the body poetik at the Writing, Thinking, Being conference

In October, TBP goes on the road, to Naropa University, a Buddhist college in Boulder. It is home to my mentor--writer, professor, and Aryuvedic healer--Bhanu Kapil. It is also home to a healthier aspect of  Jack Kerouac's spirit.  

And, I will be met there by my friends and fellow performance artists/bodyworkers from the San Francisco Bay Area.  Here is a description of our panel in the conference:

Writing and Performing [Dis]embodied States of Being: The Poetics of Disability, Movement, Grief, and Sensuality 

Shelia Black, Amber DiPietra, Margit Galanter, Lisa Gill, Violet Juno, and Denise Leto. As five interdisciplinary artists, we propose a collaborative panel presentation which will involve poetry, multimedia, and cross-genre performance exploring the poetics of embodiment/disembodiment: how different and differently abled bodies move in space and time both on and off the page in relation to movement, language, loss, and sensuality. Through somatic practices such as qi gong, performance art, embodied poetry, meditation, and live writing we will present a kinetic, aural, and literary articulation of these states of being. Within a rigorous investigation into the myth of heroic, virtuosic embodiment in multiple expressive mediums we will explore the unexpected subject: bodies in difference via challenges in physical capacity or social and political presence. We will ask: How might we enact new meaning in translative states of being within an exacting aesthetic that is capacious enough to address the body in transformation? How can movement strain the "able-bodied" expectation? How can the textual and physical body evoke perspectival shifts in the definition and experience of desire? How can loss, death, breath, and non-breath inform both the dynamism and stasis of writing and performing? In our panel, we hope to surface an emergent discussion of elegy and healing, corporeal disjunct and concord through the prism of multiple genres. In so doing, we will cultivate conceptions of embodiment/disembodiment in which the disparate pieces are not so much reconciled as they are highlighted in a fractured communion of the imaginary.

Ever a fan of Google image search,  here are some gorgeous images that come up for Naropa.

P.S. If you do a Body Poetik's class or consult with me, expect to move your body through inspired Google image searches.