2 SCHOOL 2 COOL
I’m remembering in year 8 when a guy called Adrian who was just about the coolest guy in the year level walked up to me and said, with this sense of profound realisation, that I was “too school for cool.” He seemed a little shocked by his own cleverness. And I don’t mean that in a snide way, I genuinely remember this aftertaste of amazement that his own comment seemed to have left in him. It wasn’t bullying, he was trying to help me there, the two of us having ended up alone near the downball wall. I would like to think that in the time since, I’ve slowly taken on that advice, focusing on play, embodiment and creativity more and more and striving for academic success less. Despite reading much less than I used to, the power of books will always awe me and I think that most of my favourite people in the world are at least as ‘school’ as they are ‘cool.’ Maybe even a bit more ‘school.’ I’m also remembering that in songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s book, which I read this year, he specifically targeted the school/cool/fool rhyme as a cliché he no longer abides in songs.
THE FOUR BODIES
In our performance class today, Hrefna spoke about the four bodies - spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical, and the ways that our attention sometimes shifts between all of these in one minute. I found this particularly interesting because I’ve been learning about Tarot this year, and the four suits in the Tarot deck each correspond to one of these bodies. The suit of Wands, for example, is the spiritual realm. I’ve managed to get back into a daily yoga practice at the moment, and notice how helpful that is at pulling me towards the three of these bodies that aren’t the intellectual. I’m a massive old element-of-air person and if left unattended will spend full weeks cruising in my intellectual body, so it’s nice to have the reminders and the daily rituals to pull me into the others.
TO BE SOMEONE ELSE
Incidentally, day one of this performance class was fantastic. Both Hrefna and Huginn (both of whom have a name that means ‘raven’ in Icelandic) are inspiring and welcoming teachers. One exercise we did was to swap clothes with someone else in the room and spend an hour in their skin, imitating their walk and noticing how it felt to inhabit their outfit. Of course, watching someone prance around as you wearing even your accessories is both unsettling and fascinating. I was left with a sense of how wild I must look walking down the street, so absurdly colourful sometimes, in loose fabrics, looking away with the fairies as they flutter in the wind. It was nice to wear Dominic’s heavy jeans and earthy tones, to feel the groundedness.
A ROMANTIC WALK
One lovely moment from the week was a ‘walking performance,’ which a visiting artist led. The thesis statement behind it was ‘can a performance create a sense of romance in people.’ We drank red wine by candlelight, wrote love song lyrics in the snow and, at the end, came inside to write love letters to ourselves. A couple of weeks out from an unexpected break up, this latter exercise came at a great time for me. I noticed the energy in the room once we’d finished the walk, the way people were leaning in close over the tables and speaking excitedly. I would have to say that AnaMargaret really succeeded in structuring this performance, true to its intentions. We all stumbled home to bed with little foil red hearts in our pockets.