Conversations + Workshops

Visual Collaborations

Project Guidance











About
Contact
All Projects


Withness

Community Conversations + Creative Workshops
Margot Lystra / Margit Galanter
Earthdance SEEDS Festival

Working in a summer woodland, Margot and Margit’s movement/making practices evolved out of the rich intersection of researching site and being in it. We gave ourselves time to hang out in uncertainty, taking ample space to figure out how to act and what to do in relation to a living place. 

As artists in residence at Earthdance’s Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance, + Science festival (in Plainfield, MA), we shared our findings in a talk and workshop with other attendees.

Core principles
THE SITE IS ALIVE. Working in an environment is working with numerous partners.
RELATIONSHIP IS THE GROUND. At a living site, all actions are interactions.
LISTENING. Learning other beings’ ways, we explore difference towards mutuality.
CONSONANCE: a tangible, open action-connection between self and others.
SHIMMERING: tapping into the “nature of” a thing/ being to glow or amplify it.
TIME. Be slow to let fascinations and connections emerge (not thinking them up).

Action-tools
  • work something to the shimmering edge of perceptibility
  • use randomness (e.g. flinging) to work with the nature of a thing 
  • set up precarious structures - ones that ask to fall or be felled
  • find vividness by releasing out through
  • mend something
  • give yourself a simple, compelling task and live in that task

    San Francisco, CA / Plainfield, MA (2010). For more on Margit Galanter: https://www.vividgrove.org