montréal QC 2013

Stem cells. Endless Potentiality. Mirror Neurons. Electricity. Yoga. Yoke.

My body vibrating with others. With the people I meet. With the dances I watch. With the children playing next doors.

The change of temperature like the change of seasons can be radical.

The voltage rising in early spring makes old machines explode, but with the right conductors and transformers, it regenerates you.

My body is dependent on others to regenerate itself, but also to ground itself, to become what it already is: endless potentiality.

Appreciating Peter’s compliment on my hairdo, I will still have a haircut. And maybe afterwards it will sparkle.

Re-membering white underwear burning in an electric chandelier or a rock being dropped on a copper plate with a body underneath.

Resistance and endurance.

Lin giving herself the task of seeing how far she can go exhausting one track… We might have to organize a 24 hours session for that.

 

The day started with some simple, but basic questions hidden behind the stories:

And it ended with a longue journey, creating this one perfect, still image, that was repeated twice.

The craft of securing things, so that your partners can take more risks.

The shadow of a messy table becoming an amazing landscape.

We all like to share stories about our grandparents. The once about our parents are harder to reveal.

And there is always a point towards the end where you want someone else to untie you or cut you free.

To knot yourself free!

 

Peter: “Knots are emotional.”

Lin: “And now it is gone, don’t you love that!”

 

To reveal. To unveil. To hide.

To follow your dreams.

To embellish. To narrate.

To lie. To walk through open doors.

To live with a coyote.

To be a sculpture, emerging.

To draw with water your shadows.

To be a sloth. To love to be a sloth.

To want to fly. To jump down on paper.

To secure yourself as a witness.

To write.

To open your bag.

To be not ashamed.

To ask for help.

 

Michael: “It was a lot about feet today.”

Lin: “It is like camping, isn’t it?”

 

A lot of Peter’s propositions this week where about ‘space’. Refinding and re-membering the strong connection of the practice with the actual, physical spaces we work in. The space as fourth partner, turning the triangle into a quadrant or a circle.

Today Peter invited us in his space in Griffin Town, a large shed built in the form of a triangle against the wall of the railway, which in former times was used amongst others as coal storage and as a horses and carriage stable.

We felt inside a huge dome, the hull of a ship, a huge oil tanker.

A lot of the physical actions and the imaginary was about climbing stairs to a place on the wall high up with no door to enter or exit through; to fly, like the huge metal bird in the middle of the space, made of wire and old rusted pipes from which cobweb was dripping; trains falling from the sky;…

We continued to re-member our ancestors and explore fragments of new science and we measured time in distances.

The space was polluted, so we aired it, with the smell of grinded coffee grains.

I glided down an avalanche of white paper shreds and invented a personal story, I actually had recently seen in a film.

We wore blue overalls and there was a real sense of the practice being ‘work’, constructing and deconstructing. Or as Louise Bourgeois put it: “To do, to undo, to redo.”

Time condensed, passed more slowly and quickly at the same time.

 

We brought all the written residues of the past week back into the studio at St-Andre and performed the practice for a generous audience of friends and colleagues.

I was very tired, even exhausted, but the practice – the physical contact with Lin and Peter, did regenerate me. Like Spinoza’s statement how we need other bodies to regenerate our own, which I quoted form John Berger’s book, in conversation with Lin lying on the floor and watching through a huge paper telescope. Spinoza, the grinder of lenses.

Catherine and her 3 month old son Benjamin, where present through the email she sent to us both, revealing how both babies and travelling are great sources for stories, which connected magically to Peter’s story of his high school trip to Montreal with which the practice started and all the babies, born and unborn, that were omnipresent until the very end when Peter wrapped me in a huge paper pamper and cradled me while I read another fragment of found text, torn to be revealed:

“… a small patch of light

   … falling sideways

        … with something

          … appears to this day in a

          … all manner of

            … incidence

            … way’s a story

                              is

              successful

                                    because

                      it disappears.”

                       

Guy Cools,

Montreal, May 2013