Day 15: rabbit hole

#15 Follow each chosen moment down a "rabbit hole". Don't sequence/combine. Call each "thing" something = name each. File for later.

For anyone who is keeping score, I took a few days off while I was on vacation in Portland, so the chosen items from days 13 (make a phrase) and 14 (simmer) have been on the back burner for awhile. I treated myself to an hour of studio space to jump back in today.

The first rabbit hole I ventured down was 1) the beginning movement on the knees with hands creeping slowly around. I started with the movement as I remembered it from the phrase and let it evolve from there. And it did move through a few different phases. The unifying element turned out to be the hands on the floor, carefully placed or sliding, feeling their way along. Maybe because this was the first moment I worked with and "rabbit hole" suggests a spiral, this "thing" also keeps winding around and around through the different iterations. Since there are several distinct vocabularies here, I gave each part of this thing it's own name:

"creeping circle", "dead shoulder", "twister"




The next rabbit hole started with this: "Viewed from the back: starting with elbows together, pinky fingers together, the hands separate and spread outwards becoming visible on either side of the head." I stayed anchored in one spot and focused on the back of my body. The original movement was symmetrical, and this became a longer study in symmetry. This ground has been well-trod by Jess Curtis in The Symmetry Project, of course. That didn't stop me! The prompt led where it led and this project seems like the perfect time to not despair about whether something has been done before. I could even view this like a scientist validating another scientist's results by reproducing the same experiment.

When I realized I was moving symmetrically - that that was where this particular rabbit hole led - I committed to it. And as I dropped in, I really felt the allure of symmetry. It's both familiar and not. It made me feel my movement initiation habits (I really want to pop one hip up, shift my ribs to the side, lean off balance). But it didn't feel too restricting for most of the 10 or so minutes I played with it. There was something deeply pleasing about moving symmetrically(ish), both in the doing and the watching.

"symmetry"



And my goodness, there is one more. All of that simmering boiled over. This rabbit hole began with "A hand in the opposite armpit being awkwardly pulled out against resistance". This one was hard to find. It kept getting stuck. I left it and did the symmetry thing above. I came back to it with something looser. Slapping, pushing, and pulling initiate most of the movement. It's kind of a lot of flailing. The video here is a bunch of very small fragments from that improvisation that I think might have the potential to be interesting.

"slap happy"