One of the movement research areas, within the context of the piece For God, is contemplative body. I got interested in it being first introduced to the concept of contemplative prayer during my choreography studies by my professor Kirsi Monni, while I was doing a small piece for a  promotion ceremony in a church. Thanks for her for that, seems like it was one more good advice I got from her :)

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the contemplative prayer is something like the third quality of praying in the christian context. First comes the written ones, second the persons own words for god and third, if these first ones won't do the trick, comes the contemplative one. That means there is no words, no wishes, just the person, being there. It's a sort of silence, a moment of just listening what is present, as I understand it. I think I might have even experienced this during my religious years, being depressed and ready to give up on life. 

In terms of practise, to be present requires bocoming a body, arriving to the present moment, that you are. With all the meditation experiences that I have had, there has always been this letting your thought, that are mostly dealing with the past and the future, to pass through you without attaching to them. I think this is parallel to Deborah Hay's practise of perception, where you try to constantly dis-attach from the perceptions during the practise. Also, it seems to have similarities to this concept of solullistuminen by Satu Palokangas. It deals with tuning into the cellular knowledge of the body. During the course Tidal Bodies, given by Satu in Art Uni Helsinki in autumn 2017, she often reminded us about how this is not a process of doing, but a process of being. 

​What is then?

There is life, this energy that moves within me. There is breathing that I can guide but not control. There is this body happening, wether I want it or not. If we don't take into account the possibility of suicide, then this mind-body will continue to re-organize itself, to reform, until the process slows down and we die. 

There is this basic functionality within us, the basic instinct to be balanced, well and healthy. Then there is a lots of stuff, that happens through our life that disturbs this balance. To make an example through dance, I will share some personal experience:

As so many other girls in this world, I also learned that my value as a human being has something to do with how well I can fulfil the beauty standards of the woman imagery. My subconscious undertook the tasks of being small, easy going and light. During my BA studies in dance we had a lot's of Alexander technique as part of the studies. As many of you know, there is this phrase of "come to your own lenght". I will never forget the moment, when I was standing in the dance studio, during the legendary jazz dancer and choreographer Tarja Rinne's class, and suddenly realising, as a result of the Alexander classes and the one I was in, that this is how long I am. This is how much space I take. And that this is the feeling of not hiding, not holding back or trying to be something else that I am. It was a moment like the moments after rain, when the clouds disappear and the air is clear and all the smells and colours are somehow more vivid. 

I had so many holding pattens (and I still have), that resulted from emotional trauma, depression and this need to be small and pretty. In order to be able to move my hips, back or to jump properly, I had to work so hard not only with my body but with my mind. I worked on letting go of wanting to make a beautiful pirouette, wanting to have a good balance etc, to actually be able to see what's there already. By letting the things that were happening within me to be present, I only started to be able to learn.

I think this is what Hay might mean when she says "take your hole body with you, the teacher". That only by tuning in to the body, we can have access to the process of the present, the emotions and patterns that we are repeating and that are shaping us. And since we will never be able to fully control this body and life, we should learn to listen. And from the place of listening, to gently re-direct ourselves.

So the contemplative body would be something that is meditation on the body's present in order to experience life. To balance the mind-body would be the prayer that brings the "peace of mind", that religion is maybe in it's best cases also looking for. 

To appreciate life is to appreciate the body. If you only appreciate the transcendent, there will be no peace for nature or human life, because they both will just be seen as a inconvenient pace between the now and forever. 

The residency period is over. It will echo in me for a long time, so I figured to write couple of echoing posts as well. In this post I will contemplate on the thematics of the piece For God. I hope to continue this kind of writing through out the process as an independent practise of thinking and sharing. 

In this process I want to look into the meaning creation. Humans have created different stories, rituals and value systems to make sense of the chaotic and un-controllable life. There is absolutely no way of telling what will happen next and when our days will end, unless we end them ourselves of course, and so we found ways to handle the pain of not being in control. I would say a power greater than us, say, a mind behind all this, would be well suited for the purpose.

