Are we dancing yet: Choreocartographic wayfinding.

( are we dancing yet)

Collaborative and unbuilt studies towards unknown utopian geographies of Milton Keynes.

A Choreo-­‐cartographic workshop by Beatrice Jarvis 17th August 2016.

Milton Keynes.

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For this workshop; I would like to explore how far site-­‐specific practice in the urban landscape can form a mechanism for exploring social and cultural issues surrounding the position of the body with society. Using the body as vehicle; this workshop shall explore the following issues

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How far can creative practices serve as a method of socio-­‐political communication?

Can teaching and various processes of knowledge transfer develop tangible works of art in themselves?

How far can socially engaged practices allow subsequent audiences to develop modes of cultural understanding?

How can multidisciplinary arts practices and site projects formulate a sociological knowledge base, which can be used as source material for subsequent application beyond the boundaries of arts practices?

How can social and ecological engagement within creative practices stabilize the position of the arts as tool for cultural understanding, which also function in an economically viable fashion?

With the notion Sacks suggests; ‘practice-­‐based strategies for coming closer to our own lives and the world around us: listening and hearing strategies; strategies for uncovering agendas, for shifting attention; strategies for encountering our values, our attitudes and our presuppositions; strategies for entering what is difficult and for discovering what each person feels needs addressing’ what are the potential practice based research methodologies the socially engaged practioner should explore?

How can the socially engaged schema of intentionality by which an artist has created their objet (material/embodied/ephemeral) be fully determined by the receiver? How do concepts of social sculpture become fully embodied with both ideology and practice? What are the potential ‘gaps’ which may appear in this dialog between process and product?

Can creative action stimulate social reconciliation?

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8 days of fictional performance making.

An exercise in choreo=spatial imagination.

Day one:

• The Nando chicken walk dressed as a chicken, linking the 5 nandos in the city center.

• The live art square: a small square in CBD labeled LIVE ART in which passers by are invited to display / discuss what live art is / means to them • A circle-­‐walking candle lit vigil around the dead tree in MK. • Circle of memory in MK shopping center all telling memories of MK in chorus.

• Marching band to create walking tour of MK • Car Sellers of MK gestural portrait series

Day Two

• Milton Keynes the Musical: each song represents a sector of the community ( fortnightly rehearsals, 8 weeks, show in arts center, elders, teens and children, songs about daily life in MK) • Field freedom: series of movement works in the vast open spaces of MK that represent individual’s notions of freedom • Lawn mower symphony: city council lawn mower drivers to make a dance piece about the actions they make whilst mowing lawns

Day Three

• Elderly tai chi classes • Collecting ruins. Making a city archive • The may pole every day life dance

Day Four

• Today I have felt a deep sense of static. Close observation of habitual gestural leads sometimes to a sense of weight, how to stay light and buoyant in such a slow place? Reading the weight of Sunday in MK, silence and heart monitors • Typewriters for automatic writing (city center and forest) to generate a series of texts of actions observed for performance scores.

Day Five: • A car based dance improvisation • A nervous collapse in a shopping center • Filling a shopping mall with typewriters for people to interact with (live broadcast of text on line stream) • Public readings of personal diaries in the shopping center back allies

Day Six:

• The local Morris Men Dance • Writing the City in Light, Ritual Procession in the back alleys • Notating performance of daily walk to work

Day Seven: • Sound Booth of MK archive • Developing performances in shops • Home improvement performances • The Bell ringers dance in The Range • Writing in the Range

Day Eight: • Drive thru performance • The performance of taking down a building • Making way (the choreography of roundabouts in Milton Keynes) • A manual for drivers in MK • Open House (anthropology tour of homes in MK lead by an estate agent)

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I asked the city to dance with me on a Tuesday afternoon; I asked the city to dance with me; it didn’t actually reply, well perhaps it did. I asked the city to take me and show me its parts, the city seemed nervous, our duet perhaps slow, almost tender. I asked the city to tell me its secrets, something of itself. Where are the secrets?

