Dear reader,

I am writing to you from the collective I. The I’s. All I’s on me’s.

I am writing to you, because letter writing is a part of my practice.

Let’s start with practice. What do I mean? Well, I guess I mean…everything I do…with intention and awareness.

“How to begin is a good place to begin, because practice usually begins by asking how to begin, and because in practice it only matters that we begin and that we might allow the practice to continue.” Jonathan Burrows, DOCH Lectures 2018

But don’t worry, I won’t share everything 🙂

My practice is grounded in Circus. I won’t get into the circular discussions around “what is circus”, but it has something to do with:

community, intention, physicality, space, collectivity, body

It is an approach, inspired by Seb Kann’s proposition of circus being to do with the relation between body, object & environment.

Taking this into account I have practices that look like movement practices, and practices that look like writing practices (though I approach writing as a form of movement and movement as a form of writing, so as you can see, the definitions get slippery.)

What is important to these practices?

Warming up

Once I was working for a kids TV show with my circus partner Lucie, and the producers interrupted our warm to ask us to do something that “looked more like warming up.” They then showed me a lunge. Sure, this is one form of warming up, but in circus, warm ups are hyper specific for the proceeding activity.

For me, a warm-up is about preparing the body (and I include mind in that definition of body), getting the necessary parts of it moving, raising sensitivity and awareness & bringing focus to what is about to come.

In 2017 I made a show called Fram & Dunt, with my dad. For this I developed a warm up that met his physical abilities, and was designed to prepare us to work together. This was where my research into warming up began.

It was inspired by a mixture of somatic dance practices, Gaga and Timothy Morton’s writing on attunement (non of which I am particularly into, but none-the-less).

I became obsessive and wrote warm-ups for everything. Hair suspension, conversation, reading, writing, going to the pub, disappointment, running, contemplation…

In 2020 I joined artistic research project The Circus Dialogues. Together with them, we developed a branch of “somatic warm ups” as part of our research on Rigged Dialogues, some were concrete, some were esoteric, all were specific to the exercise in hand.

Thinking With

Warming up is vital for thinking. Thinking for me is a physical activity which can include minute movements, expansive movements, and everything in between.

Thinking with, is a way of helping my mind shift perspective. It is inspired by artists and thinkers such as Zoe Todd, Carl Mikka, Vanessa Watts and Sebastian DeLine. I arrived at them through theorists such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennet and Donna Haraway, whose work is related to, but doesn’t always acknowledge the Indigenous thinking that it is drawing upon.

I started with Tank. Tank is a 20 litre HDPE water container, and my  duo-partner. We work on a 1-1 counterweight system, in which I hang from the hair, and he hangs by the handle.

Improvising with Tank was just like moving with a ‘fleshy skinbag’ (convention wants me to say human but I do not like the word) partner. I only ever know my version of my partner, what’s the difference, I thought.

So I set to getting to know him, and I wanted him to know me. I did warm ups for “becoming plastic”, I moved as polymers, I tried to open my senses to what his senses might be, I sat in stillness with him, I thought through our contents, water, blood, muscle, I moved with the intention of sensing what dimensions he may exist in, moving knowing that my movements are affecting things in dimensions I have no access to, no right to access to…

I was playful with it, I invited others in to the game, I wrote letters to and from him, I handed over my autonomy to others, they wrote as me or Tank, we wrote to our audiences, some replied. We opened up our letter writing practice and wrote as, or to other aspects of our practice: body parts, injuries, ideas, feelings, concepts…

Intuition / Reflection

I realised that in trying to leave space for Tank, for his materiality, for his experience, I had instead constructed his identity, named him, gendered him, and used his body to speak about myself. I was right at the centre, hidden in plain view.

So then, reflection became a part of my practice. My practice became a correspondence between movingthinkingworking intuitively and contemplationreflection.

Intuition was trying to connect with a part of my being that was not motivated by reproductions of power, a connection with universe, flow. It was cosmic, full of sensation, it was movement.

Reflection was about finding ways to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Look at how capitalist-colonialist power structures might be using my body to reproduce itself. My aim was not to avoid that, or deny that, rather to acknowledge, interrogate and unpick. It was reading, it was moving with ideas, it was proposing exercises to explore this physically (which is to say dancing or writing or thinking).

During this time, writing as an act of circus became a part of my practice.

Writing Circus

Thinking about writing in relation to Sarah Ahmed’s writing on Queer Phenomenology through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on how the body is oriented or positioned when writing. Thinking about the relation between body, object and environment in writing, the body of text, the writer’s body, the immediate environment, the political environment, the environment of the page, the environment of the reader, the object of discussion, the computer as object, the text itself as object.

I wrote with flow, with intuition and with reflection and pause.

I do not consider writing as different to hair hanging, in terms of being a circus practice. It trains different muscles (as does, for example juggling), it allows for different thoughts to emerge.

Subsequently, Tank wrote my MFA Thesis, an essay for the book Thinking Through Circus, a short film and a show.

I also write work that is not seen as being circus related, though I still consider the creation of these pieces circus work.

Audio Description

Thinking through a medium that is seen as highly visual, from a perspective that is very somatic (as I think is probably the case for many circus artists), has lead me to practice audio description.

Inspired by and taking part in workshops by Quiplash, has brought together my approach to circus and language in new ways, and has encouraged to exercise my tongue as well as my hand.

Together with artist Toubab Holmes, we created an audio circus, with acts by 6 different circus artists. In many ways I think circus and audio description walk hand in hand.

I could go on, and I will as I edit and rewrite and rethink and change, but for now, I will leave you with some more words on practice by Jonathan Burrows:

Practice is a doing which is not yet concept.
Practice tries not to think a future.
Practice keeps going in the full and foolish knowledge that these things might fail.
Practice looks best in articles about dead artists.
Practice resists white male genius leaps.
Practice unclenches your fingers from the idea that you will find some kind of performativity. Practice laughs at authenticity.
Practice dies when you use it to tick a box.
Practice is like a corner of the attic filled with papers.
Practice is a field wishing for a map.
Practice makes dull marketing copy.
Practice is like scanning the universe for an alien life form.
Practice is like collaborating with everybody but in private.
Practice appropriates everything but doesn’t yet know what to do with it.
Practice has never finished editing itself enough to say anything to anybody.

So reader, if you have made it this far, congratulations! I hope it was worth your time (though practice is not about being worth its time). If you have thoughts, reflections, provocations around practice, I’d be happy to hear from you,

Practically yours,

Tay