By Michael Workman

I was compelled to catch Emma Draves’ newest work The Quiet Hours at Dovetail Studios given its description, in part, as “tracking how we fill the quiet hours of the day.” What a beautiful thought, that time of reflection and repose, a time inhabited by artists and writers, by those alone with their thoughts. I had to wonder: how well do we listen?

Early on in the performance, featuring Draves, Noelle Awdallah, Chloe Grace Michels and Andy Slavin, I could trace this desire to address time and reflection, as Draves moved through the space, hands like a clock ticking off the sound of Bob Garrett’s moody, disjunctive and affecting chord arrangements. As the dancers all joined in, and the work began to shift phrases, slipping into a kind of documentation of introspection through indelible movement, Slavin and Michels yanking and circling from their clasped forearms, the light began to shift.

Giau Truong’s evocative lighting design charged the room with a lens-flare like glow that shifted white to orange to a cyan as the dancers shifted quartet to duo then back to the quartet again, dancers joining in to move with their reflections in the practice mirror. Breathing audibly, fogging the glass, Michels watches as Slavin moves into a handstand and starts walking along the mirror until then, suddenly, they all begin flocking with a resumption of the earlier hand clock movement, seeming to evoke the passage of something more like a geologic time, a time outside the current moment. A flash of unconscious energy, beat and movement pointing to something else, something beyond the room and the sweat, towards a fuller picture of a human everyday, of tranquility and unsettling proximity to something unearthly.

While it tugs on the loose end of meaning, I want to see the thread more fully exposed amidst these profusions of exquisitely crafted movement. Still, as The Quiet Hours fades into time, as that time of making and idle contemplation fades, it’s what we’re left with in reflection that matters.

Emma Draves: The Quiet Hours was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

REVIEW // Reading Experience: The Insistent Urgency of the Forgotten

By Michael Workman

Hosted in the gargantuan confines of Chicago’s Harris Theater, the Pop-Up Magazine show didn’t offer anything new in terms of format or presentation, not really. Styled after how a reader might make their way through a magazine, the idea is to bring that experience to life. I don’t know how well it mirrors my take; I usually skip what I’m not interested in, usually almost everything, sometimes reading back-to-front, or just the movie reviews or whatever intellectual minutiae, depending on my mood. In any case, if you’ve ever sat in the audience of a stage version of This American Life, you get the idea. Vaudevillian, variety-like, with all the unctuously twee storytelling that is the de rigeur standard of much of today’s public radio, the Pop Up Magazine show wants to derive its trajectory from that sort of premise and in that, it manages a few notable, actually powerful enlargements upon the format. But, let’s not get too far ahead.

At a run time of nearly 90 minutes without a pee pee break, it’s a testament to the quality of the programming that it swept by at a transporting pace. Set to musical accompaniment by the first rate, occasionally ace efforts of the Magik*Magik Orchestra, the group provides the background tapestry against which much of the show operates and which the story’s audience-emotion highs and lows rely for their illustrative cues. My favorite presentation by a magnitude or so was Jon Ronson (of The Men Who Stare at Goats authorship fame, among other notable investigations into quasi-institutionalized oddball veer-offs into fringe culture), whose surprising and compelling Bespoke Porn continued in the vein. A niche within the porn-producing industry, studios produce video upon request by individual clients, articulated in as sophisticated detail as requested. Ronson’s moving investigation threads the needles of an industry that punctures the private imagination of the public, especially in his depiction of one bespoke client who asks simply for a video of a porn model encouraging him not to commit suicide. Though the studio loses touch with said client, they go ahead and produce the video and send it along anyway, interpolating a needle of compassion into the perception of an industry that, while starting with the surface of humanity at its best, all too often collapses into depictions of humanity at its worst.

Armed Poetry by Lu Olkowski ranks equally as high. Existing without a written language until the 1970’s, it was finally introduced by dictator Siad Barre in the country, the opposition to whose rule manifested in the form of oral poetry recorded on easily reproducible cassette tapes that circulated hand to hand across the country, most notably by poets including Hadraawi and Gaarriye, together with others whose work forged a channel of open, free thinking, human communicative resistance to tyranny. Unable to intimidate them and other revolutionary poets into collusion, Barre had many of them forcibly confined or in other ways silenced — a move which eventually presaged his downfall. Olkowski’s telling of the story, set to a large-scale projection of animations by Clay Rodery, opens up a cultural history not accessible in today’s commercial contexts to spotlight not just a struggle for free expression, but for liberty in general by artists historically on the front line in the struggle over fulcrums that can determine either the possibility of its existence or complete eradication.

Similarly compelling is media savvy VICE correspondent Fazeelat Aslam’s profile of anti-slavery activist Syeda Ghulam Fatima, General Secretary of Lahore-based Bonded Labour Liberation Front Pakistan (BLLF), simply titled Fatima. Set to music by Inna Choi, it tells the story of the Pakistani activist’s struggle to wipe out the shameful practice of debt bondage, especially against the wishes of her country’s powerful and wealthy brick kiln industry ownership classes. Raised up by the international community and celebrated for her efforts after a 7-part profile series on the popular photojournalism site Humans Of New York went viral, fundraising began flooding in to the tune of several million USD in donations. Seizing on her newfound celebrity, brick kiln owners subsequently engaged in a character assassination campaign claiming she only sought to use her status as a reformer to enrich herself, the potential violent response to which subsequently drove her into hiding. Taken together, these stories achingly depict the perils and internal struggles of modernity’s effect on third world societies split down the middle as to the choices of conscience it offers. Much of the rest of the program I enjoyed and found entertaining and redeeming, though perhaps without the sense of urgency these stories left me feeling.

Fluctuating on a wavelength from middle- to highbrow, everything that otherwise took place onstage did so inside of somewhat standardized human interest narratives that consistently attempted to squarely land otherwise uplifting messages of hope and inspiration. All of it enjoyable. At times though, I felt myself wishing one would just, out of nowhere, surge past the sponsor-friendly format in a way that could reflect the necessary outrage at the despair and injustice on display in some of these stories. But then, there wouldn’t be those supporters with their “embedded” programming that came on throughout the event to tell you how appropriate their products are for those with a socially-conscious approach to the power of a consciously consumer lifestyle. Blech! Still, it provides the tent-pole for putting Magazine on in places like the Harris, doesn’t it? Much of the audience gets the commercial trade-off here, even if it’s a little less easy to stomach sitting through ad-spots after paying a ticket price — because these stories matter. And, actually, they do. So much more.

REVIEW // Reading Experience: The Insistent Urgency of the Forgotten was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

This is the third year you’re working with ACRE TV, the project you started streaming in February 2014 with Drew, Nick Wylie, Nicholas Bacon and Tony Balco. What has changed since you first started out and now?
Drew: For me, the biggest change in ACRE TV has been the increased time we’ve been able to spend on our two month thematic shows, simply due to the fact that we’ve been able to bring certain ideas, like our most recent The Set Speaks, to fruition after thinking about them for more than a year. When we started talking about making ACRE TV, we were only two months away from our initial show so we had to move very quickly. This sometimes meant broadcasting a lot more canned video works that you might already be able to find on artist’s web or Vimeo page. Also, by now we’ve been able to make a bit of a name for ourselves among other like-minded or like-scaled organizations, and so we’ve been able to approach or be approached a lot of interesting collaborators (such as ESP TV, Chi-ca-Go-Go, Media Burn Archive, Open TV, Rebuild Foundation, the Luminary, etc.) with a body of work that we can point to, to demonstrate what our interests and methods look like. Because the work isn’t archived in a typical, video-on-demand way, it sometimes takes people a little bit longer to understand what we are doing and why. The project definitely has benefited from the two years of people catching a little bit of ACRE TV, here and there. Besides all that, we’ve gotten a lot better at making and programming live television with all the practice.

