october 9
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Monday, 11 July 2011
Meditations from the wall
In our Blossom day
primroses flowered open inside of me
flowering open my shoulders and levitating my arm
petal layers between my vertebra
In our Grasses night
A chunk of golden moon held in the leaves of the tree
becomes one eye of Green Man gazing back at me
A runner takes up one half of the tree
propelling forth from the trunk out over the tops of trees
Whilst above streaks and curves of fine cloud mist form
A swimmer streamlining across the night skies
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Monday, 30 May 2011
Flower CW
dive slowly
through mathematical structure of bracken glimpse of flowers
lined and bevilled by their edges
dive slowly
into tiny flowers close to earth
blue stars pulling me under
yellow suns
white
dive slowly
in a circle
head up
lean over
slow motion plunge
through mathematical structure of bracken glimpse of flowers
lined and bevilled by their edges
dive slowly
into tiny flowers close to earth
blue stars pulling me under
yellow suns
white
dive slowly
in a circle
head up
lean over
slow motion plunge
Thursday, 14 April 2011
Dancers in Landscape III: BLOSSOM
Blossom Schema, our plan of the day,
co-anchored by Jo Shapland and Clare Whistler.
You might like to zoom into these images for details...
Clare and I made paper blossoms, with words enclosed in their ‘stamen’ – for a ritual in which we dressed a budding tree, an offering to this beautiful place, to nature in a wider context… each of us 'picked' a blossom with word 'stamen' to take into the rest of our day...
Blossom:
flower from the root.
blow into the eye of the sky…
documentation of my improvisation,
I say I danced with a wild pear tree
Blossoms fall, creativity released...
and I made a small animation, wild pear
Monday, 4 April 2011
Blossom April 3 remembrances
a tiny blossom tree papered in explanations
visiting the barn today drifts of yesterday's dancing people the empty landscape
Yumino in rasberry tragic heroine of the open skies, pond and tree
B transforming inwardly into primrose, petal, bird
Laura a miniature history of geographical change laid out in a pig pen, anchored with a dark earthing
Sophia traveling through, lilting, backing and forthing, body catching a living rhythm, blossoming with the field
Maggie a dark figure standing in straight trees, strong and still
a glorious run across an open field suddenly written on the edge
clare a youthful door opening and shutting like blossom, bee, wasp and wasp nest skirt
jo blossom of wild pear tree
drifting of paper tongue in wind
louise listening, watching, gently being there
visiting the barn today drifts of yesterday's dancing people the empty landscape
Yumino in rasberry tragic heroine of the open skies, pond and tree
B transforming inwardly into primrose, petal, bird
Laura a miniature history of geographical change laid out in a pig pen, anchored with a dark earthing
Sophia traveling through, lilting, backing and forthing, body catching a living rhythm, blossoming with the field
Maggie a dark figure standing in straight trees, strong and still
a glorious run across an open field suddenly written on the edge
clare a youthful door opening and shutting like blossom, bee, wasp and wasp nest skirt
jo blossom of wild pear tree
drifting of paper tongue in wind
louise listening, watching, gently being there
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
embryology talk
This story starts just after conception.
From Conception to Birth
by Alexander Tsiaras
For the first 3 or 4 days the egg divides, roughly once a day slowing, gathering into a tightly compacted sphere. Within a week it burrows into the lining of the uterus, which after initially swelling to engulf the embryo to dispose of it, suddenly turns receptive, it releases a starch upon which the embryo gorges itself and starts to grow at astonishing speed, doubling daily in size.
A few days after implantation the balled-up cells begin to rearrange and move - migrate. With magnificent speed and co-ordination, sheets of cells stream past each other, some migrating inward, others out, some up, some down - until 3 layers emerge - inner, middle and outer.
Once these layers are established, the cells interact rapidly with each other, rearranging themselves gradually into the complex communities we call organs. Like origami, not in one step, but by folding and pinching and refolding, then refolding again and again, it’s possible to make ever more refined and complex shapes.
It takes just 3 - 6 weeks to lay down the basic body plan. Still less than one-tenth of an inch the round ball of cells curls into a C-shape, a tiny comma. A groove has formed along the length of the back and it closes into a tube. Long stringy cells bundle to form nerves, which connect through the tube to the bulge at the top of the comma. A circulatory system unfolds. Another tube of new highly elastic cells takes shape with the remarkable ability to contract and release. Within 3 weeks from conception they have twisted into an S-shaped loop and have started pumping cells filled with oxygen and nutrients to every other tissue in the body. A heart begins to beat.
Folding and refolding happens everywhere, apace. At 6-7 weeks small bulges morph into limb buds, the head grows swiftly, eye pits deepen, the nasal region expands , the upper limb forms, finger rays appear and nipples.
