Realms

Talking through this project, research and a performance installation based on the Buddhist 9 Cemetery Reflections on the decomposition of a corpse, it’s become all the more clear how important realm-building is for this. A durational installation needs to have a logic that makes the audience feel comfortable to come through and interact. This to me is a realm.

I wish to manifest a whimsical realm of infinite resource. It’s somewhere I have been visiting for this project. I don’t know it fully. I’m getting to.

Here’s some visual cues that taste it.

- Zen Garden, raked and minimal.

-Erotica by Toshio Saeki ^

- Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern

Enrico David works in Italy’s three-person pavilion, Venice Biennial 2018

Henrique Oliveira, Bololo, wood, hardware, pigment, site specific installation (National Museum of African Art)

- Liu Wei, Microworld, 2018—a modernist fantasy hiding behind glass

“ My lift into my practicing world
Pink fuzzy exterior
Dirt floor
Pieces of fingers for lift buttons placed into the dirt wall
Sinking into the corner
Sinking into the dirt floor
Vines sinking down and surrounding me with nice smells
Pre-evening light
Naked and slight breeze on my skin
Shaved head but hair everywhere
Door opens onto a dirt path and it’s between forest and jungle
Sometimes dubstep rains down
And there’s food”

— Realm building exercise

- Artwork by Heather Phillipson (below) - Artwork by Dorothea Tanning ^

-These images from film Annihilation give the sense of the organic taking back over, in a surreal landscape encountered through expedition. When I came across this work I remember feeling like some of my creative realm had been articulated brilliantly. More information on the film and book it is based on http://collider.com/annihilation-movie-details/#book-changes

- In the wastelands of concrete lay lurking

[Sankai Juku are a Butoh dance group from Japan. Directed by JANE THORBURN for the Channel 4 Arts magazine programme ALTER IMAGE Produced by AFTER IMAGE in 1982 Filmed in the depths of Battersea Power Station before it was gutted.]

- Throwing your neck back and seeing full consciousness and its doughy textures

Other worlds

World building was a practice that felt really right. Building a realm for people to step into, with its own gravity, textures and sounds. I’ve been struggling to attach the 9 cemetery reflections to an aesthetic that’s not strictly religious Buddhist and world building is the way in.

Watching this, such a beautiful reference for world building, physics bending and dancing through all of it…

“and also where’s all the whimsy at? serious whimsy is what world-building is and I need to reflect on it more”

Free diver Guillaume Néry takes you on an underwater journey that will take your breath away. ➡ Get More Short Film Showcase: http://bit.ly/ShortFilmShowcase

Today I understood my wish to decompose, waking up

Today before waking, I pulled that moment between sleeping and waking over me just that little bit longer, reached out my eyelashes to feel it. I thought these words.

When I was a child, my face couldn’t fit my smile. It was wider than my cheeks, it would crease above my eyebrows. Life lasted forever, each moment lasted forever even and whatever happened in the present was my only truth. I wanted to touch everything, thing to myself of all the textures I had yet to feel, meaning I ran my hands over everything Weeding in the garden with my mother I’d put my hands into the compost pile and feel its heat. I’d look one way on the bus while walking past someone with a furry coat, so I could subtly run my hand over It the other way without notice. I was often to be found in a puddle, having stripped off all my clothes, laughing away at the fun of splashing around, and having discovered a swimming pool. What a delight! At 4 years old my father told me his body was changing, that this thing inside him that everyone had from when they were a baby in the womb grew. It wasn’t normal that it grew, and it was growing a lot in him. I can’t remember what he said after that, but I noticed stress, anger, tension and pain across my parents. His composite body changed its composition. Decomposing from one form and into another that had lots and lots of tumors and strange smells, liquids pouring out of places they shouldn’t, especially tears. Things went on composed as before but also not. The fun times didn’t feel like those infinity puddles, they seemed marked. The crying times seemed bizarre but were dwelled in a long time.  Over the years these waves pushed on, I didn’t play in puddles anymore but still found things to have fun in, at measured times in the week. Circus school. Chess club. Cooking with Mom on weekends. What a life!

A few years on and there wasn’t time for that. My life was settled in its composition of school where thoughts were stifled, there was no whimsical fun to be had, or it was to be had in contained allotments. There was a heavy air around all the time and that was normal. I was a carer, helping my father to decompose most comfortably. That whole thing, his body his mind, as well as my mothers – well it was all falling apart. It didn’t feel weird, it felt kind of noble. I could empathize to an extent, seeing parched lips knowing to give water, lending an ear when I wanted to sleep. But I couldn’t understand the pain. It seems like this death was ripping him in half. Screaming all the time. It was a time of study for me. I remarked to myself that this body, my body it’s all flesh all the time. And this is the way of the flesh. Standing, walking, sitting or laying down; it’s one thing for a while, an ecosystem within the earth’s, and its that same thing as it pours out of itself, returning to it.