Much of what you do with Acre TV is rooted in this notion of “liveness,” and of “live cinema,” often realized as work that is transmitted out through the internet, so that if you fail to engage with it in the moment in which it occurs, viewers may not have an option for seeing what they’ve missed. Can you explain your view on the value of this approach in your work?
Live cinema, and particularly live cinema sent out over a distance (tele-vision, in other words) is interesting to us in so many ways. There’s the looseness of it. If you fail in live TV, the embarrassment only lasts for a moment, which encourages a kind of experimentation and prolific pace of making that we are both very excited by. In a practical way, the ephemerality allows us to play works that artists might not want to have living somewhere online permanently. We’ve shown a few world premieres of works that go on to play at high-falutin’ film festivals, for that reason.

Also, there’s something exciting about broadcasting live because you know that viewers are witnessing what you’re doing in separate places at the same time. It creates a concept of a community of viewers in a way that video on demand doesn’t. There’s a political aspect to that live audience, because they are all experiencing and negotiating “now” together, which is why news works so well on television. Also, a big reason why we started ACRE TV is because the live television format has been relatively inaccessible to most artists who don’t have a relationship to corporate or commercial interests. There are some great and important examples of artists taking advantage of cable access and even commercial television formats, and when we realized we could run our own network cheaply, using live streaming and have as much access as we wanted, the project took off.

For the sake of context for readers, please discuss some of the history of ACRE TV, what you would consider your benchmark programs produced under its moniker, and why these are important to you and your collaborators. Please also discuss the successes and failures of the project, and how the media you are working within may or may not have contributed.
Kera: So far we’ve had eight two-month shows, three one-month shows, and a number of standalone live shows and off-line screenings. The two that stand out for me personally are the live show we produced for Direct Object/Direct Action at Threewalls, and our most recent show, The Set Speaks. Those two shows were both instances where we started by pitching a form and a question about liveness to a group of artists and then got to be blown away by their responses and collaborations with us. With Direct Object/Direct Action LIVE, we asked four artists to consider the stream as an instrument in a “live action” so that what was going out on the stream was secondary to the experience of being in a room with the performer. The pieces were great: Neal Vandenbergh gave a talk about the process and reasoning behind his leading role in unionizing Terry Dowd Inc., an art moving company based in Chicago that he worked for. He used ACRE TV as a funny, didactic, power-point-like tool, which probably seemed very enigmatic to viewers online. Melina Ausikaitis performed a story about being lost in the woods as a kid, when suddenly, a first-person video she made swimming laps underwater came on to the stream, accompanied by a really beautiful, fragile whistling soundtrack. Because many of the viewers in ThreeWalls were watching ACRE TV on their cell phones, the sound played all over the room, with nearly-but-not-quite-synchronous playback.

For The Set Speaks, we invited seven groups of Chicago artists to take over our temporary studio and our stream. We asked them to think about what a real time studio practice/performance can look like in a frame, over distance. Because of the duration and a sometimes shifty internet connection, there were of course many moments of failures… the signal going down, or audio not working, etc. But throughout the process Drew and I and thousands of other viewers were able to watch some of the most hilarious, touching, smart and ambitious work that we’ve broadcast so far. Some personal highlights include Adela Goldbard auditioning actors and musicians for a destruction of a makeshift building that she constructed over the week in the studio, a four-hour broadcast/dance party hosted by Open TV and TRQPiTECA, featuring performances by Molly Hewitt and Ariel Zetina, and a totally ambitious and absurd 10 day soap opera called By Way of Today, produced by Kyle Schlie and Cameron Gibson.

So many other highlights come to mind, including Joseph Herring’s live shows in Psychedelicatessen and These Streams; Leslie Rogers, Anna Ialeggio, Ellen Nielsen and Mark McCloughan’s live show in Psychedelicatessen. Seeing other artists work out what it means to go live in totally different ways has been more powerful than I could’ve imagined.

When we met during your residency at the Propeller Fund space, we discussed the political value of object-less art. Can you elaborate further on the material concerns as they relate to the project, and how this aligns with your politics and approach to art-making? Is presenting in a museum context counter to that political artistic stance?
We both come from experimental film/video backgrounds, where the occasions of attention or interest from art markets are already pretty rare. When you add ephemerality to the equation, like with ACRE TV, there’s even less of an acknowledgment of the work’s value by a market. Online video, if it can get enough views, can have a monetary value in relationship to advertising, but in a real way ACRE TV is by its nature anti-viral, because what happens on our stream comes and goes. There’s no object or video to be distilled and shared everywhere. If you miss a performance, you miss it. This is not exactly a point of pride or purity for us (both of us make money creating moving image works for commercial interests in our day jobs) but it does mean that as long as someone has the time and sweat, ACRE TV can continue to be an open feed for artists to play with form and expression without worrying about losing the big Proctor & Gamble account. Part of this equation is keeping our material costs low and manageable, which we are able to do with live streaming technologies and a generous but modest annual stipend provided by our big sister organization, ACRE, to pay our internet bills. Also the occasional grant, like we received from the Propeller Fund.

It’s also equally fun to feign existence as a “real television network”, as equally accessible as NBC or Netflix, which might encourage the tone of the work to be a bit more vulgar or less precious than what you might see at a video gallery or film festival.

Presenting in this particular museum context feels pretty right for ACRE TV. From the MCA we’ll be broadcasting to viewers all around the world, with the help of a studio audience, two actors, two performers, two playwrights, a musician, and three television producers. It’s part of the MCA LIVE, their free-to-the-public, Tuesday night programming and we hope everyone in Chicago can make it out to be a part of the production. If you can’t make it, be sure to watch LIVE on acretv.org.

Each of the projects, from the Direct Object work at Threewalls, to your upcoming MCA event, usually involve large numbers of participants. Please discuss the collaborative nature of the work, and why or why it isn’t important to you.
Kera: Sometimes it seems like the collaboration is the work itself. Especially when we do live shows. Getting a group of people to sync their clocks in a room together and make something is the best thing in the world, and I think you can really see it in the work when lots of different people’s energy goes in to holding a scene together for a moment. It changes the scale and when you’re a part of it you get to stay constantly surprised by the work you're making.

Drew: One of the coolest and most distinct parts about television proper is the lack of an “auteur,” which has stayed true for ACRE TV. Additionally, the platform has allowed Kera and I, and all of the folks on our curatorial board, to approach artists and groups we are interested in with a real opportunity… to make television. This project, more than any other project I’ve done in the past, has functioned as a way to get to know people by working alongside them.

Discuss the MCA performance. What do you hope to accomplish with it? How did it come about? Who’s involved, what are the artistic goals of the work you’re presenting? Describe it, and explain how you may view its potential art-historical value.
ACRE TV LIVE at the MCA is a two part broadcast in front of a live studio audience. For the first act, we’ve commissioned playwrights Calamity West and Nathaniel Whelden to write a scene that takes advantage of the delay that occurs between a real-time performance and the playback of that performance on ACRE TV. Two actors, Monette Mclin and David Hamilton, will be performing a one-minute evolving loop, as past iterations of their performances play back (via ACRETV.org) on a rear projection screen behind them, in infinite regress.

The second act features an improvisational conversation between Chicago artists Kelly Lloyd and Jesse Malmed, while live video images are created by us (Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney) and a live soundtrack is created by musician Ryan Sullivan (of Golden Birthday). Neither the conversationalists, image makers, or sound makers will be able to see or hear what the others are doing, but will abide by a predetermined time structure. The audience (both in studio and at home) will be the editors… the first to combine the three aspects of the piece. Kate Bowen will be helping to produce both acts.

Hopefully, the form we describe above tips off some of our artistic goals, but we also are very enthusiastic about the cross-discipline collaboration involved in this piece. We’re legit fans of every one of our collaborators, who hail from many different parts of the Chicago cultural landscape.

For more information, and to tune into the MCA and future broadcasts, visit ACRE TV. MCA Live: ACRE TV takes place April 26, 6–7:30pm CST.

