18/6/2020
I like to join Peter, Marta, Julie and Joanna’s editorial thoughts and add…
Since we met in February 3D and 5 senses, we have experienced world events and challenges, anything between stunningly beautiful and extremely painful. I appreciate how we team have responded, bringing improvisation and fluidity and flexibility to adapting content and structure in a most considered caring presence. Rigidity didn’t have a look in.
Choosing to engage with collectives, gatherings, public talks, projects and moments attentively dedicated to curiously question, rattle and actively engage in shifting outdated systems and living practices, I accepted the invitation to co-curate The Grand Re-Union project with delight. And I am loving the opportunity to honor my roots in dance. Among many and a few, in particular, I am hugely grateful to learning with Simone Forti whose approach to communicating with someone and about something, informed the direction of work I choose in the mid ‘90s, and became fundamental in all my living.
We are living through a moment of unprecedented change, which holds the potential to abolish systems of superiority and oppression. The systems within which we have been living are neither inert nor inevitable. Authoritarian systems require obedience, and the terminology to enforce it. It goes largely unnoticed that through our habitual language we are inadvertently upholding the very systems and increasing number of us are seeking to dismantle. Many words and phrases we still use are manifestations of inherited concepts of hierarchy, superiority, control, and we may not have reviewed these for a long time to check if they actually align with our current ethos and intentions.
Let’s take the hierarchical rug out from under our feet, and consciously re-fresh the concept and beliefs underpinning thinking and the resulting communications.
We can acknowledge our active part in co-creating, and then maintaining, the worlds within which we would like to live.
I welcome this moment of destabilization, and The Grand Re Union fully engaging.