This past week, I went to a workshop at 2727 California Street run by Audrey Johnson, a Detroit-based dancer I met via a friend.
Audrey's guidance in the workshop was poetic, and I know that she is thinking and working around how language and movement can blend. Mostly, she asked questions and implored us to respond through movement. I was reminded of Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood—150 pages of pure, rapid-fire questions. Reading the Interrogative Mood is a bit difficult: if you start to skim and read the questions just as words, you lose the nuanced patterns throughout; if you endure each question, each page can take a half hour. I didn't think of it at the time, but I may have been channeling such when I made my list of questions on pedagogy (see Gnamma #7).
It's hard to find meaningful questions for anything, and I find some appeal in this "brute force" approach as a place to begin. (Audrey's queries weren't a deluge: they were nuanced and fairly structured sequentially.) Remember your teachers saying, I hope, that "there's no such thing as a stupid question?" I believe in the adage because any question is a starting point, to build momentum and comfort in exploring answers.
Reframing thoughts as questions can help suspend logical thinking, too, if you're seeking a divergent mode. My former coworker Lindsey once posed the question, "[can you] walk without sharp edges?"
If I read the words "a walk without sharp edges," my gut response would to think about what in the world that could mean, or if it makes sense. Posed as a question, however, I felt the idea entered the room more softly, with a suspension of disbelief.
The imagined action presses into reality. (This mode of thinking could be framed through Fluxus.) I left the workshop with my body warm and mind reeling from the scope of what felt possible as I followed the questions posed and responses I explored.
Audrey's guidance in the workshop was poetic, and I know that she is thinking and working around how language and movement can blend. Mostly, she asked questions and implored us to respond through movement. I was reminded of Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood—150 pages of pure, rapid-fire questions. Reading the Interrogative Mood is a bit difficult: if you start to skim and read the questions just as words, you lose the nuanced patterns throughout; if you endure each question, each page can take a half hour. I didn't think of it at the time, but I may have been channeling such when I made my list of questions on pedagogy (see Gnamma #7).
It's hard to find meaningful questions for anything, and I find some appeal in this "brute force" approach as a place to begin. (Audrey's queries weren't a deluge: they were nuanced and fairly structured sequentially.) Remember your teachers saying, I hope, that "there's no such thing as a stupid question?" I believe in the adage because any question is a starting point, to build momentum and comfort in exploring answers.
Reframing thoughts as questions can help suspend logical thinking, too, if you're seeking a divergent mode. My former coworker Lindsey once posed the question, "[can you] walk without sharp edges?"
If I read the words "a walk without sharp edges," my gut response would to think about what in the world that could mean, or if it makes sense. Posed as a question, however, I felt the idea entered the room more softly, with a suspension of disbelief.
(src)
The imagined action presses into reality. (This mode of thinking could be framed through Fluxus.) I left the workshop with my body warm and mind reeling from the scope of what felt possible as I followed the questions posed and responses I explored.
The semester is starting to wind down, forcing me into a convergent mode of working, which feels against-the-grain for my brain these days. As such, I'm feeling thankful for the spaces around me that are promoting expansion, questioning, movement.
Asking the stupid question,
Lukas
Asking the stupid question,
Lukas