Coil I was dedicated to the creation of imaginary beings/bodies. I designed processes in which I co-created with people the birth of these new beings by guiding them into an improvisation within their imagination. Through discussions, writing, drawing and imagination exercises, I channeled each person to create their own “being”, pushing them to define with precision the qualities of these new bodies; their context and stories. I worked with people from different age groups; people that have a connection to the art world and that don’t; people coming from different backgrounds.
This Coil was made of smaller cycles inside it, in which, in the doing with others, I developed the practice of co-creating the beings, I reflected on what was working and what was not and constantly adjusted after each experience. In the end of the cycle, I arrived to a format that was good for my purpose, I was able to find the flow and the working formula that helped people to embark on the imaginative journey through what I believe to be now an efficient structure/score. I was able at the end of this first cycle to collect, record and document 10 imaginary beings that would be used as material for Coil II.
Methodology - creation of imagery in the form of - beings and myths -
Below I describe the process of accompanying people in the invention of an imaginary character/being/body, that is relevant to them as individuals; and the creation of a myth or a story, a conceptual framework for the being created.
Following, I included short reflections on what worked, what didn’t, and how I decided to modify the process as I advanced in the research to arrive to a final step by step approach that I found to be most effective after several trials and errors that I portray here.
- I ask the person to lie down, close their eyes, breathe and arrive in the now.
The participant has no prior knowledge of what is about to happen.
I guide the participant into a state of relaxation
- I ask the person to lie down, close their eyes, breathe and arrive in the now.
I guide the participant into a state of relaxation. ( I voice- record the experience)
- I ask for intuitively attractive objects of thought - I ask if there are any objects/animals/concepts/ numbers/things/ideas/colors that have a particular significance for them. Things that stand out or have a magical connotation, a synchronic or symbolic meaning, or anything that attracts their attention in a singular way even though they don’t know exactly why.
- After receiving the answers, I ask to keep them in mind, and to improvise with the imagination, a being, a creature, a spirit, and to describe it out loud.
- As the participant speaks and explains, I ask questions about the being in question, to stimulate the participant to define it with precision. I ask to describe its form, its colors, its way of moving, its sounds, its context, etc…
- Once the being is clear, I ask the participant to embody it, to imagine they are the being, and ask weather things brings out additional sensations that they can share.
- Once the being is created, I a moment for the participant to either draw it on a paper, write a poem about it or both - with opened eyes.
- I explain to the participant the context and aims of my research.
Floating notes and reflections
Since the beginning of the process, it was very clear to me that every person took the exercise in a very different direction and that it was essential for me to adapt my inquiries to each person every time – to improvise my way through my guidance as they improvised theirs through their imagination and impulses.
It was really beautiful to see how each person connected in very different ways to the first question of the “intuitively attractive objects of thought”; for one person it was the sensation of touching wood, for one it was the moon and some specific songs, for another it was the ability of climbing plants to invade space. I found this question to be relevant because it directly put the participant inside a perspective of being intuitive, of playing with magical meaning and to improvise with irrationality.
The fact of thinking, feeling and imagining these objects of thought allowed a certain magic to insert itself; therefore, I decided to keep this in the practice. I felt that this initial question as the starting point for our exchange was very stimulating and put the participant in the right place of openness in order to start the imaginative experience.
As I tested with different ways to guide the participants, I was trying both, sometimes to explain the full context of the research before starting the exercise or saying nothing at all. Finally, I had the general feeling that explaining and contextualizing limited the creativity of the participants and directed them into the creation of a being that was more related to my own ideas, and what they felt they were expected to do, instead of it being something totally improvised and more uniquely related to the person in question. From this I deduced that it is more interesting for me to make the exercise without prior explanations and explain the context in the end.
One step that I added towards the end of my experimentations that worked positively was to ask the person to imagine they are the “being”. This brought a new relationship to their creation and made them discover and describe aspects of it that they hadn’t seen as mere observers.
I noted the importance that the act of drawing and writing gave the participants the feeling of materializing the experience. The drawing and the words they used to bring out the being into the world brought something even more intimate about their experience, as if it was easier and more comfortable for them to put it on paper then to speak it out loud in words.
