Unruly Bodies Workshop at Yorkshire Dance

Part of Encounters - Celebrating Women in Dance festival.

with Jamila Johnson-Small and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome.

For people, practitioners and professional dance artists

UNRULY BODIES FOR UNRULY TIMES, organisms probing emergent space/s inside and outside skin-language that communicates new feeling not historical meaning…we mobilise our intelligent nosey body-minds to create space and rupture flow in the every day. We access unruliness in our thinking bodies of water to make choice -sensation and pleasure, political gesture – within the bodies we want to be breathing in. What if our bodies spoke without censoring information? I am so tired but I am alive and only a bit sick so…What if on a cellular level we are able to make patriarchy die a miserable death through investing imagination in the unruly beautiful mess of our bodies? Priming, disturbing (perceived) boundaries between choreographic, social, verbal and intimate space. What if our speaking/mumbling/voicing bodies found power inside mess and the unformed/non-namable? I think about it like the time when someone said in a performance rehearsal “THIS IS NOT A DANCE, IT’S A THREAT” – yes! How and where do our bodies find and create intimacy, what are the conditions, what and how do we classify friendships? What is here already and how do we greet/meet that speaking, mobilising simultaneous agency, oiling the cogs of this girl-machine/body-machine/earth-machine through these fragile oracle practices of divination…let’s listen, widening and wet. Moving in the dark to feel what can be accessed and harnessed by a performing body leaky…leaking into choices about moving and seeing in general. What creates liveness, and what sense of liveness are we interested in living/exploring?