By Rodney A. Brown with other sources of knowledge

 

ITS HEAD

 

Labyrinth at

 

 

IMBOLC was a totally different setting of lines intersecting. Like staircases in housing bewitched. Typescenes exhibition has been changing installations whose structure may not appear to the uninitiated. Even though the form already knows itself. Necessarily, this explaining is building that particular Alterian device where a coherent reading of any artwork, whatever the medium, requires some detailed awareness of the grid of conventions upon which, and against which, the individual work operates. Ingesting Alter’s perspective that it is only in exceptional moments of cultural history that these conventions are explicitly codified, as in French neoclassicism or in Arabic and Hebrew poetry of the Andalusian Golden Age, but an elaborate set of tacit agreements between artist and  audience about the ordering of the artwork is at all times the enabling context in which the complex  communication of art occurs. To that end agreements on the ordering communication of Typescenes convention are set ephemera as well as rigorously performing physical matter and inquiries. For example, at The Front Gallery in New Orleans, convention forms grave sites. Marked by pictures, masks and other stuff artifacts. Headstone plinth Gravemarker adorned with fresh flowers and love manicured inside the physical gallery space, and outside as well. Formality and colloquialisms are personified through things speaking out from their places. Everything positioned so the communication of the exhibition art installation occurs. Getting at some  construction of the articulation of different worlds, different typescenes. Well, if you don’t know; Welcome. This multi-layered process of making references to self knowing itself is the formal convention. A looking at our peculiar body over time through history explicitly surviving slavery in these United States. With what some have named, America’s birth defect.

You betta recognize. To know that if you know then you already know is knowing how to access sets of keys unlocking Typescenes. Thereby poets be keys opening reflections back to poetry. This reciprocation looks like cosmologies revealing some particular citizenship in what the Author also calls that nation within a nation. In practice, an uninitiated individual walks the exhibition wondering out loud, “Are you part of the performance?” The Author, hearing, and walking into the cochlea of Typescenes form, replies, “What is performing? I can be a candle if you can’t see”

 

Enter tombs and black dead bodies.

Enter mother’s memory. Enter rocks.

Enter last words that you spoke. Enter

your own face. Enter the obituary

program. Enter yourself looking

at yourself. Enter more and more

worthlessness feelings. Exit white

pupils. Enter signs plastic held

together standing up with glue, metal,

shelves that are stocked out, shelves

without stock. Enter plastic lids that

are shorter than the brown ones. Enter

the bases that correspond to the longer

lids. Enter what happens

when things or people do not fit in.

Enter the definition of diversity. Enter

lack of support. Enter identity. Enter

abuse. Sweat enter. Enter feeling

unsafe. Enter training. Enter dismiss.

Enter fear. Enter anxieties that come

with this manner of remembering and

lived experiences.

 

 

ITS VAGDICANUSKNEE (COLLOQUIAL)

 

 

As poems are read paths are rerouted. Moved sincerely since versification of consistent elements are throughout.

The belaying protections that have been placed in and overlapping tapestries inside this fully executed installation is the codification of form that is practicing movement based studies of metrical diversity in poetry. Therein lies safety. An active experimentation. Here, scansion organizing bodies are; and personified through Jute strings rope fibers, which steer linkages (viewer/participants especially poets who know) towards important roots throughout the installation.

 

This controlled study environment is made more risky as established connections become tangled or things strangle strung up swinghanging or fall down under any conditions other than those led by convention, which knows itself and references itself as a matter of being. Do not get caught up. Wands and cups move. For example, a collection of 12.7cm x 17.7 cm canvas panels, hand-painted Crayola pastels unfallen onto the floor. Painted personifications. Unable to recover from their low position without being held up, which is also being held down or helped or simply in practice scansion, here. Everything is in its place until that time the convention will changeshift its own elements. In this respect form articulates itself conscientized. Knowing, and also doing what it requires to stay apart from-and-over oppressive elements of language and reality.

