With so much happening around us in the recent days, it’s easy to find ourselves in a state of ‘stuck’ - how do we respond? The mind may continue to formulate and attempt to find optimised answers to ambiguous questions, but this session of stuck reminds us that the body also knows what to do, more than we think.
This session brought participants - students, staff, and a few friends invited by our previous attendees - to a process of movement and creation. We started with folding a zine together that would record our individual, private journeys of stuck, journalling challenges that had surfaced to us. Then, we went into a simple ‘10-minute dance’ where we invited our bodies to guide us through from lying down to standing up, between the concepts of yield and push.
The stuck practice was introduced with a few common movements and states we are familiar with (stretched, pressed down, overwhelmed, out of balance, compressed inwards, caught between conflicting loyalties) and how that might feel and look like, before we went into individual movements and sculptures, from stuck to the next state that our body brought to us.
What was the voice of each sculpture (position) our body led us to? Participants wrote them down in their zines, and with partners showcased their 2 sculptures, where there was resonance in a simple response of “I see, I feel” while each in their pair shared what they were surprised by in their own sculptures, and then individually writing in their zine journals the actions or ideas evoked by the practice.
In the end, we come to discover the wisdom of our bodies and learn from one another the different responses we can have when in a place of stuck. No one is stuck alone.
Stay tuned for Systems Stuck in Session 3, where we explore that in further detail for ‘stuck’ in the systems around us.
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FAQ: What is a zine?
A zine is an easily assembled booklet that we can make with A4/A3 paper (or any size really). We made an 8-page zine, which you can do by following the instructions here.
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Quotes from our participants
“I never looked at how my body responds to feelings. It's also body reaction to emotions. This is new knowledge.”
“It is relieving from trying to solve to accepting stuckness as a positive I can learn & grow from”
“I faced it!”
“A stuck body knows what to do next”
Check-in
Zine Instructions
Zinemaking
Starting the 10-minute dance
Slowly rising up
10 min dance feedback