Sensing in the Soft Room

Research presentation, Uferstudios, Berlin, 2017

2017

Sensing in the Soft Room is a research presentation performed in the context of the 10 year anniversary festival of the MA Solo/Dance/Authorship (SoDA) at HZT Berlin: Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin. This work developed into Feel Me, my MFA Thesis project at the University at Buffalo, 2018. The research was a reaction to a life/work context shift, relocating from Berlin (where I had lived fro 8 years, working as a yoga instructor and making art in the context of the contemporary dance scene) to my hometown, Buffalo, NY, where I returned to in 2016 to complete the MFA in studio art. In this move I was confronted with an extreme lifestyle and artistic discourse adjustment from one in which the somatic experience was considered and privileged, to one in which the cognitive experience was of primary concern. The work also stems from my conflicted involvement with the mindfulness industry as a yoga teacher.

Feel Me considers the alienation from intuitive somatic knowledge resulting in the commodification of feeling (by the mindfulness industry), and looks at experimental ways of decolonizing and recovering feeling. The work emerged from an investigation into early memories of hyper-sensing, and feeling comfort, safety and satisfaction. Memories of the the desire to have weight on my body as a child — the pleasurable feelings of having my blood pressure taken, the led X-ray vest at the dentist office, buried in sand, under couch cushions, or the bodies of my siblings, inspired this work.