2015 ART +
IDEAS +
FITNESS
A series of free workout seminars 1
Heavy Breathing is a summer series of free critical theory seminars in the form of artist-led fitness classes.
Featuring: Larry Arrington, Chani Bockwinkel and Caroline Alexander, Bonanza (with Laura Boles Faw and DJ 8ulentina), Zen Cohen, Xandra Ibarra, Jeepneys (with Brian Tester), Julz Hale Mary, Christina Linden and Claude Linden Smith, Olivia Mole, Christian Nagler (with DJ Kit Clayton), Raphael Noz, Brontez Purnell, Kate Rhoades and Eli Thorne, and Stairwell’s (Sarah Hotchkiss and Carey Lin). Heavy Breathing classes are FREE and open to the public. Support for Heavy Breathing is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program. For more information, including the Heavy Breathing 2016 line-up please visit: www.heavyheavybreathing.com Organized by Sophia Wang and Lisa Rybovich Crallé 3
Heavy Breathing 2015
Heavy Breathing is a series of experimental movement seminars designed by artists and scholars who combine physical activities with group discussion on ideas related to their creative practice. Critical thinking often feels heady, abstract, and divorced from the body. How do conversations change when we are moving our bodies and out of breath? What new modes of thinking become possible?
Olive Mckeon, March 2016
Supple Bodies, Supple Minds
Supple Bodies, Supple Minds: on Moving and Thinking with Heavy Breathing The project of Lisa Rybovich Crallé and Sophia Wang’s Heavy Breathing series — to overlay somatic practices and critical theory classes — is one that I feel a deep affinity with. Crallé and Wang bridge what is a deep chasm between pedagogical contexts for the body (dance class, sports practice, experiential somatic exercise) and those for the mind (reading groups, lectures, discussions). Heavy Breathing combines intellectual and corporeal engagement in a manner that disrupts the codes and conventions of pedagogical spaces, layering the social norms of the studio class onto that of the seminar room. The series straddles the cultural gulf (or even temporal schizophrenia) between a morning spent cranking out analyses on contemporary forms of primitive accumulation and an evening spent doing high knee lifts to bubble gum pop at the Y. Heavy Breathing asks us to rethink who we are in our minds and bodies, how our body practices might intersect, inform, or refigure our intellectual lives, and vice versa. In a silly, colorful, non-precious mode, they re-purpose the fitness class and the theoretical discussion as hybrid aesthetico-pedagogical experiences. By injecting a deliberate dose of criticality, Heavy Breathing addresses some of the shortfalls and limitations of body-based 4
The series also queries what might be left out of reading groups and seminars where bodies sit, uncomfortable and inert, so that minds can work through their Frankfurt School text of choice. By inserting a deliberate attention to corporeality, the series refuses to separate intellectual activity from body practices. Movement is its own kind of thinking, its own way of making arguments and theorizing about the world. The body is not something to merely be dealt with, taken begrudgingly for walks as one does with a dog, so that the mind can work. Honoring the body as capable of thought and 5
Heavy Breathing 2015
classes. Sports contexts can be overwhelmingly bro-y. Gym culture can perpetuate a patriarchal, fat phobic, anti-joy masochism that reduces sensuous embodiment to a set of timed and measured Taylorist exercises. Yoga classes can be hopelessly appropriative, as a tidal wave of western yoga teachers vie to sell their codified and commodified version of South Asian physical culture. Offering an allegedly groovier, gentler option, one can study a slew of somatic practices, including Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Body Mind Centering, Skinner Releasing, Gyrokinesis, Axis Syllabus, and so forth. Somatic practices, both past and present, often posit a ‘natural’ body that one can arrive at by stripping away inefficient movement and getting to the essential structures of the body, engendering a bodybased new agey universalism. While many of these somatic practices possess a wealth of knowledge about embodiment, they can be accompanied by a cultural logic that leaves much to be desired, intellectually and politically. As an antidote to these shortcomings, Heavy Breathing incorporates a type of political engagement that can be absent from sporty and somatic contexts.
Supple Bodies, Supple Minds
articulation involves a feminist rethinking of the spaces of pedagogy and learning. Heavy Breathing is one experiment that challenges the separation of intellectual and corporeal spheres. It reminds even the heaviest of thinkers that they have arms and legs, and that it feels incredible to stretch them. There are moments when the registers of intellectual engagement and embodied practice call for each other: when one hits a wall with talking, thinking, and discussing, and one actually needs to do something with the body. Simultaneously, one can feel stuck with physical practices and in need of some new concepts, categories, or tools for thinking about them. The goals and stakes of movement improvisations, Capital reading groups, and therapy sessions may overlap and inform each other in unexpected ways. Heavy Breathing’s layering of physical classes with intellectual subject matter is a tall order in that there are so few contexts that are equally committed to theoretical discussion as they are to embodied practices. It is likely that the rigor of one will be short changed for the rigor of the other. It could be a tendency for one dimension to be ironized or for different practices to be layered as non sequiturs, rather than thinking through concretely how movement and theory contribute to each other. The genre of the fitness class comes with a getting through this mode of physicality, where bodies are meant to endure or distract themselves from an experience with loud music or other stimuli. A logic of supplementation may actually detract from being alive to the physical practices themselves, as the body is working many things out on its own. In her ethnographic book about samba, dance scholar Barbara Browning describes a temporal disconnection between movement and writing: 6
“There are things I learned in Brazil with my body, and some of these things it has taken me years to learn to articulate in writing. But that is not to say that they were without meaning when I could only speak them through dance” (Browning, xi). What Browning’s observation illuminates is a mode of learning that happens through the body, which actually does not need to be supplemented with language. However silly or serious, the present and future artists involved in the Heavy Breathing series will find their own ways of navigating the tension between the lessons that are learned through one’s body and those that emerge from texts and discussion.
