Presentation at international conference:
PROPOSITION: AN ART OF ETHICS SYMPOSIUM
I was selected to participate in PROPOSITION: AN ART OF ETHICS SYMPOSIUM, a two day symposium, at the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughen, Co.Clare, on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th March 2016, organised by art critic and Circa editor Michaele Cuteya, formally editor of Fugitive Papers, with Katherine Waugh, philosopher, international curator and film maker and the Dean of the Burren College of Art, Conor McGrady.
I responded to the invite; ‘All contributors have been invited to engage through their practice with ideas relating to a conception of ethics which differs substantially from dominant notions of morality’.
The symposium gathered together artists, theorists and curators from Ireland and England for two days of research and experimentation. Participants included: Iain Biggs, David Burrows, Vivienne Dick, Maria Kerin, Glenn Loughran, Seamus McGuinness, Aislinn O'Donnell, Ciaran Smyth, Susan Stenger, Suzanne Walsh.
Asking myself what do I mean by ethics?
At a dinner party gathering of most of the Irish participants a few months before the event, during an informal conversation around what each of us mean when we use the word ethics in relation to our arts practice, I took the definition to mean for me ‘a way of being in the world’ (Beshty, 2015); ‘being’ as an awareness of presence, oneness, embodied and somatic, a quality that connects deep inner listening with the world around. This sense of ‘being’ has been developing over 20 years through a visual and movement based daily arts practice, deepened by somatic principles acquired through Body Mind Centering and Authentic Movement training.
At this dinner one of the artists there named her sense of ethics as coming from an embodied place, her gut.
She looked down and gestured to her intestines.
This was a critical moment for me and I closed my eyes and tried to feel where my sense of ethics/a way of being sources in my body. As a movement based artist I had never so precisely articulated this sensation before. While acknowledging the subtle tightening of the gut initially, the out breath released this and with a further drop in weight shift as I felt the chair I was sitting on supporting me and this deeper sense of groundedness triggered an opening from the heart out, a soft source, a holding space of witness not judge, compassionate, not based on flight or flight as ‘a way of being in the world’. With another deep out breath I felt my chest cavity drop and my heart brain unveil, a sensation that is reflected in softer focus of the eyes, a relaxing of the jaw muscle, a taste of salty saliva in the mouth as the tip of the tongue hits the front palate.
Particularly with my shared movement practice with Alexandra Rafferty over the past 7 years, greatly informed by class by the late Antoinette Spillane, my personal focus has been on what it means to be grounded, present, to come in to awareness of one self on so many levels by inner listening, that can then let us see our habits, our practices, to witness ourselves and our way of being in the world. This meditative movement practice has led me to a sense of awareness beyond this place of fight or flight in the adrenals and gut, to a somatic awareness of a more compassionate open hearted space in the body as ‘a way of being in the world’ agreeing with Beshty’s definition of ethics (Beshty, 2015).
The movement research and preparation for the presentation performance at the symposium
To respond to the invite in the manner that most informs my arts practice, I asked Alexandra Rafferty to join me to meet weekly for 6 weeks to research through movement and conversation into a level of articulation an inquiry into a somatic based ethics that takes place in our creative movement. We used techniques from meditation to deeply inquire and gain access to heart brain and Body Mind Centering to access and move through our heart muscle, and blood flow. Origins techniques like Yes/No/Maybe opened up the inner witness to habit and ingrained practice, where merge takes over from awareness and we actually don’t know what we are doing.
The performance
Alex and I sat at the front of the tiered steps with our back to the audience and just fit in as part of the audience to start our piece. There was no introduction but soon our stillness and inner silence and focus attracted attention and the audience came to a deep stillness and quietness. It was not choreographed but a form of contact improvisation based on moving through fear into meeting audience with an open heart, using all the movement techniques we could to hold the space and open up to receiving the movement. Alex was 8 months pregnant and moved through fluids near the speakers stage. I joined her there after trying to go up the steps. It lasted about 15 minutes.