And then, at about 8 weeks, just as quickly as it all began, the furious shuffling of cells stops. In form the embryo is complete, it is now a fetus.
From the Speech of the Embryo
by Jaap van der Wal
The embryo may be considered as a continuous whole or complete self organized being that seems to fall apart into its bodily constituents and organs. The embryo is maintaining order or centering this process. A kind of tree of cells, tissues and organs can be described which originate out of each other and gradually come to a distinction between each other.
So a fertilized human egg is not just a cell, it represents an organism: it is a complete manifestation of the human organism at that very moment, under the circumstances and environmental conditions that exist one day after conception. Like every living being the human embryo is in every phase of development a coherent whole, a unity of form, shape and function interacting with its environment. It is always itself.
DNA or genes may be considered as the clay for the modeling hands to do their modeling work. Neither the clay nor the hands can come to form on their own. The form and the shape can only come into appearance in the interaction between both conditions. In this way the human embryo is not caused by the genome and environmental factors, it comes into appearance (to manifestation) thanks to these both conditions.
An embryo does not yet, like an adult, have a form that functions, but that the embryo still functions in forms, in growing and changing forms and shapes. It is process in motion.
As an adult human we express ourselves by means of our body: the world is our aim and the body is the instrument for this purpose. The embryo on the other hand still impresses (imprints) itself into a bodily organization. The action, the performance is directed towards itself, inward. An orientation from beyond to here, from periphery to center may be seen in the embryo.
At the end of the first week of embryonic development the entity of the embryo, which at that moment is represented by a small sphere-shaped organism consisting of a few genetically identical cells, is divided. It differentiates into two populations of cells, into a duality. During the first days of development the embryo is divided, split up into a number of smaller cells as if the embryo falls apart into cells. Around the sixth day after conception the embryo is a small vesicle fallen apart into an outer mantle of some hundred cells with fluid within, and into a center or nucleus of only 6 to 8 cells. From that moment on a human organism consists of a peripheral body (mantle body) – and a central body, the body that will become our actual body at birth.
Of course those two bodies will change and metamorphose thoroughly but the duality, stays present and is discernible during our whole prenatal life. The processes in the embryo go from outside to inside. For example in the second and third week from this outer body a stream of blood and nourishment has to be developed in order to assure the existence of the central body. The first appearance of a heart represents the center of this whole entity at that moment. A dangerous threshold has to be taken between the second and third week: the embryo comes from a more peripheral existence to an existence in the center. It so to speak comes more to earth. It is incarnating deeper into the body. Is the whole of embryonic development a process of incarnation, an en-velopment? The dynamics of the embryo show us that the central body is coming forth out of the peripheral body. It emancipates from it in a process of gaining independency.
Monday, 7 February 2011
Unfolding Sharply
Along a horizontal tree, mossed and mushed by deer
I lay stretched out on bundled brown leaves
balancing along it, arms out, a sticky branch arrowed my heart
a moment of conception
looking up broken bare branches reached like bursting cells
swinging to a branch I dangled and feeling my knees bend and body long
became the comma
reaching through the twisting branches held by ribs I floated legs and arms
outstretched
held in a birthing tree
between here and there
seeing the snowdrops
( following Bee's presentation)
I lay stretched out on bundled brown leaves
balancing along it, arms out, a sticky branch arrowed my heart
a moment of conception
looking up broken bare branches reached like bursting cells
swinging to a branch I dangled and feeling my knees bend and body long
became the comma
reaching through the twisting branches held by ribs I floated legs and arms
outstretched
held in a birthing tree
between here and there
seeing the snowdrops
( following Bee's presentation)
Dancers in Landscape Vision
Dancers In Landscape
Network
'my way is not to imitate outward forms of nature, nor use nature as a backdrop, but attempt to reach into the deepest places inside myself that emphasise and empathise with its basic processes.' Anna Halprin
A core group of dancers across East Sussex have created a network/collective to further work in the natural landscape. It comes out of an instinctive desire to dance in community, responding to, and relating with, the earth. We are looking for a deep ecology of moving, listening and witnessing our natural environment through the body.
The work is a creative sourcing that brings resonance to our separate work as independent makers.
…our vision is partial, fleeting, mutable , and transformative. We get, at most , a glimpse now and then of a body at home in the soft lap of the earth, one foot in a puddle and one in a dream…. Barbara Hurd
We welcome hearing from anyone who would be interested in knowing more about the network
Maggie Harvey & Clare Whistler Co-Anchors
www.clarewhistler.co.uk for email & DIL blog
Network
'my way is not to imitate outward forms of nature, nor use nature as a backdrop, but attempt to reach into the deepest places inside myself that emphasise and empathise with its basic processes.' Anna Halprin
A core group of dancers across East Sussex have created a network/collective to further work in the natural landscape. It comes out of an instinctive desire to dance in community, responding to, and relating with, the earth. We are looking for a deep ecology of moving, listening and witnessing our natural environment through the body.
