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What is the Haptic Meisner Project?
The Haptic Meisner Project is a proposed practice methodology culminating in a performance art series.
Imagined in public spaces with participants from local communities, this socially engaged practice intervenes on the intersection of dance, truth, and sit-in forms of protest.
Research Questions
01. How does Meisner Technique and haptic embodiment strategies shuffle orders of power?
02. What does that shuffling produce/choreograph in terms of bodies, relationships, and archives?
03. Which bodies does society mandate to absorb the most risk?
The Practice
01
Body Scanning
Awareness. Arrival. Attunement.
02
Engagement
Focusing the body on arriving energetically to the practice
03
Meisner 01
Perform the most basic level of Meisner technique with physical observations
04
Meisner 02
Differentiate between "you" and "I"
05
Meisner 03
Graduate observations from the physical, introduce risk
06
Physical Response
Add your body to your verbal response while continually graduating observations
07
Haptic Response
Hapticly respond to your environment, introduce sensation and manipulation of objects into "the call"
08
Repetition
Graduate to introduce the looper, performing call's, repeating call's, creating an archive through blurring bodies and positions.
Sit-in Protest
& World Building
How is the practice taken into the world in a socially engaged context?
Sit-in Protests:
intended as a form of nonviolent protest which disrupts ability to work
Sitting as a durational performance:
sitting as a durational act performed by much of our modern day workforce.
Rivera-Servera opens up the possibility of world-building through dance in his work, Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics, where he “pursues the generative world-making power of performance”
(Rivera-Servera, 2012, p. 18).
This project defines ‘socially engaged’ as “[signifying] an interest in explicit forms of political change”
(Jackson, 2011, p.14).
The Meisner Project is a sit-ing practice that mimics bodies at work, but is inherently a performance which acknowledges the body as political through disobedience.
Intructions
01
Find a partner
If there is a trio take a turn observing
02
Begin by just making "you" and "I" statements
Example: "You're sitting" "I'm sitting"
03
Repetition
Repeat until someone makes a new call.
If you would like to stay in the loop and follow this artists journey into her PhD examining corporeal paradox and the conditions of self-actualization in women through artistic practice, subscribe below!
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