bodiverse

Bodiverse is Back!

2011-06-17T22:39:00.010-05:00

My Neuro Detour hasn't found its highway yet, and it's more likely I've become a POW of my own body, mind, and society's ignorance and bigotry... but that's for another time.

Along the Detour, I immediately lost my body and mind - my dance and my poetry - my entire universe, my bodiverse. They're still doing their own thing, but I've come to terms with the moment.

After a year without any creative outlet, I moved on from my project doodles and sketches to painting and collage and cane designing - when I could. And eventually, I accepted the encephalytic, TM, MS, RSD brain of mine as it was and allowed it to find its own creative voice. It was absolutely pointless to try to write and read and speak like I did pre-Neuro.

Every day, or minute, or let's stick with the concpt of moments , my body speaks a new language, moves (stumbles, falls, or lays bed-ridden) with such improvisation, I don't recognize myself most of the time. The closest I come to dancing is cane dancing, vertigo, and my falls - no longer choreographed. Even my bones speak a new language - aged and brittle with Osteoperosis and Osteopenia from repetitive treatments like IV steroids, meds, and the disease processes - don't ask me how.

There's a lot of verse left in this body - broken and fragmented as it is.

And, until recently all of that verse has been exposed on paper as experiential imagery or writings of all sorts and styles.

Surprisingly, people liked my art, and even bought it, and that's how we come full circle here. And I hope to stay, and come back - as frequently as my body and mind allow.

But for now....

BODIVERSE IS REVIVED!

Thanks to James Oliver Gallery, a new outlet of the bodiverse project - in the form of a 35-minute non-video-art-video-art work, Bodiverse for James Oliver Gallery (I), premieres tommorrow (Saturday, June 18, 6-10PM) in the JOG FEMME show.

I've posted details about the show on Neuro Detour.... I'm writing blindly here (need my treatment). So, I'll make this short and throw in an image, and keep you updated on how things go.

I've missed you bodiverse,
Melanie

Epic Body Failure: Diseased Body Announcement

2008-10-12T23:20:00.004-05:00

This blog is going to be taking a detour for quite some time. Ironically, because my body has failed me. We both plan to return.

In the meantime, please research Transverse Myelitis, and consider advocating for medical research for rare diseases and better accessibility in your city, as well as donating plasma.

Thank you,
Melanie

Live Bodiverse Revisited

2008-04-14T12:43:00.000-05:00

Something for the Vault

2008-02-17T01:00:00.001-05:00

It's not exactly verse or movement, but I'm certain there's inspiration to be found in this recent quote from Dolly Parton:

"They do seem like public property in a way. They served me well – I don't know if I'm supporting them or they're supporting me."

– Dolly Parton, on her breasts, to Ladies' Home Journal

Live Bodiverse Non-Performance

2007-12-04T18:59:00.000-05:00

This is a rough edit of the documentation of the Live Bodiverse Non-performance from 10/28.

Movement, Text, & Voice Recording: Melanie Miller
Live Music: Manfred Fischbeck
Video: Mathew Davis
Body Writings: Megan Bridge, Angela C. Gilberto, Brian Mawser, Jeff Carter, Erika Twining, Ashley Wood, Michael Balotti, Cheryl Carson, Nan Greis, Drew Greis, Lois Welk, Terry Fox

Collaborative Text 10.28.07

2007-12-03T23:13:00.000-05:00

Bring your hands here,
a rendezvous with sun
& spine, your fingers mingling as buttons & holes.

We include our impulses in everything,
tucking into envelopes & contracts
glued to our heart.

When you said you had
a "bitchin" time, your tongue
persevered longer than our
joints, which moved in solar & lunar opposition.

This is what we call
empowerment, age seeping
into solar plexus, hands,
spine, joints, then heart.

This text was written in less than 10 minutes using the 17 words that were written on my body as part of the 10/28 interactive live Bodiverse event at the Meetinghouse Theater in Philadelphia.

A Bit About the Live Bodiverse Non-Performance, The Audience Experience, & 1 Short Video

2007-12-03T10:14:00.000-05:00

Each Live Bodiverse Non-Performance was created in collaboration with the audience and "performed" and documented in collaboration with Manfred Fischbeck (Music Improvisation), Mathew Davis (Video), and Sayaka Ueda (Photography).

