Me and Mike Hughes, Brendan Jensen, and Julia Male met at Hub 14 and entered a conversation on how to work, and how to make.

We agree to address transparency and continuity throughout rehearsals by way of unedited notes on chart paper, and this blog, but not necessarily in the finished work. We want to provide information as to how we make the thing we make, but not offer a translation into what it ‘is’ or assume any kind of way to look at it, experience it, or feel it.

We set the tone in the room as a place of imagination, invention, and the simultaneous respect and disregard for conventional definitions, facts, and science in exchange for inventing our own, born from our practice in the studio, and letting meaning reveal itself to us.

We will look for content, questions, and direction from the depths of a meditation practice of our own making. This meditation aligns areas of the body with a colour, shape, sensation, anatomical relationship, environment, and disposition of our choice. We agree to begin each rehearsal with this practice as a way of coming together, modifying our state of awareness, and initiating a kind of unnamable connectivity. We have temporarily permitted ourselves to become pseudo-scientist-hippy-chakra-choreographers.

This makes me think about our willingness to rediscover what we may already know but haven’t identified, or what we could potentially produce as a new kind of knowledge from the depths of our curiosity, experience, and hanging out with friends in a completely unproductive manner. I love facts and science, but perhaps they get too much credit in shaping our perspectives, our position in the world, and what is valid or worthy of our attention. At this point, it’s much easier to look something up on Wikipedia than imagine its definition. So, we begin by challenging ourselves to imagine.