ANGELA
SCHUBOT
„Widersprüche gibt es nur in den Wörtern, Widersprüche gibt es nur in den Sätzen. Das hat mich sehr nachdenklich gemacht, bzw. mein Körper hat das eigentlich immer gefühlt. Jeder Körper fühlt das.“ (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann)
teaching is continuing the research and researching gives ground to the teaching. they are deeply intertwined. it´s finding the right questions and accepting that we are already lived answers to questions we don´t know yet. especially the body. in that sense the body is all there is. within it is all. the real stuff and the soul. and the unknown.
teaching and research have always been crucial parts of the artistic work, equally important and necessary. and from the beginning both have never been a patchwork of appropriated exercises and practices incorporated oneself from others but an out of itself developed method of practices and embodied knowledges that can be shared. with coherencies and inner necessities that build on each other.
in the beginning there have been questions of how to live formulations of the body fully on not fall into traps of representation. how to develop a mutable body that has the possibility to unfold in many ways and at the same time remain attentive to its shifting meaning. in the beginning there were a lot of questions about how to connect the speed of the body and the speed of the brain.
and training the virtuosity of the body, opening up to the polyphonic landscapes within the body; a body that is not „one“ or always a „globality“, but many details with different textures and layers and rhythms. from there came a whole set of practices on isolation, multi-moving, texture-polyphonies and unpredictable inner-body-symphonies. including thinking and making thinking visible through the body.
and then more and more entering the unknown, in the
beginning calling it „breaking habits“ or „before naming“ followed by a more radical presence-work of „where do we begin and end, where do we exist, where can we exist?". a kind of presence work that unfolds knowledge about the way we are in space and time deep within and without our bodies. practices on physical expansion and quite naively tapping into something that then was called „unconditional love“. and the dissolution of the self and melting the individual.
the collaboration with jared gradinger brought the breath into the teaching and research. and the work on intimacy, more precise on „beyond intimacy“. i am breath, we are breath, falling in and out of breath, becoming one organ through the breath, before naming intimacy. and dedication. a whole practice around dedication to the other. that years later became a practice in surrendering.
and then the „no-will-stuff“ and the desire for being moved. searching for the autonomous forces and principles in the body that move us. slowly trying to learn how to let those forces incarnate in the very materiality of us, into bones and flesh and organs and skin and thoughts. meeting those forces and getting a flavor for how it could be possible to reconcile the body and the mind within a very open and sensuous body. developing practices how to become that sensuous body and how to undo the rest. entering the territory of „the inside is the outside is the inside“. leaving the heroic virtuosity of the body behind in favor of a softening of body and fibers that offer no resistance for being moved by the forces that are in us more than us. these autonomous forces leading to a more earthly and cosmic connection and clearly into the non-human realm behind all things and within the human body. healing rituals together with robert steijn, research periods exploring plant medicine led to working more closely with the spiritual dimension of all things and how to let that dimension speak through the body. not there yet of course. still trying. and failing. but surprisingly this dimension brought the voice and an intuitive sound work into the teaching and research.
latest processes together with jared gradinger enter a deep work with plant consciousness and co-creative science, developing a whole set of practices how to communicate with plants and become part of an ecology in co-creative ways and how to co-exist in other ways. how to train new organs of perception, how making space for a true listening and for the felt and for dropping the mind into the heart. and dance from there.
in the end also hoping that all this can change the body equally than the thinking. they are so deeply intertwined as well. and thats another real hope. that shift in thought. which is also in the body. thoughts. and how we think, about us, others, about the world and how that makes us act, capital a (for less capitalistic violence).
acknowledgement: the teaching and research have been deeply infused by the artistic exchange and collaboration with rosalind crisp, martin clausen, margret sara gudjonsdottir, robert steijn, many plant collaborators and by the constant bodywork and healing exchange with lea kieffer.
the continuous collaboration with jared gradinger over the past 10 years created its own „gradinger/schubot-method“, with a strong focus on partnerwork and nature consciousness.
TEACHING
RESEARCH
Angela Schubot’s physical practice enters and lives within places of deep intimacy and beyond. In her teaching together with the students she practices a deep listening to the autonomous forces and energies inside and outside the body, that move us, breathe us, think us, dream us, create us, dance us. She searches for a space of true listening before clobbering what is there with our prin-cipals and desires. A space that will lead us to an unconditional togetherness and a body which neither loses itself in others nor imposes its power over others; a body which gives its exuberance away and thereby becomes the most exuberant thing itself.
Can we hunt down the texture life is made of? Can we be in it without needing to know how to deal with it? Can we celebrate the pleasure of not knowing? Create a space without a function for us to dedicate? Can there be moments where there is no haze between perception and being? Can we become a „sensuous body“, rather than an object-or subject-body? And what means „to open“? Towards what? What means opening in a way without closing something else instead? What is nonresistance-resistance? What means giving up on it all? And then: What is our relation to nothingness? To silence and to immediacy? Can we enter territories where principles of the living move us and incarnate into our flesh? And how will that influence our being and dancing with each other? And how to live life in this world?
Angela Schubot shares her practices of how to get into the moving body, without a pre-thought concept or a desired aim. 5 days and 5 intensive trips which will connect us to the autonomous movements and forces inside and outside our bodies, which move us, breathe us, dance us, think us, dream us. Creating a space of true listening before clobbering what is there with our principals and desires.
There are countless ways of existing with each other, if we assume our body does not end with our skin. How can the other inspire me to enter spaces that are not occupied by a ’You' and an 'I'?