Works Cited: Browning, Barbara. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Indiana University Press, 1995.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
As someone who likes to be out at the demo or the party and also someone that likes to recline and read things, I am partial to Heavy Breathing’s premise as well as the space for play that it sets in motion. It creates a context for being together that encourages a similar rigor in discussion as on the dance floor. Critical theory, as a mode of intellectual inquiry dedicated to radical social transformation, ultimately needs to be consummated by bodies. A revolutionary rupture means nothing if it is not enacted on a corporeal level. Thought must be consummated. Blood must flow into the veins of any utopia that is to come. How this transformation will happen is up to us and our particular flair. In the meantime, we can breathe, think, and dance together, letting our bodies and minds become supple and poised.
Supple Bodies, Supple Minds
Heavy Breathing 2015
Aaron Harbour, Curiously Direct, September 2015
Interview with Sophia Wang and Lisa R. Crallé
Interview with Sophia Wang and Lisa Rybovich Crallé Please give a brief run down of the project and a list of the collaborators and involved spaces. SOPHIA Heavy Breathing is an environment for artists and researchers working at the intersection of somatic, conceptual, visual, and pedagogical practices. The motivating concept was to challenge participating artists to design one hour critical discussion “seminars” that engage participants in physical activity as a way of exploring theories or ideas from the artists’ practice or research. We used the concept of the “fitness class” as shorthand for what a physical group experience would look like, but we were very open to broad interpretations of this challenge. The range of experiences the artists designed was really inspiring; we had classes that offered aerobics, resistance training, running, and Reichian somatics, exploring topics including Sapphic poetry, 19th century British gender and class dynamics seen through the lens of dominance/submission play, and the ubiquitous experience of anxiety as a symptom of global risk management practices. I think it was an outstanding experiment. LISA The series brought together over 25 artists to lead 12 conceptual fitness sessions over the course of 12 weeks. Thanks to the support of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant, each session was free and open to the public. Sophia and I organized Heavy Breathing in response to our impression that critical thinking often feels divorced from the body. We wondered how “heady” conversations might change if the participants were out of breath, engaging their bodies as well as their minds. Each participating artist interpreted this prompt in their own unique way, drawing 10
from themes and concepts central to their own practices, which led to a really diverse and invigorating program. The sessions met in a variety of venues including established art spaces (The Lab, YBCA), experimental spaces (Real Time and Space, The Omni Oakland Commons), and public areas like Lake Merritt, Golden Gate Park, and the Chinatown YMCA swimming pool. It was a bit of a whirlwind getting all the pieces in place, but I am energized by the conversations it has generated, and we are hoping to continue the project in new ways in the future.
This was an incredibly ambitious program to try to pull off - I can’t imagine the amount of email involved - to what extent did the eventual sequence of events match what you initially expected to accomplish? SOPHIA I am delighted with the outcome of the series and amazed that we actually accomplished what we set out to do: 12 different sessions featuring nearly twice as many artists, concepts, locations, and experiences. We surpassed our expectations when we realized how many people are interested in the junctures we’re exploring: so many more artists, researchers, and curators than we were able to schedule in, and so many people from our communities with diverse relationships to fitness practices and discussion-based pedagogy. So, I’m certain that Heavy Breathing will live on in many forms, beyond this first series. We have ambitions to produce a catalog of the project this fall.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
Participating artists include: Larry Arrington, Chani Bockwinkel and Caroline Alexander, Bonanza (with Laura Boles Faw and DJ 8ulentina), Zen Cohen, Xandra Ibarra, Jeepneys, Julz Hale Mary, Christina Linden, Olivia Mole, Christian Nagler (with DJ Kit Clayton), Raphael Noz, Brontez Purnell, Kate Rhoades and Eli Thorne, and Stairwell’s (Sarah Hotchkiss and Carey Lin). Special contributions by Alexiteric Tea Clinic, Jessalyn Aaland, Sam Hertz, Stephanie Rolfs, Savannah Rusher, Brian Tester, and Tessa Watson.