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Using imaginary “beings” and new bodies that are created from the unconscious, I am following a trail of myths, gods, spirits and magical creatures, which have been the metaphysical companions of humans since the beginning of times. The aim is to bring back these magical bodies to the contemporary world and use them as tools for freedom, to allow them to possess us in a new contemporary form of ritual. I question how it would be effective to approach such forms of new rituals in a playful way; how to create pathways of inner freedom through embodiment, by allowing ourselves to risk, to losing control, to not taking things too seriously or to be childlike.
What was also very interesting in this first Coil, was the relations that came up between the creator and the imaginary body. Through the imaginative improvisational journeys the participants shared instinctive images, that were often connected with their thoughts, their everyday lives and their needs. Several times a participant would say that they are seeing something in their imagination, but they wished it were different - as if some things would just arrive to them, something they did not chose. Being that the thoughts and images surfacing are a mixture between conscious choices and unconscious/unknown layers of the self; I believe they make a very powerful and significant material to use in the stimulation of the self in unacquainted directions.
In an article concerned in bringing back the spiritual to western culture, Jennifer Gidley notes how the learning process of the modern youth in western culture has shifted from “oral folk and fairy tales to the poisoning of interactive electronic nightmares”; she states that our imagination has been colonized, (Gidley, 2005, p. 20). An elemental part of my research and urge as a choreographer hangs in the attempt to decolonize the imagination, and along with it, the body and voice.
A society that pulls people to act the same, watch the same things, buy the same things and not ask many questions, needs not elevated creativity within the masses.
In this “wealthy consumer age”, as Gidley defines it, children have little space for imagining, the toys that were once crafted by family members are now just gadgets bought and sold in quantities (Gidley, 2005, p. 20).
Children are often the most imaginative members of society; they cling on the connection with the wonders of existence, a connection that, when not fed, slowly fades. In my opinion, in the arts, exists a space for humans to re-connect, re-imagine, and plunge in the forgotten wild layers of the self. According to psychologist and psychotherapist Fabio Marzocca, the reason that children are able to engage with their imagination better then adults is that “they are (still) immediately in contact with the Whole and they represent the most pristine prototype of the human being” (Marzocca, 2016, p. 01) He explains that education slowly starts to frontier the child’s imagination, imposing to concentrate on the real and not on the “world of fantasy”. This process takes away from the human the primal elements of its species. Marzocca points on how for instance, in children’s first drawing exercises in school, teachers encourage the ones who make images that are close to reality, and not the ones who make drawings that look other-worldly, therefor limiting the children’s imagination since very early age (Marzocca, 2016, p. 01).
Marzocca explains how in today’s society it seems superfluous to use our imagination in a creative way, “there are those who do it for us and there is always the device specifically built to avoid making use of intuition and intelligence” (Marzocca, 2016, p. 02). However, Marzocchi believes that man is still looking for meaning, and still trying to keep the symbolic meaning of life that modern society is trying to deny at all times, be it through tattoos, tiny totems, or whatever we can give meaning to. “With the desecration of life and creation, modern man has "removed" the symbol from the dark areas of his psyche, that is, from the dream, the fantasy, the ancestral memories and imagination” (Marzocca, 2016, p. 02).
Carl Jung states that scientific understanding has dehumanized us, making us feel isolated in the cosmos. “Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals” (Carl Jung, Collected Works 18, p. 585)
I hear the voices of the gods in the humming of the water pumps, I read in the truck lights the path of my infinity. I allow the old antennas of the rooftops to speak to me, sometimes they speak to the moon, other times we speak all together. I see them dance. They tell me things. I count the colored windows, if seven are opened, I stay home. I watch the striped curtains, if the wind moves the green ones, I sing a song, I take a walk. The pipes contain spirits, the curtains conceal the unknown, the shattered glass is the embodiment of wisdom and the toxic smoke harbors a great demon.
The city is alive, the electric wires nurse my dreams, the cacti on the terraces play chess with my feet. The dry concrete makes love to the sun and warms my chest. I imagine... I dance with the city.
Creatures that we intuitively create and that allow bringing the urban and “natural” world alive in reconciliation, the human back into nature, and not a mere observer of it. As Tim Ingold discusses, looking at nature as a mere observer, as a detached scientist looks from a distance, is an illusion (Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 20). Nietzsche extensively spoke of the fact that modern society went towards a disenchantment of the world; leaving an abstract man without any guidance from myth that categorizes everything with science and logic. He believed that this condition of demystification would have very strong influence on society (Straus, 2019, p. 2).
This project intends to enchant the disenchanted.
