Worlding Podcast

“Everyone is working through something on the dance floor” says Ivan March, a curator, artist and raver who is leading a community house in Greece, and the co-creator of the Waking Life festival in Portugal. 

Waking Life is an annual Music Festival for artistic experimentation and collective imagineering of the type of society we could cultivate, if there was freedom to diverge from default reality. In this episode Ivan shares why festival gatherings are such fascinating spaces and how peak experiences can relate to the seasons and weather patterns within our own bodies. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Berlin born and raised shapeshifter, Jacob Hühn is currently dedicated to enabling a new project at Moos Berlin which encompasses an international residency, co-living community and event space.

In this episode Jacob and Renae chat about what it means to facilitate spaces and how Moos is finding its own rituals and structures of caretaking. 

Moos has a mission to become less abstract and find new languages through which to make concrete and practical invitations to the community, both young and old. Jacob also shares his ambition to root into a place and practice ‘listening first’ - whether that be to the neighbourhood or the building itself. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Often we know the efficient thing to do but what happens when this fills our body with anxiety? How can we revalue the ‘detour’ not as an inconvenience or procrastination but as an active choice to decelerate and sidestep the shortest, fastest and most productive path?

For Natal Igor Dobkin a detour is a question within his/their research into slow transitions where he/they investigate the temporality of slowness as a method for change. Dobkin, a performance artist, facilitator and adjunct professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Ben Gurion University, explores ‘mythical’ linear movements and how they can become radical when done in slow motion, such as with gender transitions, aging and even the process of committing to a relationship. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Zinzi Buchanan is a non-binary artist who in this episode shares their lived experience of being chronically ill and how that continues to shape their facilitation practice of enabling spaces that are by and for people who are sick, or that care for the sick. The focus is on Zinzi’s performance project ‘sick bed series’, an invitation to voice, dream and feel through a program of performances and talks. Zinzi tenderly unravels their search for aliveness in a world that makes us sick. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

After her sister got diagnosed with an autoimmune illness and unexpectedly died within half a year Siegmar Zacharias, a Berlin-based performance artist and researcher, embarked on a life’s work to create collective and public places for grieving. In this episode, Siegmar shares her research into collective processes of death and dying as well as expanded notions of grief that arise due to climate change and the current mass sixth-extinction.

Drawing on her performance practice and American neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, Siegmar aims to create spaces where the inter-linking of nervous systems can become sensible and where we can build joyful futures that incorporate the necessary capacity to grieve together.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Environmental activist, artist and mindfulness practitioner Lucy Powell shares her process of creating 'Becoming Arboreal', a guided walk through Berlin’s Tiergarten that explores ideas and practices that enable us to dwell more easily in uncertainty, such as spending time with the park’s ancient trees which are rooted to the spot and not able to run away - trees that are literally staying with the trouble. ‘Becoming Arboreal’ draws on mindfulness, the Buddhist history of practicing meditation with and around trees as well as the Thai forest tradition. In times when the world feels increasingly unstable, Lucy looks to trees as companion thinkers asking ‘how to be in the world as it is now?’

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

During a recent artist residency on the island of Örö in the Finnish Archipelago writer, artist and researcher Ally Bisshop was overcome by a wash of fatigue. Sensing a pull between the two opposing forces of sleep and desire, she asked how exhaustion could help her to read this ecology with more curiosity, generosity and sensitivity.

Ally felt a tension between ambition and surrendering to her lethargy. She found it was useful to draw on the mythopoeia figures of Eros (desire) and Hypnos (sleep and death) as a device for getting out of the habits of thinking landscape or non human bodies mechanistically and discovered that by thinking through these forgotten figures she could begin to think and move otherwise.  

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Info on 'Moving across Thresholds' at: http://www.movingacrossthresholds.com/

While observing the extension of Berlin’s A100 City Highway that is being tunneled close to her home in Berlin-Neukölln, artist and writer Catherine Rose Evans collected rocks at the site which were glacial erratics deposited there during the ice age. In this episode Catherine shares her interest in geologic time and where this intersects with our own human timescales as found in our bodies, their materiality and our lived histories. Often we think of rocks as stationary, heavy things but this is only due to our perception of time. If one looks at a scale much larger than a human lifespan we can begin to understand that rocks have liquid histories and will one day return to a liquid form.

By researching and experimenting with the effects that different forces - light, weight, balance - have on materials Catherine can gain insight into how these forces likewise apply to us. How human bodies are also materials that are cycling, no different from rocks. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Synne Burnett is a dramaturg and writer working closely with last episode's guest dancer/choreographer Milla Koistinen. In this episode Synne shares her practice of creating spaces where ideas can co-exist, where we can be with our dilemmas and explore things that may at times be both comfortable and uncomfortable. We then discuss how different artists are working with the environment, exploring our relationship to our surroundings through the lens of dramaturgy.

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding

Milla Koistinen creates dance works that often evoke a feeling of spaciousness and calm in the spectator. She was born and raised in a small cabin in the Finnish forest where in winter the main sources of light outside were the moon, stars and Northern Lights and in summer there was so much light that it never got dark. What she noticed was a slow transformation that she applies to her choreographic works, where things shift gradually over time.

In this episode we explore her recent collaborative work "Terrain” - an immersive installation for one visitor at a time and "On a Clear Day" - a dance solo inspired by the artworks of Canadian born painter Agnes Martin. We focus especially on rhythm and understanding how certain worlds can linger inside of us even after we have physically moved on. 

To end, Milla guides listeners through a short movement journey inviting us to center our attention on breathing, on listening, on moving and then simply on standing still. 

Learn more at: http://renaeshadler.com/worlding/

“On a Clear Day / SCHRUMPF!” > https://www.loudsoft.de/archiv-1/schrumpf-2020-2021/schrumpf-koistinen-on-a-clear-day/