CORE: Embodied Investigation with Nancy Stark Smith. Week 1

[Rachel Boggia]

Renowned contact improvisation teacher, writer, and editor Nancy Stark Smith calls this exercise "hieroglyphs"and describes it as "writing from the body." You will need a pen and paper.  

 

You can choose to do this activity by listening to the mp3 or following the youtube video below

 

 

HARVEST:

Please share jpgs of your hieroglyphs (you can take pictures of them or scan them) and your comments in this forum

 

[Charles Dietrich]

[tamara]

[Glenna Batson]

[Glenna Batson]

[Glenna Batson]

Fascinating...my sense of orientation to the paper vis-a-vis my inner body - amazing in what is felt vs what is drawn - I'm calling the drawing my 'TKG' - tensile kinetic graphic - since it represents the phases of noise and sequence of meaningful in my hand languaging.

[Glenna Batson]

can't seem to upload the photo - only the attachment jpeg.

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

here goes to last!

[Fernanda Areias de Oliveira]

[Stephanie Miracle]

[Michelle]

[Ellen Maynard]

Great practice, I will continue to try this in the future! I noticed that at first I was actively thinking about what picture would translate to how my body felt, but then switched to just letting body motion or energy, that wasn't attached to language make the drawing. 

[Catherine Siller]

I'm used to drawing as a way of examining/documenting movement through space, weight, gesture, etc, so I found it interesting to draw my internal state/sense and then to "write" as an extension of that state. I felt constrained because I wanted to move more and to engage my whole body in the process, and I wanted to allow my marks to travel freely across the page instead of organizing them into rows/columns. However, this constraint focused my attention internally, and the exercise became more about tracking my breath and body rhythms from moment to moment--almost more of a meditative experience than about tracking movement through space. At some point I might try the exercise with a much larger piece of paper and for a longer period of time...