Prior to entering the theater, audience members received the following:

1. A program
2. A release form
3. A description of Bodiverse and their participation in it

Here's part of what the audience read:

FRONT:

Bodiverse: Interactive Process
http://bodiverse.blogspot.com

This is not a performance.
This is a living process.
“The Body is one’s BEING. The Body is the poem.
The Body is the epic of life, and if I can actually transform
the poem into Body and the Body into poem, I will have found my
‘something that’s big enough to fit it all in’."
Ongoing interaction with body, language, space, time, you.
“The body, as a map, provides direction,
and at the same time its complexity
and multi-dimensionality distorts and distracts.”
Please participate.

Participate…

the thought:
1. How and where do you experience yourself in your body?

2. E.g., what is free, contrived, controlled, contradicted within your body?

the action:
3. Write that into one word anywhere on my body.

4. Choose your word and physical location carefully. Please make it legible.

the experience:
5. Your experience as body language will inform this process.

6. It will direct my movement.

7. The language of my movement will represent the conglomeration of experience in this room.

the result:
8. Read the back of this page to learn about what will evolve from tonight’s process.

BACK:

Our Process:

1. You write your experience into my body. This is where tonight's process begins. But in reality, it began when you began. You are bringing your life into this moment. This process will be videotaped (by Mathew Davis) and photographed (by Sayaka Ueda). Please make certain you have filled out a release form if you participate.

2. While the other artists are presenting their work, Melanie Miller will be in the Kumquat Dance Center office crafting your text into a poem or drawing or both and then recording it with a tiny voice-recording device. Both the act of repositioning your text and recording it are "performed" as improvisational actions. This recording will be played during the live process, adding a further layer of influence.

3. Mat will be editing and rendering the video of your entrance, or the writing of your experience onto my body. This video will be projected into the space, also adding another layer of influence.

4. Your words, as they are written on my body, will create/direct my body into motion. This improvisational response should be a sincere interaction between the physical self and the emotional and intellectual self.

5. During the live process, Manfred Fischbeck will respond to all of these improvisational happenings with music improvisation. This is the first time that music has been including in Bodiverse. This is also our first collaboration.

6. The live movement process, which reflects all the processes that led to this moment, will be videotaped with two cameras.

7. Mat and Melanie will co-edit the final work, which will also incorporate Sayaka's photography. The act of editing is improvisational composition and will be created with the same intention as tonight's process.

8. The final process piece(s) will be posted at http://bodiverse.blogspot.com. Please visit the blog and continue the conversation however you like—with text, a video response, a visual response, etc.

9. You will be listed as collaborators. Your names will be collected from the release forms.

10. Thank you for your participation in this process. If you would like to continue your involvement in Bodiverse or Junction Dance Theatre’s other interactive movement projects, please e-mail jdt@junctiondancetheatre.org.

***

Here's a video clip of what the audience experienced when they first entered the theater:

The body writing lasted 10-20 minutes each night. And each night the audience interpreted their interaction differently. It's evident just by the words they chose:

10/27

power
being
rejoice
bicep
hope
bizarre
temptation
core
breathe
flowing
construct
in between
shame
internal
one
tender
woven
constricted
banana

10/28

my heart
joints
move
button
persevere
hands
rendevous
solar
plexus
impulse
empower
bitchin'
spine
hands
be
include
envelope
joints

The word banana from the first night was written by a stuffed monkey.

This performance was the first time other people, most of whom I had never met before, wrote on me. I actually found the experience to be more comfortable with strangers. The moment of writing created a relationship between us, literally between us; not necessarily between two people but amongst air and cells and intention and meaning. And that relationship was colored by our interaction, the way they stood around me, how they held the marker, the pressure with which they applied their words, their level of comfort. Some people began writing immediately while others stood and contemplated where and how. With the people I knew, it altered our relationship at that moment in time.

Discussing the Live Process at a Tech Rehearsal in a Very Cold Blackbox: 3 Clips

2007-12-02T17:46:00.000-05:00

On October 27 and 28, I presented the first interactive Bodiverse process in Speil Uhr, a performance featuring dance and video works by emerging and established choreographers. The posts over the next few weeks will show the process and results--from the tech rehearsal to the non-performance to the final, or rather semi-final, film. Here are three clips of a tech rehearsal discussion with other Bodiverse collaborators and fellow Spiel Uhr performers.