When beginning this practice-based research project, I had one wish. I wished to decompose. It was strong, like the fabric of a dream, encasing my whimsies. They rolled its circumferences, licking its landscapes. It took a while to fully get why, I’ll think of it for much longer than one project.

Today before waking, in dream space I was surrounded by earth and it felt nice. I wanted to return to the earth. I saw it’s been too many years and I miss it. I feel far away from this my mother. I wanted to be inside the earth again, pour this flesh into it, and play in the puddle. I wanted to smell the heat and share it with people walking by. So I woke up, and practiced.

Butoh hug

- Dancing after facilitating the Butoh workshop for CCTH this Tuesday

Trying to work through ways of keeping those stomach convulsions which looks strong with a standing posture.

Thinking about community and participation

Just finished facilitating my fourth Butoh and meditation workshop, which I do with the carers at Carers Centre Tower Hamlets. They are an excellent group of people for me to learn all sorts from, and it’s beautiful to meet and share our skills and time. What always comes out from working with this group is the need for me-time. I try and facilitate this with body reflective practices such as a meditation body scan or allowing one body part to encounter another for the first time.

My intention with this practice-based research project on decomposition is to announce decomposition in all our bodies in a loving way. My workshop with CCTH today involved all things body, including a poem on all of its functions, as well as the reflection on the 32 parts. It announced the body processes and was a reflective process, but also was really loving. We keep it casual mostly and so can always reflect in real time on the effects of something and support each other in new discoveries. This is exactly the vibe I want to recreate for this decomposition project.

My score so far involved 9 stages [see below], and now the work is to score which one’s have these participatory elements which I can workshop.

I have also been considering the soil rituals that IntimateAnimals did in the events I produced at the Royal Albert Hall. Having a participatory soil walking element is key and I will want to introduce the type of reflections I used when I was in gammatan.

Furthermore I have continued by research with bubbles and think that as perhaps an ending to my durational participatory ritual I should have some collective bubble blowing. Ephemeralness and all that jazz. The plastic bubbles decay well over a few hours though so perhaps those would do well to be blown at the beginning.

New research points

Just coming back from watching ‘Water Makes us wet with Beth and Annie Sprinkles, thinking:

• filling condoms with water and leaving them in the ground looks like frog spawn, inspired by some Pocha Nostra work that filled a bathtub with this, very surreal. The material carried light well and if I filled the condoms first with a small object, they’d definitely look like things that

• love, love of the earth and Extinction Rebellion style prayers and thanks for the life giving force. Just like in how I lead my workshops, after a meditation exercise thanking the body for carrying us around and all of the help that is gives us

• having an educational element that’s bigger is going to be key for me, whether that’s

  • about green burial and what goes on there

  • ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ style facts on how divorced we are from the body and it’s decomposition through embalming, make up and other practices

  • biological facts

  • participatory walking ritual like how we did in my Royal Albert Hall events

Lots to think about but happy to be nailing down some material thoughts and practices!

Bag of bones

Bones breaking down as ligaments fall apart, holding myself up just through bone position. Enjoyed installing myself in the space and would like to explore this further. Enjoyed making a performance that was so slow, looking forward to seeing how this would work with duration.

Work in progress showing

Doing the dance of insects decomposing the body and them taking over

the thrown aside corpse. bloated, livid pus is flowing. being devoured by: various worms skeleton with flesh and blood fleshless skeleton with wet blood a skeleton with no flesh nor blood disconnected bones scattered a hand bone foot bone a shoulder bone bones bleached white bones heaped up bones rotted and crumbled to dust

Francesca Kamil here will perform a Butoh exploration of the second stage of the Nine Cemetery Reflections: being devoured, new life taking over the dead.

The Nine Cemetery Reflections are used in Buddhist meditation practice to curb lust through an honest look at the body as a body inside and out as it decomposes.

This performance takes place within the wider performance context of Butoh work which asks: what does it mean to ‘become something other?” How can we understand the body as not a fixed or separate entity, and instead surrender, listen, melt, breathe and move with the different pulses, energies and creatures which lie within? As we slow down we enter into geological time, the time of nature with the endless cycles of growth and decay. One conditioning the other.

