This is what connects my practice back to the messyness of people.
What im feeling invisibly moving around situations isn't just thoughts that happen to be moving, but the conflicting forces of my own and other peoples wills, intentions and desires. Thoughts aren’t static representations moving through space, but intentions for things to become that way, moving towards the thing they want to affect.
They say..
- Its this! - Look at that! - You should! - They should! - Did you see that! - Feel this! - Do this!
Ive grown up with the feeling that someone filling all the space is love. From that I’ve learned to find beauty in the invisibility and silence of everyone elses thoughts.
I can use movement to explore and describe the emotional energetic forces in the field in a situation. Explore movement activities that use gesture explore and feel for intentions, wills and desires for whats happening in a scene.
I've been reifying thoughts and fetishising them as 3D digital objects.
The kinds of thoughts and feelings I'm interested in aren’t fully formed things. I can (barely) sense their affects as distortions in the field around me, as proto emotions, as the emerging presences of absences.
They are tiny processes from which ways of being, seeing, hearing, imagining and moving emerge. Some of these processes get to live in or close to our bodies, some wander projected out onto other peoples bodies or into the material fabric of the spaces I live in.
What if I treat the things people say and do in response to each other in a situation as one thing that emerges between them all?
Sharon gives the example of two people trying to keep a biro still in mid air as they each have a finger tip at each end.
In ghestalt they talk about the self emerging in the between of the field which is what emerges as more than the sum of each person's speech and behaviour.
I'm wondering how I could create new forms in the negative space between people as we talk and move. How I can capture movement and words from groups of people in something like a long exposure, to make dynamic forms inbetween them, shaped by the patterns of their communication.
Trying to make sense of the times that people who loved pushed, harried or just encouraged me to be less gay (as I'm guessing they saw it through 80's & 90's eyes) out of concern and care for me or sometimes out of disgust. I want to better understand how that crushing behaviour evolves in response to a culture. Trying to understand how voices and situations from my life and from tv and media, press into situations in my life now. Picturing perceptions being shaped by intentions from different parts of myself and others e.g. a lads face morphing from pin up heartthrob to normal lad to pin up girl to hard faced lad looking you like shit, as the meeting point of flocks, foraging paths all bringing intentionalities to that perception from gay, straight, lads, girls, mates tv characters, pop stars pov - I picture these as tiny 3Difield images from pop culture in the 80s/90s.
Imagine forces being transmitted by people's faces and bodies as they talk and listen. Forces that constrain both what we feel we can do and the movement and interactions of thoughts and feelings.
What if thoughts aren't objects that belong to one person, or part of a person or another. Instead of my thought or yours, a gay thought or a straight thought.. instead thought forms emerge as a result the tensions between many differing intentions, like flocks of different species birds crossing paths or competing colonies of termites trying to build their mounds on the same site.
Today Im feeling really aware of the ways of being that I bring into spaces (consciously or not), the ways of looking, moving, feeling and desiring that are oppressed by the biphobic, mysoginistic, laddy ways of thinking that stick to my back like limpets, dampening down the bi parts of me without me realising.
The tensions I carry between where I’m from and where I am now, between being loved and nurtured and shaped and criticised growing up, means I bring it to the office, home to friends or my mum and dads. I dont act like that in any obvious way, but somehow, silently, invisibly it's around me.