Interview with Sophia Wang and Lisa R. Crallé
LISA This notion of disembodied life seems relevant and disquieting to many people when we stop and realize how much time we are spending glued to screens. (And the irony of how much sedentary email-time the project required was not lost on us!) I am astonished by the level of interest, engagement, and response Heavy Breathing has generated. We really had no idea what we were getting into when we started the project and it has been a great surprise to see how quickly and courageously people said “yes” to this relatively absurd idea. Sophia and I spent the good part of a year planning, organizing, and negotiating details for Heavy Breathing. In that span of time the project inevitably evolved and expanded but it never strayed far from our initial impulse.
Along those lines of before-and-after, with so many collaborators at so many venues, there must have been surprises along the way. Can you relate an anecdote or two in re: unexpected encounters and moments? SOPHIA My first great surprise was at our opening party at YBCA ConVerge: how willing everyone was to dive into making comical sounds and gestures and laughing out loud, together. It was late afternoon in the grand lobby of YBCA, broad daylight, everyone was sober, and we enjoyed this invigorating, awkward, joyful experience together. It was a remarkable confirmation of Raphael Noz’s observation, from the description for his Laughter Yoga session, that art exhibition spaces are not sacrosanct and we too rarely act on that knowledge. I was amazed at how effective Olivia Mole’s session was at delivering a corporeal experience that was so responsive to and explicitly in dialogue with her discussion topic. Freely swimming around, listening to her voice emanating from the underwater speaker, was a highly effective way to think about the phlegm-goo that sustains the boundaries of our bodies and identities. I decided after this experience that all speculative theory lectures should be delivered underwater.
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Another amazing moment was during Christian Nagler’s Cosmoconvulsive Anxiothenics session, in which he led participants through a series of somatic exercises drawn from Wilheim Reich’s research, while discussing global risk management practices and the calculation and experience of vulnerability. He had cast such a spell over the room that when it was time to sustain a moment of silence, the room went absolutely still: over 100 people on the floor of the Lab laying on gym mats and moving blankets, not making a sound. It was a powerful experience.
Why only 12 and not 100 events? SOPHIA We planned on 12 sessions to offer events every weekend for three months. It was a tremendous amount of work to sustain the logistics and public presence of the project, while also generating and archiving documentation for the full series. I’ll gladly do 100 when we can figure out a good pace and sustainable model for that scale of organizing. LISA From the get-go we conceptualized Heavy Breathing as a summer series. Twelve sessions had a nice ring to it, and it seemed like something we could handle. Through the process of organizing this series we have been introduced to a number of incredible artists and thinkers and writers and researchers who have expressed an interest in leading a Heavy Breathing session someday, and we have also received a ton of positive feedback from people asking when Heavy 13
Heavy Breathing 2015
LISA The level of audience participation has been pretty astounding. As someone who often shies away from participatory art events myself, I’ve been extremely impressed by peoples’ eagerness to engage in vulnerable physical and intellectual exercises with a group of strangers. In retrospect, another surprise is how smoothly the whole series went. We didn’t get rained out of any venues (thank you, drought!), nobody called in sick, each event was well attended (a couple of them had over 100 attendees!) and then of course getting written up in The New Yorker; that was a huge surprise too.
Interview with Sophia Wang and Lisa R. Crallé
Breathing will happen again. Organizing this series has been an immense amount of work, but Sophia and I are hoping to extend the project somehow. We just need to win the lotto or find some interns or figure out another way to make the process more sustainable. We do have plans for ONE MORE top-secret Heavy Breathing session that will take place at The Lab next month in conjunction with their 24-hour Telethon fundraiser. We are still working out the details, but we are really excited about the artists we have lined up. We also have a couple invitations to take Heavy Breathing on the road and overseas… so we’ll see where things lead!
How has the experience informed future projects for the two of you as collaborators and as individual practitioners? SOPHIA One thing I realized early on is that the project’s implicit division between activities of the mind and activities of the body (implied in the way we framed the challenge) was a false division that many of the artists we worked with had already and explicitly left behind. So the project became an opportunity for people already working somatically and conceptually to push on that relationship in their work, through experimental group encounters. It reinforced my interest in the speculative lecture form as the most interesting container for the kind of research-informed movement works I want to make. I’m a rogue academic, but my training is hard to shake, and I’d still like to find a satisfying way to work with lecture and essay forms. Co-organizing Heavy Breathing with Lisa has been a great complement to our collaborative project, Manners, which engages our individual practices towards creating site-specific movement and sculptural installations. At a fundamental level, we’ve developed a really effective and trusting creative partnership through the process of talking through curatorial decisions and then co-producing weekly events all summer. The conversations we’ve had with Heavy 14
Breathing artists about how to think of movement within a visual system or how to engage witnesses as participants have certainly fed our experiments as Manners, which work in a similar space. This fall Lisa and I will be working on an outdoor movement and installation work on the campus of Sierra Nevada College, with the opportunity to lead a workshop for undergraduates in the art department. I’m approaching the workshop as an opportunity to craft a Heavy Breathing session of our own.
