POC Centered Virtual Somatics: April Parcon Resilience Immersion 2020

In NYC we were into a month into self isolation due to Corona Virus, in other places like Spain, they were 2 months in.

How does our POC centered somatic movement practice show up in the virtual space?

The virtual space allowed us to connect with people from all around the country: Florida, California, New Orleans, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland and more.

And the world: Uruguay, Canada, the Philippines, Spain, and the Netherlands.

This collective activated a core team of Parcon Resilience(PR) Facilitators for the first time. Our teamwork allowed us to offer a mixture of big group experience, small group intimacy and one on ones as needed. Orientations were offered to those with little movement or Parcon Resilience experience. Each core team member facilitated a 4 person small group to process and explore with during the big group time and the teams of 2 core teams met with racial affinity group in the evenings. Our work was heart felt, collective, and emergent.

During the Big groups: Everyday objects that we often overlook became our intimate friends to inspire us to connect with ourselves and our history differently.

Leading to a bridge for connecting with our virtual tools in new ways that could be nourishing.

RACIAL AFFINITY SPACES

2 POC and 2 white racial affinity groups met in the evening practicing PR embodied ways of checking in, asking questions, and working through conflict to approach and access our being together in fresh and integrative ways. These spaces offered rich and intimate spaces for people to connect to their questions and each other.

Testimony:

“Andrew, to me it wasn't even that bumpy considering how brand new this is for all of us. You are so thoughtful and intentional about setting it up and you really have a knack for asset mapping and trusting the group. Also, the way you facilitate the movement practices is so nutritious for me. Every time I've been with you that way I have felt stimulated, inspired, and happy to be dancing with your prompts.” -Maria Bauman

“I have felt reverberations throughout my day - and in my virtual univ zoom class this evening. lots to reflect upon...” -Karen Schaffman

Special Thanks to the Core Team!

Andrew Suseno, Anne Tangi, Kimberly Tate, Farai Williams, Ryuta Iwashita, Joanna Fitzick, Brianna Johnson, jc Bitonti, Colleen Roche, and Zena Bibler. (their photos will be added!)

This event was co-produced by Livable Futures, a project of Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, the Ohio State University department of dance and the Parcon Resilience Facilitator Fund.

HISTORY written in May 2020 reflection.

Before Corona Virus lockdowns I was slated to teach Decolonize the What? at Ohio State University thanks to Brianna Johnson, a graduate student there who I met at Fissure (My 2019) at EarthDance, a conference partly facilitated by mayfield brooks looking at the openings due to dissonance within Contact Improvisation that made space for social reflection and the creation of new practice models. i was on the fence about letting the conference go. Part of our preparation for the OSU intensive was monthly calls to integrate somatics into academic disciplines with students across disciplines and artsists. jc Bitoni played an active role in helping me to brainstorm about the possibilities for this group to exist beyond the OSU intensive.They had come down from Canada during the November 2019 Oberlin College because they had head about the work from Vivek Patel who I knew from the Ontario Contact Improvisation Jam that I had attended and taught at from 2017-2019. jc advocated for continuing to do the April Intensive Virtually and seeing if the funders at OSU and Livable Futures, an affiliate organization supporting artists, would still fund us. And they did, and provided additional funding upon our request for me to have a team of facilitators and to document the event.

We formed a Core Team of 9 people. I'm going to give a little history of how I met these amazing folks to highlight how this opportunity galvanized the team in such a beautiful way.

Brianne Johnson 1) Met during Fissure 2019 
Farai Williams: 1) Met during Facilitator Training 2019
Zena Bibler: 1) Met during WCCIJ 2019
Ryuta Iwashita: 1) Met during Fissure 2019 (described above) 2) March 2020 Immersion (Theme: Intersection of Gender and Race)   
Nhu Nguyen: 1) Met during WCCIJ 2019 2) Facilitator Training 2019 and PR admin and infrastructure planning.
Anne Tangi: 1) Met during NYC practice group; 2) PR intersectionality with aging project & Facilitator Training 2019
Kimberly Tate: 1) Met during ParconNYC performances of 2017 @ INSITU and collaborated on Highline Projects and her classes at Parsons 2) Continued through local NYC 2018-9, partner in offering PR at Fissure,WCCIJ 2019, Hindsight 2019, and through the New School. 
Colleen Roche: 1) Met pre-Parcon through ZCO- A mixed abilities dance group, then joined in Parcon labbing at the Wexler Tables, NYC in 2016 2) Continued with local Mixed Abilities PR classes from 2017-2019, and many other adventures including the Facilitator Training of 2019 
Joanna Fitzick: 1) Met pre-Parcon in 2004 when I taught Contact Improvisation in Baltimore, MD then joined Parcon Resilience Immersions starting in 2017 on, including Facilitator Training of 2019 

