a movement and revisionary practice that uses Laban Movement exercises to investigate the experimental prose/poetry process
There is something about plopping and rolling in a pile of neatly raked leaves that is liberating: defiance in a season where the breath of desperation (of winter) is cold at your neck. We are fallen stars exploring space in the gesture of gather-scatter,1 limbs mimicking the twinkle lost in the expanding edges of harvest moons.
Sheila Packa embodies contraction-expansion [gather-scatter, fold-unfold, zoom-scan, exhale-inhale] as the words pulse from page to field to shoe to foot to leaf to page to word to sound to [ ]: her language wraps and releases delivering the reader into a landscape, a body, of story.
Somatic Lab #15 plays at the edge of revision and generation (fall and spring) by using movement to work through a text. Choose two texts: one that falls (or reaches) and one that floats (or arrives). These texts can be your own or borrowed. Rip the texts into leaf sized bits. INHALE: Place the pieces onto desired surface (table, floor, bed, lawn, valley, beach, parking lot, construction site, etc.). EXHALE: Scatter the pieces (blow, swipe, roll across, slide). INHALE: Gather the pieces (rake, scoop, stack, hook). Select two pieces
that call out to you and set aside. Repeat 5 times.
Use the leaf(lets) as found material to generate a new work. EXHALE: Write the connective tissue of the found pieces: the vein in leaf, the trace in pile.
1 A reference to describing movement in relation to space within
the kinesphere as applied in Laban Movement Analysis.