Pictured: Melanie Miller, Manfred Fischbeck (Bodiverse Musician & Group Motion Artistic Director)

Speaking: Manfred Fischbeck, Melanie Miller, Matt Sharp(Lighting Designer), Dancers

Video: Mathew Davis

Live Interactive Process (NOT Performance) 10.27 & 10.27, 8PM, Philadelphia, PA

2007-10-21T17:25:00.000-05:00

Spiel Uhr Series:
Saturday, October 27 & 28, 2007, 8:00pm
The Meetinghouse Theater/CEC
3500 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, 19104 (University City District)
Tickets: $10-$15. Available here or by calling 215-387-9895

Group Motion proudly presents The Spiel Uhr Series, Group Motion’s forum for presenting new work by local artists. The evening’s work boasts five new pieces created by Group Motion Company dancers and visiting artists in a lineup that includes established and emerging choreographers in the Philadelphia Dance Community. Artists presented: Melanie Miller, John Luna, Molly Root, Rachel Slater, and Zachary Svoboda.

ABOUT BODIVERSE: LIVE INTERACTIVE PROCESS
The next Bodiverse piece will be created in a live-process-non-performance in collaboration with Melanie Miller (movement, text), Mathew Davis (video), Sayaka Ueda (photography), Manfred Fischbeck (music), and the audience (co-writers) of Spiel Uhr.

Audiences will write their experience onto Melanie's body as they enter the theater. In less than 1 hour a poem of the "body language" will be written, recorded, and rendered; a video will be edited and rendered; and a live process of all of these processes will be improvised by Melanie and Manfred, recorded by Mat and photographed by Sayaka. The final piece(s) will include all of the collaborating artists work and will be presented on this Web site by December 1.

Writings on Bodies IV

2007-04-27T08:16:00.000-05:00

Bend

2007-04-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

Writings on Bodies III

2007-04-24T08:15:00.000-05:00

Writings on Bodies II

2007-04-24T08:14:00.000-05:00

Hand II: Touch Through The Lens

2007-04-23T13:28:00.000-05:00

Raw Footage 2: Movement Day 1

2007-04-23T13:21:00.001-05:00

Raw Footage 1: Movement Day 1

2007-04-23T13:19:00.000-05:00

Documentary Photography: 4.1.07-4.15.07

2007-04-23T10:37:00.000-05:00

Photographer: Sayaka Ueda

Some of these photographs were color-enhanced by Sayaka. Some have been or will be included in the video poems.

I almost didn't include the color-enhanced photos in this slide show because they heighten the reddish mottling of my skin, which is called Livedo Reticularis. This imperfection embarasses me. It is, of course, just a physical imperfection, and should not trump emotional and mental imperfections. So, I must admit that I am embarassed that I am embarassed by a physical imperfection, which has become an emotional-mental imperfection in that I am vainly embarassed by its existence in all realms of imperfection.

Including the color-enhanced photographs is my attempt at overcoming body-censoring, an act, which I define at the moment as: censoring one's own perception, reception, expression, or representation of one's own or another's body.

From health-cares.net:

Livedo reticularis is a blue-reddish skin discoloration and most often localized in the lower extremities. The pathological mechanism of this is poorly understood. Probably it is related to the peripheral blood flow redistribution. Livedo reticularis mostly represents an idiopathic condition but may be associated with systemic diseases.

Letter of Process

2007-04-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

The body—our bodies, other bodies, my body—is a reference book for living into the past, present, and future. It is the map of life—our lives, other lives, my life. It is both an example and a symbol of nature and nurture. It straddles the sciences. It negotiates space and time. It communicates and interprets. It is historically accurate. It is an essay on cultural ethics, gender politics, ecology, family, architecture, gerontology, comparative religion, education, sexual revolution, work ethics, and class. It is mystical and explainable. It is form and content. It is predictable and irregular. It is layered. It is taken for granted. It is worshipped and adored. It presents us to the world. I have a mild obsession with the human body.

My parents put me in dance class when I was three. I recall that early experience as: step, touch, step, touch, clap, clap, stomp. Whether or not those memories evolved from the experience, photographs, or my later work as a teacher of movement, it set me on a kinesthetic path.

My child and adult life is recorded in terms of the body. My work has been physical, in that it has been “of the body”: professional dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, waitress, bartender, cleaning woman, hoagie maker, etc. For me, writing is a channeling of experience via the body, and this could be taken to mean body experience or experience as understood by the body or experience channeled from mind through the body to the page, and all would be correct and some would probably be unaccounted for.

While living in Berlin in 1997, I had the clear realization that my life experiences, both good and bad, were stored in my body. The signal: injury. The response: ten sessions of Rolfing. The result: still injured, but I began my secondary inquiry into the body’s mind and the structural integration of bones, ligaments, fascia, memory, and experience.