Where is the dance of the city? Why aren’t there dance halls in the city? I asked the city to dance with me and it told me of quiet, a tranquility that is not quite at rest. Trying to get inside of it, to become a part of it, of this concrete, of this earth, to become a part of the city. My knees got muddy and I fell over on to the ground. How to become a part of this place? Of zumba, of ballet, of traffic lights, of shopping malls, of walks, of runs, no one will dance with me, the city pauses and there can be no silence. Perhaps it was nervous.

Revealing my dance to the city; we begin to find a duet.

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Workshop overview: 300 words

Returning to Milton Keynes after Groundwork residency at Milton Keynes Art Center, Jarvis invites participants to take a choreo-­‐cartographic journey by foot on a journey to two sites which she developed great affinity with during her residency period. Reviewing, revisiting and revising her conceptual framework for a daily schema of real and imagined performance interventions, exploring the city as studio, the terrain as home and the landscape as space of potential; this workshop reengages her critical performance dialog with the city, opening her performance methodologies to the wider public to repose key questions of socio-­‐spatial practice sourced from her initial residency period.

In this workshop; we shall explore two score based exercises enabling the body to become the main lens through which the landscape of MK is explored; encouraging tactile, somatic and embodied responses to areas of central and suburban MK this workshop crafts a unique journey through an urban landscape of contrast, contradiction and caution. Allowing the body to become archive to the sensations and psychologies of place; we shall also explore personal narrative and elements of songlines and free association writing; developing the possibility for participants to truly engage with MK and more widely explore creative methodologies for interdisciplinary practice based landscape research.

Beginning with a series of somatic exercises to energize, enter and access the body; this workshop will explore techniques based around The Four Dignities (Walking, Sitting, Standing, Lying) and also encourage active consideration as to the reality of documenting urban investigation through spoken narrative, text and image as practice. Encouraging participants to consider the every day use of their body and mindfulness as an approach to place exploration; this workshop unites body, mind and city for a cohesive, collaborative and holistic discovery. Entwining personal contextual narrative of the city into this workshop; Jarvis will share aspects of her personal relationship to the city; addressing how far the personal impacts upon the public within creative urban practice. Detailing key collaborations with the urban planning infrastructure; Beatrice will highlight key notions of collaboration between choreography, cartography and architecture, which lead to concepts of successful social architecture projects.

Key words: movement / architecture / urban / history/ narrative / writing / somatic / daily/ archive / association / collaboration /

(Participants are advised to bring comfortable shoes and clothing, which they feel at ease in.)

This workshop will involve moderate walking and some movement; please indicate any health issues to Beatrice prior to participation. This workshop has been crafted for all ages and abilities; no prior movement training required; simply a desire to explore with open eyes and ears.)

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The task of sociology is to provide a diagnosis of the social world and how it is organized; but also; it involves listening to what 1 goes on behind the public façade, attending to ways that people achieve a ‘bit of humanness in a world become inhuman.’

I would like to utilise this workshop to raise the issue; can such creative material become social resource? If sociology is the understanding of daily life, and forms of creative practice can articulate a wider social dialogue and comprehension; then does this allow such practices to become a ‘sociological resource’? Neither sociology nor art practices can be divorced from the realities of daily life -­‐ the issue rests in how such structures nor interactions are re-­‐presented and explored. The whole-­‐ heartedly engaged researcher and artist finds in their discipline and the fruits of their research a means to navigate a route through the world.

The complex relationship between sociology, and the sociological function of the arts as a mechanism to cultivate particular stands of social value and hence become socially useful product and development mechanism. Yet such social ‘usefulness’ can mean that the actual art work itself becomes a secondary concern which may contradictory to the intentions of the maker; as Zolberg problematizes ‘Because of sociologists concern with the social, the art works themselves become lost in the search for 2 understanding society and end up as virtual by-­‐products.’

As Becker alerts; ‘All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number of 3 people.’ The complex matrix network of societal interaction which allows an art work to form; be received and reviewed is expansive; notions of the individual become redundant; as seminal to a project’ success is the network by which it is supported.

However as Becker suggests such a complex network should not detract from the significance of the initial conception of an artwork; ‘The artist thus works in the center of a network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final 4 outcome.’