The full dissertation performance will explore all Nine stages through movement, actions in a durational installation outside.

She is looking for feedback on the loving moments in the performance and how the audience would like to feel cared for when looking at the movement.

Thoughts on scoring before WIP showing

NINE CEMETERY REFLECTIONS

1. A few days dead, coming across the thrown aside corpse. Corpse is bloated, livid and pus is flowing.

⦁ compare this with your own body

⦁ our bodies are of the same nature

⦁ I am not exempt from that fate

REFLECTING WHILST NOT CLINIGNG TO ANYTHING IN THE WORLD

2. Come across this above corpse, being devoured by:

⦁ crows

⦁ hawks

⦁ vultures

⦁ dogs

⦁ jackals

⦁ various worms

3. Reduced to a skeleton with flesh and blood held to it with tendons

4. Reduced to a fleshless skeleton with wet blood on it and tendons

5. Reduced to a skeleton with no flesh nor blood, and tendons

6. Reduced to disconnected bones scattered in all directions

⦁ here a hand bone,

⦁ there a foot bone,

⦁ here a shin bone,

⦁ there a thigh bone,

⦁ here a hip bone,

⦁ there a back-bone,

⦁ here a rib-bone,

⦁ there a breast bone,

⦁ here an arm-bone,

⦁ there a shoulder bone,

⦁ here a neck bone,

⦁ there a jaw bone,

⦁ here a tooth,

⦁ there the skull…

7. Reduced to bones bleached white

8. Reduced to bones heaped up, more than a year old

9. Reduced to bones rotted and crumbled to dust.

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9 CEMETERY REFLECTIONS SCORE:

the thrown aside corpse.bloated, livid pus is flowing. , being devoured by:various worms skeleton with flesh and blood fleshless skeleton with wet blood a skeleton with no flesh nor blood disconnected bones scattered a hand bonefoot bone a shoulder bone bones bleached white bones heaped up bones rotted and crumbled to dust

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Notes on Dust Gets in Your Eyes:

⦁ To curb lust

⦁ detach from desire for permanence

1. distension

2. rupture

3. exidation of blood

4. putrifaction

5. discolopuration and dessication

6. consumption by animals and birds

7. dismemberment

8. bones

9. parched to dust

⦁ meditation could be internal, but often based around real things that were rotting and trips to the Charnel ground.

⦁ consistent exposure to dead bodies to remove trepidation around dead bodies

⦁ dead bodies have dissapeared from contemporary culture

⦁ decomposign bodies are needed to alieviate fear of death

⦁ what of the culture where the dead/rotting bodies are removed?

⦁ death denial: obsession with youth, detoxifying diets, anti-aging products: technoology and buildings creating divide between us and animals, alienating us from associating with their dead bodies which we see more often,

⦁ Green burial: body straight into ground in a biodegradable box, shooting atoms back into the universe to assist in new life, rock marking the place: VIVRE LA DECAY

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Free writing on thoughts for 5min perf tomorrow:

Green burial submerged in soil, audio or something playing that could narrate the reflections, OR have everyone crowded around me installation style and perform in the round. where to begin and where to end. how to incorporate actionism, and bubbles. bubbles and soil and the body. The rotting body discovered cast aside, how to encourage identification, maybe a big sign that says you on it, what about dirtying some pink fluff, the dross of every day existence, dirtied and no longer beautiful. It's for your own good F and others to relfect on the dead but am I dead or playing dead or playing decomposition or playing something altogether different which I don't know. It seems like the last, like it has this strnage vibe and there's this big thing that I can't quite place that si the whole frame. what to wear and what to think and how to show the self when it's sort of about there not being the self. Dancing the no-self, dancing the darkness, dancing the worms that animate the corpse. Dancing the Rick and Morty Episode where it's intergalactic TV and the dead cat ladies cats make her get good for some lovin and sampling that and then having a sound which sort of plays it out. The sound of crawling and tiching and maggots moving and flies, need to do the track for that. And what of making it a loving experience, decomposing lovingly HOW? to decompose is to fall apart, host life, scatter and erode into something so fine, it's just dust. Dust, dust is an important material- AND WHAT OF MY SKIN? I should use my laundry dust and use my skin. Do I have different stations and move between them? each one would have it's own setting and surrounding that would make it more identifyable what'a happening. And what actions to use anyways? Impossible actions meets Butoh or just Actionism? And where's the place for the audience and their own visualisations? WHERE IS THE SPACE FOR STILLNESS, how to guide or not guide this?

Jams experimenting with different Butoh Elements - Devising Process