The work is a creative sourcing that brings resonance to our separate work as independent makers.
…our vision is partial, fleeting, mutable , and transformative. We get, at most , a glimpse now and then of a body at home in the soft lap of the earth, one foot in a puddle and one in a dream…. Barbara Hurd
We welcome hearing from anyone who would be interested in knowing more about the network
Maggie Harvey & Clare Whistler Co-Anchors
www.clarewhistler.co.uk for email & DIL blog
Outline
Germinating Seeds
Dancers in Landscape 2
Feb 6 2011
Underground, first impulses, a tiny shoot, foetal
Walk to first meadow, pick seed quotes out of envelope, silent & singular meadow, then pair up. Walk to barn combining seed quotes ( if weather ok and not too muddy go top field way)
In Barn
B Unfolding talk
All to go off to create individual 'unfolding solo'.
Go around and watch each other
lunch
Seed talk
Structured improvisation working together
working with paper to create shapes to bury like seeds
photos of the shapes
writing, writing in mud
Walk back
Tea
Talk about blog Raphael
Dates/Updates
Germinating Seeds
Dancers in Landscape 2
Feb 6 2011
Underground, first impulses, a tiny shoot, foetal
Walk to first meadow, pick seed quotes out of envelope, silent & singular meadow, then pair up. Walk to barn combining seed quotes ( if weather ok and not too muddy go top field way)
In Barn
B Unfolding talk
All to go off to create individual 'unfolding solo'.
Go around and watch each other
lunch
Seed talk
Structured improvisation working together
working with paper to create shapes to bury like seeds
photos of the shapes
writing, writing in mud
Walk back
Tea
Talk about blog Raphael
Dates/Updates
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Fierce Energy
germination
Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn!
You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!
Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay!
George Bernard Shaw
Germination begins when a seed imbibes water, which initially causes swelling and then embryo growth.
An Orchard Invisible A Natural History of Seeds Jonathan Silvertown
germination
Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn!
You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!
Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay!
George Bernard Shaw
Germination begins when a seed imbibes water, which initially causes swelling and then embryo growth.
An Orchard Invisible A Natural History of Seeds Jonathan Silvertown
Excerts from poems by Mary Oliver about seeds
But the seed has been planted, and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin
its leaf green breathing?
for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles
dazzling as the teeth of mice
but black
filling the face of every flower
Never in my life
had I felt so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began
Their bright faces
which follow the sun will listen,
and all those rows of seeds -
each one a new life!
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I made friends with the creatures nearby , they flowed through the fields and under the tent wall, or padded through the door, grinning through their many teeth, look for seed, suet, sugar
that now is nowhere except underfoot
mouldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries- roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water
we did not hear, beneath our lives
the old walls falling out of true,
foundations shifting in the dark
when seedlings blossomed in the eaves,
In my hands, I will see the holy seeds
and a sweetness will rise up from these petal-bundles
so heavy I must close my eyes to take it in
and I hope you too will pause to admire the slender trunk, the leaves, the holy seeds, the ground they grow from year after year with striving and patience
its leaf green breathing?
for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles
dazzling as the teeth of mice
but black
filling the face of every flower
Never in my life
had I felt so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began
Their bright faces
which follow the sun will listen,
and all those rows of seeds -
each one a new life!
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I made friends with the creatures nearby , they flowed through the fields and under the tent wall, or padded through the door, grinning through their many teeth, look for seed, suet, sugar
that now is nowhere except underfoot
mouldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries- roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water
we did not hear, beneath our lives
the old walls falling out of true,
foundations shifting in the dark
when seedlings blossomed in the eaves,
In my hands, I will see the holy seeds
and a sweetness will rise up from these petal-bundles
so heavy I must close my eyes to take it in
and I hope you too will pause to admire the slender trunk, the leaves, the holy seeds, the ground they grow from year after year with striving and patience
Monday, 17 January 2011
January 17th
Our vision is partial, fleeting, mutable , and transformative. To live as if our view is permanent and stable is to cling to what is inherently elusive, to exhaust ourselves trying to cleave to what ripples away, drips off the willows, is pierced by the hollow stems of reeds. We get, at most, a glimpse now and then of the body at home in the soft lap of the earth, one foot in a seephole and one in a dream.
Barbara Hurd
Barbara Hurd
Sunday, 16 January 2011
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