Such a perspective of collective authorship facilitates a vision of artistic production with minimal preoccupation with authenticity and ownership; due to the collaborative structure of production such a concept is particularly useful when exploring the potential for social and physical change as a direct and indirect result of artistic documentation and intervention.

The social chain by which an object/ artwork will be manifested and reviewed cannot be divorced from the process by which it is initially conceived.

Hewitt expands; ‘What I am calling ‘choreography’ is not just a way of thinking about social order, it has also been a way of

thinking about the relationships of aesthetics to politics.’ (Social Choreography. Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Life) This raises the further issue as to how far can choreography exist as vehicle for socio cultural commentary which extends a dialog in which the body as a punctum for the social and cultural framework in which it exists. The body becomes ultimate tool within this framework of exploration; not as trained or non-­‐trained dancer; simply existing within its locality as it exists and utilising its existing capacity in either an active or passive means to explore its social position.

Within my own research I am raising the issue as to how far the act of choreography creates a process, which enables the body to become an active constituent to the cultural context in which they exist; or whether the act of choreography becomes a form of distancing the body from the social schema in which it exists. The body in the practices I have committed myself to has been framed as site for the enactment of social order in which it exist, an act of conscious reflection and integration with social order that facilities a form of autobiographical framing of the scenario in which the body exists. Hewitt further problematizes this position; ‘Whereas writing on dance’s function (as image) within modernism has tended to stress the movement of transcendence as the dancer disappears into the dance; here I envisage instead a more ‘lateral’ transcendence whereby the dancer is integrated into a social organization.’

This workshop has been developed from experiences I shared with my father as he revisited MK during my residency to explore his old routes around the city when he was a part of the Development Corporation in the 1960/70’s; our collaboration explored the process of attempting to find home; or at least seeking home within our bodies.

In this short workshop we shall explore a sample of practice based methodologies to explore notions of home as different internal and external states in relation to landscape; using the concept of home a means to explore how we relate to social and cultural concerns within our environmental frames of reference. The goal of this workshop is to uncover spaces of experiences and transformations of bodily states, which raise questions about physical and mental conditions through the lens of ‘home’ as a self tutored concept. This workshop provokes the wider issue: How far can performance and artistic activity subvert or alter an experience / reality of the fabric of the urban landscape? Working with the body as form, archive, sculpture and social concept, this workshop will explore how ‘home’ can be a lens through which we can better understand our relationship to both self and landscape.

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Inclusive of quote from Ardent. Men in Dark Times. P 23. Sourced in Back. L. ( 2007) The Art of Listening. Berg. New York P 167 Zolberg. V. ( 1990 ) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. P 54 Becker. H. ( 1984) Art Worlds. University of California Press. California. P1 4 Becker. H. ( 1984) Art Worlds. University of California Press. California. P25 2 3

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Overview “Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?” (Perkins) This workshop is designed to create a process in which participants evaluate their embodied relationship to landscape and explore the medium of free association writing and drawing to create unique cartographic narratives of their experience of specific aspects of landscape. Creating a unique immersive process to reconsider the personal etymology of home in relation to current life states, this sensitive process allows a place of grounding and rooting to concepts of person hood and identity.

Routine and habit often tend to lead us away from our core, spiralling outwards or so far inwards we forget to move in way that nourishes and nurtures our connections to the core and ourselves. This simple yet deep natured movement based exploration is designed to explore the connection to both the body and the worlds in which we live through a series of exercise which can then be adapted by participants into their everyday routines.

In this delicate state we shall explore touch, memory, smell, sound and texture; seeking to reignite the living ecology of body in place, a search to enable each day to become more enriching, we begin simply to attune to both our bodies and each other and the place we are in.

This sensitive space will explore the body’s connection to the earth, the seasons, the weather, and the landscape, which we collaborate with on daily basis. Encouraging participants to gain a sense of active responsibility for their daily experience of the body in landscape.

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What makes you feel at ease in the urban landscape What allows you to feel “ at home” in the city Can home be fluid? Are you at home in your skin?

