I’ve attached some pics from the scroll. Getting it out just now helped to jog my memory and perhaps we can’t get started tomorrow by looking at it together. There’s so much there already.
I started by introducing the space, the studio and dream ecologies - this shared experimental practice and we invited the participants to come into their bodies and bring their bodies into the space and explore the space, much as Sarah B had invited us to do in the previous session, though as I said in my previous e-mail I felt a bit lame as the facilitator of these exercises and it occurred to me afterwards that one function of this collective could be to make time, not just to bring our diverse practices into the group but to train one another how to properly facilitate them too. Over time, as a collective, we would build up a little repertoire of approaches and exercises.
Sara introduced herself and her background in the Hebrew priestess tradition, referencing the book The Undertorah by her own teacher Jill Hammer and explaining as well that within the Jewish calendar the meeting (which took place on December 10th) was happening in Kislev, the month of dreaming, and so pointed to how the shortest days and the process of going in are directly associated with coming closer to our dreams. She also spoke of believers coming together to share the past night’s dreams and of where a dreamer would speak of a troubling dream, the collective would respond with a statement of faith in the benevolence of the maker of dreams and the giver of dreams saying, “good it is and good it may be”. Taking Sara’s lead we, as a group, practiced the refrain.
We came to the scroll and wrote down either a dream or what we understood a dream to be and then we took Mark’s prompt to explore the physical experience of our dreams, turning to one another in pairs, one person recounting a dream of their own, the other the listener, the observer, whose task it was to hear the dream being told and also to watch the way it moved in the dreamer and initiate the movements of the body of the dreamer and even exaggerate them. Then we switched the roles around before coming back into a circle around the scroll to share reelections of the experience.
The idea was that the work in pairs would be a warm-up for what would then unfold as a free-flowing improvisatory space but even after we introduced that idea the energy of the conversations that had begun was clearly insistent and people largely stayed in their pairs through to the end of the session when we brought minced pies into the mix and shared them around.
We had the audio recorder and a microphone in the room so there will be some kind of document of the session other than the scroll and these notes.
One of the participants also got in touch after the session to ask if we might be interested in her sharing more about her practice in dreaming bodies and organic movement. I don’t think she can make it tomorrow but i will invite her to a future dream ecologies collective meeting.
Dates for the diary: 4th Feb, public matrix 25th Feb, collective 11th March, public matrix 25th March, collective
All of the above, are at the RE studio in Webbers Yard, Dartington
TBC, but we are hoping to hold a public matrix at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton on Saturday 12th April, where I’ll also be exhibiting a solo exhibition of film and photography.
