"Freedom comes from disruption, comes from feeling familiarity, comes from sudden dislocation and disorientation. So arguably, making art and thinking about the power of art are both processes of getting free. It’s a weird and humbling thing to think about, as we are – more than ever – so hugely aware of how embedded we are in the prisons and ruts of contemporary social and political systems. But when we look around and feel scared and frustrated, the two of us can’t shake the feeling that we have a choice; and the choice is about what we practice*. And so, Freedom Practice is about studying our quotidian impulses and behaviors, and learning their innards in a effort to infuse beauty, hope, and impracticality into each and every little thing we do.
But… it’s fucking personal. So, we need you to collaborate with us, please. We need you to ignite your own ideas and experiences of choice, of resistance, of madness, of body intelligence and survival. We want to build a new behavior, and this time of practicing with you is our research. We hoped that dropping the word “freedom” – as an object – into a text about a dance workshop might get your mind working on how, with our dance/art practice, we can begin to re-animate such a word; a word that comes with such a big blasting bombastic charge (a charge that is sometimes useful and other times not useful at all). It seems that a word like FREEDOM gets tossed around with such frequency that its potency becomes diluted by the sheer volume of its occurrence. Still… we think that we kinda know exactly what we mean, when we say FREEDOM. It’s a bodily state. It’s a way of being together. And when we can’t muster much action around any of this, it is at least an intention. One distillation of all of this is what ye olde dictionary (online) says, just to get pedantic on ourselves:
freedom- the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action
...We’ll create scores/rituals that we can take home and invite into the minutiae of our bodies, our homes, our beds, our dreams. We extend the practice to excavate the creative viability of the big wide world around us. Using the practice as both a personal and political tool to unlock the total possibility of LIVING ART. Let’s try hard! It is our personal belief, that the world needs these shake ups RIGHT. now. The potential of art/creativity/ritual/magic need to be unhinged from the pivots of “career” and “profession,” and allowed to seep into the totality of our being/living."