Nourishing, grounding, homing, tuning, sensing, feeling, being. Being in the now Let us begin with a sense of perspective: Powers of Ten: A flip Book by Charles and Ray Eames… From the self, on site; to the country, maps of the earth, maps of the sky, then back to molecules, blood and skin, molecules and atoms: how can we see the body and how does this affect the way we interact with ourselves and landscape.

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The process of creating an active choreographic methodology, which systematically affords a safe and malleable platform to analyze the ways in which the body exists in the world. This perspective has been largely informed by the seminal impact of 5 John Berger on my practice. In his text Field Berger indicates how the process of looking closely at a field, framing a field as specific event space can enable the observer to learn a great deal as to their own position and relationship to the world. If, for the process of this research, the term field is replaced with public urban space, this text outlines the perspective desired of the researcher and participant to the spaces, which they will encounter. Berger outlines: ‘you are before the field and although it seldom happens that your attention is drawn to the field before you notice the event taking place within it. Usually the event, which draws your attention to the field and almost instantaneously, your own awareness to the field, then gives a special significance to the event. The first event-­‐ since every event is part of the process invariably leads to another or, more precisely 6 invariably leads you to observe others in the field. The first event may be almost anything, provided it is not over dramatic.’

As Berger continues; ‘ you relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing in the field. It is not only the field that frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the pre-­‐condition for them occurring in the way that they have done and for the way others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by the virtue of their relation to other events.

You have defined the events primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the 7 same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events, which are taking, place within it.

Here ( replacing the term field for site) Berger’s text can be used as the means to highlight how this choreographic research in the city can function as means to evaluate one’s own frame of perspective towards their own life world.

As Elsa Gindler’s research indicates, the cultivation of a heightened sense of awareness of the body as kinesthetic awareness cultivates a platform of a more sensitive relationship towards daily encounter and social practice, ‘we must recognize the connection between breathing and bodily movement, and bring about their correlation. In doing so we begin to understand that demands made upon us by life are not so overwhelmingly difficult, that they can be carried out with greater sense of economy 8 without our maximum effort and turmoil.’ She highlights the need for the body to be a porous vessel, capable, calm and responsive to the demands of our environment.

‘The two accomplishments common to mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend, yet it has 9 been clearly explained and successfully initiated by artificial contrivances.’ Todd explores walking as a task seminal to the understanding of man, a task, however, that is potentially filled with danger and complexity and not to be debased as an innate human function, ‘walking then is a perpetual falling and a perpetual self-­‐recovery. It is the most complex, violent and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early stage of life. We find how complex walking is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never fully understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or to overlook the last step on a flight of stairs, and discover 10 with head long violence we have being hurtling ourselves forward.’ As Merleau-­‐Ponty indicates, the body holds the human capacity to interact and see the world, how we cultivate our ‘arc’ of interaction is how we will receive and transmit collaboration with our life world. As he outlines; “The life of consciousness -­‐ cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life -­‐ is subtended by an `intentional arc' which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and 11 moral situation. (1962: 136)”

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Berger. J (1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London ( P199-­‐205) Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P202-­‐3 Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P204-­‐5 8 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books.

Berkeley. North California P12 9 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P194 10 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P195 11 Cited in Dreyfus. L. H (1996) the Current Relevance of Merleau-­‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment. University of California, Berkeley –.The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996) 6 7

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The body forms our spatial, social and cultural disposition, how we continually reveal and tune this body to our various environments can be shifted, re-­‐aligning our capacity to connect to our surroundings. As Merleau-­‐Ponty indicates; ‘the body is our general medium for having a world.

Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself 12 a cultural world. (1962: 146)

When the body and mind are in active and committed dialog to the projection of the cultural world which the body projects then a more active dialog is possible with ones life world. Seamon outlines: “ Understanding is coming to see more deeply and respectfully the nature of human experience and the world in which it unfolds. The subject of understanding is the everyday met afresh, that world takes on a new and richer facet of meaning, which speaks to the individual’s life. Unlike explanation, understanding does not seek the causes of events, it helps the person see more intimately and lucidly the pattern of his own existence and thereby live better in the future.”