We organized as a team to support 40 people from around the country and the world to explore anti-racist relationship building in the virtual medium. I can't stress enough how satisfying it was to bring so many PR worlds together for a deeper dive! Ea was going to join from the Philippines, we met in 2016 in a PR protest of Marion Sims in NYC. Pablo was joining from Uruguay, we met during BIPOC Contact Improvisation Jams. Awilda was joining from Puerto Rico, I had the opportunity to offer PR to the CI community a couple years ago. Olaya was joining from Space, I think she was introduced to the work by my posts following some Parcon offerings in Madrid in 2016. Maria was joining from NYC, I had offered the work to her company MBDance and now she was joining the PR community! 

And there were so many new people too! Before the April Intensive, we held Orientations for folks to reorient or gain first exposure to the work so they would be able to move beyond the initial shell shock of it for the intensive. And we provided one on one conversations with anyone who indicated that the needed more orientation about what a POC centered space was. One thing I loved about working in our team was how the practice of Parcon Resilience invites us to draw from our somatics and felt sense of the world to craft how we collectively organize and care for those who we come into relationship.

For the intensive we had Big group meeting from 12-3EST and 4 Racial Affinity groups meeting from 6-7:30pEST.
I facilitated the big group. The themes I focused on were connecting with a sense of intimacy and support with the objects and place that we are in, including the the virtual devices we were using. Small Core groups of 4 broke off during the Big group time to engage more deeply in improvisation, process and reflection. The Racial Affinity groups were a smaller group space for participants to drop in more using PR tools, have more autonomy in the direction of the group and to process our racialized identities within current events. 

We learned a lot. For participants, many expressed awe at how they could have more agency with their space and use of objects and devices. Others found tremendous relief and a sense of connection and being seen within their smaller groups.

There were also hard things that emerged within the "brave space" that we created. Without going into details, about the particular happenings, I learned that for me, to take our anti-racist work into intersectional spaces and integration we need to bust looking at race as a binary: White and POC. In my effort to create a POC centered space, I was identifying myself and POC joining us as a monolith, other-ed by whiteness. I wanted to integrate ways to connect with ancestors, history and animism...but this in itself does not do justice to the voices of those on the margins. I think from this intensive I began to acknowledge that POC is not a monolith, we are a multiplicity. 

I want to dive into deeper embodied understanding of my relationship to Asian American anti-racism, which in itself is an identity of multiplicities and to use it to build connection and relationship to people of the African Diaspora. And as a collective we learned that in order to do this we need to do more work on our own in POC only intensive spaces separate from White folks. And white folks need to do more collective race consciousness around whiteness as a multiplicity of identity building with anti-racist mentors to develop the PR work with guidance so they can take more responsibility for on-ramping white people who want to participate in PR. 

So this leads us to a new phase for Parcon Resilience where we engage in our own deeper dives of our racialized groups to better understand history and politics from a collective embodied place. And then to give much more time to POC only projects to give time for us to explore our relationships within our multiplicity without diversion from white people calling for us to be a monolith. And we will check-in and build occasional projects with our white sisters and brothers as we all build our capacity and resilience to be in an embodied share reality together. 

Deconstructing Gender & Sexuality March Immersion 2020

Parcon Resilience is a POC centered somatic movement form that supports us to actualize new sensibilities of ourselves and expression by moving in consensual relationship with collective consciousness in our bodies and the environment. During the March Immersion we explored how our expressions of femininity, masculinity and non-binary gender. We used the Parcon Resilience lenses to amplify and clarify our non-verbal communication around boundaries, self-connection and collective intentions as we explored gender identities, the multiplicities of gender expression and cultures, and our path for sticking with community agreements to show up in our fullness by using our developing trauma-informed approaches. 

Testimony

This was the most extraordinary experience. There was the sense of playing a small, exploratory part together in the making of a new "language"—not only verbal and moral but, inseparably, embodied—and a new world, a piece of a huge work in progress, like a quilting bee of the future. The movement was fun, playful, searching, creative, homing our attention on the bodily location and sensation of an emotion or memory. The depth and genuineness of contact with others was what I did not expect. It was so moving.

I was changed by those two hours. As I walked home I realized I was centered not in my head, not even in my heart, but deeper, in my hara. It was a completely new feeling. I have felt centered in my hara gravitationally, but this was emotional. 

-Annie Gottlieb

This weekend encouraged me to meet my self connection with a collective connection, to ask for what I needed and meet another’s needs, but also to say no, and to learn to receive no. With the support and accountability of the group, I confronted trauma held in my body and developed somatic strategies for grounding and re-centering. The challenge was to heal through presence and connection, even when it was difficult or I didn’t know. I left the workshop with deeper relationships to place, to community, and to myself.

