Sensitive Systems was a class series facilitated in-person and then virtually during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the ideas and scores developed during this time have been recorded in a zine. The cover and text from the zine is shared below.
visual description: This is an abstract anatomical drawing of a human torso in black ink. Each side of the torso represents different anatomical layers including bones, muscles, nervous and vascular tissue. The drawing is loosely sketched and textural. The original drawing and a reverse of it are the front and back covers of the paper zine.They are shown side by side here.
SENSITIVE SYSTEMS (A READABLE TEXT VERSION OF THE PRINT ZINE)
We (Emily & Hannah) both white femmes practicing a queered ethics of friendship that has evolved over three years of collaboration. We share a dance practice and often teach together.
We started conceptualizing a series of offerings called “sensitive systems” back in winter 2020. At the onset of COVID-19, we shifted this practice to a weekly offering online.
This little zine contains some of the scores (aka. movement practices) from sensitive systems, along with some of our inspirations and sources.
The scores we offer are influenced by artists and writers including taisha paggett, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Sara Ahmed, Sonalee Rashatwar, Mary Starks Whitehouse, Steven Porges, and many more.
You will see our different processing styles reflected throughout…
As a writer that tends to drill into details, Hannah will often mull over words, seeking clarity and transparency in every corner. Their writing is laid out in a linear fashion.
Emily holds much curiosity for the ways in which individuals come to know their body/minds and how different conceptual realities generate varying possibilities. She enjoys mapping ideas and leading with questions, often recognizing that her inquiries lead to multiplicities.
Before we get into practice, below are some thoughts on consent and boundaries, which have become foundational to our work together…
We know that conscious relationship to consent and boundaries begins at the time of birth. Inconsistent or non-existent consent practices and pseudo, forced, and coerced consent practices erode personal agency and capacity for decision-making. BIPOC, queer, trans, non-binary, intersex, femme, disabled, and neurodivergent individuals are disproportionately effected by nonconsensual systems and practices, both presently and historically.
As dancers, we have found that as we continue to participate in the systems that exist for practicing and making our art, we run into challenges with consent and boundaries.
These emerge in collaboration, dancing, teaching, performing, documentation, interaction with arts institutions, etc. We have witnessed, experienced, and perpetuated poor consent and boundaries practices with regard to the following (and many more):
Body Image: For us, this includes being given feedback about ones appearance.
The rhetoric of “body image” commonly applies to a static image of the body in as visualized elsewhere existing outside of self (e.g. in a mirror or portrayed by a photo). This rhetoric can actively erase a sense of lived experience, history, ancestry, gender, spirit, and relationship to community.
However, body image also relates to movement—dancing brings bodies into different relations with the world socially and politically by moving through and within and taking up time and space, which leads us to…
Embodied Agency / Autonomy: For us, this includes choosing when and how one moves (or doesn’t move) through space, being able to decide who and what one’s body comes into contact with moment to moment, and have a choice about when and how one receive feedback about one’s body and movement through space.
Extraction / Appropriation: In our understanding, this reflects the ways practices are coopted and shared without permission, context, or payment from the global majority and then replicated and commodified in majority-white dance spaces and performance contexts.
Ability: For us, this involves one’s agency to decide one’s own thresholds of participation based on ever fluctuating physical, cognitive, and emotional states.
Representation / Documentation: Whose images are being used, where, and to what end? Were pictured individuals told how their images would be used and why? Did they consent, or were they coerced as a participant of a class or program? Were individuals asked in a group setting where there was pressure not to single oneself out?
Our consent and boundary practices are far from developed and will continue to shift and change over time.
In practice, we understand that regular check-in’s, transparent communication, and listening practices can support individuals in building and upholding their individual boundaries. We have also learned that the individuals with the most agency in any given context must be accountable to drive this. Accountability is a generative challenge….
^^^ This ^^^ is a map by Emily of consent as it relates to Steven Porges Polyvagal Theory. This map is also informed by the book Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown:
[Thoughts from Emily: In reading and conversing about consent I noticed there is use of the language “yes” and “no” to describe how one feels about a given situation.
I found myself wondering how we know to identify with “yes” and “no” language. So often, I am informed by power dynamics that exist around me—how do I cultivate the skills to fully understand what is “yes” and what is “no”?
Polyvagal Theory offers one way of describing autonomic nervous system reactions to a given situation, these reactions may give me clues as to what is “yes” and what is “no.”
Thoughts from Hannah: I understand consent to be fluid, so “no” does not necessarily mean “no” forever. But the person consenting makes the choice of when to shift their “no” to a “yes” or “maybe.”
I really need boundaries, and I am getting better about requesting they be made clear. Especially in group settings and overstimulating environments, my attention distribution and social anxiety keep me from being able to read cues well and sometimes even stop me from asserting my own boundaries.