In the meantime, this seems like a good opportunity to plug a Manners piece we are doing at di Rosa on Sept 26. Sophia is arranging a performance with Crystal Sepúlveda and Oscar Tidd that will take place within the sculptural installation I built on site last month for the Body Talk exhibition curated by Amy Owen. This will be the second and final performance in the installation and it is definitely not to be missed. It will last from 2:00-3:00pm, after a performative and somatic walk on di Rosa’s grounds led by Renée Rhodes. We are also contributing to an 8-week visual arts/ movement series at Interface Gallery in January.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
LISA Organizing this series with Sophia has been an incredible adventure and learning experience. Heavy Breathing is one cousin in an extended family of projects we are working on, both together and independently. The more desk-bound and disembodied life feels, the more I find myself wanting to return to my senses – touching, hearing, and seeing the world around me. The projects Sophia and I are engaged in are attempts to get physical, or at least to ask questions about what it means to be physical in this complex and shifting existential space we share. Heavy Breathing has been an inspiring (and perspiring) opportunity to think through some of these questions. We are currently in the process of distilling the project into a Heavy Breathing catalog, which will incorporate text, photos, video, audio, and ephemera from each of the sessions. If all goes according to plan the catalog will be released this fall.
Interview with Sophia Wang and Lisa R. Crallé
Was it fun? SOPHIA YES. It was really rewarding to support so many great artists in experimenting outside of their dominant idioms. I am so proud to have had a hand in materializing these amazingly open and experimental group experiences all summer. Most of all, the range of people who participated in Heavy Breathing sessions — many often attending multiple sessions - was the greatest encouragement of all. In addition to the enthusiastic presence of our community of fellow artists and friends, we met so many people who had come because of press or word of mouth. We wanted these classes to be appealing and accessible to the general public, or at least the segment that’s into fitness but interested in alternatives to the norm. Knowing that we had succeeded was very gratifying. LISA It has been an incredibly fun and sweaty summer. I’ve really enjoyed the range and depth of conversation that has transpired over the last few months and I’ll miss the weekly discussion/movement ritual. It is a little disconcerting to suddenly have free weekend-time after 12 consecutive weeks of Heavy Breathing, but I’m looking forward to enjoying some summer bbqs before the fall is officially upon us. We are currently working on the Heavy Breathing catalog and getting ready for next month’s Heavy Breathing session at The Lab. We will be posting info about that session, as well as the forthcoming catalog on our facebook page: www.facebook.com/ heavyheavybreathing. We’d love to hear from Curiously Direct readers if they have any questions or thoughts about the project. We can be reached at heavyheavybreathing@gmail.com. Thanks for the interview and we hope to see you on Sept 26 at di Rosa!
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Heavy Breathing Begins!
June 18th at YBCA, San Francisco
JAO
Session One
Special contributions by Alexiteric Tea Clinic, Jessalyn Aaland, Stephanie Rolfs, Savannah Rusher, and Tessa Watson. HEALING SOUND AND MOVEMENT with Jeepneys. Live music by Brian Tester. Jeepneys leads a group performance of a Pauline Oliveros Sonic Meditation score and a discussion of Deep Listening in relation to perception, empathy, and the body. Wear comfortable layers and socks, and bring something to lie on. Herbal eye pillows and handpainted Jeepneys space-bodysuits in limited sizes will be available. Click here to listen. PUMPED UP FOR NOTHING with Julz Hale Mary A rebellious exercise class where you’ll get pumped up to do nothing, while looking luxurious! The harder you try not to try, the more you’ll succeed in this campy, motivational, NOPEposi workout. Dress lazy, fun, or “glamorously frumpy”: anything loose, silky, bright, sloppy, or wildly patterned. Bring props for activities typically devalued as “doing nothing,” and come ready for NOPE!
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Heavy Breathing 2015
LAUGHTER YOGA with Raphael Noz Laughter yoga brings the lightning energy of laughter into spaces that need to be broken open. The hallowed temples of museum spaces can hush voices and inhibit ideas, impacting the health of our communities and our cultures. Come ready to laugh out loud. Click here to listen.
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Session One
Heavy Breathing 2015
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Session One
Heavy Breathing 2015
Sweating to Sappho
BS& Session Two
June 27th at the Lake Merritt Bandstand Imagine somatics + Kate Bush + Ciara: we’ll get sweaty and circular, moving our A$$ muscles and feeling our insides together. Read at least one passage of Sappho (your choice; see resources below), and come ready to project yourself into history while invoking ancient greek women and contemporary goddesses. Wear gym shoes and an outfit that brings out your deep femme/tough exercise queen. RESOURCES: If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson Sappho | Poetry Foundation
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The Pleasure Principle
July 11th at Real Time and Space, Oakland “I am looking for the body, my body, which exists outside its patriarchal definitions. Of course that is not possible. But who is any longer interested in the possible?” Kathy Acker
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Session Three
RESOURCES: “Ecstatic Resistance” by Emily Roysdon
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How is the imaginary possible? Compound movements, balancing between the push and the pull, thinking through it. Participants will discuss Emily Roysdon’s essay “Ecstatic Resistance” while doing a series of resistant training exercises. Bring a yoga mat and workout gear.