 

Elements: Poet. Candle. Key. in experiment with Jessica Duffy, for example. Articulates Poet learning metrical compass through the feminist poet Annie Finch. Without Finch’s vital teachings on poetic meter and versification, the Labyrinth as a poetic device would otherwise be made impossible. A key. Without Typescenes the actualization of the Labyrinth would be non-existent. Candle illuminates that what you see before you is the Typescenes Labyrinth activated as an embodiment of poetry’s metrical compass. The Labyrinth serves as a derivative and extension of the metrical compass. Embodying reading, writing, speaking, and choreographed physical movement under the consideration of syllabic stress. Embodying stressed and unstressed syllables, the poet (or participant) moving into and/or out from the center of the labyrinth can choose to collapse and rise while speaking their chosen word(s ) / line(s) / place (s) of poetry. The intent is for the poet’s (or participant’s) ear(s), body, and the syllabic sound(s) to emesh full somatic experience of the poetic meters contained within Typescenes as a Choreography Poem (Choreopoem) active both on and off the page.

The Typescenes Labyrinth charts a particular pathway and entrypoint into learning poetry and thus, Poet(s).

We must ask:

How might we learn poetry?

How does syllabic sound settle into our bodies anew?

Can this be a way of reprogramming what we hear?

Can we further investigate as a result of what we’re learning?

How might we begin to explore trauma-informed pedagogies while utilizing the labyrinth as a learning device for thinking about the history of poetic meter and healing (the concious, subconcious, and unconcious)? We must pay particular attention within the Typescenes Labyrinth (most especially our personal physical movement and/or the choreographed) record which bears the imprints of how Typescenes is intended to be received publicly. Aiming to get at how physical_ social and psychological component parts of Black living_which when read together create some singular convent of Blackness_out of which narrative repetitions of Black-lived experiences (oral histories become folktales are poems as typescenes) can

be analyzed_and then arranged into something of a singular pre-eminent creative project that is an otherwise doing-for-ourselves now_ and [enactment with] one another now_ what no one has ever done for us_  (Hemphill_ 1993)_”

 

 

ITS COCHLEA

 

In translating Elements of Greek Prosody and Metre to the Public. Thomas Webb suggests an articulation of convention byway of art installation exhibition performance could be useful, fruitful. Through their project, Webb demonstrates Author’s chief aim to facilitate the progress of students who are about to commence an acquaintance with the Greek poets; and, should the present work tend in the smallest degree to assist them in overcoming the difficulties they have to encounter, his object will be completely attained.

 

Enter things that make fire.

Enter things that are impossible to

forget. Weed enter. Enter time some

months past a week ago. Enter the site

of your death. Exit the city you were

born. Enter more worthlessness feelings.

BB enters. Enter suicidal thoughts.

Enter in your mind’s eye. Enter bacon,

tomato, bread lettuce. Enter puke. Enter

people assumed to lack home training.

Enter people assembled together.

Enter support. Enter diversity in the

workplace. Enter your own body. Enter

reasonability.

 

Because there is diversity in blackness there is diversity in the way blackness maneuvers and overcomes. The art is still the evidence that something has happened. In New Orleans it is normal to hear intersections of faith mixing African diaspora and Christian institutions. Believing the city be germane to utilizing the labyrinth for exploring trauma-informed pedagogies as a learning device for thinking about the history of poetic meter and healing (the concious, subconcious, and unconcious). The record, remember, bears the imprints of how  Typescenes is intended to be received publicly. It should be indexed then that the installation (fully executed) noticed and makes room for interfaith as an approach to learning this poetry, and poets. Articulated in a different way. Convention is responsive regardless of any individualized practice of spirituality praxis including god worship / prayer / meditation / dancing liturgically / singmoaning, speaking in tongues, etc…

Early on in the experiment process the convention recorded, for example, traditions of families (Brothers and Sisters) attempting to enter a “Spirit” through sets of ritual practices and services of prayer, unconcerned by prevailing politics of respectability. In an attempt to know how poets, as the songwriters wrote, “feel better”, and “lay burdens down.” The installation unit Vespers or After Dove After William’s After Dove obfuscates any universality in ways Typescenes prose choreopoem form will recall ecumenical cultural frameworks in  conjunction with Black people’s realities in their current societies; especially concerning political policies  governing American life including same sex marriage, Church and State and homosexuality and campaigns for healthcare and poor people. Movement-based frameworks change shift weight. Properties used in the maintenance of balancing the worlds of form. Here, through recollections and understanding spirit be a way of getting closer to, making it through, and transforming those things that are not working. This looks like repetitive language in the body with spirit to help overcoming that which challenges daily.

