Animal Body
ongoing embodied movement and performance research
Animal Body and Circe
Circe is a mythological character known for transforming men into pigs, she lives in exile on an island, new versions of her story narrate her life and her arrival to Aiaia. This landing is about a mythological body, that has a specific story written within itself, that carries with archetypes, paradigms, ways of seeing and been seen. It finds itself on an unknown territory, Aiaia. But the unknown today is not so far away beyond a horizon, through seas, on an inhabited island, but it is laying at our doorstep and the journey can be the street we walk every day to go to work for example.
Circe is also a listening body, a body that carefully attends to Aiaia nature in a continuous dialogue with itself and with its surroundings, learning to tune in with herself and her world.
What happens when we position ourselves in a way that we can be in constant relationship to the unknown and in tune with our surroundings?
Circe is also a witch, a shapeshifter known for transforming man into pigs. Pigs, according to James Hillman, are animals who bring us back to lower impulses that push us towards the very ground, to the mystery of materiality.
What does it mean? What lays behind this power? Why Circe wanted to transform men into animals? Perhaps there was a higher purpose in doing so, in letting the human body remembering its origins.
Animal Body
What does it mean to be an animal? It is not about imitating its form but about remembering our animal selves. It is “about becoming a two-legged animal, entirely part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us. It seeks a new way of speaking, one that enacts our inter-being with the earth rather than blinding us to it. A language that has a style of speech that opens our senses to the sensuous in all its multiform, strangeness.” David Abram
Becoming animal is the capacity to become present, all perceiving, ready to listen, ready to encounter the world without preconceptions or hierarchies. The human animal body moves and dialogue trough space, step by step, moment by moment, carefully attending the world that it encounters. Sensing its way through life in symbiosis and connection, awaking all parts of ourselves, physical and non, feeling our bodies as an agglomeration of sentient cells, moving and communicating with an unknown language as it arises from deep listening, a language made of invisible and inaudible matter, born from the gravitational force that regulates our worldly standing positions, a language born out of entities that collide towards each other.
How the world would look like if we were making decisions from our animal bodies?
In this animal state thinking can strive to practice curiosity and careful reflection, that no longer tears us out of the world of direct experience in order to represent it, but that binds us ever more into the thick of that world. This way of thinking is enacted as much by the body as by the mind, informed by the humid air and the soil and the quality of our breathing, by the intensity of our contact with the other bodies that surround”.
“What if thought is not born within the human skull, but is a creativity proper to the body as a whole”? What if the curious curve of thought is engendered by the difficult eros and tension between our flesh and the flesh of the earth?”Our minds and thinking might assume a different symbiotic quality, arising from every cell, in and out of our bodies, confronting us perhaps with new questions, new narratives and creations.
Animal Body Workshop
Berlin 2023
The workshop puts together different practices such as deep listening, embodied movement, vocalisation, free writing, drawing and dialogue as well as the use mythology to explore the animal body in relation to global environmental crisis. It is the springboard for devising a performance based on the Animal Body principles and can be adapted accordingly to the participants and the locality.
It is designed to be a journey in which participants will go through a series of embodied practices to deep listen, move and vocalise the tension between their flesh and the flesh of earth in all its complexity.
A conversation will follow to share images, sensations, feelings, questions raised from being in an animal state in the attempt to overcome the body/mind construct, connect more deeply with the constructed world and generate a different kind of thinking.
Animal Body workshop, Berlin, 2023