IN DEPTH// Living in the Cinematic Moment: Kera MacKenzie and Drew Mausert-Mooney’s “MCA LIVE: ACRE… was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

Performed in locations as disparate as a sidewalks in Chicago, a gallery in Tokyo, and their Veteran’s Day staging of the event at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tea Project has opened a space for an important conversation about racism, both domestic and foreign, endemic to the global War on Terror. I sat down recently to discuss it their performance art project with the collaborative artist duo of Iraq war veteran Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I take it, from your description of the tea project, that on some level it’s about trying to focus the national conversation on our sense of collective trauma; do you feel like your experiences on tour in Iraq left you traumatized? And do you feel like our culture effectively respond to that, and in what way is that, or is it not related, to what you’re doing with the Tea Project?
Aaron: It’s definitely all connected and related. I have a V.A. rating for post-traumatic stress disorder. I think, in a lot of ways, our whole society is dealing with different kinds of trauma from the fact that we’ve been at war for so long and, dealing with the structural violence of our society, and I’m interested in constructing this space that can connect those dots. Perhaps use some of the sensationalizing of veterans’ trauma to deconstruct that narrative and reconnect to the notion that we’re all struggling with these issues and living through these experiences. I hesitate to make this project or any project I’m involved with about therapy or directly about healing. I mean, I think healing is a very important thing that we all need. But we need survival as well, and I think a lot of times these terms “healing” a “therapy” and “trauma” tend to de-politicize situations that are extremely political. I think there’s a lot of power dynamics involved that we’re trying to negotiate in this project and acknowledge, and to acknowledge how we fail at dealing with them a lot of times. How I failed at dealing with a lot of the problematic structures of power through the military when I was deployed. That’s even a part of why I never accepted tea while I was deployed. I didn’t have tea with Iraqis or third-country nationals or Kuwaitis because we were told it was a security threat because we were told it could be poisoned and underneath all of that was really this racism and Islamophobia. I’m interested in holding a space to acknowledge how these situations arise, where people’s fears get so built-up that they can’t accept a cup of tea. And what is the reason to accept a cup of tea, and what does it mean to offer a cup of tea? What does it mean to these Iraqis who have live through these occupations and lost a great deal of their dignity and they still have this gesture of hospitality? I know this is a long statement and maybe not helpful —

No, it’s extremely helpful.
— but it’s just that at the end of Guantanamo Diaries, Mohamedou [Ould Slahi’s] lawyers comment that even after this book that documents his torture, his extra-legal detention, his extraordinary rendition first from Afghanistan and then later on to Guantanamo, later on he says, “I wish and I hope everyone whose been mentioned in this story and in this narrative reads it and corrects any of the mistakes, that one day we can all sit down and have tea together and talk about all that we’ve learned.” And to me, that’s such a generous offer of hospitality from someone who’s lived through so much violence and is still detained in Guantanamo.

Amber: Can I just add one thing to this? About this question of trauma or however you want to frame it. You know, working with Aaron, our dynamic is really interesting because I’m in what is generally termed a “civilian” position, right? If you’re a veteran, the complement term to veteran would be civilian, or citizen, or some other way of differentiating from not having participated in the military and the longer I’m in the project, the longer I’m resisting that binary. I think we are all as citizens and as veterans — and this term, I’ve been trying to find language for which I’m now calling “non-veterans” — as a citizen and non-veteran, I’m deeply implicated and ever-involved in the state of war that were in. And so, when we sit down and have tea, all of these things that are in place to separate our experiences through language and definition, those are the kinds of binary structures we hope can get dissolved in these kinds of moments, or work to get dissolved in these moments.

So, it’s a sort of awareness of the military-cultural intersectionality that you’re pursuing.
Yes. Exactly. Very well put.

I agree with you, and if this is to some degree protestation against those binaries and the systemic evidence of them, how much of it is social, how much of it is part of the cultural divides that you’re encountering? I’m not sure that’s something you can speak so much about outside of actually engaging in the performance, but I’m curious.
Aaron: I think in some way it’s up to others to determine — some people might call it protest art, some people might not — I feel like it narrates based off of perspective and relationship to the piece. I do think we are trying to push back on some of the overarching political and cultural narratives in our society and create a space for people to share how those dominant narratives affect us not only for veterans but especially for all the individuals that have been affected by these wars domestically. Whether it’s the equipment that I never even had, or coming home to police departments in the United States or the fact that a lot of the targeting of Muslim, asian, black and brown communities that have been targeted overwhelmingly by our domestic and foreign policies, I think all these things, these wars don’t necessarily just exist in some far-off land. They exist in the refugees that come here, they exist in the fact that right now, the NSA is collecting our cell phone data, you know? So it’s something we’re all negotiating.

Amber: The other thing that I’d maybe resist — maybe not resist, but question — about this notion protest art is how one of the things about the performances themselves, of offering tea and prompting questions from very personal stories, is how it elicits other people’s personal stories. While this is a performance, it’s also an invitation and there are very, very few spaces where we’re good at holding disagreement. So it’s not that the performance particularly advocates a given position, it’s a way of talking about things that don’t get talked about, so responses to these performances — who’s there? The politics of the people who are there isn’t wholly pre-determined. It might be partially pre-determined by certain proclivities, but it’s not wholly pre-determined so it’s not clear tat everyone in the audience is against the Iraq war or against these other things. If we took a stand of a protest position directly, that eliminates the possibility for contradictory voices to exist in a single space. And Aaron can speak to this better because he tends to have more of these responses, but there has been criticism of the kind of space that’s held as being far too one way or the other — not enough of one…I don’t know, Aaron, you have some good examples of this.

Aaron: Right, while all that’s true, the intent is not to be neutral. Not to not acknowledge power dynamics. It’s about challenging the overarching narratives that exist, especially around — you know, the veterans aren’t the victims of these wars, the people who live under the occupations are — and there’s an overwhelming kind of denial of their humanity, and this is ultimately about trying to find different ways of acknowledging their humanity, which is really about acknowledging our own humanity. And there is pushback when people say things that necessarily are — for example, one woman in a performance refused to take a cup, even though she was really interested in the whole performance but in the very end refused to drink out of a cup because it had a name of one of the detainees on it — and she said “Oh, I can’t drink out of this. I didn’t know it had to do with these terrorists!” And that opened up a space for discussion about and we’re not saying, “Oh! We’re not going to agree that, oh! Now they’re all terrorists because someone said that.” It’s more a question of, “what informs that? What makes you believe that? Let’s look into some of the facts of the situation. And now that you now these facts about how people were detained, how people were extralegally detained, and extraordinarily renditioned, all these layers of how people were brought from over 48 countries around the world to Guantanamo, not just Afghanistan and Iraq, not just individuals who had any kind of relationship to any kind of violent organizations, many who worked with NGO’s in Afghanistan, now that that’s on the table, now that we’ve talked about these individuals already — ” because a part of the dialogue is about talking about the POW camps that existed in the U.S., Chicago during WWII, which were Nazi POW camps, Italian and German POW camps filled with soldiers, out of those POW camps came love stories, and on Sundays Catholics and Lutherans would go provide Mass and potlucks. So what are the facts that let us humanize in that situation? But we can’t even acknowledge the humanity of this supposed enemy today? Why is it that these supposed enemies have to be in Guantanamo and can’t b in a POW camp down the road the high school kids can ride their bikes over to and blow kisses to all the young Muslim boys that are in Guantanamo?

Amber: And that’s a reference to — it seems like almost everywhere that we’ve spent a significant amount of time and do research, because there are so many POW camps — when we were in Lawrence, Kansas where we were casting the cups, there was a POW camp for primarily Italian soldiers and it turns out they had actually worked in the factory where we were casting, making 15,000 cans of canned vegetables a day to be sent overseas and there was only 1 ordinance in the city of Lawrence during the specific time that the POW camp existed, and that was that there needed to be a boundary and a perimeter around where the camp was, because young girls were coming and blowing kisses to the young POW’s. So these stories that are deeply embedded in local culture emerge and provide this connection to this form of tremendously effective kind of “otherizing” in the wars that are happening now and against the people against which they’re happening. And so, always trying to bring back the humanity of the actual single, individual people that are affected.

