Workshop Ponderosa: Gasping for Air: intimate spaces, new world orders and unstable wi-fi

This workshop explores a transnational conversation, exchange, improvisation and dance between NYC based (Mayfield Brooks) and New Zealand Berlin based artist (Alexa Wilson), based on research toward their creative collaboration called 'Breathless'. 

We invite participants to engage in embodied practices that rupture 'the nation state', neoliberalism, capitalism, war, globalization while collectively breathing in Art/Activism/Land, Black Lives Matter & Feminist/Climate/Migration politics and intersectionality through processes involving and musing within skype sessions, tarot readings, sharing our own intimate spaces, stories, unstable wi-fi, State of the World/Temporality/Alternatives/Spaces of Refuge, studio practice, elections; TOGETHER because the world has become so globalized, disrupting our personal space while we are all so affected by the political morass. In the words of Eric Garner “I can’t breathe.”

Breath can be seen as like wind, with different winds breathing new life into old situations. It can be seen to break up the pollution of stagnant politics. We are all connected by air, which no one owns. What does it mean to be breath taken? Breathless. It is through breath that we can express this wreckage, and the spaces between life and death; that is transformation.

Act of Naming

Proposed acronyms for our collaboration in process

BUGS - Bitches Under Gross Surveillance
TITS - Transnational Interfacing Tantrum Schisms
FRANK - Feminist Revolutionaries Acting Nice and Kind

AM - Alexa & Mayfield

Selected name: BUGS - Bitches Under Gross Control

Description / Background

This work explores a transnational conversation, exchange, improvisation and dance between NYC based (Mayfield Brooks) and New Zealand Berlin based artist (Alexa Wilson), around the disruptive body (black, female), which finds itself expressed through variations of connection to the Breathing body as a resistant and unifying force.

Breath, disruption and resistance find expression and connection within and between  political artists across cultures, lands, distances, migrations, stories and waters, through conversation, poetry, dance/movement improvisation, song, spoken word, and performance art as binding forces for the unified resistance of gender/racial oppression in today's 'New World (Order)'.

This transnational collaboration breathes in 'the nation state' critique of neoliberalism, capitalism, war, globalization through Art/Activism/Land, Black Lives Matter & Feminist/Climate/Migration politics and intersectionality through processes involving and musing within skype sessions, tarot readings, sharing our own intimate spaces, stories, unstable wi-fi, State of the World/Temporality/Alternatives/Spaces of Refuge, studio practice, elections; TOGETHER because the world has become so globalized, rupturing our personal space while we are all so affected by the political morass. In the words of Eric Garner “I can’t breathe.”

Having met at Converge, a 2 week residency at Ponderosa outside Berlin in Germany, the artists' mutual interest in political commentary through improvisation and conceptual performance activated a strong interest in collaboration. It is our aim to be presenting this work in Berlin, New Zealand and NYC next year. It will look like performance art, dance improvisation, theatre and satire.
Breath can be seen as like wind, with different winds breathing new life into old situations. It can be seen to break up the pollution of stagnant politics. We are all connected by air, which no one owns. What does it mean to be breath taken? Breathless? We share this air.

Breath can be a connecting healing force through which we share silences ruptured, where our re/birth pierces and breathes life, creates intimacy and remembers trauma, as well as voices silenced. It is through the breath that silence is disrupted and oppression resisted, truths exchanged, healing and connection created. It is through breath that we can express this wreckage, and the spaces between life and death; that is transformation.