dancing experiments in grief & love

I don’t take this lightly.

I am not an expert. Nor do I believe artful engagement can, or should, somehow offset or make polite the profound rawness and strength of grief. Or love.

They will do what they will do.

But maybe there are skills that can be practiced. And maybe beginning somewhere familiar is ok. And being with questions, through embodied inquiry, is what I am most drawn toward.

These experiments started in the context of a solo residency/dance creation project in 2020-2021 called sketches/studies in unsettling. It was only ever seen online. The risk of sharing what is usually private with others feels real. So that vulnerability is worth following.

In the spirit of animating the core concepts of improvisation, paired with resistance to claiming a known conceptual structure (for the IICSI peeps, y’all remember IMPR*6010, right?), I make this offering of a temporary alternative world of learning and conversation through the experimental performance of practice — spontaneous creation of a 30-minute playlist, dancetheatre composition — and the welcoming of movement, visual art and written responses.

It is my (gosh, I’m doing a phd) student-directed response to “getting to know ya” and notions of community making. How do we get to know? If I really wanted someone to know me, how would that happen? And how do our ways of gathering cultivate or discourage?

mixology thoughts [January/February 2025]

What if our ways of ‘networking’ have nothing to do

With the soft web of passions and vulnerabilities

That are already there

Without the edges of business cards and nametags

Serving up the replication of our known, certain selves alongside the drinks.

What intimacy is possible among strangers?

What if the softening didn’t require hors d'oeuvres and alcohol?

What selves can emerge when relating to art practice is the focus?

What belonging can be created, even if fleeting and incomplete? 

With scholarly inspiration from Vangie Bergum, bell hooks, Priya Parker and Aimee Cardillo Rowe, I invite you to join me in this experiment, and perhaps “place our lives more fully in each other’s hearts” (Rowe 2012, p. 1052).

No expectation. Just possibility.

Please send me a note if you plan to come (or for any other reason — responses to this invitation are welcome even if you cannot attend).

If you missed the logistics on the image: Tuesday March 11th from 3-5pm in the ImprovLab (Mackinnon Rm 108 on the University of Guelph campus).

Sincerely,

Georgia

[and while there are so many more influences, these are the sources of scholarship mentioned above and most directly considered in relation to the project]

Bergum, V. (2003). Relational Pedagogy. Embodiment, improvisation, and interdependence. Nursing Philosophy, 4: 121-128.

hooks, b. (2003). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (1st ed.). Routledge.

Parker, P. (2018). The art of gathering: how we meet and why it matters. Riverhead Books.

Rowe, A.C. (2012). Erotic Pedagogies. Journal of Homosexuality, 59: 1031–1056.