Move continuously to humiliate yourself. This can be done as a solo, duo, or group practice. Consider the following meanings:
humiliate
to lower to the earth (humus)
to make foolish by injuring one’s dignity
to reduce to a lower position in one’s own eyes or others’ eyes
II. decay
Inhabit decay.
Allow each of your movements to grow on top of the previous one (like a fungus).
Melt, rot, decompose.
Invite the possibility for something unexpected to happen.
III. tick check
Observe your skin in detail, especially pockets, folds, and corners. Look for ticks (small black dots). Use it as a reminder that you too are food.
IV. playing dead
Find a place where you can be relatively still and “play dead”[i] for an extended amount of time (15 minutes or more recommended).
What happens when you become quiet and still? How do your surroundings, and your perceptions of them, respond? What happens as you attempt to recede into the environment you find yourself in? What does it feel like to practice one’s extinction as a survival mechanism?
playing dead variation a
If you feel constrained or overly confronted by the task of playing dead, consider a spectral dance interlude:
Dance to acknowledge the known and unknown beings whose decomposing material bodies are now part of the substrate for the living.
Roam.
Visit.
Be haunted.
Receive and transmit messages that could be interpreted in multiple ways.
Vanish and reappear…
~#~
Leave something to support future generations.
playing dead variation b
Notice what is eating or digesting little pieces of you right now. Contemplate what might metabolize you in the future.
V. real, organic, all-natural, authentic movement/preyer
[adapted from Authentic Movement, as developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse and taught to us by Katie Workum, hannah krafcik, and Yvonne Meier]
Take turns witnessing and being witnessed by your surroundings. You can decide in advance on an amount of time to spend in each phase, or toggle back and forth according to your own curiosity. When you are being witnessed, you may decide to close your eyes (if it is safe and comfortable to do so).
When you are witnessing (use these ideas and/or add your own):
Let your attention roam…
…do an environmental scan using one of your senses, then another, then another
…sweep your focus in regular and random patterns
…let movement carry your focus from one aspect to the next
…look up
…look down
…don’t look; close your eyes
…notice what touches you
…consider the points at which all senses become tactile
…witness yourself as part of what is happening
…witness the actions that are happening because of your presence
…witness the actions that do not happen because of your presence
…witness the processes that happen regardless of whether or not you are present
When you are being witnessed (use these ideas and/or add your own):
Allow yourself to be perceived by the environment…
…in 360°
…in imprints + indentations
…in touches, glances, and tones
…close up and distanced
…as part of and other
…as imperceptible
[i] also known as apparent death, playing possum, or feigning death and most typically performed by animals as a defense mechanism.
What might it mean to explore performance in a multi-species arena by choosing to engage a multitude of more-than-human modes of perception, values and desires assembled and co-mingling together on this ancestral Abenaki land?
-Black Hole Hollow, another audience residency call
In 2021, we were invited to be in residence at Black Hole Hollow Farm on unceded Abenaki land. Nicole Daunic, our host, had distributed a call inviting artists to create performances to share with another audience—to reimagine who we might be performing for…and with.
The invitation, she explained, was “shaped by a curiosity about the critical role of creative embodied practice in the process of unsettling forces of human exceptionalism” that, she continues, “imbue modes of ‘life’ shaped through the illogical logics of colonial violence, extractive capitalism and white supremacy.”
We spent five days investigating the habits—physical, sensorial, and ideological—that shaped our embodied relations with our surroundings and more-than-human others. The resulting scores in this Theatre are intended as an ambivalent archive, an earnest offering, an incomplete acknowledgement, an unsettled placing, a nourishing burial—a “preyer.”
I witness an ant spiral endlessly along the edges of a clover leaf, its movements growing lethargic yet determined.
During a durational practice of playing dead, we remain relatively still under a hazy sun and realize that the smoke from the wildfires blazing in California has come to greet us.
Buried in the foothills of Black Hole Hollow in 1800, Rhoda Blommers, a fellow settler, would become a key collaborator. In her ongoing decomposition, she showed us one way to trouble the oversimplified binary between a human and non-human audience. Simultaneously, she reminded us of the histories of European settler colonialism that informs our arrival to this place. Rhoda’s life is marked—by a headstone on the land—and retold—in a brief newspaper article published in the New England Homestead in 1965. In death, her body continues to settle into the earth.
We talk about how humans are often rendered at the top of the food chain, but at Black Hole Hollow, we receive frequent reminders of the ways we are always becoming food to other beings. Ticks and mosquitoes feed off our blood. Gnats find moisture in our tear ducts. Fungi make homes in our shoes and skin after heavy rains. Rhoda, who seems at once to be roving around and slamming cottage doors, while also spreading the nutrients of herself in the dirt, continues to remind us of place in the midst of a multi-course meal. We come up with a working title of Preyer in attempts to hold onto this awareness that we are also food, and that our movements are intended as an offering.
In these scores, excerpted from a larger collection, we tangle with an inherited choreography of human-centeredness, which is inseparable from the colonial logics that separate beings according to physical and imagined characteristics. We contemplate the ways we have been cast as repeaters of this choreography and explore a few ways to disobey it and imagine otherwise. Our preyer is that this might help us to perceive things that are obscured within vertical, rational, objective, and objectifying praxis, and perhaps to re-situate ourselves more respectfully in relationship to more-than-human kin.
