As I mentioned before I often find events like Prepared Field to be somewhat overwhelming, and they usually leave me with the sense that I’ve gotten only a tiny glance at an artists work. I always want to turn the event inside out and hear the perspectives of the artists. Many of them generously shared their thoughts with me in the past weeks. There was thanks, frustration, deliberation over their process and how it correlated to the performance. Mostly there was some really great writing, which I’ve tried to edit lightly or not at all.

From Brian McCorkle of Panoply Performance Lab:

The curatorial theme of fallow time brings up for me qualities and values we so rarely honor in new york city: wakefulness, rest, stillness, patience, and moving at the unpredictable pace and unhurried rhythms of non-human natural life. My hope in my durational piece, with, is to performatively explore elongating time within a location qualified by rushed production and to embody aspects of natural living beings that move according to their own internal rhythms. Essentially a several hour long meditation, with offers an altered time-space to those who are inclined to notice it, watch it, or join it.

I just want to add that the experience was very beautiful for me. I love durational work and this piece came at a perfect time, allowing me a chance to carve out some meditative performance space. I just got back from a last-minute trip to Indonesia and this performance happened on the heels of my grandmother’s death. Coming back to NYC is such a jarring experience (though I grew up here!) and my performance/video work often explores my dis/connection and longing from the country I call home as an Indonesian-American. Fallow Time was a perfect place to slow down my pace and to consider past and future, rather than rush around stuck in the now, literally planting seeds and offering flowers to audience members who have to be patient for the gratification. When I offered the plants, I said only one thing to the receiver: This will bloom in a year from now.

From Anthony Rosado:

In a festival like this there’s an almost overwhelming number of intriguing participants. The following are websites for or related to artists who participated sorted by event. I’ve dropped a lot of these throughout the blog but I wanted to compile a reference page. I welcome anyone who attended any event to add their website/blog to the comments section. Lets learn more about one another.

Through Earth, Through Body, Through Space (Tuesday)

Fantastic Futures: http://www.fantasticfutures.fm/

Jason Munshi South: http://nycevolution.org/

4 Workshops (Friday)

Voice as Movement: http://www.petersciscioli.com/

Geometries of Recognition: http://oors.net/

related – check out the text from Stephanie Gray’s “I Luved this City” an excellent Super 8 film we watched with the artist during the workshop.

Empty Bodies: Jaime Ortega is too cool for a website. I am not being facetious. He’s operating at another level. Take his classes and workshops.

Geographic Translations (workshop and walk): waiting for artists to let me know what they’d like featured.

Prepared Field:

Lily Gold: psychedelicmarfafilm.com

Zavé Martohardjono: zavemartohardjono.com

Panopoly Performance Laboratory and Dreary Somebody:

panoplylab.org

anysizemirrorisadictator.com

Anthony Rosado: http://literalwashproject.tumblr.com

Macklin Kowal: http://cargocollective.com/macklinkowal

Honey McMoney: http://www.honeymcmoney.com/

Claywood Shraard/Kalan Sherrard: enormousface.com

Artist to Artist (Saturday Morning)

Elliott Maltby

Alicia Ohs

Tara Aisha Willis: http://taraaishawillis.tumblr.com/

Sensing to Know//Analyzing to Imagine:

Amy Berkhov: http://www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~berkov/members.html

Kathleen McCarthy

Jason Munshi South (see above)

Hara Woltz: http://harawoltz.com/bio.html

Novel Ecosystems (Sunday)

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: www.buscada.com

wanda gala

Luke George: http://www.lukegeorge.net/home.html

Jan Mun: http://www.janmun.com/index.html

Mariana Castañeda-Lopez

Wendell Cooper: http://www.wendellcooper.com/

Andres Toro

Adaku Utah: http://decadancetheatre.wordpress.com/the-crew/adaku-utah/

Melissa West: mwestandcompany.com

After being provided with “unstructured time” (which I imagine is like Montessori school for adults) two groups of artists invited others into fallow time on Sunday in Bushwick. Group one (Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani / Buscada, wanda gala, Luke George, Rena Mande, Jan Mun, and Jill Slater) began at 311 Melrose an open lot inviting questions both profound and banal. What to make of this space? Where are we situationally, if not geographically, located? Why is it so hot when yesterday was so cold? We moved on to Jill Sigman’s studio, The Border, listing through the quiet streets of residential Bushwick into the bustle of Bushwick Open Studios. The first session began with a conversation around inviting and engaging in fallowness, and the cyclical nature that fallow time is nestled within. wanda gala suggested that we slow down and tune into one another by feeling first our own and then another’s pulse (a process some of you may have seen at Judson Monday night). From there movement evolved into an un-named, un-known score. Picture gallery and video link below.