Chris Cahoon

Hey Andrew, as you know i i absolutely loved this past weekend of PR. The power of exploring gender roles with our bodies was fascinating and surreal. The power of exploring yes and no using gender identities was unique for me.

Omar Gonzalez

The invitation to explore gender identity while staying rooted in my own body, experiencing and exploring thoughts and feelings both verbally and through movement sequentially and in layers, offered a rich opportunity. In this safe and connected space I was able to examine and discard some arcane stereotypes, and try on some new ways of being. I am still getting little minibursts of insight.

Joanna Fitzick

Resources list:

My Gender Workbook: Kate Bornstien

Masculinity: Bell Hooks.

CQ newsletter: Body as Home: A Reflection of the POC-Centered Jam Experience at the West Coast Contact Improvisation Jam, 2019

Body as Home: A Reflection of the POC-Centered Jam Experience at the West Coast Contact Improvisation Jam, 2019 by Nhu Nguyen

When I asked myself, “Do you feel like your body and its identity are considered at a Contact Improvisation festival?” the answer was often “not really.”

Click the link here to read Nhu’s Nguyen’s article!

Dismantling racist internalizations: June Immersion weekend 2019

The June 2019 Immersion weekend happened in NYC drawing participants from NYC, Baltimore and Ohio to take a deeper dive into the work. We explored Ken’s Hardy’s task of the privileged and subjugated through the Lenses of Parcon Resilience: Body, Touch, Locomote, Place, Connect, and Imagine. I enjoyed improvising on the bars at Jefferson Park while vocalizing our internalizations around race. And I remember stick strolling down the sidewalks through Chelsea in NYC.

Decolonizing the What? Moving toward a critical settler consciousness @ Oberlin Fall 2019:

Decolonization is a craze hitting academic curriculums around the country. Enthusiastic about creating a “POC-Centered” somatic form I sometimes called Parcon Resilience a form that decolonized the body…BUT “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” The article by Eve Tuck and K Yang, 2012, that helped me to reframe the Parcon Resilience as a raising of settler consciousness within a POC centered framework. Decolonization itself is an act that specifically restores the sovereignty and land back to the indigenous people which may be facilitated by raising the embodied consciousness of settlers to challenge settler constructs in our bodies and constructions..

“Decolonizing the What? Moving toward a critical settler consciousness ” @ OBERLIN [nov 2019]

We explored many things together at Oberlin. The classes I created explored the phenomenology of a settler consciousness through Parcon Resilience and the emerging collective during the Intensive.

I will share some of the key concepts from our Intensive we explored to foster our shared vocabulary.

FELT SENSE of SELF: Core to Parcon Resilience is the felt sense in our bodies to ideas, emotions, urges, and connections. During the first session Oberlin participants found ways to physicalize their felt sense of their collective values. In PR we find several physical ways to express our felt sense: movement, touch, locomotion, how we attend to the place, connect with others and images and other ideas. For example we deepened our collective emergence and embodied channeling of the value by sharing about one family member or friend who best exemplified the value.

TOUCH: Often times touching can be seen as simply aggressive or sexual. In a culture that is hyper visual we lose site of the power of touch to communicate intricate and intimate details about our intention and attention in connecting to the world. During the Person of Color affinity group a participant entered with an injured back. We split into duets and used touch as a way to bring relief, healing and ease by following the cues of the recipient as to what touch was desired or not. Then we explored how touch supports understanding of another person’s felt sense of ideas and the world. Similarly the receiver could make requests for modifying the touch to match the feeling of tension and movement in the tissue. The duets found as much ways to move together as possible while maintaining the integrity of the felt sense.

SETTLER TRIAD: Settlers are settlers because they are in a triad of abuse with land and slaves as property of the settler. During the weekend students went outside to a playground falling over the structures alone and with the support of others to slow their falls through pulling, pushing or sloughing in interesting ways. Then we imagined, in trios, that one supporting person was land(and the native) and the other was the slave(ie. labor,) to understand our mobility while we talked about our histories around settler wealth.

BOTH/AND One student felt trapped in her senior thesis between her expression of learned white-centered modern and ballet dance in the college and the traditional filipinx dance she learned over the summer. Together we began to identify what elements of the traditional form were essential for her in her felt sense of being Filipinx while she modified the rest of it using her dance and Parcon Resilience cues for filling out movement expression in her use of objects, others, and the environment.

COMMODIFIED TIME VS SELF DETERMINED: A group of students at the library explored duets that had an imagined component of touch that represented work, and another that represented leisure. Then at times work and leisure time were dictated by capital for when to switch, juxtaposed to the self determination of work and leisure. We reflected on the images that arose and the connected feelings.

