2023
in Collaboration with Participatory Arts Cooperative & Bridgespace Events Center
Animist Arts is working with many other groups and individuals in a year-long artist residency meets placemaking & mutual aid cooperative experiment centered in the SE Portland Waterfront area. More details to be updated as they are created by the group. What follows are in-person events we are hosting at the space.
Animist Arts In-person Events April-May 2023
Venue unless otherwise noted: Bridgespace 133 Southeast Madison Street, Portland, OR
The following dates are not listed in precise linear order.
Details will be finalized by 3/31
Saturday April 15th 1-4pm
Nondual Theater Jam April Session A facilitated by Animist Arts
Email if interested in attending. Currently these are RSVP confirmation events only.
Nagoggy Theater Play 3 part Series with Heather BeGaetz of Alchemy Arts 4/22, 5/6, 5/20
Requested Sliding Scale $30-75/session. No one turned away for lack of funds.
RSVP and Donations to:
Facilitated by Heather BeGaetz of Alchemy Arts (Animist Arts plans to be in attendance participating, not facilitating)
Nagoggy is a theatrical, physical, vocal play practice that aspires to a present day living relationship with the ritual roots of theater as a community relationship practice with human and beyond human kin. The practice culminates with multiple players enacting 'scenes' or 'group dreams' in multiple replayed iterations where the group has a hand in casting, staging, and seeding how the improvisation might play.
In these three hour sessions, we move from 'solo' warm ups and exploration, to duet and trio improvisations, to culminate in whole group improvisations/scores, and with various styles of closing integration. These three sessions can be attended individually or as a three part series.
Saturday April 22nd 1-4pm Session 1: Power Play: Elemental Source/Force
We orient to felt-sense power as a kinesthetic experience grounded in elemental awareness as the source/force aspect of power in its various manifestations. What kinds of motion do various elemental interactions generate? At the initiation, peak and dispersal of those elemental movements, what can be sensed?
As we approach the reality that many of our power stories grow from power paradigms steeped in power over/under, domination dynamics, and oppressive systems, we look for personal clues for how to re-earth our relationships to these. When we play with human relations as interactions of source/force nature, what reveals?
For group work in these series, we approach scenes & group dreams that cast human characters in relationship with each other, but also primarily with myth-beings, ancestors and other beyond human kin, as power play usually involves beyond human players who often are overlooked.
Saturday May 6th 1-4pm Session 2: Tails, Tusks, Wings and other appendages
As we extend and alter our body map with props, costumes, and unlikely appendages, awareness often shifts and fascia holding patterns can open to allow new or renewed relationships. Appendage practice naturally generates character play. As our bodies gain different gaits, burdens, amplitudes, extensions, we both gain and lose inherited and trained movement/identity patterns. As a creativity, relationship, and liberation practice, body masking playfully disrupts and illuminates.
Saturday May 20th 10-1pm Session 3: Power Play 2 ***PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED for session 3 only
Continuing in the practice of Power Play Session 1, we begin grounding into felt-sense source/force power as something that moves through or with us.
In this session we play with clowning our dom/sub, victim/perp dualities, where they might arise for us individually. Moving from this basis, we play with group improvisations that move away from casting our human personal identities as a protagonist, and towards playing scenes/group dreams with source/force characters that the group mutually consents to encountering.
***PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED (for session 3 only). This session is for intermediate/advanced practitioners, meaning people who have already initiated and engaged with their own relationships to power/oppression, complicity patterns & victim patterns, as well as having a capacity for self-responsibility/awareness around their power impact on others. Theater/dance experience is not as important, but a readiness to step boldly into improvisation, being witnessed and bearing witness is good groundwork.
Wednesday April 26th 530-830pm
Nondual Theater Jam April Session B facilitated by Animist Arts
Email if interested in attending. Currently these are RSVP confirmation events only.
Saturday May 20th 4pm-9pm
The Play to Find Out Salon Hosted by Animist Arts in collaboration with Alchemy Arts and Participatory Arts Co-op
This event will happen later in the day after Nagoggy Session 3
Open to Friends & Family
Donations Sliding Scale: TBD
The Play to Find Out Salon is a culturemaking, placemaking event centered around loosely held showings of creative works-in-process, liminal games, irreverent TED talks, and other whimsical anti-professional performance actions. There will be music, food (potluck style) and emergently weird-cool-fun activities. The event is facilitated by Animist Arts in our post-traumatic-growth-centered style.
