Session Notes: Period H, Stretch 1/4, Video 1

Duration: approx. 20 minutes

DC Notation: [ A Ra Ru ] < Su , G O U | Sh

Preparation: Active Imagination meditation

Ariel, Raz, and Ruby act as practitioners; Susanna as director; Gal, Omer, and Uri as witnesses; and Shahjadha as videographer. All participants experienced the same preparation, and are encouraged to play with the resulting material.

During this Period, we experimented with the practice’s capacity to include practitioners from a wider range of backgrounds, particularly in relation to experience in embodied practice and performance practice. Thus, the disparity in embodied technique between the participants – inherent to most if not all practice situations – was intensified and foregrounded.

In an attempt to accommodate this intriguing diversity, we abandoned the material used in previous session, the Tarot cards, and relied exclusively on the preparation; aimed at dilating and specifying the focus of and communication between the participants. The preparation was a seven-minute meditation based on Carl G. Jung’s practice of Active Imagination. Starting from a collective image – here, a person on a hill in the desert – we invited our individual imagination to adventure, delicately tracing the transformations and allowing the ego to interact with them. These journeys are then externalized through writing. In this Period, the participants were invited to mark three parts of the text which they found ponderous. Neither the journeys nor the markings were shared with the other participants. (The Active Imagination journeys from this Period are available in the Material Catalogue below.)

We found that the lack of a communal and clearly defined material detracted from the play of directorial relations; and from the agency of all participants to trace such material throughout the experiment. We decided to return to the Tarot deck as embodied archetypes in future sessions. Additionally, we will experiment with the Active Imagination journeys as material. For the sake of rendering this material transmissible – and effectively retainable throughout the duration of the practice by all participants – it may be necessary to develop and technique for processing the written journeys into clearly defined units.

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