“What is 'learned by body? It is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished about, but something that one is and so the body is thus constantly mingled with all the knowledge it 13 reproduces "(I990, 73)

This workshop has been designed to explore the position of home as a means to explore sociological, humanist and ecological perspective. In a time of much unsettlement and fragmented cultural and national identity; the challenge of citizenship is ever more pressing as a political and ecological concept. In search of hope, rooting, consideration and kindness to self and others, this investigation of the concept of home as methodological lens seeks to create a ground of union and contemplation between participants and landscape.

“In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, and documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-­‐ arranges, and ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a storeroom, and it is hard in any case to part from leftovers. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-­‐pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of the intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier state have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.”

Theodor Adorno, 'Memento' in Minima Moralia

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Cited in Dreyfus. L. H (1996) The Current Relevance of Merleau-­‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment. University of California, Berkeley –. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996) Cited in Loukes, R. (2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-­‐Hetter(1891-­‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-­‐95 p88

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Structure

‘Attention means tension, a readiness to move with no movement taking place, which spells fatigue.

Emotion constantly finds expression in bodily position, if not in the furrowed brow or set mouth, then in limited breathing, in tight necked muscles, or in the slumped body of discouragement and 14 listlessness.’

BEGIN : we shall gather for a short meditation and introduction and body awareness warm up. The workshop will begin with a series of guided movement and body awareness series drawing from Butoh exercises and principles of Tai Chi and walking exercises from The Four Dignities: Walking: Sitting: Standing: Lying.

‘We no longer lead our lives thoughtfully and sensitively. We become rushed and allow confusions around us to accumulate in such a way that they get the upper hand at very inappropriate moments.’

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Stage one: Score one and dialog in pairs: solo score relating experiences of place, narrative and dialog; walking and talking.

‘The two accomplishments common to mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend, yet it has 16 been clearly explained and successfully initiated by artificial contrivances.’

Stage two: Score two: are we dancing yet / urban notation/ embodied social cartography.

We will then all meet in a site and collectively perform both our phrase and the phrase, which you attempted to learn from another. Rather than sticking to your original partner and try this phrase with another person and continue; so the whole group is cohesive.

Stage Three: Circle meditation: Based on Bagua Circle Walking and The Sevenfold Circle and self-­‐ awareness in Dance. GROUP DRAW (large paper of map of emotions in the workshop as a collective exercise to finish)

Finish: Walking and digesting (pair walking/ talking / singing)

This structure is designed to span 2 hours; I would like to invite participants to create their experience of the workshop as though they are dancing all the time; in the sense you are invited to have a continual and active sense of movement and the position of the body in landscape at all points of the workshop. You are invited to make as much or as little movement in the session; with a real awareness of WALKING SITTING STANDING LYING as pedestrian movements, which we shall continually have an awareness of.

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Todd, M. E. (1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro, USA. p44 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People Whose Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North California North Atlantic Books, Berkeley. p5 16 Todd, M. E. (1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gestalt Journal Press, Gouldsboro. USA. p194 15

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SCORE ONE: HOME? “ Have you ever considered, how invisible we are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only the voice inside oneself.

The words of others are mistakes of our hearing shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss/ we read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound. The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator, the voice of trees, whose rustling means what we say it means.’

(Pessoa)

What are your first memories of MK? When you think of MK what is the image that comes to your mind?

Describe a route you have walked around MK. Tell me about one place that is vivid when you think about MK. Can you remember the smell of MK? What about specific colors of MK? What is your last memory of MK? Can you sing me MK?

Walking with a partner / one has eyes closed / lead them / guide them / listen / share / swap.

On arriving to our second site we will then take 8 minutes to make a short improvisation reflecting upon these sensations en site; simple gestures which reflect emotion towards these sensations. This will be a lead exercise reflecting on exercises from the four dignities.

How does this exercise allow you to share an experience of place and how does this sharing allow a sense of shift in your relationship to place and to the person you have been working with?