Since 2009 Gradinger and Schubot's topic has been the debordering of the body. In their work, they have attempted to reorganize the relationship between the 'I' and the 'You', in the search for other forms of co-existence. The next chapter in the work is negotiating the collective, the 'I' and the 'We'. We aim to create a performative sphere that can effortlessly shift between mutable constellations, where 'I am You' can become 'We are You' or 'I am We’ etc.
We start with a training that aims to undo the habits of the body and perception and expands its current comfort zone. By exploring and widening inner and outer spaces we will find a mutable body full of vibrations, sensations and fantasies and discover the realities and performative potential that such a body does create. Through partnering work based on extreme physicality (breath, exhaustion, duration, full-dropping) we will work on an unconditional togetherness and dedication to the other or others.
This work searches for a freedom from a habituated, implicated self, through the creation of a new body which enables the conditions for being in a state of constant 'becoming'.
practices in how to communicate with plant nature and how from that place of connectivity and true listening start a co-creative process with non-human forces through dance and meditation and incarnation of nature forces.
Can we let the body speak, by itself, by moving, breathing, dreaming, resisting thoughts, by talking not too logically, by not talking at all, body talk, body silence, body noise, acceptance of everything that could happen, would happen, should happen, do we need a direction to find things that can inspire, why look for imagination, when the body is already so complicated in sensing and creating moments, movements, memories, milestones. Falling in love with dance is that really necessary to be able to fly, flow, forget.
Robert Steijn and Angela Schubot share their practices. How to get in contact with the vitality, lazi-ness, and creativity of the body? They like to redefine together with the participants how one can get in a body state of discoveries, going to things one did not experience before, how to refresh constantly an attitude to let things happen, instead of controlling them.
And when there is an aim, we only could describe it as finding qualities of deep listening to what is there already and discovering forces that guide us beyond ourselves and touching realms of ritual, magic and healing.
Starting from bodywork and 1-on-1 healing work, both artists will connect the participants with the autonomous movements and forces inside and outside our bodies which make us move, breathe, dance, think, and dream. Inviting everyone into the deep sea of flows inside and outside our bodies.
This is an open invitation to enter the intersection between bodywork and dance, healing and moving, introversion and expansion.
This workshop explores embodied ways to be with the knowledges and spiritual insights of plants and plant consciousness.
It is a time of encounter with the multiplicity of non-human forces in us, more than us, and beyond us and dedicating to our ongoing mutual relationships with them.
Our practices explore inner and outer dimensions of bodies and lands, inviting a place of connectivity and listening.
How might we meet the entity of a plant as an ensemble, a symphony in our shared
ecolgy?
How can we enter co-creative processes with nature forces in visible and invisible realms, letting them speak through our bodies through dance, meditation, touch and incarnation?
How will we stay in it, loving the unknown?
For the past 14 years I have been dedicated to exploring the "Body of Sensuous", the "Inner Movements" and the autonomous principles and forces inside and outside our bodies that move us. These inherent movements of the body and the world, the "I-am-moved" instead of the "I-move-me", have become the physical ground of my artistic work. The "Body of Sensuous“, which is not an object or subject body, opens up fundamental questions of the connectedness of human beings. From this research I developed different methods of presence, dancing, healing and training like „Radical Softness“, the perception and training of the "Inner Movement“ and a special form of "Flow Work".
From the contrast of the experience of the "Body of Sensuous" to other normative bodies and forms of being in the world arises a sharp critique of existing conditions that produce or maintain a very specific form of bodily subjectivity in the first place; but new utopian possibilities of living together also emerge.
Many of these autonomous principles are directly related to non-human, i.e. not humam-made phenomena. So I came quite organically to an exploration of Nature Intelligences and plant consciousness.
This long term research by Angela Schubot in Collaboration with Shelley Etkin and others explores embodied ways to be with the knowledge and spiritual insights of plants and plant consciousness through hybrid practices of plant trituration and movement research.
Trituration is a practice stemming from homeopathy. It opens a space of resonance through the grinding and scraping of a living substance with mortar and pestle in several rounds of potency. The practice offers direct experiences into a substance’s essential healing properties and it’s signature. Information is observed and noted on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and collective levels. No ingestion is involved. Rather, the practice of trituration works through a mutual field of resonance and reciprocity.
The ritual of trituration forms the container for an experimental dance research into the multiplicity of presences, reflected in the substance and the body as well as the collective gathering and wider land. The one substance expresses itself through the prisms of each human system present and this heterogeneous information comes back together as one whole picture; that of the substance’s signature as a being.
This artistic and scientific research is practiced in different settings and different constellations, always putting one plant in the centre for a sustainable period of time.
This research is also the attempt to to find a language to honor the knowledge that is given by plants. A language that is neither esoteric nor cerebral but keeps on opening up into the connection rather than freezing it as something static or fetishized, objectified or not alive.
And how might this „language“ even be different for each plant?
Might be movement or sounding language, bodies of multiplicity and group choreography, written and spoken text, scientific insight, drawing and weaving memories.
Past and present Partners & Collaborators:
Moss
Clover
Yarrow
Oak
Spruce
Shelley Etkin
Kate Nankervis and Ann Trepanier
Toronto Dance Community Love-In
Aune Kallinen
Toronto Dance Theatre/Valerie Calam, Alana Elmer, Peter Kelly, Erin Poole
Suvi Kemppainnen
Moving in November Festival Helsinki
Future Partners & Collaborators:
many prospective plant beings
Theater Thikwa Berlin
Hebbel am Ufer Berlin