TMN1
Friends, Family, Familiars,
First and foremost: Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine. If you've never experienced these words in your body before, or if you want an opportunity practice for your next action, here, say it with me: Free Palestine. What did it feel like? How did your body respond to this utterance? Simultaneously a demand and an assertion, it is the will of the people and so it will be. Wherever you are and whatever you are holding right now, I am reciting poetry in honor of the beautiful fullness of whatever you are feeling. My bucket is overflowing with love, grief, rage, helplessness, determination, disappointment, hope, despair, and and and I know I’m not alone. We are collectively experiencing the degradation of life, planet and humanity in service of empire and capital -- it is so much to take in all the time, and even as we are experiencing it together, we are each on our own journey. I notice that possibilities for hope emerge in processes that center access and consent as preconditions for belonging, that can speak to difference in terms of power and value, and which respect sovereignty as a relationship between self-determination and interdependence. Everyone is needed and everyone has needs. The more gentleness and presence one brings to a process, the more ease with which everyone’s gifts and creativity flow. Easier said than done, I know!
Which brings me to the subject at hand -- after a year of post-PhD healing and integrating, I am hanging my shingle as your friendly neighborhood Art Doctor/Movement Researcher/Abolitionist Astrologer, here to help with creative, analytical, and metaphysical challenges, to support individual and collective transformation as we create a culture of care. I have an array of offerings based on the rehearsal pedagogy I developed in my dissertation work and my art practice over the last decade. As a performing artist, rehearsal processes have taught me about play as a strategy for bringing intention to action, finding presence in relation, creating safe and beautiful transitions, enacting modes of collective survival, and bringing questions to life through repeated practice. It has been through my participation in creative collaboration that my political consciousness has developed, and it is through my lens as an instigator of performance that I perceive the abolitionist conversation on rehearsal as a mode of liberatory praxis. Below, find ways we can learn, practice, and play together this fall and beyond.
"We are remaking the whole world—at once in our most intimate and local places, and through our matrix of relationality with all living things and anti-colonial movements on the planet. A never-ending project, a practice, a way of living." - Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in Rehearsals For Living
Learn
Sign up for Taurus Moon News, a once-monthly newsletter where I will share insights from my process, what I am thinking/learning about and working on, and announcements about public offerings. Much like this message you are currently reading! Readers will get the inside scoop as I launch my Patreon next month -- I'm setting up a portal there to share writing, open studio practice, and longer form classes. See below for more details on what the the school of Art For Earthly Survival has in store for the fall!
If you want to really nerd out, you can find my full dissertation here; as well as some curated excerpts on my website.
Practice
Change Happens in the Moment Before: listening practice for the month of Elul
I am preparing to cross the threshold of Rosh Hashanah -- the turning of the Jewish calendar year. The new year begins with a 10-day period called the Days of Awe, between the sweetness of Rosh Hashanah and the seriousness of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when we take responsibility for realigning our actions and our values and making material restitution for any harm we have caused. Elul (the month preceding the new year) offers a preparation for this transformative process: there is a tradition of listening to the shofar, the ram's horn, every day to awaken our hearts to the call of justice and undertake cheshbon ha'nefesh (soul searching). It is an opportunity to tune into what we are accountable to and what we are cultivating within ourselves as we co-create Olam Haba -- the world to come. I invite you to join me as I observe/interpret this tradition with a 30-minute daily practice incorporating gentle movement, deep listening, singing/sounding, and reflective inquiry, starting this Thursday, on 2 Elul through the end of the month; 9/5-10/2 at 9am PT | 12pm ET on Zoom. Please reach out to me with any questions. Free of charge, everyone is welcome -- drop in once or twice, or join me for the whole 27 days according to your need, curiosity, and capacity! Read some of my previous work describing this practice here.
Art For Earthly Survival: upcoming, October-December 2024;
10-week course combining creative practice, critical/cultural analysis, and relational feedback. For artists, organizers, educators, and anyone in movement work interested in exploring art/creativity as a landscape for cultivating the capacity to imagine other possible worlds. I am experimenting with the idea of offering this course seasonally, organized by an urgent/emergent question I have, inviting participants to bring their own related questions to the table. I will announce more details in next month's Taurus Moon News!
Play
I practice what I've been calling Visionary Astrology, engaging the relationship between material conditions and cosmic process, mediated through our bodies and the stories that orient our perceptions of time. I employ astrology as a useful tool for understanding one's own nature in relation to time, to cultivate greater sensitivity to time as an embodied experience, and to unpack how one's individual sense of time interacts with the temporal structures, stories, and rituals that shape our daily lives. My approach to astrology is informed by anti-ableist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist commitments, thinking about the realm of time--an interaction of body, earth, and cosmos--as a landscape for liberation, and a key component for imagining and practicing other possible worlds. I follow/study the Jewish wheel of the year, Hellenistic astrology expressed through the Gregorian calendar, and the moment on the clock of the world, as Grace Lee Boggs described the urgent time of our survival on this planet wherein we are required to reimagine everything. I welcome and expect that everyone else is managing multiple calendars at once, and offer astrological consultation as a framework for observing, attuning, and integrating the different frames of time we are always tracking/navigating.
As an artist-educator-astrologer, I am pleased to offer consultations, workshops, and trainings on time-based approaches for group process mechanics, cultivating a revolutionary imagination, giving and receiving life-affirming feedback in creative process, and movement research strategies, integrating movement of the body, movement of the social collective, and movement of the earth/stars. If any of this sounds exciting or relevant to your organization/department/institution/collective, please reach out for more detailed information.
Remember
Support
If you are seeking life-affirming projects to learn about and support, here are a few that are close to my heart:
Please feel free to forward this to friends!
With great care and appreciation for you,
Eva
Three calendars hanging on a white wall, cut through with a beam of bright sunlight. Top left is Briony Penn's illustration of the 13 moons of the Tsawout calendar, which depicts the salmon, plants, and other wildlife that emerge throughout the year; top right is the 2024 Certain Days Freedom For Political Prisoners calendar, opened to August, with an image by Praxis Vgz of a prisoner sitting in a cell next to a wall that is being broken through by a leaping dog, a cat sits at their feet as they read a letter, "Every brick will fall" is written below and "Freedom Awaits" is written above; at the bottom is the 5784 Radical Jewish Calendar opened to Av, with an illustration by Wendy Elisheva Somerson depicting the silhouette of an open hamsa hand facing down with a flower and butterfly inside, set in a black circle adorned with flowers, with the words "doikayt means / we nourish/ where we land".
Six books sit stacked on a blond wood table -- Pauline Oliveros' Quantum Listening, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Rehearsals For Living, Simpson's Noopiming: The Cure For White Ladies, and Rabbi Jill Hammer's Return to the Place.