“Togethering: Improvisation as a Practice of Care”
“Togethering” is a practice for all ages and abilities where we will explore movement and sound improvisation as community-engaged art activist practices. Come prepared to witness, play, and or move together.
In this hour-long practice, we will utilise improvisation scores as a method for inviting diverse publics into a rehearsal space as a mode of thinking together across differences. These scores allow us to engage in a practice where we work together without complying to sameness and allow us to reach toward and explore the creative returns of not knowing together. We will lead the participants through practices of leading and following. This practice awakens spontaneity, spatial awareness, and the cultivation of listening both to one’s internal environment (the body within) and to the ways bodies are always in shared spaces of reciprocal, interpersonal communication, with our environment and others.
Film: Becoming Walnut Tree, Becoming Forest (6 minutes)
Produced by Sweet Labour Art Collective
We don’t know what our bodies can do. What one can imagine the body can become. In this film, we guide you through an imaginary world and ask what our bodies, attentional practices and relations can become if we get interested in what Walnut Trees care about. Can becoming walnut trees, and therefore by extension becoming forests create new sensible worlds? What happens when we place Oneida modes of knowing, alongside emerging science studies on plant sentience? What is the relationship between the structures of colonization and imagination? How might this relation be re-made in more livable ways?
Bio:
The Sweet Labour Art Collective is a collaboration between artists from London, Ontario, and the Oneida Nation of the Thames. We have come together through complex world-making practices that include adoption, immigration, the forced removal of the Oneida people from their territory, dance events in London and the Six Nations of the Grand River, and migration relations between the Oneida of the Thames and the Soho neighborhood of London, Ontario. Our work explores and challenges the boundaries between humans and other beings, including toxic landscapes such as the Deshkan Ziibi (“Antler River”) that runs through the places where we live and create. As a collective, we engage with the friction and paradoxes of the colonial relations that brought us all together.