Contact Quarterly
#MetaAcademy, an online lab exploring embodiment & co-creation on the internet – first realized at Bates Dance Festival 2013 by Marlon Barrios Solano, Rachel Boggia and me, was featured in the January 2014 issue of Contact Quarterly, with an Editor’s Note by Nancy Stark Smith.
Some very interesting discussions around embodiment and presence occurred – specifically, the nature of extending embodied practice, collaborating and learning online. Nancy reflects on some of these issues in her Editor’s Note:
“…this past summer, I had the opportunity to throw my whole minded body, my embodied embedded bloodful dancing self (including my resistance), into creative, real-time, moving collaboration with other humans in faraway places through Internet space. And if actually felt like dancing.”
“The computer screen has until now seemed a barrier, an interface that allowed ‘information’ into it but somehow lacked, well, body — warm feelable vibrations, something that could touch all my tissues, not just my retinas, eardrums, and ‘thinking’ brain. How is my physical bodymind touched, moved, communicated to via the Internet? How can I touch back? Can my bodily experience — with its mysterious ways of knowing and discovering — extend through the wairwaves, through these plastic objects and metal wires to other warm humans — ‘here’ in time but not in space? Or beyond? What new forms of dancing insight will result?”
(To get this issue of Contact Quarterly, go here)
