Week 2 Forward Session 5/8 : Ashtanga Yoga

The Ashtanga yoga session with Dani was incredibly fruitful. I have been so intensively focused on working one to one with the practioner of each session that at first it felt quite a surprise when some members of the public arrived and said that they were ready to take part since they’d seen my call out.

The project has been evolving as expected on a daily basis, and I had quickly recognised before I begun that the value of public participation would not be found directly through me leading sessions directly with them, perhaps in another context this would be appropriate but I felt in the context of the curator’s supportive reminder- this exhibition was for me, what I gain and grow from it, I realised I would like to work again with the practioners in the second week in a slightly different way. I was interested in working together to share perspectives and create a new space. Doing away with ownership.

The members of public who specifically came along were really insightful and helped shape this second session into a useful discussion and exchange- critical engagement that I really long for in all my processes.

The second week was then to look also forward, still on a daily basis to be present within new learnings but also then to have the parameter of what I call the performance this Saturday. Unfortunately, it was the quickest way to communicate to the wider public what this event might entail, since it would otherwise involve a more lengthy description, nor is it a presentation or conclusion or closure, parenthesis. I am still very much in mid process, because this is a long one. We began by the Primary Yoga Series, but quickly, this evolved into debating braking points, limitations and fears and finally in symbiosis the pairing of postures and practice with an alterior interpretation that broke away from yoga practice and into correlated exploratory movement and then again discussion, moving forward in this manner.

In some manner cyclical and overlapping and sometimes, like the postures, folding into new ideas and spaces, we started to consider a framework for how my ‘performance’ may unravel on Saturday since I or rather my mind , had begun to focus on this rather preventing me sometimes from being present in the session. I was starting to think about the different sessions, and we spoke about cadavres exquis and collage techniques combining yogic postures with chance and music and audience participation, batting and extending ideas one to the other.

I kept returning though to bees and snakes technique and also other more contact related sessions I’d had, so perhaps there was no need to complicate, to go against what I had asserted from the start for the motivation of Saturday’s public ‘performance’.

To combine this interchange with others in a really natural and responsive manner was the ideal scenario for this platform I’d created to come into play. It’s clear to me now that actually this is quite a complex layering of structures that it’s a really a pleasure for me to be within yet have the alternate space and human interaction to create something different again to any of my previous works. Ia m happy with how this project has been so nuanced with all subtleties and encounters and possibilities to work with different people closely, intensively and to have that instant degree of exchange and absorption of others who want to become an active part of it and contribute is for me a gift because I’ve also been able to really push my own development in this once blank canvas of a ‘dance studio’.

Anyhow, it’s Friday night now, I am writing this and still have a few more backdated entries to do since I’ve been so busy, practising in the day, taking the train back and editing footage in time for Saturday…. best head to the next few days– like today’s Breaking session and yesterday’s hooping and Laban dance session. See you there.