I am always curious how to practice fluid and relational awareness of “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” across different environments.]
Another important piece of this work is poetics.
We work with poetics as an opening for another set of meanings to enter in.
For us, intimacy of poetics allows a confluence of multiple meanings to brush up against one another and exist in relation to one another.
As you read and try these practices, we invite you to work with, disregard, push against all of this.
*These working understandings were informed by the work of taisha paggett and their Dance workshop “the poetics of resistance,” offered at the Seattle festival of dance improvisation.
WARMING UP WARMING IN
Here is a list of ways we’ve warmed up and into sensitive systems as a practice.
extension & contraction practice | finding places of extension, reaching, seeking, and risk &/or finding places of contraction, safety, security, and feeling more rooted into your supports, physically/metaphorically
inversion practice | lower your head and lift your tail &/or imagine experience of inversion &/or imagine visions of an inverted world
spinal undulations | using breath to swell different areas, then release, creating miniature rises and falls
self-touch | using your own hands to create friction, tapping, compression, jostling useful for soothing and stimulating
holds | taking a few moments and a few minutes to move your hands places on your body that call for attention; trusting your hands are giving and receiving; using your eyes or sense of light to bring your focus outward
queered pushing practice | push-ups: using arms to receive and push surface away; lunges: using legs to receive and push into surfaces to move away; reclined-to-upright: finding a pathways from a reclined position to verticality and back down again
We find ways to make these work for our bodies, change surfaces, use pretend surfaces, use agency and imagination whenever we please.
SCORES
FOREGROUNDING SCORE
- Set up your space / compose your background, wherever you are at. Create an environment for yourself.
-Think about or even write about your experience of setting up your environment.
- Choose a word or idea from your experience of setting up your environment.
- Use it as a prompt: Create a series of actions, gestures, or movements that respond this prompt. The prompt isn’t meant to be didactic, so really do whatever feels right in your environment you’ve set up.
- Free write for 3 minutes on the question where are you right now?
To ponder: What jumped out in watching and/or in moving?
LANGUAGE SCORE
This score comes out of curiosities about language and aesthetics:
- Pick an object from your life and foreground it for yourself by mentally focusing on it and/or physically bringing it into view.
- Close your eyes if you can. Move for a few minutes on your own with the object foregrounded in your mind and memory.
- Open your eyes. Spend a few minutes writing about the object descriptively.
- Pick one word or idea from your writing session and use it as a springboard for another dance with your object, this time with more physical and visual relationship to it.
Contemplate what has shifted, if anything.
SUPPORTIVE OBJECT SCORE (with citations)
excerpt from: Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology
“Furniture involves technologies of convention, producing arrangements as an arrangement of things: in the presumption that life should be organized in certain ways, in this space or that, for doing this or for doing that, where you find this or you find that.
Furniture too is an orientation device, a way of directing life by deciding what we do with what and where, in the very gesture toward comfort…
[then she talks about how furniture often exists in the background of lives]
A queer furnishing might be about making what is in the background, what is behind us, more available as “things” to “do” things with.”
excerpt from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, the essay SO MUCH TIME SPENT IN BED A LETTER TO GLORIA ANZALDÚA ON CHRONIC ILLNESS, COATLICUE, AND CREATIVITY
[In this section, she starts by addressing the way capitalism dictates how bodies and lives are valued useful or not useful for laboring and wealth creation. This has bearing on the way disabled, tired, and sick bodies that are are treated. She says: “People are valued only for the wealth they labor to build for capitalism.” She goes on to write:]
“I am a chronically ill queer of color artist, and so much of my time is spent in bed. I joke that my bed, heaped with cushions, is my office, my world headquarters. My life is arranged around my bed. There is good art to look at, a window, my vibrator plugged in, a stack of books within easy reach.
I lie in it thinking of all my other crip poet friends who spend most of their days in bed too. Draped in pillows, red and plum sheets, surrounded by good art to look at, curtained by plum sari fabric. This is my place of power, the fulcrum, the place everything emerges from.
I dream here. I write here.”
To start, choose a chair or supportive object to work with.
Spend some time looking at your supportive object/chair:
- What is it made of & by whom? Imagine where materials it is made of came from & who made it.
- Where did you find it, and how did it end up in your present space?
- What do you use it for? How does or doesn’t it support you?
- Imagine for yourself the ways that you interact with it regularly…
- What are some other ways you might engage or interact with it?
Take 15 minutes to engage in possibilities with your supportive object/chair.
Come up for a few strategies for engaging with your supportive object/chair.
Once you come up with some alternative strategies for working with your supportive object/chair, you can take turns sharing them, if in a group setting, or try them for yourself a few times. Witness yourself doing these tasks.