Script for The Pleasure Principle by Laura Boles Faw (excerpt): “...While you continue to stretch, I want to quote dancer, choreographer, teacher and founder of the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, Anna Halprin. Halprin’s groundbreaking work and postmodernist sensibilities led her to create an “expressive arts healing movement.” As a side note, she was also a teacher of the dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer who later would be a teacher of Emily Roysdon.
Session Three
the body. Essentially, two ways: one is the mind informs the
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According to Halprin “There are two ways of working with
that point of view to have experiences that go beyond words,
body and the mind is telling you what to do. That is one way of working. The other is when the body itself informs the mind. Your body impulses guide you. And then you do these movements, and suddenly they become your movements. They are a part of your creative process. And you are able from that go beyond your conscious thinking, but are a part of you. That is the thrill of working with movement. So open up that possibility.” Keep stretching and breathing into and out of your body.... Halprin also speaks about movement as “the process of finding your place in space.” So, find your place within space and we will continue this training through a series of one-minute instructions. I will give you one instruction
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per minute and respond to these instructions in any way you choose. Bonanza will circulate the room and help you make adjustments. Laura gives instructions (1 per minute): Each minute: 1. begin face down, on the belly 2. reach back for the tops of the feet, relax the chin to the
4. as you inhale, lift up, rise 5. inhale and exhale 6. kick into the feet and lift your gaze 7. inhale, exhale 8. soften the jaw, soften the gaze 9. point the toes directly to the sky, arch back 10. release, bend the knees 11. bring the chin back down to the floor 12. swim the hands forward, rest the forehead down 13. ‘windshield wipe’ the legs from side to side 14. release them down, heals splayed open 15. hands to the side, ear to the floor, rest For the full text, click here.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
floor 3. relax the glutes, don’t grip, open hips are key
Getting Dirty with Cullwick and Munby
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Session Four
July 19th at Real Time and Space, Oakland Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby had a wacky 19th century S&M affair. Get a little taste of their fascinating, though sometimes problematic relationship through S&M-inspired exercises and a lively discussion. Bring a partner you trust and wear clothes and shoes (preferably leather boots) that can get dirty. Queer and trans folks warmly welcomed. RESOURCES: Imperial Leather: Race, Cross-Dressing, and the Cult of Domesticity by Anne McClintock
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Innovating Ether July 26th at Omni Oakland Commons, Oakland
Session Five
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A note from Larry: I am choosing this astrological form of periodizing global history-future-time as a technology to bypass dualist thought in all its modalities. The organizational tool of astrological ages is space as time and time as space in which the body is absorbed and absorbent. While I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the structure of astrological ages, I hesitate to share any specific texts about the shifting of ages as I find the discussion of the aquarian ideal of “freedom� still tethered to the problems of verticality and power of the age of pisces (a historical freedom is not freedom). Our notions of freedom are on distant horizons. We do not know what we are gazing at. We cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce within this 2000 year cycle, but we can play at their prefigurative forms.
Pre-Party Dance Party August 8th at Omni Oakland Commons, Oakland
IS ยบ
Session Six
A workout disguised as a mixtape: or the other way around? Chance operations, non-sequiturs, and a lot of walking, looking, and running around. Come dressed for your Saturday night out. Live drums by Adan Ortega!
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Body Paradox August 15th at The Palace Theater, Oakland
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J 9B Session Seven
Participants are taken through a series of movement exercises and styles ranging from Butoh to Voguing while embodying wearable sculptures to create a total mise en scène inside The Palace Theater, the oldest theater in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. Discussions include excerpts from Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and its Double and a selection of texts that address bodies, non-bodies, fluidity, queerness, ritual, and transcendence.
Topos: That’s What She Said August 16th at the YMCA Chinatown Pool, San Francisco
V 4 O Session Eight
There can be no knowledge without a community of researchers, nor any inner experience without a community of those who live it‌ Collective swimming with immersive audio. Bring bathing suit or immersible outfit (no cotton please); goggles + nose clips if desired; water bottle recommended. Towels and flotation devices will be provided.
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TOPOS (excerpt): place: the lived sensible relation between two bodies that differ in being. You are where you are. you are in this place, which surrounds nothing more than you, which contains you. The first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds you. It’s the mainspring of Aristotle’s physics and it comes down to a gendered and hierarchical containment, so Luce Irigaray has it. Woman contains man. She’s his first place, the primordial topos is her proverbial and biological womb – man’s place, his first place, is woman.