That reminds me of the problem of the Homan facility, this “blacksite” facility we have here in Chicago, which seems to have been weirdly sort of accepted by the public, such that there doesn’t seem to have been as much of a public push as there could’ve been to explicate what’s happened with it, with all this discussion of interrogation and rendition connected to that facility. And that’s a great jumping-off point for my next question: what are your thoughts about the global War on Terror today? It’s still happening. What’s different and the same about it in terms of how it resonates with your project and knowing that it’s propped up on this systemic racism, how do you go about getting rid of it?
Aaron: I think the first thing you do in terms of how you go about getting rid of it is just to acknowledge it. I don’t think that there’s any sort of mass acknowledgement that we’re at war and that it’s this global war on terror, not specific countries, not specific people, it’s an abstract idea resulting in really a blanket permission of our state and our military to really exceed its constitutional powers. The idea that we’re going to win a war based on this abstract concept is pretty flawed, as seen through the continuing lack of strategic clarity from the military.

Amber: I so agree with Aaron that the first thing is to just really acknowledge the fact that we’re at war and that there’s this sort of this teeter-totter, so not only bringing to light that this is happening to families, to communities, to individuals, not just in this other place. This isn’t something that just happens to terrorists. This happens to environments, where countries are left without trees and have 140-degree summers, and then the flips-side, the other side to the teeter-totter of that is that we have incredibly anxious young people who have no funding for their education because of our military budget. The idea that it’s all happening “over there” to this abstract concept, I just absolutely agree with Aaron, first and foremost to acknowledge that we are at war and what does that entail? Taking the time and space to think about what that entails — there just isn’t room being made in our lives for that.

Aaron: And I think that a lot of communities that are directly affected directly or indirectly by the policies of the global War on Terror and dealing with more of the targeting going on of specific communities, and specifically of the Muslim community, their voices aren’t necessarily heard and so part of the project is making sure there’s a space where this cross-dialogue between how these wars, how these policies have affected people in their lives on a daily basis for the last decade plus.

Amber: And I think there’s been a shift in the project in the last maybe 3 years of really recognizing that there’s a lot of reason those voices might not want to go public at this time but also that they’re not heard. Specifically, for our Links Hall performance, we’re really grateful and excited to be collaborating with the Council on Arab-American Relations and with Radio Islam and that this project, where we’re bring people together, and where we’re bringing together communities that might not otherwise — lots of organizations are working on human rights issues, but may not necessarily have the time or the opportunity to come together and that’s what the Saturday night tea engagements are, where we’ll have a really diverse kaleidescope of voices from the folks who have done incredible work in Chicago on the John Burge reparations and the Black Lives Matter, connecting that with activism and culture that’s happening in the Muslim community and connecting the relationships not just between the militarism that’s happening there, but in the prison-industrial complex that’s happening here and how that affects our communities. But I do think that the lens of thinking about Islamophobia in relationship to the global War on Terror is something that has increased in the project over the last few years.

“The Tea Project” takes place at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60618. (773) 281–0824. Performances take place March 31-April 16. For more info visit tea-project.org; for a full schedule and reservations to limited-attendance events, visit linkshall.org.

IN DEPTH// Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsberg’s Tea Project: Confronting Systemic Racism & the Global… was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

This interview was conducted prior to Jennings’ “Lessons in Human Development as Captured in the Movement of Whales and Horses,” performed March 2016 at Links Hall, which the article references throughout.

When did you move to Chicago and what brought you here? Had you always grown up dancing, is this something that was always your goal?
Yeah, I grew up dancing. I went to school and did dance class every day. The last 2–3 years of high school was dance every night and on weekends I did competition stuff. I was born in Des Moines, Iowa with my twin sister where I lived until February 2001, when I moved to Chicago with two friends in musical theater, two young men whom I was with in a show in Des Moines. There were open classes happening all over the city and I went to every open studio that I could find, and went to these open community classes that Columbia had open, and I started going to classes at Hamlin [Park Theater] even before I started dancing with Chicago Moving Company. I didn’t have any money for school, couldn’t afford a plane ticket, or to go to college in Arizona and I was just waiting tables there, so I moved here because I could do the same thing here and have access to all that stuff. There were no dance classes in Des Moines besides the opera gig that I did — because the ballet company that I was with — I was really into ballet when I moved here — that ballet company went defunct in like ’98 or ’99, so it was just kind of building.

So you were drawn by the culture and to learn more about the art you were interested in.
Yes. I met one of my best friends, Brian Robert-Hinckle, we were in a circus together, and we ended up living in the same area together. I was in Rogers Park and he was off of Granville, and we did this circus in Aurora, the Walter Peyton Roundhouse, and we got paid this great chunk of money every weekend for like 4 or 5 months, we got paid rehearsals and we became tight friends. He was in school at Columbia and he introduced me to all these people and we have always worked together and still make work with the group I’m in with Rachel Bunting, The Humans. He was going to be a part of this but the scheduling didn’t work. And that’s how it evolved, just through creating relationships with people; I moved here knowing no one. The two people I moved here with ended up moving away.

That must have been isolating.
It was and it wasn’t. They went to go do Summerstock and they ended up not coming back, and I was just like “Oh, all right.” It was before 9/11, so there were jobs and I ended up getting hired on part time, doing temp work, and I had a job within 4 months, a solid job, so I didn’t have to temp anymore. I waited tables for about 6 months then quit that, but they let me come and go as I wanted, so I’d go take class in the morning, come in the afternoon, stay ’til 7, go to class, come back.

How did you come up with the idea for the program you’re working on now?
I’d been a part of other people’s processes from beginning to end in supporting their research, being a large part of their research and I did a piece I think in 2007 combining voice and movement, part of the Field Works at the old Links Hall. That was my first solo thing, looking at sound, movement and improvisation —

That’s interesting, there’s this shift that happened for you, somewhere in all of this, between ballet and improvisation?
Yes. There was this huge shift. In 2002, Brian Robert-Hinckle and I went to this festival — I mean, growing up, I did ballet, jazz, I had this dream of one day doing Stomp — I was a percussionist also, so that translated for me — in 2002 we went to Bates, where I did this Body Percussion class, and another, Body Harmonics, where every afternoon we did Mind-Body Centering and then into Thai massage — so looking at the energetic body and the cellular body. Growing up, I was always into science too, and always thought there was something else going on. Yes, ballet is great, movement is great but somewhat taught me meditation when I was growing up, and every night I would mediatate and think to myself, “There’s something else going on.” Whatever that means. So, at the Bates Dance Festival I got more into this whole other world of movement that’s possible in improvisation.

How would you categorize it? As a kind of spirituality or as a kind of visualization technique?
I think it was very grounding for me, and I was this person in space — spiritual? I don’t know. Maybe. I know my spirit changed, there was something that I wasn’t going to let go of easily. Maybe that has to do with spirit? I think improvisation came in early on — I remember one specific day growing up where my dance teacher said to me, “Oh, you can come and practice.” And I remember thinking, “Okay, what the hell do I do standing here all by myself?” and just playing around with really simple things, and then realized, “Oh! I can create something by myself,” and I think I came back to that at Bates and I worked with a Japanese choreographer there where the energy really became solidified and he performance of emotions — because growing up, I didn’t really like the competition part because it was all so much fake and contrived emotions people were conveying. It wasn’t at the level it is now in performance, but this Japanese choreographer was so slow in building up, from the inside, and he would give a direction and say, “No, that’s not you.” So I began asking, where does the performance come from, I think, which was improvisation.