[Thoughts from Hannah: I like thinking with this lens toward furniture because it reminds me of the limits of my ability—how I will always need support and how I always need space for reprieve.]
SELF-SOOTHING SCORE
- Put on a song that brings you joy. Choose the first song that comes to mind. Put it on repeat if possible.
- Make a throne of comfort in your home. This could be the place that comforts you most, or maybe proximity to an object that you love. You could set up a scene, or find an existing scene that fits this description.
- Rest into your space of comfort. Using multiple senses try to notice the details in that space.
- Begin to move in a way that describes your experience there.
- Choose movements that come up to do on repeat with the intention of finding kinetic flow. This could be a single movement or a string of movements.
What happens through continual repetition?
HONING ATTENTION IN ON A PARTICULAR AREA AND LETTING MOVEMENT ORGANIZE AROUND THAT SCORES
[thoughts from Emily: Bodies are comprised of many relationships. When I move, I am practicing known relationships and cultivating new ones. I think of these scores as internal versions of the foregrounding score. When I practice relating two (or more) parts in a particular way, possibilities emerge]
- Track movement of a diaphragm in relation to a spine: How does the ascension and descent of the diaphragm affect movement in the spine?
- How can you use your feet to initiate what happens through the rest of your body? What does pressure through different places invoke?
- Play with the mass of your pelvis, ribs and head as three differentiated but connected pieces. Lead with one area and let others lag.
- Make your own score or research any relationships in your body.
PROPRIOCEPTIVE FEEDBACK/ RESISTANCE AND FALLING SCORE
[thoughts from Emily: I like to begin practice on the floor. Proprioceptive feedback from the floor gives me information about my body. I can sense my 3-dimensionality. The floor provides stimulation to my nerve endings, bringing more awareness and activation to the surfaces of my body. The floor and gravity provide support to do things that I could not do with out a surface to push into. This pushing into is also a way of retracing my embryological development, cultivating an innate sense of push and fall.]
- Begin in any comfortable reclined position.
- From that place start to oscillate by pushing one area of your body into the floor or surface you are working on.
- Use the momentum form that push to shift to a new position.
- Continue this pattern, gradually decreasing the duration of time oscillating, and explore ways to push into and receive the floor or surface you are working on.
HEADS-with-OOO SCORE
This offering is all about sound:
- Simply move around a space. When your head comes in contact with a surface (floor, structure, your own body), make the sound “ooo” at any tone.
- Different surfaces might elicit different tones, longer or shorter sounds, different pitches.
- Resolve when it feels right.
CAN YOU MEET ME HERE SCORE
This score is usually done in collaboration between two bodies, we’ll call them Partner A & Partner B. In partner work, assume both have vastly different histories, boundaries, lived experiences, and conformability around verbal and nonverbal consent practices.
Check-in’s are encouraged throughout the score in order to maintain safe boundaries:
- Partner A asks if they can offer physical touch to Partner B.
- With Partner B’s permission, Partner A gently places a hand on Partner B’s body (maybe on a shoulder, upper back, etc.) and asks, “Can you meet me here?”
-Partner B slowly tries to lean into that touch and share their center of gravity with Partner A.
- Then partner B takes a turn. This exchange continues.
- Clear nonverbal consent may be established between partners, so that the verbal cue of “Can you meet me here?” is longer be needed or will only be needed on occasion. Partners don’t need to work toward nonverbal consent if it doesn’t feel right to one or both of them.
- Eventually after getting consent, Partner A might lean a different part of their body on Partner B and ask “Can you meet me here,” and Partner B will gently share their center of gravity with Partner A.
- Partner B steps away, and Partner A takes a turn.
- This exchange continues until the Partners begin to share more and more of their centers of gravity with one another and find an ongoing exchange.
That’s all for now!
It’s important for us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of this document of scores and ideas, and we expect to come back with critiques and additions, probably sooner rather than later.
We both feel committed to seeking more nuance and complexity in the practices we partake of, and this inevitably makes coming to a place of documentation challenging.
At the same time we feel this little offering provides an opportunity for reflection and sharing that we hope gives you something to brush up against in your own research.
Trying out these practices in the company of others (virtually and also in-person) has enriched these scores and ideas, we are thankful to everyone who has participated and provided thoughts and feedback. If you quote a score from this zine, we kindly ask that you reference us.
If any ideas, critique, or questions arise for you that you’d like to share, or if you’re interested in a print copy of this zine, please feel free to reach out:
Emily Jones: ejones248@gmail.com
Hannah Krafcik: hannah.elizabeth.k@gmail.com
written By Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones
cover art by Emily Jones
zine formatting and design by Hannah Krafcik