Our second session, facilitated/created by Mariana Castañeda-Lopez, Wendell Cooper | Complex Stability,  Andres Toro, Adaku Utah, and Melissa West became a quiet meditative dream scape situation. We were invited to listen, taste, feel, look and rest deeply. Examining each of these acts slowly to the sound of singing bowels brought us to an almost still pace. I was struck by the way most people, upon entering, seemed curious about and eager for the respite. I thought about a a conversation I recently had with a New York Times employee who described a section of her office as the “crying room” (and really, doesn’t every place of work or study have one of these?) and I felt the necessity of a resting room, not a place to sleep necessarily, but a place to cultivate quiet and unfocused thought.

This morning I listening to an audio recording of this session and I was really surprised by both my inability to make a clear recording of the singing bowels (though I sort of like the distortion) and the sheer outside noise invading the space. I don’t remember that noise at all. Was there something about the stillness, the separation from the movement creating the noise that allowed me to tune it out completely? Gallery and audio below. If you are using ear-phones to listen seriously, turn the volume down. Bushwick on a Saturday afternoon apparently gets LOUD even though I remember the room as being the quiet-est place on earth.

Novel Ecosystems Session 1 Video

Novel Ecosystems Session 2 Audio:

Novel Ecosystems Session 1&2:

The festival has ended but the blog blogs on, for now. Check back throughout June for thoughts from the artists, pictures and videos. Below is an excerpt of the sound installation Fantastic Futures created around Queen’s Corona Park. Listening to this last Tuesday evening was a really nice way to reflect on the ways people can be asked to connect and reconnect with their surroundings.

I’m also included Tara, Alicia, and Elliott’s introduction to the Artist to Artist discussion and brunch on Saturday. Listen to these women talk about what “fallow time” means to them personally and artistically for a more specific perspective on this year’s Spring Festival theme.

Artist to artist, me to you, I not so secretly dread the open forum issue talk. I always go, hoping not for illuminating discourse, just a little shared frustration/humanity; and I often leave mired in the weird silence that occurs when everyone has something to say but perhapsnotinaroomfilledwithstrangers? So often the thing that brings me out to events like this is not the discussion that will happen that day, but days or weeks after, when I run into a new or old friend who also attended, and suddenly we both realize that we have a lot to share with one another.

Its for this reason that I was so happy Elliott Maltby, Alicia Ohs and Tara Aisha Willis abandoned the giant circle of chairs for a “speed dating” format that allowed for personal exchanges instead of broad statements. Please, moderators of the world, consider this format for your next event. If you weren’t able to make it on Saturday here’s what we talked about, here’s how we started to know one another:

How do you sustain yourself? What are your sustaining activities? What supports you in engaging in sustaining activities? What in your life needs sustenance/maintenance? What do you need time for? (The answer to this was almost invariably that we all just needed more time.) How do you permit yourself to take time? What in your life needs resolving?

Our answers to these were revealing, personal, and then sometimes surprisingly common. I enjoyed talking with the people who mulled their variable, open meanings with me and earnestly helped me to find some possible answers. In between this talk and the next event I talked with a friend whoreflected on the fact that we often see each other before or after classes or performances, times when “often nothing of worth can be said.” I wonder how we can turn this filler, idle time into a more fallow idyll time when we feel we can process, chat, probe.

I ended up taking a scratchpad of notes about what people did and needed (meditation, journaling, NEED TIME, being alone, other people’s time, collaborators, being in two places at once, asking questions). And of course everyone should feel welcome to tackle one of the questions in the comments below.

Check out the gallery, especially for the food porn of the delicious brunch created by MOUNTAIN (they’re opening a space on Franklin Ave. in Crown Heights check it out) in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis.

Raise your hand if you’re American.

I think I’m not alone in saying that I never quite know what to do or make out of evenings like this – events that serve so many purposes at once you’re not sure you remember why you first came, but you’re glad to be there. Its a time to come together, drink, be merry, mingle and see the work of many people all at once. I think I often come to a place where I just want to see more of the work, and know more about the artists. So in the coming week look for interviews/press bitlits/ internet detritus related to Lily Gold, Macklin Kowal, Zavé Martohardjono, Honey McMoney, Panoply Performance Laboratory and Dreary Somebody, Anthony Rosado, and Claywood Schraard.