Who was the choreographer?
He was actually an engineer, he wasn’t a performer. He built robotics, Fukurow Ishikawa. And then there was another, Kosei Sakamoto was the artist in residence there at the time — two Japanese men — so Bates was a really big shift. Then I came back here, did the massage studies, did yoga — that was my first big experience with a yoga class every day for 3 weeks. I drove a car there and I couldn’t actually lay down al the way, extend my right leg, for the entire time there — I think it was from having to press down and hold the gas pedal driving that distance from here to there, or maybe an in jury to my foot from the year before. So then I came back here, met a bunch of teachers including — Kathleen Hermesdorf was at Bates that year and we all went and did a workshop with her in San Francisco in 2003. She talked a lot about energy and was working with the elements and dance in creating improvisation — and then I came back here and thought, “I want to know more about this.” And that’s present in the work I do now, it definitely is; I went to the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and learned about Chinese Theory and Chi Gong, which Kathleen usually incorporates. Then I met Rachel Bunting and she introduced me to teaching actors by having me come teach anatomy to her class and then I said “Whoa, this is really great, they’re so unlike dancers and I can really use what I know in a really simple way to get people into thinking about how they move, people who don’t move. So then I met [former Chicago Moving Company Artistic Director Elizabeth] “Nana” Shineflug, and we had a lot of similar ways of moving and she went, “Okay, come take classes with me,” and then I met K.J. Holmes in 2007. In those intervening years, I performed a lot, did a lot of DIY stuff, and then started a duet with Rachel that we did a few years, with multiple years of research work in-between with lots of works-in-progress performances. Specific to improvisation aside from that, Ayako Kato and I would do short improvisations and research, I would do yearly workshops with K.J., I think I missed a year in ’09 or ’10; I’d go to Movement Research or she’d come here. And the last 3 years I’ve been at Bearnstow in Mt. Vernon, Maine, which is where most of the research for this has taken place.

In 2011, someone gave me a bunch of these cassette tapes — actually Daniel Guidara, the Tai-chi teacher at Hamlin Park. I got a car and it had a tape player, and he was all, “Ahh! I have a bunch of tapes for you.” So he gave me all these tapes and I picked one up and it was Whale Nation. I was like, “Hmm!” I was driving home to Iowa, and I put it in, and I was like, “Whoaaaa! Amazing!” I listened to it for probably 2 months straight, that was all that was in my car. If anyone got in, I was like, “Ummm, I’ve been listening to a book on tape.” Anyway, it’s really amazing, it talks about whales — I think it was made in 1987 or something — Heathcoat Williams is the publisher (editor’s note: Heathcoat is actually the poet-author of the book); I’m not sure if it’s a book or it may just have been a book on tape. So, that was a huge thing. Then my friend Jeff Giza and I were going to do this improvisation that was in this attic in Pilsen, just go and he was going to play drums and I was going to dance, cool, awesome and then, the day of the performance, he says “Oh my God, I can’t get into my space to get my drums.” I was like, “Okay, we’re performing tonight.” Here’s the practice of improvisation: I was like “Okay, don’t worry about it.” And he was like, “But I still want to come and watch you.” And I was like, “Don’t worry about it!” And…I had an idea! So…I went and taught my yoga class in the morning and was all, “Okay, okay, okay.” And, for some reason, while I was home with my dad, I asked him, “Can you put this on digital in case something happens to it?” So then I had a digital copy of the file, and I blew it into iTunes, spliced it out, frantically ran around my apartment and just grabbed stuff…I mean not frantically, very mindfully. Ha! I just ran around, grabbed these objects, set up the space, and edited these little objects within the hour, I mean, it was like 15 minutes from within the hour of book on tape, and did a performance. Maybe a 15…18, 20 minute performance?

So this recording is someone talking about whales.
No, right. It’s about the history of whales and the industrialization of the world, built on the back of whales and the world, beauty products and —

Lamp oil…
— lamp oil, and the astronauts going into space, all of the moving parts that come from the sperm whale oil; medicines and most every major city made for import/export were built for whaling communities…so, islands, all this history is huge. So that was inspiring in many ways, and that was in 2012 and I let it lay, went and worked on other people’s work, but still listened to my book on tape on whales, and would get all hooked in and be like, “Oh, what does that really mean? How the world is now?”

So were you thinking about that, about the history of industrialization as you started to move toward making this piece?
I don’t even know what that means, how to think about industrialization in terms of how you build a structure in improvisation, and the relationship between everybody in the space and how the whale moves through the oceans and there’s this whole other thing they don’t know about that’s affecting how they migrate or…now, I’ve watched every documentary there is on whales…and there’s a new one, because all the fish are being wiped out over here and shifting the ecosystem of the ocean, then the whales don’t have anything to feed on and then they have to go migrate to go and find food, so there’s that large-scale shift.

It sounds like you basically became a marine zoologist.
I don’t know…ha! Yeah, and working with musicians, and writers and water is the holders of emotions…so, while I was working with K.J. at Bearnstow, the first year I went there, she was like, “Just bring a seed,” and I was like, “I’ve got whales and I’ve been reading this,” and there’s a huge lake that most often in the morning, but usually 3 times a day, we would go get in the lake. After class, wander down, get in the lake. And it’s a glacial lake, so it’s colder. I did a lot of processing from my personal life there, I did a lot of writing and singing and walking in the forest and it was this huge, enchanted, magical thing. And then I did a solo. I was processing relationships, it was in 2012, I think I had come then from doing a lot of performance and teaching and that was my time to actual unpack, away from all that, time you don’t have for yourself. Yeah, unpack, relationships, getting to know myself again, being outside of relationships, or in relationships, or being around people that I know. And working with some of the people I do for so many years, I mean, I work with my best friend. What do I want to do with that outside of supporting another person’s work, what are my interests? I need to take a little time for that. And then, if I do that, then I can do this other thing, or this, and I was working with Ayako a lot for the piece I did for that.

It sounds like maybe you were going through some relationship difficulties at the time.
Yeah. Nothing I want to talk about. Positive, I mean. I find all relationships positive, whether they’re negative at the time or not, ha ha! But yeah, I have a lot fo writing from then that I go back to, but that’s part of the work also is me, it’s part of this — which I talk about a lot — it’s taking something really, really personal and how do you go into it, looking at performance — I talk about this with my students all the time that there is that — eww, it’s not ready to show yet, it’s something for you and not something that’s ready to show yet, the personal has to expand out into the universal.

Right. So you’re combining a lot of thing. Symbology, such as with the water of the subconscious you referenced earlier, this zoology — 
Yes, and the developmental movement patterns, I was looking at that, from Body-Mind centering, thinking about the body from it in utero stages, of humans, how we start out suspended in water with no sense of time and space, we don’t sense gravity; we sense gravity through another person’s body. And through another person’s sense of gravity that’s carrying you through space and then, looking at that in different ways and looking at the development of the chakra system and development of that into emotions and energy, and layering that through — as we sense gravity, the two main chakras that are open when we’re born is the root which deals with earth and the crown which deals with — I mean, I babies have a different sense of connection that builds through the spine — so then, as we start to come into relationship with gravity, we start to build up to standing, and the chakras do the same thing. It’s in that first 7 years — we develop our bodies at the same time we develop relationship and emotion and how we perceive ourselves in the world. As we develop and find our movement patterns, how we either relate to space or people, how we were treated once we’re born, the environment we develop in constitutes how the chakras are formed.

And there’s an order to that that determines the movement?
Yes. Well, it’s the chicken or the egg. If someone’s screaming at you, you’re either going to scream and yell at the back or retreat and just implode in on yourself, which then automatically affects your movement patterning. You can get into the psychotherapy and all of that but I’m more interested in experiencing it, really getting into all of that but having a place of play. So that’s sort of my focus, not getting into the specifics of balance and imbalance, but being able to play with that. Not even thinking about the chakras, but going into movement, developmental movement and improvising with that jumping-off point and then, the Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen — that’s who K.J.’s teacher was — her Body-Mind Centering separates the physical body into different parts, so I’ve been combining the BMC work into the chakra work. So I’ve got this and then I’ve got the horse, so I feel like what I’m doing now is the groundwork into “How do I relay all this information to people, and then how do I create with it?” So it’s about having specificity which, working with horses you need to have extreme specificity…

Can you explain a little for readers how the horse aspect of this production comes into play?
So, I’m looking at two different nervous systems. Whales have this bigger emotional center, the hypothalamus, so looking at this holder of emotion, in this huge animal, floating in water, they live in pods — a.k.a. herds — I’ve been relating that to the organ systems and fat and floating, and then looking at the horse’s nervous systems, these sort of super-anxious, high-tone and, since they’re a prey animal, they’re usually on-guard and very sensitive. I did that research with Rachel [Bunting], so that’s where that aspect of the research comes from too, I guess. I was really enamoured — my brother-in-law’s father, he bred horses — he has one horse now, he kind of sold them. But I would go there, I went there a few times and he has mares, which are supposed to live in a herd — there’s a place in Michigan where they let them live in a herd, but they’re still captive — so I would watch the mares and their foals. An even just being invited in, at one time I think he had six mares and their babies , which is kind of a lot. And the moms will get super pushy with you if they don’t want you near, so like looking at how they care about their young.

