Specially developed for the presentation at MDT, the Critical Awareness Lesson is a journey through body experiences from somatic practices that I have engaged with throughout my research. In this lesson, I combine notions of Feldenkrais' Awareness Through Movement® lessons with literay or poetic modes of writing, for instance the way that Monique Wittig describes the body in her novel The Lesbian Body.
I explore different modes of addressing the body and try to make tangible how ways of naming the body condition how we sense it.
How can we introduce criticality, a sense of detachment and awareness at the level of our bodily sensations?
In the lesson, I go through different notions such as "pay attention", "sense", "observe" and "feel"; what I call the "desire for symmetry"; the concept of "left" and "right"; the concept of the "midline"; singular and plural; coming from the I to the “we”.
Photo documentation of Critical Awareness Lesson as part of Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies at MDT, October 7, 2021.