Artists through out the history have composed and painted trying to capture the divine or to write glorious anthems to both to image the gods and to channel ways to meet them. The ballet developed from the court dances, that were there to organise the social encounters of the court in a suitable manner, to illustrate the heavenly and godly postures and behaviours. Church and kingdoms as gods representatives have been huge funders of arts the in the past. Both for personal and political reasons, art has been made for god, so to speak.
​
For male artists it was more possible to have divine motivations. And to be artist was to be in a way spiritual and in the best case genius. But when it came to women or fleshy movement qualities, we were suddenly dealing with being possessed and sinful. What is common in both cases tough, is that there is something transcendent that is being given a form, something un-known that becomes known through the process of meaning creation. The intuitive qualities, that art making bears within, become bearable for the people around the artists when we have labels for them, such as genius, witch or shaman. 

So I'm curious, why aren't we more aware of this fear of un-known, but instead just fall for different forms of oppressing the reality by labelling it into boxes that we call truths and gods? 

For some decades religion hold the answers for the questions of existence and told us where we should go and how to behave (especially women). For a long time now, to relief of many and myself included, the power of church has diminished in western society. But at the same time ISIS and Israel burn for the religious states, havens, and different forms of believing blindly flourish around us in many ways, like people following Trump and other kinds of leaders. It's almost as if the god would be about to make an encore after being dead already. As a woman I have a deep concern about this changes that are happening in the society. It is not so long ago the laws oppressing other-than-white-hetero-man were put down, after "just" couple of thousands of years of oppression.

So I think it is important to ask why do people need the concept of transcendent to bear the chaotic present. Or rather, could we understand it better? 

In christian tradition we expect our minds to leave the body in death. The mind would be the sole entity of us, the I that will still exsist after our death. The meaning of life is then to delivery us safely to the eternity. Therefore the body has been often seen as just a vehicle and often something that is on our way - a mere disturbance. But as the western science is also finally starting to show us, this "vehicle" the we are, is actually the body of our thinking. The intestine is our other brain, nervous system is affected both by the body and the mind, our survival is due to bacteria etc. So I want to face the limitation of the life of the body and of myself as one way of giving space for some kind of multiplicity within me, like so many others before me. To loose the sense of self-centredness can end up to blind beliefs but also to a process of living un-egoisticly. That kind of image of self can include multiple truths simultaneously and the life will then be the process of balancing and finding a peace within the constant change. And what better way to contemplate on this than to look inside, into the body-mind.

The concept of body-mind-connection has been present in many cultures before this western one. And the fact that this is the case, talks for itself. The western science is not the only way of knowing. After all, it repeats the logic of subject telling the object what is real for the object. That is the objective knowledge as I understand it, something that doesn't take in account the knowledge of the lived experience. And I'm not saying it's not complicated and that we wouldn't need that kind of mirroring too. But it's not the only true point of view.

So this is why I think it is important to propose the body-mind as something holy. It goes against this logic of objectifying bodies, cultures and women. To me it's also personal to be in a dialog with the christianity since that is my religious background. It's also strongly the foundation that the western society is based on. If we were to collapse backwards in culture it might be just the 'laws and order' to go back to. There is time for utopias and there is time for looking back. This piece is my way of looking back. 

So to conclude: It seems that we need a sense of meaningfulness, something that marks the important moments and experiences from the flow of everyday events. And from these markers we create a sense of direction and a feeling of belonging. This is maybe something that on one hand the death of god and on the other the globalisation leaves us longing for. According to romanian born philosopher and writer Mircea Eliade, these needs are at the core of the homo religious.​

The first week is already behind us and second has begun! During the past week we have been sharing our materials and thoughts, recording the sounds of my body, and asking multiple questions like: "what do you mean by that?" and "could you elaborate on this?".

Artistic practise is a lot about communication. First I had an idea and now we are working on it together with these brilliant people, who I'm lucky to share my interests with. At this point of the process our most important aim is to stay in the mode of asking. We need to keep ourselves in that open place where it is possible to see not only the second but also the third option. It's crucial for me to separate the information, that arrises through our reactions to materials and of their relations to each other, from my personal likings.  I need to elaborate why I do and say what I do. And when I don't know why, I have to find the courage to say so. This can be especially challenging when the topics are personal to some extend. 