Why did you want to move from just looking at the whales?
Oh! That was from at Bearnstow also, the stuff that I did with Rachel was there. And the place I went in Michigan, I went there for a leadership conference on mindful practices, all the admin team I was with went to this horse place and did this leadership course. In it, we had all these tasks to do, we met the herd, went up to pet them and blah blah blah and then they were like, “Okay, in groups of 5, you can’t touch the horse, but you have to go and try and get it to come from the back to the front of the field and go through this obstacle field, and they would take away, “Okay, you can’t touch. Oay, now you can touch. Now you can’t use the begging, pretend you’re giving them a treat. You can’t use sound or yell or talk to the horse. So it was about a half hour, so we had to call upon rhythm and moving and getting close to the horse and moving, then going far away. It was almost impossible. Most everybody got their horse up but then they were totally not interested and totally just wanted to eat the grass. And then we all sit in a circle and talk about it — it’s a husband and wife that own the place — and then literally not 3 minutes into talking the horses come in, stick their head in like, “Hey guys, how you doing?” It was amazing, they’re totally social animals, they want relationships but if the relationship isn’t more interesting than what they’re eating, or if it’s just what they want to do because they eat lots of food, they’re very big animals, then they’re not going to be engaged. So, it’s like what do you have to offer them? It’s a trust issue. So the horse ideas came into my work at Bearnstow in 2014 and I stayed for a week after just to work on stuff and they have 2 horses there and I would take them for walks to get grass. A quarter mile up the road, there was a field of clovers they liked and I woud walk up there with them and build trust and, at first, he wouldn’t walk with me. Then, one day, he started to push me off the road and I was like, “Seriously, he’s going to push me into the ditch.” So I’d push him back and he was like, “Hm. Okay.” So we’d walk and he’d get closer and closer and he would come up to me and say hello for a little bit, or he would push the other horse and they’d have this little archetypal relationship. He’d push the other horse to me, and be like “You. You go play with her,” and he was the alpha. So that sort of spurred my relationship with the horses. And now I’m here.

Right! And so, in that confluence of research and investigation into different systems, where do you feel as though the project is now?
Now it’s in this place where I’m trying to make work that’s accessible and non-judgmental and not just for dancers, looking at the relationship of everyone who is creating the world of this performance and not only just the performers, there’s this whole thing out here called an audience that you’re asking to engage with you. Because that’s what performance is, which is like how you get a horse to be interested in you; and also, it’s just like letting go of that and really honing into the relationship, especially with improvisation. You aren’t just playing to the audience, at the same time you have to create in-depth relationships with the musicians, with whoever else may be in the space. I’m working with people I’ve never worked with before, or whom I even knew before this, which is what I knew going into this residency when I called all my old friends and they were like, “No, it doesn’t work with my schedule.” And another thing had spurred this was doing the Three on Three program here a few years ago, and that was with a close group of friends that I’d been performing with a few years, and two musicians. And I was giving them very little to go on, just “stay in solo and see what happens,” and then another friend was projecting images and I got pulled in and thought, “I want to look into this.” I was sort of going off the work with horses then.

How do you see all this coming together?
We’re setting up a working body and working mind. The performance comes in the practice, so what you’re seeing is a polished practice. Hopefully the audience, like my performers, will learn more about themselves, looking at the capacity we have to be in a relationship to each other, the world, to the group and no one way of sensing it is right or wrong — and to have fun. That’s been my motto for the residency, it to play. Everything is in play, and I want the audience to experience that joy, or sadness, or fright. That’s what we’re getting into now, finding this place of earth together. We’ve chosen one chakra to be together in and then everybody else is choosing another persona chakra to work within. You can kind of stereotype each chakra — the heart has to do with compassion, for instance, and then you get into how would you describe that in theater and acting terms, that would be: “I take care of myself and that’s the only person I’m concerned with,” or: “Oh, let me take care of you, can I help you?” So, playing with that. Am I directing people within that? No, they’re doing it themselves. I’m giving them a means and a structure to do it within. I’ll lead them through something and it can be different everyday — their emotional and personal lives change every day so we always come into the room with a new mind and body — but it’s also this question of can they drop into a specific place, which I am asking them to do. I am asking them to choose a specific place to work within, and then you can toy with it. It can be sort of like a melting pot where nobody knows what to do, so they all roll around on the floor ha haaaa! Unless that’s it, and it can totally happen unless it has meaning, and sometimes you unpack shit you didn’t know you had; we’re creating this work in this space, and I know we’re going to look at it in a completely different way.

IN DEPTH// Precious Jennings: Relationships in Idealized Evolution was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Tristan Workman

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT IT
I like that can you do more things with this tablet than the old iPad 2 that I have. On it, all the things seem more updated than on the iPad, so some of the games and apps work better on this device.

I usually like to watch Youtube videos on it. There would be other things that the manufacturers could add, like Netflix so kids could watch TV and movies from that, and apps that you can use for more things. Some of my favorite Youtube videos are Scrap Mechanics, Ballistic Squid and Neebs Gaming.

Ballistic Squid usually plays Minecraft or Scrap Mechanics, and does challenges in SM with his friends and records them to show other people what it’s like to play the games. So this tablet is great for keeping up with their videos as they post them.

I like Neebs Gaming because he likes to play with his friends and also does challenges, and things like crazy stunts in Grand Theft Auto so it’s fun to watch. He’s also really funny and has a great sense of humor. I laugh a lot watching him.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
I think it would also be cool if they made tablets so that you could transfer power from one device to another. I’d love if I could plug my old iPad into my new phone or device or tablet, and charge one from another. It would also be great if there was a way to plug in more things like external hard drives. It would also be cool if there was another battery in your device, so if one was running out of power, you could switch to the other battery so you could have more power.

GET IT OR FORGET IT?
I would probably get it if you’re on Sprint, because it comes free if you update your phone.

REVIEW// The Sprint “Quanta” AQT80 Tablet was originally published in The Little T Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

This is the full, unexpurgated version of the interview with Marasa that originally appeared over at Newcity.

You’ve worked with a lot of figures in the dance community in the city. Are you originally from Chicago?
I’m from Fox Lake, originally. Northwest of the city is where I grew up. I moved to Chicago in 2006, almost ten years. Growing up, I used to visit Libertyville, which is where my studio was. Not as developed as it is today, it’s the last stop on the Metra line, so I used go to Libertyville where all the dancers were from Gus Giordano in Evanston. Then I started visiting Evanston, which had a larger group of people, a lot more energy, and from there I’d meet other teachers — it’s where I met Joel Hall — when I was 14, mostly jazz. Then I went to school and didn’t study dance, I was a journalist at the University of Iowa and after that I moved to New York to work at a public relations firm. At first, I worked at NBC, then I left that job, people’s peace of mind and overall happiness…I was really questioning it. So I left, got another job and was seeing someone here whom I was madly in love with, so I moved back in 2006. Shortly after that, I met Molly Shannahan and thought, “Dancing sounds good, dancing is joy.” I met her when she was finishing her long-term project, “My Name is a Blackbird,” and beginning an ensemble process and I got brought in, incorporated, and I’ve remained active with the community since. I worked with Julia Rae Antonick, Jonathan Meyer. Joanna Rosenthal, Ayako Kato, she is sort of a mentor for me and she’s cosmic, I think. Her studies and views, and Molly’s are the ones I have bridged into myself. Kristina Isabelle on a short project. But in 2012, I went to a study on Body-Mind Centering and it’s a somatic study, one I know Julia and Jonathan are very heavily influenced by, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen.

