The Fantasmical Anatomies lessons are choreographic lessons of approximatevly 45min each, that I have developed in relation to corporeal, therapeutic and anatomy. The lessons differ from one-on-one sessions; they take place in public contexts and address a group of people instead of an individual.
The participants are invited to lie down on a more or less comfortable mattress and to close their eyes if they feel like it. Extending the format of Awareness Through Movement® as practiced in the Feldenkrais Method®, Fantasmical Anatomies lessons suggest dysfunctional relations and speculative actions of the body using poetic and scientific-anatomical language. The instructions can be taken in, but also rejected.
Each lesson is given live. Sometimes sounds of objects, soudscape, silence accompanied my voice. The objects and materials used are later collected and kept in a Fantasmical Anatomies Box carrying the same name as the lesson.
Ways of encountering the proposals inside a lesson:
Invent an avatar, think of something else, fall asleep, leave the place, pay a small amount of attention.
Go inside the liver, go to the place you love and from there get into your liver, give a small amount of attention to the liver’s whisper.
Take up the right to non-expression of the movement, the right to dériver (drift), the right to disappear, the right to be gone.
VERSION 2
Fantasmical Anatomies Lessons
Similar to Feldenkrais’ group classes Awareness Through Movement®, the Fantasmical Anatomies lessons are conceived to be orally transmitted. The lessons are living entities; a co-regulation process between the teacher and the participants. Once the lessons land on paper or are recorded, this element is adapeted. Nevertheless the co-regulation relationships can be imagined and felt. Moreover, the lessons are altered each time they are presented, adapted to the different contexts (workshops, conferences, theater venues, dance festivals, museums, performance laboratories, etc). Each context requires different attention, explanations, and enunciations. Even if the lessons are slightly modified depending on the space, some rituals remain constant: a moment to find a place for the body in the space, a welcome and an acknowledgement, a situated awareness, moments of stilness, des dérives (drifts), and open ends.
A lesson is a cut, it has a beginning and an end. It offers itself to be repeated, re-encountered, and re-visited, knowing that it will never be the same. A lesson invokes the desire of repetition and variation. An open repetition, considering that a strict repetition is inherently impossible as the lesson is affected by many factors (the space, the presences in the room, the context, the environment, the improvised moments, the modulation of my voice, unexpected interruptions, etc).
The lessons are partly guided and partly improvised. There is preparation beforehand, but when the lessons take place, there are echoes from the rooms, the temperature, and the presence of bodies. As I become more familiar with each lesson and with anatomic language(s), I improvise the Fantasmical Anatomies lessons to a greater extent.
Index of Fantasmical Anatomies Lessons (ongoing)
- The Lesson on the Mother Tongue
- The Lesson on the Tongue
- The Lesson on the Skin
- The Lesson on the Symmetrical Body
- The Lesson on the Eye
- The Lesson on the Mouth
- The Lesson on Sexual Organs and the Insect
- The Lesson on the Artificial Uterus
- The Lesson on Symptoms
- The Lesson on the Hand
- The Lesson on Seismic Activities
- The Lesson on the Lesbian Bodies
- The Lesson on the Seismographic Body
- The Lesson on Anatomies
- The Artificial Floor Lesson
- Critical Awareness Lesson
- The Far Away Lesson (the very too far)
The first iteration of this lesson took place in the framework of the exhibition What does it take to cross the border? at the ifa gallery, Berlin, in February 2019. I approach the skin as a starting point to address the relationships between thresholds and people, between frontiers and bodies and within bodies themselves. Skin – with its surfaces, scars and folds – doesn’t simply contain bodies as an enveloppe; it rather exposes bodies to other bodies and surfaces.
The lesson is a gathering, an entanglement of different voices from different, sometimes contradictory sources and discourses.