Kevin O'Connor (Deepening Class)
Class Description: "Fascia: The Cultural-Material Entity"
This class will think with the cultural-material entity called fascia or connective tissue—the viscous goop that connects, divides, and slides between muscles, organs, skin, and cells. Fascia has been found to be active, intelligent, communicative, and a sensory organ—sometimes three, sometimes many and sometimes one liquid, solid and mucus. We will move with and engage with the histories, practices and science discourse on fascia. In doing so we will address the potential of performance practices to intervene in and extend vital debates around biological and medical knowledge and practice, enhance our understanding of how fascia is made through practices, and potentially offer an antidote to biosciences influence and dominance. We ask, can engaging emerging biologies as non-essentializing material-cultural entanglements offer us new practices in our Contact Improv dances, and different ways of training our attention and body-minds, while acknowledging the implicit power dynamics at play within these biologies?
Biography:
Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary artist working as a choreographer, dancer, improviser, circus artist and installation artist from Ontario, Canada and now based in the Bay area. He is involved in a decade-long artistic collective exploring participatory de-colonizing performances within polluted watersheds in Ontario. Over the last few years, he has worked with NAKA, Shakiri and Skywatchers in the Bay Area, Oncogrrrls feminist art collective in Spain, and collaborated with Inuit hunter and designer Paulette Metuq on a project in Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. He has been learning with the axis syllabus community for over a decade and is a biodynamic cranial sacral practitioner. He completed an MFA in choreography and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in performance studies at UC Davis. HIs research examines anatomies, body performance capacities, interventions and imaginations in relation to science studies, including the becoming material-bio-capital tissue called fascia.
