i got stuck with these earth hands
but i am all air
all chimes
all crinkly and floating out of the car

feel like i'm going batty
hung upside down in the dark
i open my eyes to try and see but all i hear are the sounds

i reach for the foods just to live
but if i was brave enough, i'd let myself wither
and live off this feeling alone

guidance
guidance
i am always listening for you
so why do i find that only despair comes to visit?

i am battling my body
my body is battled
my battle i embody

i cannot support this,, it angers me beyond any other measure
i cannot be at war with myself
there are much larger wars outside that deserve, nay, call on my attention
for too many years have we been kept away from power, turned against our own selves
fractured and in conflict
at war with our bodies
this self-hatred is not mine and i renounce it

it is so difficult to think what you do with your day is right
when there is no one around to agree with you

it is hard to find the strength to plant another seed, to visit another rock, to speak to the sky
when you do not know who that seed will feed
or why
words seem to ripple off unanswered

 so many voices to be this or that to be relatable to others
be quiet, be sexual, be fabulous, be a bitch, be gay, be straight
when all i really want to be is this welling in my chest
all i really want to be are these tears in my eyes
all i really want is a place to put this anger

women across the world are still punished for eating of the tree of wisdom
i would eat a thousand more!
they are silenced, they are eaten with words, gestures, deeds,
in the name of male gods
in the name of oh fathers and oh lords
oh woman, oh mother you are so rich in your struggle, you are so very strongly, powerfully unalone
man, how do you get led so obsessively to evil?
how did you stray so far from the love of your equals?

oh woman, oh girl, oh mother, oh womb
oh holy heart full of dread, compassion; love and revenge

the animals
the animals
the animals
of our planet are fleeing
i don't know that there are safe places left for them to run to

every shriek, cry, post on facebook rings like a state of alarm

the humans
the humans
the humans
we too it feels do not know what to do
awaiting instruction, quivering across the wide web, anxious in our beds
running to the city, running to the wild
awaiting a great rally
can we take back the earth? altogether this time?

it feels like i will spend my whole life seeking the innocence taken from my childhood
it feels like i will spend my life defending my childhood
freedom, come back to me
i need so to be unafraid in the face of pain

they say we already fell from grace
but i continue to fall and lift myself everyday

I took photographs of people holding hands
sitting in a pile resting after working
after drinking water
after walking under 1:17 PM sun.


we are not so complicated

but we do pretend to be
and now we're stuck in the sprawl
of trapdoors, mirrors and lawns
starting to run as to have enough time
to sort through what can be felt and everything else.

i sharpen my wit like the blade of a knife
the slightest shrapnel,
a shred of insight to slice open time
to open this space
where feelings are wide
and we approach each other
like ascending a staircase of tension
each step comes on like a heavy press upon the skin
i gasp at the wind of you alone

how far can a mind turn inward on itself

before something truly is lost

that special mysterious layer

that's wild.

the wilderness is not wild.

there is something among the things of this place that are

we are one of these things.

i ve been roaming now for twenty five years

to find.

to be an artist is not what it used to be,

but any day we are free to walk away from ourselves

to get out of our own way

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

march 28 between raging and drizzling

spring is here
swollen rivers run
the rains come
hair tangles unbrushed for days
we are singing, dancing,
packaging maple buds in a little pouch
for the travelling times to come

still undrawn, the scars of surviving
carried through the winter
tattooed starry stomps
burning through sheets of mist

audrey
works at the general store
she is 23 or 24, or maybe 25 like me
big with her imminent baby
her husband was stabbed
in a bar in grants pass
in a fight
they got married this summer
he worked at the general store too

mud in the tracks of boots
our people are coming and coming

throw the rotten eggs in the fire
dance close until they break on your skin
releasing the death and decay that sat under your collarbones
the composting corpses between your toes
the slime unwiped behind your heart
(all these things aren't real until they are, and maybe you fake it till you make it and then it is really gone, really)

out with the story that
the things i see, the work to be done, that i will always be the one
doing and then receiving the accolades,
going to all the things, weaving all the knowing,

out with the story that
i can do it all right, that mistakes are failures,
that the paralysis of indecision would
ever be preferable
to the sulphurous splatter
the tear-stained peeling of the onion
breathing-into-the-stomach expansion of what i thought was possible

ready for new stories,
new-old stories,
old-new ways,
where they will come from i do not know
(we are enough)

they are coming and coming and
they are dancing, they are always dancing