On February 8, 2007, I defined what I knew about the external world. Stripped to its essence, this piece of writing pointed to how I processed that world via the body:

I know about bones and muscles, connective tissue and fascia. How the body knows more than the mind. It processes relationships better than people ever can.

I know how to dance and how to dance and not think about dancing or death or hate or the dirt under the refrigerator. I also know how to dance and think about alignment and technique and height and weight and lightness and creasing into another body and supporting.

I know the floor is support. I have practiced falling inside and outside on Marley and pavement.

So, in creating this investigative project, it seemed clear that my obsession with the body, my constant return to the internal world of connective tissue and fascia and its external world of gesture and feeling, was saying, continue moving, continue writing, continue seeing and watching, continue thinking and sleeping, continue touching and feeling, but continue in a new way.

I could read as much fact, fiction, or sci-fi that I could or will find about the human body, and I have and will read as much as I have or will have time for or mental ability to process. But in order to understand it, I need to send that information, whatever information my mind retains either voluntarily or involuntarily, into the body itself. And I need to push my ways of processing before and after that channeling.

So, with no ability to draw or understanding of drawing techniques, I began to sketch my body experiences, understandings, readings, research, and responses. And then I began recording myself responding to those sketches. And then I went into the dance studio and wrote those words onto my body, and I recorded myself responding to those body poems. So the result, I hope, is a body poem of a body poem of a body poem of a body poem. In other words, a layering of honest and impulsive (i.e., improvisational) responses of my perception of the body, which is layered and complex like our minds and our lives and our mind-realms and the realms of the worlds we live and take part in.

Immodestly, I hope to eventually discover a new body language. At this moment, this language represents only my experiences. As this project grows, I plan to include other bodies and other realms of experiencing through the body than my own frame of reference carries.

The body, as a map, provides direction, and at the same time its complexity and multi-dimensionality distorts and distracts. I am prone to distraction, and the physical and mental tangents of the body variously pull me out of line and center me. I read Claudia Rankine’s book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, at the perfect time. Her non-linear poetic essay demonstrated a cohesive arc of reference and experience that I needed to be reminded of, that I needed to practice in my own editing of the improvisational exercises that make up this project. (An important point: this project is a process not a project. I need to rename it, Bodiverse Process not Bodiverse Project.)

On March 10, 2007, Kristin Prevallet wrote to me, “You have laid out a multi-year project that started long before this class began and will continue long after. In it are the seeds of your own vitality.” This, followed by reading Anne Waldman’s Iovis II, where, documented in a letter from K to Anne on page 36, she writes, “But anyway, it’s this whole idea about an epic that I am finding fascinating, that is, about how one goes about bringing one’s BEING into the poem…” is when I realized this body poem process is my epic project.

In response to the last citation, I wrote: “The Body is one’s BEING. The Body is the poem. The Body is the epic of life, and if I can actually transform the poem into Body and the Body into poem, I will have found my 'something that’s big enough to fit it all in.'”

Any outside eye is helpful. Even if we disagree with it, it frames our work differently. I am particularly grateful to Christina Lundberg’s and Melissa Kozakiewicz’s close reading of my initial writings on this process. Christina asked me, “What is this project fascinated with?” And I believe that disembodied question is so important to the content of the work, because, 1) I haven’t been able to pinpoint that and 2) it is a disembodied question, which is the opposite of the embodiment of the mind/body relationship, but the same in that the concept must at some point be disembodied to write about it in an essay-like manner, rather than intuit it in a physical, improvisational one. Melissa wrote to me, “Dealing with your body problems is more interesting than dealing with someone elses. I encourage you to say the things that may be painful or gross if you have any of those things in your world.” I took this motivation with me into my improvisations, and returned to it, when I felt I was avoiding my own honesty.

The body poems posted on this blog are examples of process and product, improvisation and choreography. Each piece resulted from various genres of improvisation. The video editing was both improvisational and choreographic. How can something be improvisationally composed? I have been choreographing dances for stages, site-specific spaces, and the public realm for more than ten years. In the beginning, my choreographic structuring was conceived. I had to work hard. Today, there are many instances when it feels like muscle memory. I have no video editing experience, yet these little pieces seemed to come together as instinctually as a dance. So, to me, even the pieces that do not include a physical body in motion are dances of language, language in the sense of modes of communication. They are body poems-improvised visual choreographies of, for, and with the body.