She was an occupational therapist, she was unaware in what ways she was facilitating ease and mobility in people, so a lot of her work was bringing Eastern energetic and philosophical — but also Meditative consciousness practices — and her work can be sometimes explained as experiential anatomy, as a reductive way of thinking about it. But basically that her way of understanding the body was through an empirical understanding. So, her work was looking at developmental movement patterns from conception through the first year of life and how that process of evolution mirrors the philogenetic — animal development — so trying to go in and find an access point into the movement patterns of your body that are the start of it. That are of the jellyfish, radiating out and pulsating in, all of those patterns are within you. That work, a lot of it is sounding into the systems, moving into them, breathing from them, trying to understand one’s mystery through experiential anatomy — a lot of it is visualization, and she would call it somatization, and that those two things really give one a sense of embodiment and presence. I think there’s something about the nervous system, and how it gets really activated when our minds get going, and so to have that be as integrated, as experienced as all of the systems, blood, organs, the skeleton, fascia, for all of them to be together, there’s a sense of relief. And, these aren’t my words, but you “separate to integrate,” you separate the systems to try and integrate them. It’s remembering the body, which has its own memory. It’s in the tissues.

I’ve always found that fascinating, the way trauma stays in the body, and how triggering can cause one to relive of those experiences.
I know very little about it except for my own experience of witnessing that with people and in myself…so it was there that I had the insight, where I thought: “bone recognizes bone,” and it was just that simple, and my non-hierarchical mind was like, “Oh! Okay.” Even in the bones, which in some ways is how we lever ourselves, where we stand above, how we even fit things into hierarchies…that drew me back because it made feel relational. I’m so drawn to dance because it’s a relationship, movement. So that’s what really drew me back in and reawakened it in my life. It was actually Lisa Gonzales, who organized a improvisation workshop at Columbia…I hadn’t really learned how improvisation was more than a tool to use to set movement, and using improvisation itself as the practice, as the container, as what we were observing. It really lit a fire. Since then, I’ve really started to find ways to bring that into my work. So, last year I created a series called “Jewel Tones,” responding to the call for wanting to know more about improvisation, and inviting people who know and practice it, just to share space with them together and learn from them.

That such a journalistic response: I’ve got to write about this to learn about it.
That was exactly it, that was the process. It’s also experiential. I just need to give me body more life experience, engaging with it, and the conversation will begin. And Jewel Tones was my first real effort with that, the seed for which had come out of that “bone sees bone” moment and while I was there, I met a friend who was practicing insight meditation or “Vipassana,” which translates into insight meditation, and it’s a Buddhist practice, it’s sitting and walking meditation, essentially just dropping questions into the unconscious and observing. It’s hard to describe. I went on my first meditation retreat in the summer of 2014 and prior to that I had started going to the Zen Buddhist temple here in Chicago and sitting on Sundays. And they have these internal practices they call “precepts,” and my understanding is that the precepts are the things that overlap in all of the different forms of Buddhism and so, when one takes a vow to the practice, one takes a vow with the precepts. So I decided to take the more formal precept ceremony at the temple that summer. Day two or three of retreat, leaving sitting to do walking, one of the instructors says, “Do as the Buddha, and make of yourself a light. So I walked outside, and was like “What are you talking about? How do I begin to experience that in my body?”

It’s a karmic notion?
Oh! I don’t know. The back end of that is “Make of yourself a light, rely upon yourself. Do not rely upon others.” That sounds like karma. Thinking about that, I also take a lot of pleasure often in wearing the same colors top to bottom, different shades of the same color, so I was thinking about monochromatics, and the words just struck a cord for me, “Jewel Tones,” so it was bringing all of those things together, it was an aspiration to free myself of prejudice and just be. For me, I wasn’t really speaking to that aspect of it because I was fearful of talking…also, knowing that my aspiration was after movements ahead of the words I could say about them. Just receiving. I had received something and I knew it was in the receiving that I knew I had to create the conditions for that, I had to create a dance. I think the reason I was mindful of speaking about it in the language I was using is that there really was the aspiration to be free of prejudice creatively, and really curious about how — and these are my words for it — how naked of a container can still keep everyone connected. How much form provides freedom? And, this piece about giving your body life experience, I feel like my body had so much experience of color and being a divisive agent, I was curious about what it might feel like for it to be the sole unifying agent.

What’s next for you?
My next project is at Links, it’s a series I’m running that I approach [Links Director] Roelle about. I knew she was interested in having a works in progress series, which they used to have at the old Links. I proposed this new thing called Set Free, which is a progress in performance series. Hopefully it will become a place where artists can use performance to understand their own work, so performance is included in the process, not just as a place of arrival, but where it can constantly be a place of departure. The name for me really came from my value that people working with traditional forms of set composition, improvisation and free structures, that the two are not separate. I think I’ve felt that way in the works I’ve been doing, that there was a kind of either/or and that that was my own lack of perspective. I find that’s a way people talk about process and product. We’re going to do 5 months, 5 Mondays at Links and there’ll be a weekend show in August with 4 artists, 4 works, so instead of it being a 1-off performance night, this gives people a chance to repeat, return and continue, and provides some consistency and some continuity. I’ll be one of the 4 and I’ll be making a new work called “Woodpecker,” a duet between myself and drummer Ryan Packer, following up from Jewel Tones, when I became very interested in the interpenetration of the music and the movement.

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“Set Free” takes place at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60618. (773) 281–0824. Performances take place the third Monday of every month: Feb. 15, March 21, April 18, May 16 and June 20, culminating in a weekend performance Aug. 18–21 (two evenings per artist). For more info: linkshall.org and thewateringcandance.com.

IN DEPTH// Jessica Marasa & the Somatics of Meditative Reconstruction was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Advertise with CPS Obsessed! was originally published in CPSO: Neighborhood Kto12 Edition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

It’s intriguing to me, in an era of growing awareness and acceptance of the concept of intersectionality, when more advances than ever have been made in pushing back against binary thinking, that the practitioners in certain art forms should react so negatively to diversification of practices within their respective fields.

I bring this up since, in recent weeks, a young dancer I was working with on a dance notation and choreographic project, dropped out of the effort (for the second time, actually), citing my lack of personal experience as a dancer and questioning whether or not I was qualified to produce “good” choreography. It’s a dismissal I’ve heard over my years of working in interdisciplinary modes that I’ve found most productive for my own artistic exploration, but which are often easily misunderstood qua those modes themselves. Recently, I’ve begun to describe my work as an exploration of the variants of “marks on a page;” literary writing and poetry, drawings and watercolors, or what used to be termed the “grammatologies,” as it were; and in this instance of the arrangements of a figure in space as an investigation into writing shattered into its constituent language- or basic, meaning-making participles. This is also backgrounded, for me, in my history of social and civic art-making practices, as an organizer of public art moments, happenings and events, all of which work outside traditional notions of the proscenium, of art off the pedestal, outside the academy or the institution.

Indeed, what for me this disputation helped expose was an awareness of what seems a divide between a certain sort of “purist” approach to the practice of dance-making, and perhaps an even professionally jealous willingness to reductively frame the art as bounded simply by its technique. It’s a not unfamiliar experience, having run into the various art mafias out there in their seemingless endless tribal configurations (especially in Chicago), that I should eventually encounter the dance mafia variant. It’s equally as surprising, frankly, since the dancer in question operates as much in the improvisational mode as anything and, well anyway, you’d have thought it an insistent obstinence we’d have left behind at least since Rauschenberg first dared to call himself a choreographer with his 1963 work Pelican, for which he provided instructions on movement to dancer Carolyn Brown. At least if you knew the history.