quote: empire of language that so privileges the male sex as to confuse it with the human race end quote. The secret condition of philosophy, she goes, is a giant coverup, an obliteration of an inclusive relation between phallomorphism and the maternal feminine. Irigaray: quote: She does not set herself up as one, as a single female unit, she is not closed up or around one single truth or essence. The essence of a truth remains foreign to her. she neither has nor is a being. And she doesn’t oppose a feminine truth to the masculine truth. end quote. She rereads Aristotle to reject woman–place as an immobile limit surrounding the man–embryo, and re–presents place as an open envelope, a place in multiple senses – after all a woman’s place, in his model, is itself in place, and that place is in place, and that place in place, and so on in an endless enveloping. For the full text, click here.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
For Irigaray this imagining of woman as place, as container, as envelope to man’s solid ‘thing’, has stuck with western metaphysics since Aristotle, in a
Cosmoconvulsive Anxiothenics
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Session Nine
August 22nd at The Lab, San Francisco In this session we will delve deeply into some embodied non-solutions to the problem of global risk management. What are global risk management practices and how do they relate to our nervous systems? Engage in an athletic and de-armoring session of Reichian somatics, full-corpus spasms, and galactic tingles. Wear comfortable clothes. Come prepared to move, breathe intensely, yell, and freak out a little. **Bring a pillow please** Some issues we might hit on, either discursively or somatically: The fear of life and the network of political üü unrest insurance
üüThe miracle-terror of the vagus nerve üüThe level of co2 in the bloodstream The 18th century grain tradeforming an üü
internal intentional community of alkalinoids
Decalcinating and repotassiumizing the nervile üü chemoducts
üüBlue sky in mind üüLloyd’s of London üüWho am I and why am I so anxious üüThe circulation of financial derivatives Foucault’s critique of the repressive üü hypothesis
üüTremoring polar bears 34
Heavy Breathing 2015
RESOURCES: Ulrich Beck, Living in the World Risk Society, 2006 Michel Foucault, Security Territory, Population, Lectures at the College de France, 1979 (especially lecture #2) enjamin Lee and Edward Lipuma, Circulatory Risks B and the Speculative Habitus Dusan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971 laire Souch, Pushing the Boundaries of Catastrophe C Modeling, 2014 For the full Waiver of Liability, click here. To hear the full score, click here. 35
Monsters Herding Cats, and Ducks in a Row
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Session Ten
August 23rd at Starline Social Club, Oakland Stretching, rolling, crawling, and light contact improv for adults and baby or toddler friends. Readings of selected excerpts from children’s books and Moyra Davey’s Mother Reader. Bring blankets and comfortable clothes, and practice movements your child makes and/or prepare a movement for both of you to do together.
Settling In Babies In The Middle But when we consider ourselves more than one at a time And admit we glean movements through copy and mime We discover quite plainly that our actions alone Reveal through our bodies all the people we’ve known The patterns we’ve formed from symmetries deep inside us Gain much of their shape from the others who guide us (Anna Craycroft, Developing Patterns of Movement) BREATHING Jemima Puddle-duck was escorted home in tears on account of those eggs. She laid some more in June, and she was permitted to keep them herself: but only four of them hatched. Jemima Puddle-duck said that it was because of her nerves; but she had always been a bad sitter. (Beatrix Potter, “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck”) STRETCHING But who gives it? And to whom is it given? Certainly it doesn’t feel like giving, which implies a flow, a gentle handing over, no coercion. But there is scant gentleness here, it’s too strenuous, the belly like a knotted fist, squeezing, the heavy trudge of the heart, every muscle in the body tight
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and moving, as in a slow-motion shot of a high-jump, the faceless body sailing up, turning, hanging for a moment in the air, and then—back to real time again— then plunge, the rush down, the result. (Margaret Atwood, “Giving Birth”) LAYING, HAPPY BABY, AND ROLLING ]beautiful he ]stirs up still things ]exhaustion the mind ]settles down ]but come O beloveds ]for day is near (Sappho from Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter)
FLAILING AND LEARNING TO STAND his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything. (Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are) COPY EACH OTHER This act [of recognition] rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body and the persons or things around him. (Jacques Lacan from Écrits. A Selection) FOLLOW THE BABIES To suffer with and for and against a child—maternally, egotistically, neurologically, sometimes with a sense of helplessness, sometimes with the illusion of learning wisdom—but always, everywhere, in body and soul, with that child—because that child is a piece of oneself. To be caught up in waves of love and hate, jealousy even of the child’s childhood; hope and fear for its maturity; longing to be free of responsibility, tied by every fibre of one’s being. That curious primitive reaction of protectiveness, the beast defending her cub, when anyone attacks or criticizes him—And yet no one more hard on him than I! (Adrienne Rich, “Anger and Tenderness” from Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 1976)
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Heavy Breathing 2015
SITTING AND CRAWLING Care is therefore not just like any manifestation of one’s own power to do this or that, but is something that one is empowered to do by someone else to whose needs one responds. If the power to care is of a different kind, could it lead to an alternative concept of what it means to act, not based on the belief that actions result from our own capacities or talents, but built on the realisation that they can also be called forth by the need of the other? (Jan Verwoert from “Personal Support: How to Care?”)
Step by Step August 29th at Kezar Stadium, San Francisco
º U S Session Eleven
We will combine stair trivia and aerobics inspired by ‘80s and ‘90s dance routines to travel up and down the Kezar Stadium steps. Wear comfortable shoes and layered clothing suitable for stretching, light aerobics and stair climbing. Bring water, snacks, and sunscreen. RESOURCES: Watch the YouTube video for the New Kids on the Block song “Step by Step” for inspiration.
