Session 1: white syncopation
Welcome
People of all continents and every island. People of African descent, of Asian descent, of European descent, of First Nations descent. People mixed in multiple descents. And all the languages spoken. We say you are welcome.
To all our kin on the wide spectrum of gender identity and expression. Queer, gay, bisexual, heterosexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, non-binary. The sexually active, the celibate, and everyone for whom those labels don’t apply. We say you are welcome.
Bodies with all abilities and challenges. Those living with chronic medical conditions, visible or invisible, mental or physical. We say you are welcome.
People of all ages, adolescents and young adults. Those caring for babies and small children. Middle aged people and elders. We say you are welcome.
People who identify as activists and those who don’t. Mystics, believers, atheists. We say you are welcome.
Your emotions. Joy, fear, grief, contentment, anger, disappointment, surprise, trepidation, and all else that flows through you. We say you are welcome.
Your families, genetic and otherwise. Those dear to us who have died, our ancestors and future ones. The ancestors who lived in these lands in these places. We honor you. As we journey up, down, around, through the cracks. The discomfort, the celebration, the dance. We say you are welcome.
People who feel broken, lost, struggling, alone. Those who are self-judging. Those who leave their camera on, and their camera off. We say you are welcome.
All beings that inhabit the mountains and this earth. Human or otherwise. The two-legged, the four-legged, the winged and the finned. Those that walk, those that fly, those that crawl above the ground and below, in air and water. We say you are welcome.
Edgard Gouveia Júnior
We said yes to this invitation, we will dance with mountains. 2 challenges:
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90 seconds for the collective challenge. Collaboration without speaking, gestures for creaking connection. Let’s play with mountains in a divine invitation and divine agreement: I am god.
Make an x or a o with your arms. The whole zoom page has to be doing the same gesture at the end.
What did you have to do or not do to complete the challenge? What do we have to do to create agreement? To create harmony between so many people in such a short time? -
Stand, literally dance with mountains. Explore ways of moving arms and legs to places that are not common. 2 minutes to find comfort and enjoy it.
What happened when we use and explore spaces, abilities or disabilities that we are not used to? What did it take for you to get there? What kind of comfort and discomfort, pleasure and playfulness? What did it take to dance in places that you are not used to?
Bayo Akomolafe
Noise is fugitive intelligence. Noise is the playfulness of the world being constantly created. Everybody say: “welcome, I am here”.
Orishas are super deities. Powerful archetypal forms, energies and intensities. In Brazil, went to a ceremony to feed a crack in a rock, who is an Orisha, and said a prayer for everyone of us. You have come to a place of blessings, generosity, and hospitality. I invite you to relax as we co-create this space.
The run-away slaves would sneak and run through this the crack to get from bondage to freedom. It became a threshold of their becoming. Maybe it wasn’t that the were escaping to freedom, which in one sense is still the logic of the plantation. On the other side of the crack is uncertainty, not freedom. We prefer anything else than here, escaping into the unintelligible, unsayable, impossible.
We don’t have a purpose, no destination, and that is decoloniality.
42000 years ago there was a magnetic polar shift, the north became the south and the south became the north. It caused a lot of deaths. Also cave art proliferated around this time. Why did they make art in times of crises?
We presuppose that individuals decide before taking action. We are part of a sweltering, composting, pulsing, intensifying field that enlists us, and brackets our intentionality and purpose. We reduce everything to that purpose to make sense of the world, but the world exceeds it. It exceeds codes and language.
Those bodies were enlisted to make art that will not be reduced to consciousness. It was anima mundi, spirited away.
What is this course about? I have some ideas, but this is not going into your CV, not going to align your chakras, not going to give you the truth, or some underground way of solving the world’s crises.
This is a sensorium that is still making itself. It’s thesis is uncertainty, indeterminancy, it’s already a failure. This failure is an orisha. A place to eat and be eaten.
Mostly from the United States comes the idea of preemptive creation of safe spaces where hegemonic relations are cast out. A formula for how diversity looks like. It’s well-intentioned and compassionate, coming from eos of hegemonic experiences. But even those algorithms for preemption will not adjust to a world that is constantly moving. In molecular ways that are sometimes not intelligible, we reinforce the same relations that we are trying to get rid off.
If we can for a moment feed this orisha, the uncertainty, the 401 orisha whose name is not yet on the pantheon, who wants to make the same work in here. I invite you to not be so sure of what you know. The course doesn’t teach uncertainty, it’s an exemplification of opening, circling, receiving feedback loops and see what happens, and maybe we might be met by forces with no names. Ancestors, spirits, intensities and powers that failure has room for.
There is spaciousness here. There is more room in the cracks. Let’s play here together, nibble at the edges, lets dance and something might happen.
