Desires and gifts

In the closing session today I asked everyone to identify one thing that they desired, either for someone in the group or from the group, the project or the process more generally, and one thing they thought they could give.  Right now they are all sitting around me typing up their responses.

Giving and receiving are the basis of learning and of collaborating.  The skills of asking for what we need or want and offering to give something that others may need or want are the necessary corollaries of giving and receiving.  But often people find these things difficult to do.  In this group I think we’ve already established enough trust and common ground that we can begin to ask and to offer.

Her are the two things I desired and wanted to give:

I desired what I described as a “movement critique”.  I want Catherine, Maggie and Lian to bring their amazing embodied understanding of movement and physicality to the analysis of me, and others, experiencing artworks.  I want to listen to them describe and interrogate the way people move in galleries and around artworks.  I want to hear their expertise vocalised whilst I look at moving bodies.

I offered to  try to combine my techniques of video-cued recall with a performative/participatory version of a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement session using some kind of wearable object made by Catherine.  I imagined we could create an artwork/research process – in a kind of Lygia Clark model – where people would perform a series of movements un-encumbered, and then perform a series of movements wearing some kind of prosthesis or object, and, using my methods, describe their experiences and compare them.

I’ve asked everyone to be responsible for pursuing their own desires and gifts over the next hours/days/weeks, either with the whole group, or bilaterally with other individual participants.  Looking forward to see what happens….