In any case, it’s long since obvious that dance simply isn’t reducible to technique and, just like any other art form, isn’t neatly reducible to its craft. Now, I’m certainly not coming to this notion of choreography in anything like the more traditional understanding of dance choreography and, honestly, that approach isn’t overall that interesting to me artistically. My approach is, ultimately, one of relative disinterest in the more common engagement with dance choreography proper, and more of an exploration, invention and appropriation of the notion from dance, one that I then interject into a perhaps, initially, seeming unrelated context. I’m thinking, for instance, of Mårten Spångberg as a contemporary corollary, though the interest for me reaches back into and through visual, literary art and poetics in a way it may not for him (though our approaches do otherwise converge on the necessity of producing work that confounds the appropriation attempts of neoliberalism).

For me, this shakes out more, ultimately, as a kind of performance choreography, if my more purist readers will permit my further bastardization of the term, if in a dance mode, one in which my thoughts on it lately seem to have been leading me, for instance, to incorporate the movement study of actually hanging myself as an investigation of this performance concept of “dancing at the end of a rope,” for instance, as part of the Neo-Judson program I am developing to revisit and reevaluate, and perhaps even update the widely-recognized transformational influence of Postmodern philosophy on dance, visual and performing arts of the era. In this instance, for example, my immediate interest is in an implicit exploration of discursive language and its elision into an instance of performative action. It’s as much an interrogation of the art form as it is an inhabitation of its precepts and investigation of its techniques as seen through a reframing of them in new and perhaps reassuring, if alarmingly different, contexts.

So, in a sense, I think it’s crucially important to use the term “choreography,” since it appeals to my interest in the socio-cultural appropriation that my work is at times particularly about. My ideal outcome, of course, is an expansion of the form and vocabulary of both dance and performance art, as I see what I’m doing as operating at an intersection between them both, rather than allowing myself to readily get packed into one or the other box. Similarly, that’s how I feel about jumping into any such designated category under the heading of “graphic novelist” or “dance/art critic,” though I’ve made work that appeals to each of these designations, as readily as they do “poet,” “visual artist,” “reporter,” “producer/director,” “semiotician,” “colorist” or whatever other terms I could come up with that suit the range of available modes or media. Each, taken alone, seem an unsophisticated, reductive framing mechanism despite the artistic project that backgrounds all of these different categories, which at a baseline is, for me, philosophically multidisciplinary in its approach, and not afforded sufficient descriptive power by any single one of these terms.

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*The title, of course, is a wry play on the phrase “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance” that started popping up on T-shirts in the U.K. in the 1970’s, and has since gone through innumerable permutations, all essentially condemning the vacuousness of the interchangeability of these terms whenever generally applied to limitation of human, emotional or artistic work for the purposes of utilitarianism.

COMMENTARY// On the Hazards of Reductive Insularity, Or: Fuck Dancing, Let’s Make Art* was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Michael Workman

As a victim of physical and emotional violence, which I’ve written about extensively both for Chicago alt-biweekly Newcity and in discussing the motivations for the birth of his Sophie Allen system of dance notation and choreography, the story behind Chicago-based dancer Samantha Virgilio’s “Trapping Butterflies” is profoundly resonant. Her performance makes its Chicago premier Valentine’s Day at Links Hall.

For those readers who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about Ashley Hall — who she was and the story you’re trying to tell about her through this performance?
Ashley Hall was my older cousin. She was an intelligent, giving, strong, beautiful human being and devoted mother. Ashley was killed in 2013 by her husband, after years of domestic violence and a recent separation, leaving behind two young daughters. Her body was found in her estranged husband’s apartment, so battered we had to have a closed casket service. Nobody deserves to die like that, especially someone so beautiful. Ashley and I always shared this bond through dance and performance. Every child in the Virgilio family has a discipline growing up, anything from sports like soccer, cheerleading, music or the performing arts. We were the two dancers in the family.

When she had her daughters, she made it her mission as their mother to instill in them a deep love for the arts. Performance and dance was a huge part of who Ashley was. That’s why I wanted to create this piece in the first place; Ashley always believed in the power of art to make a difference. It’s only right that her legacy continues onstage, where she lived so much of her life. This piece is Ashley’s legacy onstage, but it’s not just Ashley’s story. Trapping Butterflies is a vehicle, an outlet for other victims, grieving loved ones, and allies to share their experiences alongside Ashley’s. Ashley never had the chance to share her story with the world. Even after her death, many news outlets just wouldn’t cover the story because, unfortunately, it’s just so common. I think she would’ve liked for others to have the opportunity that she never got. Trapping Butterflies is an artistic outlet that gives a voice to a group that has been forced to sit politely, cry alone, and die in silence for too long.

It’s a powerful, and heart-wrenching story. How did the idea for Trapping Butterflies start and how has it evolved into the performance you’re presenting now at Links Hall?
It’s a rather long and odd story. Ashley died on Black Friday 2013. We were so close to Christmas and, as a family, we were as just completely destroyed. We held the annual family gathering, and we all tried to put on a smile for her daughters, who were still very young. I remember I got them both ballet shoes, and they were so happy, but the youngest’s pair was too small. She forced her feet into the shoes and walked around in them with tears, refusing to take them off. She was only two at the time, but I could tell why she didn’t want to take them off: they reminded her of her mom. And it just hit me, Ashley needed one final dance to place that important missing punctuation mark on her life’s journey, and the girls needed something, years from now, that they could turn to and say that their mom really does live on through her art, that her life sparked something great. It took almost a full year for me to be ready to tackle Ashley’s life and death in such an exposed and vulnerable way, and the process never gets easier, but it’s brought me so much closer to Ashley’s memory. I really hope that the Trapping Butterflies movement really does become the ever-spreading wildfire that Ashley sparked in everyone who had the privilege of knowing and sharing in her inspiration.

You originally staged this performance in Tampa Bay. Can you tell us a little about the story behind how and why you brought it from there to perform at Links Hall?
That’s right. Yes, Trapping Butterflies originally premiered in Tallahassee, Florida at the FSU School of Theatre, with a cast of roughly 15 students. We rehearsed late at night and between classes, and performed in one of the FSU rehearsal studios. If you watch any of the videos or photos online, you can see blue mats stacked up against the wall and a kitchen in the background. We played the sound through a tiny old guitar amp, there was no stage lighting, our audience sat on the floor, and the dressing room was constructed out of some of the blue mats, stood upright. Still, it had this impact that I really wasn’t expecting. People filled the space, we raised a good amount of money from broke college students for the Ashley Hall Fund and the Spring of Tampa Bay domestic violence shelter. In the talkback, people were engaging and coming to realizations about dangerous situations they didn’t know how to handle and we were able to talk through that.

I wanted to bring Trapping Butterflies to Chicago, because there was still so much explore in this dance now as its own artistic organism. I owe so much to the staff at Links Hall. This is my first full work since moving to Chicago, and they have been has been incredibly supportive of this piece, and the movement it has generated, from the first moment I asked how to make this thing happen in the city. When I originally made Trapping Butterflies, it wasn’t really my plan to continue past its premiere, but now its become this living thing with its own momentum. It’s become this movement for artists to speak out against domestic violence and a way for victims to break their silence about their experiences through art. Now I don’t intend to stop working on it for the forseeable future. And wherever I go, Ashley goes with me. I want this movement to really make a difference, to become a resource for artists and the community. I don’t know what the next step is for this movement and this piece, but the journey definitely isn’t over.

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Samantha Virgillio, in collaboration with Claudia Moreno, Brittany Burns, Law Chan, Sarah Schiff-Berger, Trapping Butterflies at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60618. (773)281–0824. Sun., Feb. 14, 7pm. Purchase tickets online, and learn more about the performance on the artist’s website.

BRIEFS// A History of Violence: Samantha Virgilio’s “Trapping Butterflies” was originally published in Occasional Inquiries on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.