So what we are doing, is building a common ground, a place of sorts, through communicating our thoughts and situation in the world.

How do we communicate then? At this point I have shown to Mikko and Roy the stuff that I'm working on and they have shown me theirs. I try to open an access to my thinking process, that is for big part embodied thinking (that sometimes felt like an encrypt). For example, I have been using American choreographer Deborah Hay's practise of perception as a base for practising non-ego-sentric moving. In this case my goal is not to control what my perception looks like, (as my movement is considered a perception). 

We also did a crazy "run-through" of the piece that doesn't exist yet. It was chaotic and yet it seem's to inform us that we are on a right track. I also realised how much space sound takes since it spreads all around us in the space. During one of the "scenes" that I'm working on, so called contemplative scene with listening the body's inner space, I could do nothing, since I could not hear myself. This kind of info is wonderful, it helps us to figure out how to share the time and space between different elements of the piece.

​It seems to me that it is almost impossible to create anything, if my ego with it's concerns and fears is on the way.

This also goes to the communicating with my colleagues. Sometimes during the week, when I couldn't find the right words to explain some of my ideas for others, I felt scared. It's always freighting really, having to face the fact that nobody really knows what is going to happen within next 10 seconds, let alone in this piece. But that's exactly the funny thing about life, you can not control it. And yet we often tend to try to make it stable, non-changing. I think that choreographic stage  and art of movement are a perfect media to think about this stuff. 

Nevertheless, it's humane to feel frightened when you are in contact with each other, when sharing something so personal as artistic visions and practises. When this happens it is easy to project the fears on to my colleagues. In those moments I try to find a will power to inhibit myself from reacting to those projections that my ego presents to me. I need to really reach out for the people beyond all those fears and to let go of my will to already be there, at the "end". If I'm not able to let the things be blurry and to be able to stay in the mind-fucking mode of asking and of listening to the un-known, there will be no "magic". 

I used to think all this communication and social awareness were something that is on the way of artistic work. But for the past years I've started to think it's actually the crucial moment where life happens. That's exactly the un-perfect  surface, contact between me and the world, the place of shared in-betweenness where I change and grow, hopefully. 

This and the following week will be spent in Luxembourg, in a residency that is organised in collaboration with TROIS C-L Centre de Création Chorégraphique and JoJo - Oulu Dance Center. We are going to be working on my next solo, For God, that will premiere at Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki in February 2019. ​I/we will be writing every now and then to  share something about our work with you guys!

The setting of the residency couldn't really be any better suited to the themes of the piece, since our accommondation is in an old abbey with catacombs and statues of the holy figures of christianity. I can't help but wonder at the fact that, during the abbey's original time of use, the society would have most likely seen me as a heretic: a woman making the statement that the body, seen as sinful and seductive, may in fact be the only holy thing there is, if holy meant something that was sacred, important, something that had more knowledge that we could possibly understand - and something to cherish, not to despise.

This seems to be one of the core interests in my artistic works and it has for sure a lot to do with background. I will talk more about that in the later posts.

Our artistic team consists of sound designer Roy Boswell, costume designer Siru Kosonen, composer Mikko Sarvanne, light designer Teo Lanerva and dramaturge Santtu Uuttu. But for the following weeks it's going to be just myself, Mikko and Roy. Our aim is to focus on the relations of music, sound and movement. 

The residency is a chance for us to make an intensive trip into the world of the piece that is emerging. Everyday life, with all it's production, marketing and other freelance "situations", often takes up most of the hours of the day. Days can easily turn into weeks and months without proper training and focus on choreographic laboratory, if I'm not careful. It's so easy to get caught up with the ideas of future pieces and possible funding but also ideas of "should I quit 'cos I got 10 to 20 rejections with zero explanations" from the places I applied to. Of course this is an inseparable part of the profession, which I'm sure we are all, unfortunately, all too familiar with. But I must also say I have got many positive answers too. After all - we are making a piece! 

So if the daily life of an emerging freelance choreographer is intense in the sense of a million things happening and not happening at the same time kind of way, this residency will certainly be intense in a very different way. There's only one job description for the next few weeks: that of the choreographer.