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Training For Exhaustion (For The Unintelligible) August 30th at Lake Merritt Amphitheater, Oakland
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UBS Session Twelve
The means for enduring the bombs of whiteness are not going to be exclusively cultural or political; you will have to train: run, invade, perform, smile, and reinvent yourself as a cockroach. Bring running shoes, headphones, mp3 player/phone, water, and weed (optional). Electric wheelchairs welcome! We will run Lake Merritt. Please don’t be discouraged if you don’t run often, we will stop frequently so our cucaracha crew can stay together. For GIFS and more images, click here.
Heavy Breathing Movement Panel Discussion:
JAO Panel Discussion
Oct 17th at The Lab, San Francisco The Heavy Breathing Movement Panel was designed as a component of The Lab’s 24 Hour Telethon event: an endurance exercise to fundraise for one of the longest running, truly innovative art and music spaces in the Bay Area. Expanding on the original Heavy Breathing model (where one artist or collaboration leads participants in discussion/movement exercises) the Heavy Breathing Movement Panel took the form of a group discussion combining conversation with movement and embodiment exercises. The conversation explored the topic of critical somatics: thinking with and as bodies. Participants engaged in various movement and embodiment exercises while discussing questions such as: How do our physical states and activities üü contribute to the way we think, observe, speak, and listen?
What kinds of physical movements are üü
intrinsic to your practice, even if they are not visible or foregrounded as the “object” of your work?
What might discussion seminars, art classes, üü poetry readings, lectures, reading groups, etc. look like if we prioritized the ways bodily states can produce and contribute to intellectual and creative work?
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Moderated by Sophia Wang and Lisa Rybovich CrallĂŠ.
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The conversation included: Olive Blackburn, Lydia Brawner, David Buuck, Zen CĹ?hen, CA Conrad, Ben Furstenburg, Shanti Ganesh, Christina Linden, Julz Hale Mary, Neve Mazique, Lucas Murgida, Christian Nagler, Oscar Tidd, and Dena Beard, as well as members of the Telethon audience.
CAROLINE ALEXANDER was born and raised in San Francisco and graduated with a degree in theater, dance, and performance studies from UC Berkeley.
L ARRY ARRINGTON is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher whose choreography has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Z Space, The Lab, CounterPULSE, ODC, The Garage, Cell Space, Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, Supperclub, backyards, living-rooms, and in New York at The American Realness Festival. She has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, CounterPULSE, Kunst-Stoff
Artists' Biographies
Arts, the Garage, and ODC’s Sandbox Series.
CHANI BOCKWINKEL is a dancer person who works in photography and video. Her work was most recently shown at AUNTS, NYC and the Collage Festival in Philladelphia.
BONANZA , the collective practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams, centers around ideas of abstraction and questions of authorship, while dismantling ideas of the heroic artist. They have exhibited at Tmoro Projects, Interface Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, and n/a in the Bay area.
8ULENTINA ’s name is inspired by Bulent Ersoy, a legendary transgender Turkish singer. For 8ulentina, DJing is about creating a personal archive that tells a story; it can take the form of a Turkish trance remix, an Egyptian Mahraganat track, or a sad R&B track.
JOSHUA KIT CLAYTON is a musician, artist, and deejay based in San Francisco. He has been releasing and deejaying music in the space that spans and surrounds techno, house, dub, and noise for over 15 years, with recordings on a variety of labels including Orthlorng Musork, Cytrax, ~Scape, DropBeat, Soul Jazz, Context, Parallel, Mille Plateaux, Vertical Form, Background, Nummer, Musique Risquée, and Car Park.
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ZEN COHEN received her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and her BFA in Media Arts from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her video, photo and performance projects have been presented in venues such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, deYoung Museum, Centro Atlántico Arte Moderno, ARTSpace New Haven, Vanity Projects, Center for New Music & Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley, Recombinant Media Lab, SOMArts, Krowswork, 21 Grand, Roxie Cinema and Artists Television Access (ATA).
L AURA BOLES FAW ’s work consists of investigations through sculptural objects, installations, curatorial projects, and collaborative ventures. She examines spatial and social constructions and looks to create new meanings and transformative fictions. She has exhibited at Scrawl Center for Drawing, Ever Gold Gallery, Alterspace, Meridian Gallery, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Vast Space
XANDRA IBARRA is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, Mexicanidad, and proper and improper ethnic, gender, and queer subjects. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within immigrant, anti-rape, and prison abolitionist movements.
JEEPNEYS is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. Named after the iconic converted WWII army jeeps of the Philippines, she is of mixed race Filipina and Slovak heritage and her work focuses on the complexities of identity, memory, and language through a decolonizing and critical lens.
CHRISTINA LINDEN began working as Associate Curator of Painting & Sculpture at the Oakland Museum of California in the winter of 2013. Prior to her tenure at OMCA, Linden worked as an independent curator and writer based in Oakland with projects at SFMOMA, Kadist Art Foundation, and Stanford. She teaches as visiting graduate faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, holds a Master of Arts in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from New York University. 43
Heavy Breathing 2015
Projects in Las Vegas.