On completing the catechesis on prayer as a relationship with the Holy Trinity, in particular with the Holy Spirit. The Holy See reminds, “Every time we begin to pray to Jesus it is the Holy Spirit who draws us on the way of prayer by his prevenient grace. Since he teaches us to pray by recalling Christ, how could we not pray to the Spirit too? The possibility of encountering Christ, not only as a historical figure, is open. No: he attracts Christ to our hearts; it is the Spirit who makes us encounter Jesus. He is not distant, the Spirit is with us: Jesus still teaches his disciples by transforming their hearts, as he did with Peter, with Paul, with Mary Magdalene, with all the apostles. But why is Jesus present? Because it is the Spirit who brings him to us. If Christ were only far away in time, we would be alone and lost in the world. Yes, we will remember Jesus, there, far away, but it is the Spirit that brings him today, now, at this moment, in our heart. But in the Spirit everything is brought to life: the possibility of encountering Christ is open to Christians of every time and place. That is why the Church invites us to call upon the Holy Spirit every day, especially at the beginning and the end of every important action” (The Holy See Catechesis on prayer – 26. Prayer and the Trinity. 2).

 

Another typescene danced activates especially local spirit theologies. The Author practiced rituals combining Afro-american performances of Christian faith traditions in America. In respect to another recording of typical scenes handled and surveyed within convention. Outside of the physical space and time of the labyrinth yet still witnessing to the facts Typescenes references.

 

Embedded on physical performance matter. Covering the page. Written in spirit. Reflections Upon Fete Gede articulated by Najah Lightfoot at New Orleans Healing Center (not actually in Typescenes labyrinth). Be speaking into the vastness of blackness and blacknessess relationships being guided by spirit or ancestors or angels or gods or….

Reflections is written, “They are not buried here. None of my blood relatives are buried in my home state. Yet that has not stopped me from making lasting, powerful, magickal, connections to women, who have gone before me, namely the Divine Marie Laveau and a Black woman from Pioneer times, who is buried in a cemetery, near and dear to me, which is close to my home.

Before each of their graves, I have knelt. I have poured my heart and soul out to them. I have left offerings. I have done ceremony and asked for their help, with issues that weighed heavy on my heart. And each time I have wept and asked for help upon their graves, they have answered me, and given the help I was seeking, openly and graciously. And upon my asking, I have kept my promise and returned to their graves, in gratitude, to leave offerings of thanksgiving for their spiritual guidance, protection and assistance.

For not all of us are blessed with ancestors to whom we can call upon at their gravesites. Not all of us have that blessed grandmother, auntie or uncle, at whose knee we can sit and soak up their magickal and powerful wisdom. Some of us have to create our families in the here and now and find those ancestors to whom we have a deep and spiritual link. I am one of those people, and I am forever grateful to those who have gone before me, to whom I can turn and pour water to daily, as part of my ancestor veneration and ritual. So during this time of year when we celebrate the darkness, and our loved ones on the other side of veil, during Fet Gede, Samhain, and Halloween, let us do it with glad hearts for the spiritual connections we have with those who answer our call, whether we be related to them by blood or simply by love.”

 

Enter your own God. Enter words. Dance

go. Enter worthlessness feelings. Enter

the voice of the author. Enter the

sound of your own voice. Mix that, the

first, voice into socratic seminar with

the other voices present. Enter toy.

Enter cultural trade. Enter aftermath.

Enter activism. Enter results. Enter

directions. Enter grown men. Enter

action. Enter stars. Enter namesake.

Enter boss. Enter bag. Enter brag. Enter

families. Exit families. Enter families.

Exit families. Enter families. Enter

clerks. Enter coworker. Enter suicide.

Enter then. Enter again. Enter suicide

management.

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/o__uU-rffaQ
© Copyright – Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Reflections Upon Fet Gede Posted October 2, 2019
https://www.neworleanshealingcenter.org/reflections-upon-fet-gede