Time, efficiency, goals, grasshoppers.

In tackling the second unit of the course I am trying to be more systematic. A recurring problem I am finding is knowing when to stop thinking and searching and start closing or clarifying a point so that the answer in the TMA is concise and has some conclusion. I'm aware that I am not alone in this feeling but it is interesting to note that is relates back to defining a boundary in both time and concept and sticking to it.

 I am now following advise from the student help pages and starting with the TMA and working backwards. As a video interview noted, this seems somehow against the openness required in embracing new knowledge but it serves its purpose for me now. To sit down to relatively open-ended task to 'learn something' today versus sitting down to recruit information, exercises, explanations that will serve me in answering the TMA is more motivating. I need something to grasp onto in uncertainty.
We need something to grasp onto in uncertainty.
In reading a fascinating article about DNA and grasshoppers and locusts I was reminded that sometimes the simple explanation wins out as its is the simple option.
http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/ retrieved 9th Dec
Yes I should use Harvard references...its so complex its and obstacle to my progress.
The article stunned me by saying locusts and grasshoppers are not part of the same species they are the same animal that undergoes rapid adaptation in times of food scarcity and in which the DNA manual for life as one of the other has not changed but 'gets read differently'. It goes on to be more complex than this and honestly eight paragraphs later I was quite lost. By my intution says to me, 'yes, this, this is truth because its relatable, complex, poetic'.( I would need much longer to explain the validity of that sentence.) Basically complexity is unpopular as it can inhibit progress and progress is a primary buzzword in the lexicon of modern civilisation.

I am also finding it difficult to identify a system of interest in my work. I noticed reading about the sticky tape drama in the Study Guide that it was manageable. I can relate the that at work. However I felt do I really want to direct a unit of this valuable OU study to a manageable task on a scale with organising a stationary order when there could be world peace to solve. Whilst I openly acknowledge not only can not one person solve world peace, its won't be me as my systemic practice is still so vague and as issues goes I'm not best placed to understand. What is important is when do we feel that alignment that the scale of problems is worth taking on, that we have the power to influence it and that we are motivated to explore it and take action.

A further issue to finding a system of interest is that I conceptualise systems interventions as involving people and find it hard to imagine a system investigation into my technical practice for example.
In thinking about applying the idea of efficiency, and often what we are aiming for in business is efficiency, I find myself in that cold hard goal orientated territory that I tried to avoid by working in the arts. I remember feeling a point was being missed in Parkour being all about efficient movement. I am fine with efficiency when it about being more elegant ( I by that I mean elegant in design and organisation rather than aesthetically pretty) but I'm a bit allergic to it in relation to progress and shortening time.

As a person I am always in a rush and 'out of time'. I am taken out of the moment by the desire to make the most of the moment. I don't like rhetoric about making the most, or milking something. Ethically its seems greedy. Yet I think in this paradigm every day and I lose touch with life. When I slow down life is better

How long does a movement take? Forsythe asked?
How can we create systems that function well, in the way ecosystems function elegantly?
How can we serve a true expression of the nature of each entity?

This is a question for me for choreography. How can we choreograph to reflect life and not put a series of themed activities together in the way cheap design programmes create a 'colourway' and paint a room a series of hues with 'accent' cushions. EUURGH.Formulaic.

When I relate to choreographic processes I recall endlessly the rehearsal days when we may have started with a plan but that a divergence is made at some point when something fresh, interesting or useful arises regardless of when the show needs to be made by. The idea of saying thats your lot, stick the choreography in where it belongs and work on the next bit is unthinkable. It also suggests that there is a system of choreography and whilst there may be methods choreography does not seem to be able to be intervened with or altered in the way you could seem to with an organisation productivity or an institutions meeting procedure ( my current area of interest).

My feeling is that it would be a very interesting more philosophical line of inquiry to use making dance work a systems of interest.

My final thought from recent days was; in organising oneself, in study, in life, productively yet responsively and mindfully am I defining a system of interest by my awareness or by my goals?.
For example I have chosen to work the TMA backward this time and study with a goal. This can seem 'unethical' or limiting. By I choose this because I am aware, I accept and make a choice to define my system of interest in studying as looking for the answers rather than racing through the open pursuit or knowledge section questioning will I run out of time to do the directed part?. As I will be organised by this either directly or discretely either way. The former way it was organising me was via a fear that you shouldn't let it organise you!
 and the second is accepting that it does and being in reality.

Final point, in scanning the book I noticed a section on emotion. Feel good I was already thinking about that without prompting during the last post and it may be encorporated. (corp, body another physical root/route).

.....and do you have to be systematic to be systemic?

