...to already be aware of turning personal experience into material for performance.