Attendees can witness, participate, play and present as desired. We will create the evening flow based on who shows up and what emergent desires are expressed and felt.
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01
Nondual Theater Jam w/ Animist Arts
This is a rotating training jam hosted by Animist Arts in a theater lab format. You can expect versions of Viewpoints, Rhizomatic Choir, Meisner technique, Deathclown, Bouffon, Improv & more. For further details, watch this space. See Current Dates listed above or on Calendar page.
Email if interested in attending. Currently these are RSVP confirmation drop-in events only.
Nondual Theater Jam In-person Information
if you enjoy these practices and like to be a part of our nascent crafting process/beta testing, please join us in march (and april) before we open this up to the more general public
Friends of friends are welcome if you think they will be a good match. So when we say "plus ones" we don't mean literally only bring one person, and you also don't have to bring anybody. Please RSVP by emailing us back. (We know some starting times might be difficult start time for some of you just getting off work, if you can't get there right at the scheduled time that's fine, you will probably miss the intro and warm up.)
You should bring your own yoga mat and knee pads if you like that sort of thing, and warm layers/socks to work in because as it is a very large space it can feel a bit drafty. Bring any drink or snacks you need, you might be glad to have hot tea (though the space does have mugs, tea and electric kettle, etc). Please bring pen and paper, or anything else you like to use to take notes/doodle.
The entrance to the building is up a set of concrete stairs/from a concrete platform. We will have a paper sign posted near or on the door that says "Animist Arts".
Here is our general flow (Each session will have a different flow, different exercises and games/scores. Elements and sequence are subject to change depending on real time feedback.)
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Warm up/work your kinks out through gibberish, vocals, and movement
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A Deep Listening Exercise in rounds of actor/witness (2 person groups take turns sounding and listening, kind of like authentic movement but focusing more on sound, sometimes elements of meisner work)
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small intro to session themes
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Introductory practices based on session themes
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Group Scores & Games
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Reflection
Accessibility Section
There is a lot of work happening through April to make the space fully fit for "the public". Currently we are inviting only people we know, and their plus ones to do the practices together. You should bring your own yoga mat if you like that sort of thing, and warm layers/socks to work in because as it is a very large space it can feel a bit drafty. There is a large wood floor, some couches/chairs/tables and kitchens/bathrooms. The bathroom is ADA accessible, though stairs are required at this point to enter the building itself. There is a full kitchen available if you need it, please clean up after yourself.
As far as covid protocols go, the space itself is mask-optional, meaning lots of different people use the space and not all of them mask. Currently there are no Hepa air filters in Bridgespace. It’s a nascent shared space that does not have regular sanitation protocols that we can guarantee. It is a VERY large space so distancing isn’t an issue though with singing and voicework it becomes more of a concern. Currently we (dare/larissa) are masking when someone in close-range proximity absolutely requires us to for their safety, and when it’s useful to just mitigate risk. Because we now have the access to use this space for singing and soundmaking, we are taking advantage of that to do so and owning our own personal risks.
Because we are biasing soundmaking/singing and movement in this nondual theater jam, it is mask-optional. We will bring pump hand sanitizer. There will be different practices that we move through, and we will leave it up to you all to decide proximity or opt out if need be.
There are plenty of competing access needs and we aren’t pretending to be able to make these events accessible to every kind of access need, though we are in a larger and longer process with the space and the various groups who use it to agree on a working overarching accessibility statement and protocol.
Also, because this is a multi-use event space, there will be other people besides our group using the common spaces, walking through the entrance/exit doors, using the bathroom/kitchens etc. Therefore it is not a fully private rehearsal space like a black box.
Content Section
What are the practices? Well, some are from the Rhizomatic Choir practice: See this link
but others will be sourced from viewpoints, meisner technique, physical theater, clown, bouffon/deathclown, authentic movement, voice movement therapy, contemplative dance, systemic constellations, etc etc etc
We (Animist Arts) will plan on fully facilitating the first few and then later on if all goes well we can turn this into a mixture of facilitated and emergent practices based on the creativity of the group that shows up.
We are intending to host at least two in March and two more in April as we refine the model before we open it to the public in May.
We are counting on word-of-mouth and people bringing their plus ones who want to train in an emergent theater style based in PLAY, nondual animism, and post-traumatic-growth-based ritual theater arts.
02
The Play to Find Out Salon
03
TBD
04
TBD
