facilitation

+ [in progress - forthcoming workshop at KHiO (Oslo National Academy of the Arts)
     Thursday 5 September 2024, one-day hybrid workshop, in collaboration with Professor Susanne Winterling.  

+ ‘Soft Class (After Steve Paxton)’, LSE Shaw Library, London School of Economics (2024)
     Friday 17 May 2024, one-day Theory Lab, by invitation only.   

Forthcoming embodied theory workshop for and with disabled and able-bodied scholars and performance artists, in collaboration with Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds (LSE) and independent dance artist Annie Hanauer.

                                                                                     “… a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you”.
                                  Jack Halberstam, ‘The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons’ (2013)

 How can we be in class together, softly? How can we study whilst being in and not of the university?

This workshop takes its title from a class led by late American dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton (1939-2024) as part of the winter semester in Oberlin College, Ohio, in the early ‘70s. Held every morning at dawn, Paxton’s ‘Soft Class’ involved what would later become known as ‘The Stand’ or ‘The Small Dance’, a standing meditation that taught dance students that standing still always involves movement. Struck by the incongruous combination of ‘softness’ and ‘class’ (class, for me, somehow evoking an organisational structure of learning with rigid and often violent hierarchies), in this processual & participatory workshop, I wish to probe into the potential of a critical research practice and critical pedagogy of softness, against neoliberal flexibilisation and precarity.

Facilitated through a series of invitations and proposals, ‘Soft Class (after Steve Paxton)’ invites participants to engage with the notion of ‘study’ as found in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s influential and, contra its own principles, foundational publication The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013). What does Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s ‘study’ look, and feel, like when brought into contact with Steve Paxton’s somatic explorations on dependence, interdependence and autonomy? What is the political import of a pedagogy of ‘improvisation’, as espoused by Moten and Harney and as practiced by Paxton? What are the implications and/or applications of Moten and Harney’s potent articulations of ‘blackness’ and ‘fugitivity’ for crip theory and critical disability studies?

     PAST WORKSHOPS 
 
+ Hydrofeminists against Fascism: A Fluvial Soundwalk, Antiuniversity Now (2023)  
    Sunday 1 October 2023, 14:00-16:00 (Hackney Wick/River Lea)
  
What would it mean to develop a practice of deep listening by adopting ‘a fluvial orientation’? And what would it mean to ground such a practice of listening in a trans-affirming, anti-racist praxis that counters ethnonationalist hatred? Drawing on the insights of thinkers Paul Gilroy and Astrida Neimanis on the ethics of ‘hydrocommons’, and bringing them to bear on the deep listening practice of soundwalking, this workshop invites participants to think with, and listen to, water.

 + Our Bodies, Our Time - an embodied theory workshop in 3 scores  (June 2023) 
     diffrakt: centre for theoretical periphery, Berlin
 
An expanded 5-hour iteration of a somatic/consciousness raising (CR) workshop, delivered at diffrakt: centre for theoretical periphery as part of Project Space Festival Berlin. Improvisation scores included engagement with sonic experimentation in an ensemble composition, rehearsing the freedoms of an ‘anti-family dinner’, and testing the potential of producing new modes of temporality through witnessing ourselves breathe.    

+ Our Strike Action 100 Years From Now (March 2023)

A teach-out at the Birkbeck UCU picket that drew on materials from the MayDay Rooms archive on university struggles to invite reflections on how attending to the chronopolitics of our future archive can shape the demands we make in our historical present. Conceived in collaboration with MayDay Rooms.  

+ Our Bodies, Our Time, Antiuniversity Now (September 2022)

Engaging with Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of ‘chrononormativity’, and exploring questions such as ‘how “free” is free time?’, ‘can my body measure time?’, and ‘does time have a gender?,’ this two-hour workshop combined a traditional seminar format of intellectual discussion with somatic guidance and a consciousness raising (CR) approach.

+ Taking Our Time: Critical Theories of Temporality, Free University London (May-July 2022)

A critical theory module designed for an inclusive pedagogical initiative outside traditional university structures, this open-level course introduced students to Marxist, phenomenological, feminist and queer approaches to temporality, placing emphasis on the participants’ lived experience, and the transferable skills of cooperation, solidarity and mutual care.

+  Social Centres Past and Future: A Utopian History Walk, Antiuniversity Now (June 2019)

A peripatetic workshop inviting participants into the past and future history of London’s autonomous social centres, organised and delivered in collaboration with comrades from LARC and The Common House.