quotidian freedom practices

from laura arrington dance (oakland, CA), march 2014

"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."

quotidian practice day 1/ PLEASURE BINGE

quotidian practice day 2 / SCALES

quotidian practice day 3 / SUBMISSION

quotidian practice day 4 / DESIRECHOICEDESIRE

repurposing my pen, my nosehairs, my skin

picture this: an eliot pokes its head out of a hole in the ground. the earth shakes a little (remniscent of a faraway quake in chicagoland near eliot's fellow creatures). at once, the eliot leaps out of the hole bearing a huge machete (all-purpose tool) and dirt flies everywhere, spattering blisters and waterfalls and guavas as it races into the bamboo trees. "i live in your dreams!" it screams with delight.

got through rio de janeiro safely, albeit a slight delay because we missed our bus...
now we're in rio pomba!
picked up from the bus station at 2a.m. by a man with a beau-ti-ful head of dreadlocks (you know wwoofing has turned out well when-) and a smaller man, both of them thin and tightly muscled. when you drive the 12km out to the farm, there are lots of monoculture fields of sugarcane, corn, coffee. and then once we arrived (the '86 volkswagen fixed with a pebble, the sky held up with a twig, the mountains eroding because there are no trees anymore to hold up the ground), we were met with something remniscent of a baohaus, rural-ized, in progress, partially roofed, made of cement blocks with ambitions of bioconstruction...the bath is a waterfall and the water, for once, is infinite.

cycles cycles which fit together as cleanly as wet adobe on a wall:
- humans eat fruit and vegetables, goats eat peels and compost, remains are perfect for plants; everyone is nourished.
- tree is cut for building, small pieces used for fire, dust and chips are used for compost toilet; forest thrives with increased light.
- cows eat grass, cow manure is sifted for soil to germinate delicate seeds, remains are used for plants; perhaps the cows are glad.
and in this light, everything begins to fit together: reverse or ignore the crumbling institutions which struggle to salvage ethical ways of living in this world and instead, instead, take a word from the permaculturists and anarchoprimitivists (ritual fits in to, comes easily in a place where the ground, i, and all inbetween are connected somehow).

the first day we were here, we mixed adobe and sand and dirt and grass and some sugar and made adobe, covered a wall of the house. since, az and i have continued to do work on the land (digging huge holes for banana circles, cutting bamboo forest and cleaning long stalks, sifting manure, cleaning found roof tiles) as well as having time-space to draw, paint, designar. my fingers are blistering and callusing but also rememememembering agility and i've been drawing yogic poses, psychedlic plants (oohhh! apparently mushies grow on cow pats here! pray for rain for me plzzz), designs, some rolling hills. artur asked if we could paint the side of the house, not sure i'm ready for that but working up to it.

saving saving saving my sexual energy, the one functionality of my body that, it seems, isn't in use these days.

this morning, i woke up and made a fire to make oatmeal
tonight, we go by bus back to the city
the cars, the smoke, the cops, the corruption and the favelas falling falling like shoeboxes from the top of your closet (or my glasses from my chicagobed)
i've harvested a few choice things from the forest for a carnaval costume...we'll see
i asked az if i should wear my strapon and she said "better not attract undue attention"
unlikely to become a guiding principle in my life, though it is something i am learning and navigating amidst my slowly slowly improving portuguese. (sometimes these moments of invisibility, along with the moments of sprawling distinct euphoria, make me long for the bao.)

oh also! i am sublimating my desire to pick scabs/bugbites into a habit of picking my nose (more). i think it's working!

love to all,
remember your dreams.