Context: Since around 2009, I’ve been working with and through a practice I call nonstopping. It started as a creative survival strategy and progressively accumulated into a practice of self-amplification and articulation in relation to conditions of the continuous present. Lately, I find the term itself, nonstopping, problematic. I read recently that the earth is spinning faster and we are headed toward a “negative leap second.”  In the midst of exponential speed and automatic over production of material making, I think most people just want to slow down, rest, experience sensation, and notice details. Not exclusive to that reality is a feeling I can’t shake which is: if time, space, matter, and circumstances are moving faster than I can track, I want to sharpen some tools to be more aware and present. I keep on keeping on with nonstopping because it understands the dance experiment as being on the way and because it persists in amplifying the mobilizing and mutable force of mind and body in the midst of undeniable, uncontrollable change and precarity. I keep at it because it’s been my active resistance to other forces (internal and external) that conspire against expression of thought, speech and body.

Practicals: In our time together, we’ll start with what we know and then lean into what we don’t know. We’ll start with non-theoretical, simple approaches to nonstop moving and speaking, without constraints of how, what, or why and then progressively play, and sometimes grapple, with the impossible possibility of attending to multiple tools and strategies in the continuous present. We’ll notice how the complexities of our desires, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and even doubts are formed and articulated in relation to ongoing shifting conditions and propositions. We’ll stay with not-knowing as a generative tool to be able to notice more. Never going faster than you can feel. We’ll work together in relation, alone together, or just alone, sometimes in pairs, or small groups. We’ll watch, write, discuss, and question. We’ll bring our questions into conscious action and practice. We’ll work with provisional micro-scores to frame and hold attention to our practices. Sometimes, we’ll use everyday objects as necessary obstacles to the unconscious pattern of just wanting to go with the flow. We can’t, we won’t, and we don’t stop getting closer to encountering and choreographing the material of our selves.

What to expect: Folks can expect to move and speak a lot as a mode of creative practice. This workshop is open to all folks of all disciplines and experiences willing to do those things while sometimes or sometimes often not knowing why or what is being produced from it. A willingness to not know and still stay in desire is useful. We’ll discuss and write. We’ll work alone together, together in relation, or just alone, in pairs, or small groups. The practice is built on directives, tasks, tools and strategies for moving and speaking but the ways in which that manifests is self-determined, self-motivated, and self-observed. Please bring something to write with and on.  

-Jeanine Durning