( The idea with this series of questions is that they are transferable; the subject today is MK but this can be changed to fit any specific site exploration that you are making)

What notes are you making/ can you make a map of your thoughts; can we draw our thoughts/ how can we be more mindful as to the nature of our sharing?

If this is method one: The city as natural choreography: then method two becomes: Encounter: the tentative formation of workgroup. The duet of the city and the self is solitary affair; one can learn and return to the studio where I was hoarding thousands of images, notation and documentations of my encounters, yet this is ‘ me in the city’ which I am not to draw for too long a period on. To explore choreography as a social apparatus, one has to become social. The choreography of sociality and sociality of choreography.

Is this about defining the cultural heritage of Milton Keynes or defining the capacity of choreographic methodology to create embodied and tactic knowledge of place.

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SCORE TWO: ARE WE DACNING?

What does the space necessitate you to do?

Consider pace, stance, emotion, proximity to others, placement of body in space.

Allow your body to mirror, imitate and follow movement sets which you notice around you.

Allow your body to blend with such patterns. | Allow such motion to happen | Let it pass.

Return to the emotion of arrival; remember your preconceptions; trace the stances, which they have left on your body. Trace the acceptance you fabricated to the space | Simplify Allow your body to repeat the motions you chose to represent. Notice if anything feels uncomfortable. Closing your eyes allow yourself to dismiss the response to the patterns which you performed Dismiss.

In softness, find comfort and stability in newness; in your own innovation to dismiss the constructs you first constructed. Take such movement and reapply allowing yourself allowing yourself to emerge to a new point of arrival. Take a sense of the liberation you experienced in this momentary freedom. Return to a sense of place; how are people around you walking? How can you feel and sense the pace of the space? The emotion by which the space is allowing people to move through it; how do you fit into this scale?

How does your body fit to the construction around you? Return to forms to space to generate an understanding of the body; see how shadows of buildings may affect or generate shapes and forms in location. How are you accepting the behaviors of place and how can such observations manifest as contract in your body Take a moment to allow yourself to formally agree to the expectations of the space you occupy. Pause; filling the space through breath; envisaging flux both internal and external. Allow yourself to actively become a spatial anomaly to the space you occupy. Play with alternating these positions, pacing acceptance and dismissal as you wish.

Return to the space as neutral; become void Return to your breath; acknowledge streams of thoughts to come and to pass, direct attention to breath, the rise and fall of the exchange of the breath, which you consume and direct back into the space you are in dialog with.

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PART TWO | Emerge, Merge, Collect Depart.

1. Arrive to location …Take a long slow look around, the way people are moving, the way they come and go, the things they do, their pace and their patterns, maybe take some photos, make a few notes…

2. Then merge with the patterns of movement you see there…

See the people and their actions; remove them from their space; see them and their bodies. ...Join in, mimic, simulate, copy, imitate what you see there, and try to be unobtrusive but also be aware of what you are doing.

Do this for long enough to blend with the patterns, possibly 5 minutes or so, trying different movements and sequences if you like.

Then as soon as you can make some notes and records of this experience, thinking about the place and space…. its form and shadows, its steps and seats and trees ……

3. Then from that ‘ordinary’ sequence choose one or two – a step, a stance, and a gesture ….and repeat that in the place you are working in. Note your feelings and if anything feels strange –are you uncomfortable? are you being looked at?

THEN do the same with your eyes closed a few times!

(Then open your eyes, and make some more notes)

4. Next teach yourself these movements and add to them… ….turn them into a little performance, half natural half new movements of your own, something freer and more complex perhaps than the original you have already ‘taught’ yourself ….and then ‘perform’ that in the space, with ordinary users and their movements around you. Change and modify this as you repeat them, adding improvised cadenzas and unexpected changes. Try another.

After you have done this a few times, and maybe noticed reactions to your actions, pause and again make some notes.

REFLECTIONS AND ADDITIONS

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What’s missing from the space?

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How can your body become an architectural intervention?

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How can the body become a means to unveil the potential ( used in the subjective realm) of the space?

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location as a means of executing a subtle nuance of change.

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This exercise may allow schemas of interaction and participation to arise as reactions from the general public.

