Robust Delicate Braids

Well here I sit, reading and writing for my PhD.  It is endless, tedious, and fulfilling.  I am at the point now where I really have to think on what it is I am doing, where has the journey taken me so far, where is it wanting to go from here, what points need to be made in this particular effort and project?  


The PhD is many things...a deepening of understanding in the history and approaches of my interdisciplinary fields (anthropology, dance studies, performance studies, narrative research, practice based research, and consciousness inquiries)...a creative journey into the heart of a spiritual tradition (whirling) and a creative practice (dance) which influence and overlap each other in ever more intwining ways...a degree which bestows personal merit upon the one who can finish it...an autobiography.  

Braids in "Circles" V. 1-Stratford Circus Theatre 2010

My theoretical strands are finding themselves taking root in three distinct whirlpools: Embodiment, Ritual Performance, and Intercultural Hybridity.  These whirlpools form a braid which allows me to connect my three main practices for this research: dance creation, spiritual practice, and writing.  Questions of embodiment tend to relate to the braid of practice in dance, those of ritual theatre and performance to the braids of dance and spiritual practices in general, interculturalism and hybridity to weaves of dance and whirling.  I am looking at how my background in dance and somatic practices led me to track my journey through a sensory perceptive lens, how totally Western this approach is, and when and where my ego dissolved in the process - leading to a new vantage point in creative process.  I am looking hard at this new vantage point, considering how I train my dancers, how I shape an event, the outcomes I tend to expect from process and performance, and the role of presence or Being in the context of the theatre.  
As is often the case in PhD studies, I think that I am on to something radically new.  Reading case studies and theoretical trajectories I find that nothing that has been done is quite nearly what I am doing, so I coin a new term to fit the blend of theory and practice which is this moment through me.  I'm thinking of it as New Ritual Theatre. 
The concrete phenomena the study surrounds itself with are the parallel creations/events of Circles of Light, a multimedia dance performance event staged twice in the course of one year, and my training and initiation as a semazen.  

myself in a crazy moment in "Circles" V. 1-Stratofrd Circus Theatre 2010

If I get brave enough and have enough time I'll create a site where I post the papers I've written. This should help me to get some of the ideas moving around on the thought trains I'm riding out there, and to get some feedback on how those are received, by whom, and how they get applied apart from my own uses.    I should also like to finally make my performance web site.  After a few years of thinking I was giving up performance, I seem to be more deeply involved in it than I ever was, so it is time to embrace this life direction in totality and create a densely woven online presence for it.  I don't know when these will develop, maybe in the autumn when studiousness is at its peak, that would be fitting.  

A section of "Grief" from "Circles" V. 2-Cambridge University 2011

For now I must simply read and think, read and write, write and think, dancing through it all, be-bopping away in my seat as I type, getting up to jam when a really good song comes on my playlist, sometimes eat a bit.  I've made a wish list here of books that would be really helpful to me, which I could not afford on my own.  Hannah's PhD Necessities  The big readers, textbooks actually, which are over $100 each (what a quack!) are actually important.  They allow me to cross reference multiple theories at once without reading the full trajectory of thought in that theory, gleaning off the top so that I can draw useful but unladen parallels.  I welcome these as gifts at anytime in the next year or so, when they will be most helpful.  As you will see, they cross disciplinary lines and engulf the process as a whole.  Hopefully they will not bog it down, but instead give a shiny sheen to my tutors and examiners.  Thank you in advance for whichever of these comes to me!!