Emotions

I never said it would be concise waiver.

Here are some ideas occurring to me recently as the approach gets welcomed into the approaches I already have. The point of this is to catch some lose threads of thought and also "keep knitting" as Jo says these strands together.
 Firstly I cannot stop using the word system or understanding, finding examples in terms of the idea I have so far of systems boundary defined by an area of interest etc.
Even more so my notion and relationship with change has altered greatly. I have learn that I would like to be the one to orchestrate the change, if change comes from another source and I means shift more than more organic changes, that to me are transformations, then I want to get behind the idea, or (get infront of the idea?) and lead teh change to serve my own ends. For example I heard during the first week of the course that we (theoneandonly and I) that we need to find somewhere else to live as our flat is being put up for sale. Change. Instead of being buffeted down that river ended up who knows where I have said o.k this is an opporutnity and we will use family help and buy while the many windows of opportunity are all open. So I start to make the decision that interest me and I claim the I'm moving/I'm buying system to fulfill a transformative function on me. I NEED to get something out of this and not feel a victim of casual disinterested fate, so I engineer some aims and they move swiftly from low to high priority until now I am infinitely absorbed in the endless paperwork and frustration of the 'buying a house' system which is so deeply flawed and imperfect I wonder why it hasn't been reformed. ( All I want to do know also is reform everything, which is not so different to last year but now I use the word system or systemic failure in the rant).

Why so personal is my question to myself. I'm always talking about myself, how I feel my work, I am organised my journey in life. I was listened to 3 female nobel prize winning scientist and it was so refershing to here about the work and with only a swift mention of them as in the work, as women with personalities, emotions, life stories. It seemed like they just got the job done and did so very well.

I however am really profoundly interested in emotion, what purpose does it serve, how it informs or provides a way to steer through change. In looking at the study guide for section 2 the idea of being in the unknown is raised. In dance with the students we talk about this ALL THE TIME. Don't try and be comfortable, don't expect it to make sense, keep pursuing your line of inquiry with curiosity, fin dyour motivation, find you confidence in the face of unknowns and so on and so on. I have been very concerned of late that what is I can't do what I say?. Over the summer I started performing in a piece that wasn't allowed to be set, or settle in its form and everytime we repeated a movement, a line of text any accidents or additions or debris that came in the redoing became conciously and added and the better we as dancers got at remember, organising, 5 ,6,7 bits of information and producing it attentively, responsively the more safe we felt, the less intersting things happens so the goalpost got moved again. I am beyond pleased to say that I managed to refuse the life rafts the choreographer offered in times of compassion and the purpose was to be drowning, but not die and enjoy it. It was beyond exhilarating, the question Jo posed 'is it now?' I ask over and over and is applied to everything.

So emotion (that someone pointed out to me one day is e-motion) is our shifting sense of self and shifting state of mind, emotion is change and chemically it is transformation. I don't think we can reasonably assess or reflect upon our involvement within a system of inquiry without talking about this as a driver. But not just a driver, the thing leading you and organising you but the thing teaching you. Far from being an irrational interruption to an otherwise objective and rational inquiry, it is the means by which we can learn to taste freedom, to operate as a free agent within a system.To fulfill or adapt to a potential position as agent, 'to do what is necessary',' to have what it takes' 'to respond to the situation' I'm convinced of this. We feel emotions as terrains that provide an "inner landscape" (Laban) with which we must negotiate not ignore. And there is something about our perception of inner and outer space that are reflexive, space in the body, space in the mind. Bjorn Erick said we cannot change space only our perception of it ( not sure how much I agree)

So in conclusion, emotions are a system of interest, they are the invisible forces that encourage us to defer or be passive rather than opposition and thus reaction by force not proactive by design. Alternatively when and as is currently so topically- Nelson Mandela springs to mind- when we are organised by hope, love, charity we free the potential in others and we are active agents in our wolrd, fully particpanting and responding to reality. This state o fleading is so unknown, it is to be a pioneer of you own life and it is deeply uncomfortable and this aversion to originating change, is also an aversion to particpating in change and then I arrive at the saying ' if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem' and it leasds me to rethink perpetuity and the ethics of our obligation to feel, to acknowledge, to act and to transform

I also understand sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and a kitkat -so often the human condition-and them I am reminded in who makes kit kat and what I am reinforcing and Iwonder is to answer the call of these difficult times a pledge to live in unending discomfort with a savage alertness to systemic failure and suffering, not as an end in itself but as a means to invite new transformed behaviour. Is the problem that the solution is too demanding, and we are not equipped to deal with an ego that needs to preserved its own self interest to do its job.