Can these embodied research and movement workshops take place anywhere?

Entering a workshop space in this moment

We now for a moment, we will attempt to enter a research space together.

I ask you to close your eyes.

Listen with your body.

Listen to the air.

Listen to the space around you.

Listen to the bodies around you.

We arrive together on page 45 of our publication, counterfield II.

‘Pause, take a breath,

listen to the words that follow with your body.

We enter with an invitation offered at the beginning of an embodied research and movement workshop, ‘The Feminine-to-Come’ and the Poetics of Filmic Breath in October 2023.

'Soon, we will weave the spaces as we speak.

Together, we breathe these words, inhaling and holding them,

if only for a second,

before we have to exhale again.

We do not determine the space that surrounds us,

between us,

that passes as shared air,

if only for a moment.

We breathe, we move, we feel.’ [1]

Before undertaking this discovery together, and to enter with the energy of the Irish ‘feminine-to-come’, that moves with me in my research and practice, I firstly draw attention to how the feminine is evoked. I align with a rereading with Luce Irigaray which is within and still yet to come. Walking alongside Julia Kristeva’s focus on the ‘transformative potential of what she conceptualizes as the feminine: not femininity, not femaleness or womanhood ‘but particular aspect of the human psyche which might be the proper engine of our capacity to change.’ [2]

I invite you to join me collectively in the moment that it finds you. Come and go as you want to. There are no calls to perform, move or be in any way. Remember to breathe.

Inhale,

Exhale

Notice how the air feels and moves between and upon your body. Place a hand where you feel your breath in your body.

We dance with and are affected by the air around us, whilst forgetting the earth.

[1] These words were written thinking with Irigarayan shared air, with Graduate Tutor and PhD researcher, Killian O’ Dwyer, on the writing retreat in Brighton, as part of counterfield, research collective.

[2]I think from this thread positioned by The School of Materialist Research, The Feminine in an Age of Anthropological Transformation, which I will join in September 2024.