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The intention of this exercise is not to subvert spatial use patterns; rather to explore what the space may lack and develop a means of amplifying spatial use.

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How can the body be used in a non-­‐intrusive way to develop a means of allowing a mode of spatial evaluation to occur?

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Take an action/series of actions and consolidate and finalize it to generate one sequence/action which you feel can add to your perceived potential of the space you have been researching.

Ask you self the following: How far does your body become spectacle within this exercise?

How far can this exercise be pedestrian or performance? Can you play with the boundaries between these two?

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Does your body express your emotions; if so; how is this communication occurring; if not; can you explain the ‘blockages’ you may be experiencing.

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Practice Overview

The city can exist beyond limitation as a stimulus and resource; such reflections can be sociological, poetic, and political, the city exists to be studied, analyzed and intervened. Methodologies developed in my current research practice allow me to disengage from ontological methods of representation; rather they seek to objectify creatively the way in which social interactions and patterns of spatial use occur in the city.

The city as a facet of sociological research data remains an anomaly. The city perhaps cannot be summarized. The mythology of the multiple narrative forms which form the labyrinthine quality of the urban scale allow a brief understanding as to what the city may be defined as.

The everyday life of the city; the routine; as so often we see projected in cyclical realms of film and in images of the dawns and dusks; but whose city do we so eagerly consume with tired eyes in the early hours. Watching yesterday films of the unique everyday lives of subjects unknown; reading accounts of the trials of the city and trying to allow an identity to form. To remove the self; the walk to work, the supermarket, the potential eviction; the bailiff, the broken boiler, the decisions, made and unmade, the lily pollen which stained my clothes, the boy who bought me a cup of tea and gave me a book, the lady who asked me if I would sit with her a minute as she was lonely, the bus stop as site for social interaction, then what does the city become.

Such softness in the kindness of strangers. I walk the streets on a daily basis with a camera, framing, curating and navigating the string of discordant events which seamlessly pass; yet to what avail? To begin an understanding? To formulate a hypothesize? To construct and reconstruct? I collect their stories. The stories of the city folk. The boy on the bus sat there for over an hour and narrated his version of the map of London. The lady on the train let me walk with her all the way to her office and told me her tale of a city, the man in the newsagent tells me what happens to him everyday, the duke in the kiosk tells me all about his long nights as he stands behind the shuttered gate. All of these stories are different; they are all in a medley of event, sorrow, mistrust and hope. The city remains a playground to dreams. Yet what does freedom mean in Milton Keynes? The paths are neat. The lawns are moved. The paths are all ever so tidy.

This workshop explored some of the key research methods I used during my residency at Milton Keynes Art Centre exploring MK as studio, canvas and archive; seeking to created an embodied archive of place. In the residency period I researched the city in relation to creative qualitative investigative methods, striving to create inventive schemas to both represent and investigate aspects of the social orrery of the networks within specific sites and locations.

‘The city is a stage, a theatre stage even, on watching an uninterrupted succession and ever changing forms, characters appear 17 and disappear, events develop and come to pass, which taken together form something like an orrery for the social world.’

This is a summary of a much more extensive research period within my work locating my artistic practice in an academic framework beyond dance and choreography. I have drawn on published material, exhibitions and first hand investigations into human movement, activity and interaction in urban space and through this to the wider fields of town planning, social, political and historical theory. I am currently developing a framework for my practice based on concepts of the impact of the urban environment on creativity.

My research methodologies function as both artistic practice and spatial research practice for sociological theory. I am keen to involve multidisciplinary practices with key relevance to live art, performance, photography, film and installation, drawing direct inspiration from situations, which occur in situ, and formulating qualitative sociological research methods. I am keen to explore how creative approaches to the city can facillate sociological frameworks of investigation towards the urban infrastructure. Within my practice I instigate key collaborations with architects, town planners, cultural policy makers, artists, found-­‐space collectives and sociologists to extend the legacy of small-­‐scale interventions to a wider social dynamic.

This is not really a history of Milton Keynes

(Fragment from conversations in MK and borrowed facts, which attempt a cultural history)

Anthropology: what does it mean to learn a place?