JULZ HALE MARY is a multi-media performance artist who exposes the absurdity of polite society, with a particular focus on interrogating the white patriarchy by creating campy renderings of feminized pathologies. Their work has been featured at SOMArts, The Lab, Artists’ Television Access, Submission, The Stud, Seattle LGBT Film Festival, Boston LGBT Film Festival, and The Center for Sex and Culture.
OLIVIA MOLE was born in London, England in 1975. She attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, and received an MA in Production Design from the National Film and Television School in the UK. Her work has been shown guerrilla style in her own garage, at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Southern Exposure, the Wattis Institute, and Pro Arts Oakland.
Artists' Biographies
CHRISTIAN NAGLER is an artist and writer based in Oakland, California. He works at the intersection of bodily movement and geofinancial systems. Recent projects include Market Fitness and Yoga for Adjuncts, which pursues economic critique through kinesthetic, participatory performances. Currently, he is doing graduate research on issues of performance in economic discourse and completing his first novel, The Capitalist.
RAPHAEL NOZ is a San Francisco-based artist and educator whose performances have been shown at The San Diego Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as well as many galleries and venues in the Bay Area and beyond. He holds an MFA from CCA and an MS from Wheelock College in Education, and is currently a Root Division studio artist.
BRONTEZ PURNELL is author of the cult zine “Fag School,” frontman for his band “The Younger Lovers,” and founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He earned a B.F.A. in Theatre and Contemporary Dance at California State University, East Bay, just published his first novella,” Johnny Would You Love Me (if My Dick Were Bigger),” with Rudos and Rubes, and will publish a second novel, “Since I Laid My Burden Down…,” with the Sister Spit imprint of City Lights Books.
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KATE RHOADES is an Oakland-based multimedia artist. She received her BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design and her MFA from Mills College. Rhoades has been a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and has taught art students of all ages. Her work has been exhibited in art venues, alleys, and hotel rooms across the United States and Canada.
CLAUDE LINDEN SMITH was born in September 2014. Claude screams a lot and mostly in a happy way. While rolling used to be a favorite hobby, as of May 2015 there is a lot of crawling by sliding around on the belly like a lizard. Standing up with support is also a current interest, and a good guess is that there will be walking and running by August.
STAIRWELL’S is a hybrid project – part curatorial platform, part social engagement – run by artists Carey Lin and Sarah Hotchkiss. Founded facilitated explorations of the urban landscape. We aim to create new models for audiences to engage with art by shifting exhibitions out of traditional gallery settings and into transitional spaces like stairwells, garages, balconies and windows.
BRIAN TESTER has been involved in music and art-focused practices and collaborations since the late 1990s, bringing a focus on sonic detail, left field allusion, and an intuitive grasp of improvisation to each musical project he has been involved in. In addition to solo appearances, he currently performs in the minimal electronics duo Spaceburn, and in a constantly morphing variety of bands and projects, as performer and engineer.
ELI THORNE is a transgender Oakland based hybrid artist born in Harrogate, England, and raised in Santa Cruz, California. He received his BFA from UC Berkeley and his MFA from Mills College. His work has been shown in a variety of spaces in the Bay Area, the greater US, and Canada.
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Heavy Breathing 2015
in 2011, we organize site-specific exhibitions, interactive events and
LISA RYBOVICH CRALLÉ is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area. Her installations and collaborative performance projects incorporate elements of drawing, painting, and sculpture to address the possibilities of spectatorship and embodiment. Lisa received an MFA from UC Davis in 2011. In addition to her studio practice, Lisa currently teaches sculpture at California College of the Arts.
SOPHIA WANG creates and performs movement-based works in collaboration with performance artists, writers, and visual and sound artists. She earned a PhD in English from U.C. Berkeley, and integrates
Organizers | Special Thanks
her research and performance practices through writing and curatorial projects focused on critical somatics: thinking with and as bodies.
To the community of artists, curators, writers, and friends who offered their time, ideas, and encouragement in support of this project: Jessalyn Aaland, Luca Antonucci, Dena Beard, Olive Blackburn, Lydia Brawner, Sarah Burke, Joshua Kit Clayton, CA Conrad, Keith Denatale, Braden Weeks Earp / The Workshop Residence, Courtney Fink, Shanti Ganesh, Aaron Harbour, Leif Hedendal, Jennifer Hennesy, Keith Hennessy, Sam Hertz, JM Hoff, Sarah Hotchkiss, Rachel Howard, Bessie Kunath, Christina Linden, Katya Min, Tom Morrison, Amy Owen, Savannah Rusher, Pat Rybovich, Clarke Selman, Shimeko, Emma Spertus, Oscar Tidd, Tessa Watson, Kim West, and David Wilson. We would be nowhere without: The SF Chinatown YMCA Pool, Edoff Memorial Bandstand, Kezar Stadium, The Lab, Lake Merritt Amphitheater, Oakland Omni Commons, The Palace Theater, Real Time & Space, Southern Exposure, Starline Social Club, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Catalog Design: ALTR Risograph Printing & Binding: Colpa 46
For more information please visit www.heavyheavybreathing.com.
Heavy Breathing 2015