I’d also like to invite all of you who submitted videos to send me links to them online. The videos were really beautiful and entrancing, and while they made a fascinating wall-paper for the event, I suspect they’re just as effective viewed on there own. Email me at hadley.smith1@gmail.com with the link and any credits you’d like to provide!

If you came, saw, camped, danced, listened, or wandered through…JOIN US! Tonight at Judson Church 8pm for Pile of Shit. We will be moving, speaking, rehashing and birthing our experiences from the past days of the festival in a participatory event.

Lorene Bouboushian and Kaia Gilje created this in response to ideas and experiences in Psychic Geometries.

Today was a smattering of workshops all with people I could have spent many more hours learning from and moving with. I won’t recap the workshop descriptions but I want to share some writing and video that was made during Geometries of Recognition, the workshop led by Rachel Levitsky and Stephanie Gray. (For more on their work check out the Office of Recuperative Strategies website)

Below is a short video of Emma Grace moving in the entrance of a parking garage during our exploration of the blocks around Issue Project Room and my observations during our walk.

IMG_1025

We walked down the stree and I saw gestures of complaint, and a woman cried out “I’ve got my walking shoes on” and did a little dance. I saw the office of Worker’s Comp, something something and Sports Injuries and I’m reminded of the way all the county buildings down here always seem jumbled and confusing. We walked by one of those quick antiseptic sandwhich and juice places that seem to only exist near certain size office buildings. I saw a chair and some filing drawers – a micro open office – out on the street and I sat down. I was an office worker also displaced and now on display. One thing/part of my body always slightly out of place. My body was a group of limbs like this was a group of furniture that belonged together but now were vaguely lost. We walked on turning the corner onto the street of hardware stores. I love hardware stores. They conjure a pleasant  sense that soon you’ll be living in a slightly better patched up reality. I’ve been to these they’re crowded and you have to send and employee in search of anything you want. Being taken care of by virtue of having things hidden from you. Dangerous care anywhere but here. Emma Grace plucks a basil leaf off a plant and eats it. Smiling, I’m complicit in her petty plant theivery. Emma Grace stops at the entrance to a PARKING garage. She slowly moves down the ramp. It occurs to me that even though she is doing the exact thing that the parking garage attendant would least like, she is assiduously following the directions of the signs. GO SLOW. KEEP TO THE RIGHT.

Floyd Bennett Field is one of the strangest places I’ve been in the city. The campgrounds are lovely, lush protected areas with sturdy fire pits and built in grills. But as you emerge from that area into the surrounding park your met with a somewhat unsettling mixture of old tarmacs and lush vegetation, semi-abandoned buildings and red wing blackbirds. An alternate title for this post could be “Everywhere a future SVU crime scene.”

Something about the difficulty many of our fellow campers had walking from the bus contrasted with the ease of the lone men who whipped by the campgrounds in cars only to park on the tarmac and stare out at the ocean seemed uneven. Walking to the water the first afternoon I found myself thinking that the boat launch pictured above looked like the city being swallowed into the ocean. I felt uneasy, as if the blurring of the city and the “wild” meant that the rules belonging to either weren’t applicable in this place. I think it might be one of the most literally liminal spaces I’ve ever wandered around.

The eerie quality soon gave way to the rhythms of camping. Pitching tents, lighting fires, anxiously reading informational brochures on deer ticks and lymn disease (save that tick for the doctor yo!).

We made a campfire.

And, led by Jennifer, hobo suppers.

Mine was delicious, thank you.

We arrived by car, train, bus, and foot. To make the aformentioned feel less cool about themselves as human beings Victoria and Mariah pulled up on a motorcycle.

We gathered and ate and shared food with one another, and talked. We talked the way you talk while eating, while outdoors, while sitting around open fire. The kind of spiraling, tangential, lazy excited talk that gets you nothing but a better sense of the people near you.

Throughout dinner and post dinner (hot dogs) and post post dinner(marshmallows – camping makes one very hungry) we became increasingly aware of the loud shouting occurring by the water. As someone with an active imagination who has watched a lot of Twin Peaks I felt wary about an investigation. But as we walked over I realized we were approached a swarm (its the only word that describes it) of Hasidic men, busily converging on the boat launch, running down to the water one by one while they chanted. I have yet to wrap my mind around everything this sight brought forth in me. Ritual, “only in New York”, curiosity, a use of a site so wholly unexpected. I think this pernicious idea occurs in the city sometimes that these parks and campsites and beaches and bike lanes and green spaces and composting exist only to service the ideals of the “environmentally engaged” yuppie. Floyd Bennett feels like a place that exists for no one and then everyone. Hobbyist (I haven’t even gotten to the airplane restoration project yet) and Hasidic ritual and the fisherman who confessed to being “completely freaked out by those dudes” when we asked him if he knew what was happening.