Power the City

2007-04-23T10:01:00.000-05:00

References

2007-04-20T13:56:00.000-05:00

Everything I read, see, feel, touch, taste, know, regard, disregard, engage in, ignore, interpret, or misunderstand during the creative course is digested and becomes part of my physical-mental being. This includes things and beings that do and do not breathe. The following is a sampling of the sources of my digestion immediately leading to and during this time period.

In Person:

Tara Blaine
Karen Finley
Manfred Fischbeck
K. Scott Forman
Larry Krevolin, DO
Melissa Kozakiewicz
Christina Lundberg
Brian Miller
Maureen Miller
Zoey Bleu Miller
Kaen Oyler
Kristin Prevallet
James Thomas Stevens
Sayaka Ueda

In Print:

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine
Barbrara Maria Stafford. The MIT Press, 1993.

The Book of Jon
Eleni Sikelianos. City Lights, 2004

Can Humanity Change?
J. Krishnamurti. Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2003.

The Conquest of Happiness
Bertrand Russel. Liveright, 1971.

Civil Disobediance: Poetics and Politics in Action
Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman. Coffee House Press, 2004.

Dictee
Teresa Hak Kyung Cha. University of California Press, 2001.

A Different Kind of Intimacy
Karen Finley. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Claudia Rankine. Graywolf Press, 2004.

From the Warring Factions
Ammiel Alcalay. Beyond Baroque Books, 2002.

Gray’s Anatomy: Fifteenth Edition
Henry Gray. Barnes & Noble, 1995.
NOTE: Referenced in audio text on the sternum (project not yet completed).

The Handmade Museum
Brenda Coultas. Coffee House Press, 2003.

Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects
Carolee Schneeman. The MIT Press, 2003.
Note: A Coherent Muscular Life is based on a quote from this book.

IOVIS Volume 2
Anne Waldman. Coffee House, 1996

Jane (a murder)
Maggie Nelson. Soft Scull Press, 2005

The Language of Inquiry
Lynn Hyjinian. University of California Press, 2000.

New Beauty: The Wrold’s Most Unique Beauty Magainze
Midwest. Issue 1. Volume 3. Winter-Spring 2007.
NOTE: Text for audio recordings of plastic surgeon’s wives borrowed from interviews. Project not yet completed.

Paterson
William Carlos Williams. New Directions, 1995

The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols
Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant. John Buchana-Brown (Transl.). Penguin Books, 1996.

Pierce-Arrow
Susan Howe. New Directions, 1999.

Private & confidential letters from Linda A. Kerns, Esquire
Linda A. Kerns, Esquire.

Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition
Germano Celant and Arkady Ippolitove, with Karole Vail. Guggenheim Museum, 2004.

This Blood Spilled in My Veins
Jalal Toufic Âshûrâ. Forthcoming Books, 2005.

Various Renal Pamphlets.
National Kidney Foundation of Illinois, Inc.

Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering
Linda Hartley. North Atlantic Books, 1989.
NOTE: Bold font in Writings on Bodies I–IV is borrowed from this book.

In Virtual Space:

www.city-data.com/forum/pittsburgh/17747-few-questions-about-w-pa.html
www.animalnewyork.com/2006/05/saks_goes_slumming.php
www.blissymbolics.us/lessons/arm/
www.city-data.com
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow-joint
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKeesport,_Pennsylvania
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_of_gesture
www.feeds.feedburner.com/TheContemporaryTaoist
www.glamour.com/horoscopes/dreamdictionary/viewsymbol?symbol_id=1113
www.ika.ie/diet.html
www.marshall.edu/akanart/abramo.html
www.mckasd.com
www.mckeesport.org
www.mckeesportgospelhall.org/south_hall2.gif
www.metmuseum.org/explore/newegypt/htm/wk_pecto.htm
www.nzart.org.nz/nzart/Exam/morse.htm
www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=apa.003.0697a
www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/cismaf/mf1a.htm
www.shakespeare-art-museum.com/Rummy/Rummy06.html
www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?searchterm=elbow
www.templechryses.org/mm.html

Quote: Walt Whitman

2007-04-20T13:12:00.000-05:00

From: I Sing the Body Electric

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
his hips and wrists,...

O my body!...

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the
soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
that they are my poems,...

4.13.07 Bad Movement Day Commentary

2007-04-20T12:51:00.001-05:00

Body Constellation

2007-04-20T10:58:00.000-05:00

Palms of Myself

2007-04-20T10:57:00.000-05:00

Wings of the Body

2007-04-19T17:31:00.001-05:00