NOT PLAYING INDIANS: We ended our intensive by exploring our felt sense around the four directions and the sky and earth and acknowledge the truth that we had yet to invest in decolonization via relationships with the Wyandetta or Odawa tribes and committed to practices of sustainability toward self connection. The technology of the medicine wheel offers us a holistic template for the embodiment process needed to broach and engage in the relationships needed for decolonization.

View fullsize

View fullsize

TESTIMONY:

- I think the Parcon Resilience practice supports me in sustaining self-connection through many ways, but orientation and critical questioning seem most important to me right now. The orientation practice helps me to become aware of and consider how to address my body's present sensations and needs, rather than ignoring them in order to get things done. I think about how it helps me wake up my side body and backspace, and feel more whole. 

- I also feel more connected to myself because PR allows critical questions to enter the improvisational practice - this keeps me engaged not only as a body puzzling out how to move through space but also thinking about how my racialized experiences inhabit or manifest in my body. I feel connected to my self because I am not only working through new ways to move but seeking movement that affirms my sense of self.

_Kara Nepomuceno

Cada Paso

Cada Paso is a non-profit in East Harlem that leads walking tours for mostly Latino families to learn about health living options in NYC. They cover topics such as the Green market, Play, Civic Engagement, WIC, education for adults, and etc.

What: This summer we began to experiment with teaching Parcon around a theme that Cada Paso was focused on. If it was Green Markets, we used Parcon to embody the dynamic relationship between local farmers and consumers versus a big faceless corporations with blander food. If it was play we invited the adults to engage in novel movement on the children’s playground and invited creative interactions with their children.

When: During the summer of 2018

Special Thanks to

Doctor Cappy Collins. The project was a success. Perhaps we will continue again once COVID lifts. A couple of the participants from these workshops ended up coming to local East Harlem classes at the Johnson Houses in East Harlem in the Winter of 2018.  

Intergenerational Parcon Play

Where:  Church of the Living Hope, 161 East 104th St, NYC, NY 10029

When:  2-5pm May 19th, 2018

Who:  An intergenerational Parcon workshop with participants from the Su Casa Residency program and their families. 

What: We explored objects exploring the environment. A plastic shovel sliding along and around a metal railing versus a rubber stopper needing to roll along its surfaces. Then we explored consent in making contact with each other. And we ended by moving our partner as we did our objects, and then found ways to support their exploration in Parcon.

Andrew Suseno is a participant in SU-CASA. SU-CASA is a collaboration among the New York City Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department for the Aging and the City's five local arts councils. This program is administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and supported by public funds from the New York City Council in partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department for the Aging. LMCC.net.

Parcon and Non-Violent Communication Jam

Testimony from May 23, 2018

Despite not knowing anything about Parcon, I loved Andrew’s meet up. It’s deeply inclusive, empathic, and gentle. The meet up merges movement with learning to assert yourself in a way that is empowering. I wish there were more things like this in the world, and not to mention it is only $5! Andrew and Shana are clearly socially aware and in being so cater consciously to individuals marginalized by society. If you’re into spiritual movement and intuitive connection you should definitely check these meet ups out! -- Christine Lee

Parcon makes me feel alive in a way that I haven’t felt before. Combining the best of contact improv with the opportunity to dance outdoors connects me with my partner, my body, and nature. I appreciate the opportunity to experience NVC while dancing.  Andrew creates a space for people of all abilities, ages, genders, and races to explore movement and social justice in one very fun package.   - Ana Wieder

May 30, 2018

"It's hard to put into words how a simple decision of showing up and seeking discomfort brought me to self exploration through Parcon and a damn good time with a humbling folks. To explore and forge relationships through exploration of touch and movement is the essence of what Parcon is about. What's so powerful about such community is that I can go home and continue to live my life but now with much more awareness of my environment."  -Rimsha Warda

---

Initial Invitation…

I am super excited to explore this work with Shana Deane. She is a long time facilitator of the Non-Violent Communication (NVC) work and member of the Parcon community. NVC is a tool developed to break down the way we think about ourselves and the world to nurture connection rather than violence. Parcon is a way to physicalize that thinking into our relationships through movement and contact. These relationships can be with an object, another person, and the place. This opens up many many possibilities for play and transformation!

Mixed Abilities Parcon at the Axis Project 2017

Where: Axis Project 1325 5th Avenue, NYC, NY

When: Every Wednesday 4-5 from summer of 2017 - 

Who: Open to all members of the gym

What: Axis Project is a a gym, rehab center, social gathering place for people with physical disabilities. Parcon Mixed Abilities is a class geared toward understanding and teaching toward their experience.