Fantastic Futures and Jason Munshi-South shared a sound scape they created in and around Corona Park at the Queens Museum tonight. It was somehow overwhelming and relaxing at the same time. More thoughts about their workshop and this project to come in the following weeks, for now enjoy the read/watch list I got from Fantastic Futures.

Read: When the Moon Waxes Red – Trinh T. Minh-ha, The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander and Cornell West

Watch: Unspeakableness – Pei-Ying Lin, work by Jane Elliott.

Listen: If anyone at the event today recorded sound I’d love to share it on the blog. It turns out Movement Research’s sound recorder is so high quality WordPress just can not handle it. Not even. Get in touch with me at hadley.smith1@gmail.com.

Similarly get in touch with me if:

I spelled your name incorrectly. You can’t have your picture on the internet because you’re being searched for by an international crime syndicate. You think I’ve vastly misrepresented or misinterpreted something you or your collaborators said or intended. You lost something at one of the events and want to know if anyone found it.

The blog lies dormant for the next several days while I CAMP. Please, everyone join us at Floyd Bennett Field Wednesday and Thursday. Make a day trip, or pitch a tent.

   I think for many of us gathering at Corona Park today this was an event you arrived at knowing very little, only that the people leading it had a great name for their collective and evolutionary biologist Jason Munshi-South in tow. Fantastic Futures (above, in no particular order and in some cases pictured twice) are Julio Hernandez, Huong Ngo, Phuong Nguyen, Solgil Oh, Sable Elyse, Or Zubalsky. The group has morphed in and out of various configurations, beginning with a project that brought together students and faculty from the University of Baghdad, Parsons The New School for Design and Pratt Institute.

Through their iLAND residency they’ve been researching the history of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Talking early on with Sabel Elyse I learned they were drawn to the site as a place charged with the history of two World’s Fairs that also served as a temporary sight for the United Nations. Fantastic Futures and Jason Munshi-South were further intrigued by the recent controversy surrounding former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s development plans for the park and nearby Willets Point. From a social ecological standpoint the development would alter the site in a way that negated it as public space.

The workshop required a playful curiosity from us as participants and, speaking for myself, I would like more time in my life to be dedicated to imagining myself as a white footed mouse making my way through the protective canopy of the park. Asked to experience the space as white footed mice (a population of mice Jason has studied within the city, for more on his work visit NYCEvolution) participants reported vague anxiety, a new awareness of litter, and a different way of thinking about tree branches as accidental maps for the animals that use them as cover. We then drew maps of the space around us from both human and mouse viewpoints, pictured below.

Simon’s Map.

Sable Elyse’s map of human activity and noise that would disturb a mouse.

Moira’s map.

Sable Elyse’s map of human activity and noise that would disturb a mouse.

Hi, I’m Hadley, and above is what I do in my spare time. The title of this festival, this blog, this thing that’s happening could also be an apt title for my life these coming months. fallow time. It conjures up luxury, pleasure, abyss, dirt, air. I’ll stop before this starts to read like very forward thinking fashion advertising.

In the spirit of this festival I’m going to declare that I don’t have specific goals for this blog. Its documentation, its a place to continue conversations, its a place to introduce and acquaint yourselves with people you take class with, see at shows and then never never know their names. Its whatever we need it to be. I hope it can be something you gaze at the days you don’t make it out to events. I hope its filled more with the ideas, memories, pictures and thoughts of everyone around the festival next week than my experience at the festival next week.

I’d like to leave off here with a radical suggestion from someone writing daily posts for a blog. Get off the internet. Like Kathleen Hannna, I want to see you in the streets, and the venues, and the bridge, and the camp grounds. This blog will continue after the festival, and we want your comments, thoughts, pictures and videos in the weeks after the festival as much as we want to hear from you during the festival. When you’re with us document all you like. Or not at all. Let your mind wander and wonder. Be still, be lazy, be receptive. Rest in the knowledge that I’ll be obnoxiously busying around with recorders and cameras for you. When you want to act, this platform will be here.

Welcome to the blog site for the movement research festival spring 2014 fallow time. We are really excited about the range of events and workshops lined up.  In addition to being a resource for all things festival, the blog will serve as a documentation platform as the festival gets underway.  Hadley Smith will be a daily contributor to the blog, creating an opportunity for a robust discussion about the concepts of the festival.  Please feel free to contribute images, text, and ideas.