Bonjour!
I’m Anne-Gaëlle, and I am making the next offer for In-Body, called Passages (Portals to the senses).
You can follow it either through listening to the audio score by clicking below on this page, or through watching and reading it before doing it.
It lasts 30min ish, but you can make it much longer if you like.
If you are reading, trust that you will remember what is just right for you at that time. If you are listening in real time, I would recommend that you use no headphones, or if you do, that you use wireless headphones, so that you feel as free as possible to move, and that you feel free to pause whenever you want to take more time than I do.
Please take the suggestions I am making in a way that suits you: adapt them to your space, to your own body today and to your desires of the moment.
For this invitation, I will propose that you go outside and come back in; that you use pen and paper; that you move; and, I would like you to have a piece of fruit and some water available with you for the end.
Hello! I’m Anne-Gaëlle.
For this In-Body invitation, I would like to bring the idea that our senses are like portals: windows, corridors, doorways, arches, etc. portals between our outer and inner environment.
Please take a look at these 5 photographs, and if you feel like it, read the descriptions I made.
1.
A spirally staircase made of wood is seen from below, photographed from inside a dark space. The step wave starts out from the right side of the frame and goes anti-clockwise towards the middle, leading up to a white round of light. To me its shape recalls a snail, the inside of an ear or, perhaps, an eye.
2.
Two close-up pictures of an empty keyhole leading to a green outdoor space. One is blurred in the background greenery, and the other one is blurred in the foreground. There are various textures: wood, metal, rust, dried white paint, and in the loose shape of the keyhole could fit a minuscule person standing, using all the space.
3.
A photograph of an inviting bridge in a park, unfurling in front of us, in the middle of green trees and plants. The colours are unsaturated, bringing all textures together, and some light hits the middle of the bridge. The bridge goes up and down like a small hill and is made of many carefully laid out slim planks of wood, with a more sturdy rubber corridor in the middle. The arch it creates reminds me of the arch of a foot.
4.
A big bonbon pink double door is open, in between some big grey-stone walls. You can see the details of the carved decoration on them. And funnily, it is not the part of the door with the handle that is open, but the other one. They make me think of winking eyes.
5.
A picture almost in black and white of a passage through an old building in a town. You can see two rounded square frames marking the entrance and exit of the passage, which leads to a street up, and warm and cold textures inside it.
There is a wide-open metal gate on the left side; it’s as if someone had opened it and was calling the body for a run through, going from light to dark to light.
15min walk
Please go outside to have a wander in your surroundings, from 15min to however long you want it to be. Even though you might know the area quite well, I invite you to come to it with fresh senses. Make it a real breather, a way to change all the air inside your body into new air coming from the outside. Your walk might include, if you feel like it, changes of pace, running, changes of levels, of direction, new paths you hadn’t noticed before… or not. And you might notice passages: doorways, corridors, windows, bridges, keyholes… and how your body engages with them. When you are back in, please come back to this.
5min kinaesthetic drawing
Welcome back. I hope you had a nice stroll.
Using a paper and a pen, I am inviting you to do a kinaesthetic drawing. This is about a felt experience of your hand and the pen moving on the paper rather than seeing the marks that you make.
Start putting your pen on the paper, ready to go.
Then close your eyes, and retrace your walking experience via your sensations.
What textures did you encounter under your fingers or under your feet on your walk? What did you smell, hear, taste, see? And how did your body feel?
There is no need for it to represent anything or to be understandable, this is just a way to integrate memories; you might want to let the pen just stay on the paper and leave marks, as you recall your sensations from the walk; as if your pen was like an inky extension of your body memories.
Once you have drawn for 5min, you can put down the pen, and open your eyes.
5min measuring with the body
What can you sense from the air around you from where you are now? Are there windows, doors or corridors in your surroundings?
Find a place to stand, sit or lie near one of them.
Take a moment to settle where you are, and take a breather perhaps.
What would it be like, for the next 5min, to measure with your body these in-between spaces, concrete and nearby, or a little further, adding imagination?
Let your fingertips find empty spaces, interstices to visit.
Trust the sole of your feet to give you access to the ground or to other surfaces, or maybe, let the back of your head or your bottom do that.
Let new information in, make space by letting old information out.
Feel free to keep feeling and moving through, and to pause or stop whenever feels right.
Slot yourself in, fold, peek a hand or a foot on the other side, touch the edges or float in-between, or fill the whole space available.
Try different compositions of your body and space together.
Whatever makes you feel curious.
You can pause the recording here and start your 5min.
5min “Tastes of unison” score
Welcome back.
To finish this score, I invite you to a “Tastes of unison” score. Prepare a piece of fruit and a glass of water, and take approximately 5min to eat and drink these.
I invite you to really take your time, and enjoy it as much as possible from all the senses, knowing that no small pleasure is too small.
I hope that we somehow might do this all together, as if we were an ensemble; that we enjoy the imagined unison of fruit eating and water drinking from our many places, made of rhythms of sound and silences.
Afterwards, feel free to download on the website any sound recording, video, picture, drawing you may have taken or made.
I look forward to imagining you.
This is the end of the score.