Welcoming prompt: What is beautiful here in this space of uncertainty? What is opening? What is showing up for you? – John Lee Clark
Greg Ellis
Rhythmic meditation or invitation to move and dance.
There are as many ways of dance as people on this earth.
Sonic fugitivity: there is an audio matrix of sound keeping us from our authentic selves through electronics, rigidity, drum machines, loops. There’s a place to all of that, but to access this pure rhythms is fugitivity. It requires vulnerability. And then we go back to work, it’s not an arrival.
Care team
Dancing through the cracks is a pilgrimage of joy and pain.
Community guidelines:
- share generously
- stay with the trouble
- take responsibility for your own self, your well-being, and your boundaries.
- meet cultural identity differences without making them the enemy or the idol.
- we don’t know what we don’t know and that is ok.
- aim for kindness, settle for curiosity or even avoidance.
- honor the stories and learnings.
- if it feelfs safe enough, leap.
Bayo Akomolafe
The heart of this course is the musicality of the drum and syncopation. Senses are corralled and contained by the electronification of sound and the imperial march of time.
This is an invitation to the sensorium swirl. Be sound and drum and voice and glitch. Technologies are shaky and it is good to be here.
I’m looking at the Atlantic Ocean from Brazil. Ships brought black bodies to this place. There is celebration, carnival, food. If you have a window, look out and take it in.
when we look upon the world we often presume it is relatively stable and done. We are transferring that data into our minds, the integrity of this transfer is clarity, purity. The world is out there for the taking. A deeply ingrained enlightenment.
Different notions of senses and sensing. My 6 year old son is the nerve center of my political imagination, grounding, edge, challenge. He is autistic. I got a call from my wife saying he was refusing to get out of bed. He organizes everyday according to a theme. For him this day was Halloween. He was angry because the day wasn’t dark.
I found myself wanting to urge him, to accept that day follows night. I paused. I was dragging him into my sensorium linearity. For him the world is still being created. He lives at the fringe of perception were things are still folding and coming into themselves. The world is still emerging.
In a sense this is the same for all of us. It’s just so minor, so delicate, that lounge before intelligibility, that we hardly notice that we have learned to be sorted into common sense. The luxury of rendering the world intelligible that my son doesn’t have.
We don’t see the world as it is. Vision is not representation. We are habituated in an architecture of sensing. Modernity is the racialization of sensing. Certain senses are given privilege. Vision is the priority.
Disrupt the thinking that things are thoughts. Sensorium is how bodies make sense and how senses make bodies. We don’t have senses. Senses have us.
Why modernity is a sensorium. By whiteness I don’t mean white people, I mean particular ways in which our bodies are inflamed to feel the world and be felt by the world. In order to stabilize the individual as the highest prize of modernity, it’s fetish, it cuts off every tentacular extension that gets in the way of the individual thriving. White modernity creating the disassociated self.
White modernity is losing its ability to create the conditions for the individual to thrive.
Have you recently felt that the feelings you are feeling are not your own? None of our feelings are entirely ours. Sometimes we are participating in a different kind of dance, a frequency that the myth of the ontologically closed individual doesn’t have a room for. It’s like a god is flying by. Stay with it but don’t claim it. What we might be sensing in escalating degrees is the lamentation of a whale, the tears of a spider, or the waltz of a leave. We are opening up to these frequencies.
Whiteness guaranteed us the private experience, only feel your feelings, a capitalist relation. We are being glitch, something is streaming in and is making us porous. A mass disabling event is making us less impervious than the ontologies of white modernity can preserve.
Decay, smooching. This is grace.
Syncopation is when the weak elements in a musical phrase are emphasized. The clock is on the downbeat. Syncopations turns a march into a dance, enhancing the upbeats.
Whiteness corrals us all in its milkiness and wants to preserve the individual, cutting our manners of speaking, cutting our imbrication with ancestrality, cutting our entanglements with ecology. Even our attempts to get rid of whiteness could be whiteness repeating itself.
Not to render it evil, essential, universal. Think of it as also material, thinning out. Dance becomes possible exploring these gestures in the middle. When we dance we distress the locatibility of the body, it’s very hard to be surveilled. It breaks the easy outline of the body.
New mythologies are being written. Our pristine, stable, secure individualities is loosing its edge, we are being exposed. We will try to close the doors, name the borders as disgusting, offensive. Stay there at those edges. Welcome those glitches.
Syncopation. Disruption of the normal flow. This is not us, we are part of the web weaving itself.
Jordi Rosales
Freeze the electrons of the moment when a ghost emotion passes by, keep it safe. Failure creates cracks, offer them to each other. This is not esoteric, it’s ordinary.
When was the last time you time you were interrupted by something alien? You step back and say: was that me? What’s wrong with me? When were you touched by something beyond your capacity for awareness?
The fugitive makes refuge in the cracks, in the downbeat.