A lady on the tube asks my two heavy suitcases, and me where I am going. I tell her MK. She looks confused, “oh that’s a new town isnt it” In my first visit to MK Sainsbsuires (passing through to find the only Independent coffee shop in Central MK, Ash tells me some people know MK as Cliff Richard made a music video here.

Midsummer Boulevard, so that you can see the sun and the moon in the sky, the streets are pristine and the fountains have put on a lavish display for our encounter.

Nothing in Central MK was supposed to be higher than the Church. Jury’s Inn was higher than the church and during construction, it collapsed and killed people. Of course there was speculation in MK as to whether this was an indication that any progress should cease.

The hospital is over crowded. Its easy to live here. There is so much green space. You don’t have to shop. Water. Yellow and Green. The roundabouts.

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Reymond. Von M. (1894) p.1. Berliner Pflaster. Preface to Berliner Pflaster. Illustrierte Schilderungen aus dem Berliner Leben. Berlin. Cited by Schlör. J. (1998) p241.

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BIO | Beatrice Jarvis Choreographer, visual artist and urban space researcher/creative facilitator.

University of Kingston / University of Ulster

Beatrice is an urban space creative facilitator, choreographer and researcher. She utilizes key concepts of choreography and visual arts methodologies with the intention to develop, original doctoral research on the connections between choreography and urban cultures developing heightened socio-­‐cultural responses to the urban realm. Her practice merges essential techniques in a sociological framework of critical perspectives, cultivating a unique stance point to practice based research. Beatrice is currently a visiting lecturer at various town planning and architecture departments in London and wider afield in Europe (LSBU & AAIS, The Bucharest National University of Arts) developing a platform for the conceptual and physical integration of urban planning, sociology and choreography leading to practical social creative implementation and curation. Beatrice is keen to create platforms social interaction using urban wastelands, conflict zones and areas of social and cultural transformation and reflections on urban habitation as a creative resource. Beatrice received distinction for her MA in Photography and Urban Cultures affiliated by Arts and Humanities Research Council within the Department of Visual Sociology at, Goldsmiths and now continues with her PhD at University of Ulster and Kingston University within the Architecture department; fusing a strong mixture of practice, research, experimentation and exploration to create a unique approach to urban socio-­‐choreographic research. Her PhD is titled: The socio-­‐choreographic apparatus| Developing a practice of social choreography through practice of individual and collective embodiment. The Sociological Dimension of Choreography as framework for progression of social reconciliation.

Beatrice initiated an urban forum: Urban Research Forum for artists, architects, urban designers, cultural researchers, sociologists, anthropologists and all with an urban interest. This is conducted through seminars, workshops, performances and exhibitions. Collaboration, discourse and intellectual inquiry are seminal to her constant sense of enquiry. Her practice has been profiled within dOCUMENTA (13), (Kassel) Pina Bausch Symposium, (London), The School of Art in Bucharest and various spaces in Berlin; including VITal, C|O, and Zentrum. She has presented her research: ‘Das Duet des Leibes und der Stadt. Berlin. Verschieben Stadt’ at Annual Association of Geographers Annual Meeting: LA; exploring the position of the body as social and political archive.

Her research has been profiled at Urban Encounters Tate Britain 2014, Critical Costume (Helsinki 2015) The Playhouse; Derry, Bauhaus-­‐Universität; Weimar, Birkbeck College; University of London, DRFI 4th International Conference 2012; Urban Photo Fest; Irish Association of Geographers: Annual Conference 2013: National University of Ireland, Galway, Aarhus School of Architecture 2014, Bucharest School of Art, Terror and the Tour and Galway Dance Festival.

Her commissions include Jerwood Space, Steven Lawrence Center and EGFK.

For further examples of current work please see the following links:

Creative City life: http://beatricejarvis.net/ Urban Research, Workshop templates; Selected Writing: http://issuu.com/urbanresearchforum Documentation: http://www.blurb.com/user/bj87 City as Studio: http://urbanorganics.cultura3.net/Resources/media/promo.mov

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