Corporeal Reformation Exploration (@ Zorthian Ranch)

Body awareness, conditioning, and exploration meet up.

Please come join us at the Zorthian Ranch for this exploration. Bring water, a towel, free moving clothes, comfortable athletic shoes (the flatter the better), A yoga mat, if you got it (well be on the floor outdoors), a willingness to sweat, play and explore the environment outside and with-in yourself. Feel free to invite anyone that you feel might be interested.

The session will be divided into three section roughly one hour each.

1.Warm up

2.Flow work

3.Meditative/ Stretch

Heavily influence by butoh techniques, others are welcomed. Feel free to bring in movement ideas that will work in these areas. If you are unsure, come along and see how this session will function.

This is all levels. Listen to your body and keep your own pace.

*Next Corporeal Reformation Exploration will be August 19.

**These sessions will end in a meditative play experience/ photo / video shoot at the end of the month.*

info@razethewhitebox.com


5-10 suggested donation
11:30am-2:30pm
Zorthian Ranch
3990 Fair Oaks Ave, Altadena, California 91001


*********



josie j:

My movement practice is an extension of my search to unlock internal memory. This "built-in" info I believe will help us function in this planet not as separate individuals but as part of an organism.

I have started to collect exercises and play activities that I believe will help awaken already built in ways of healing, conditioning, and inherent ways of centering yourself.

Some of these methods include: Working with dichotomies, open eye imagining/ meditation, theories of flow, metamorphosis, athletic conditioning (endurance for ecstatic dance) sensation work (meditations to awaken sensitivity) and play (playing with forms {playing within parameters}).


When it comes to body work my background started with performance art, branched out to Butoh and now Martial Arts. I still am actively searching and wanting to learn and share new methods of body work. I am interested in the exchange of these ideas and fascinated with how lineages grow and cross pollinate.

My hopes is to build a way to become fully the animal we could be. In a way a universal way of approaching movement that is approachable and helps in everyday life, work, self defense and in play. Not animal as reactionary but adaptable and intellect, contributing to the graciousness of our ancestors.

I don't see myself as a teacher but possibly a facilitator that wishes to learn as well.

I personally use the term Corporeal Reformation, a way of saying at this moment my body needs a reevaluation, a reorganizing, a re-shifting that is deep and spiritual.

Raze the WhiteBox- DivineBrick in Collab. w/ Mike Meanstreetz and Z.Vital @ Human Resources, Chinatown, LA, Ca

Raze the WhiteBox from Eon Mora on Vimeo.
Raze the WhiteBox

DivineBrick in Collaboration with Mike Meanstreetz and Z.Vital @ Human Resources, Chinatown, LA May 10, 2016

Video By Eon Mora


www.razethewhitebox.com

Click on Title of Vid to Enlarge

Divinebrick in Collaboration with Mike Meanstreez and Z.Vital @ Human Resources LA May 10, 2016

May 10, 2016 9:30 pm

Human Resources, Los Angeles, Chinatown
410 Cottage Home St
Los Angeles CA
90012 

in collaboration with Mike Meanstreetz from the LA band Present (drums) and Z. Vital (loop effects) to close this circle.

Bass pushing air, creaking, cracking a wooden device called the Basso, to set the bio and molecular rhythm of the space. A device, part bazooka subwoofer speaker, part drum, and part bellowing feedback loop. Supplier of urban noise this wooden sub-woofer will be the splintered connection to indigenous past. A past rooted in a vibration.  A slight alteration.  

A exploration in movement called Corporeal Reformation will occupy the rest of this space. Inner woven reaction to time, space voice and body, will be aided by the pulse of the sub, riding on witnesses inside a WhiteBox as landscape with their collective voices to activate our collective memory.

Sound, Movement and Voices will, I hope, conjure somewhat of a memory in us all.  A dormant behavior that is of a collective experience and a collective understanding.  If only for a second, a fleeting moment of understanding, may we forget the destructive philosophy that we follow without question.  This “performance” is more of a hot box of possibility.
 
Free to voice yourself.  We will need you to be the creepy crawlers in a night by the lake.  The many gorgeous songs on a perfect night while we form the body of water and the movement of the sky.  Be the bubbling pot that is the voices at a crowded bar.  The musical conversations on a semi crowded bus.  The silly conversation over heard by reason of proximity.  This WhiteBox will converge to be a primordial soup of abstraction of Growth and collective participation, a dance easily achieved by living.

This is a collaboration, concept by DivineBrick, vocal loops by Z. Vital, and textures and rhythm by Mike Meanstreetz.  At center the Basso.


Trying to reclaim some sort of indigenous or forgotten belief or behavior is close to impossible when these things have been destroyed or co-opted. Where does one turn if their past does not exist to borrow from it? Sometimes the things that the colonizer has stereotyped as “indigenous” become the only symbols on which to connect to, either in act of dissent or in hopes of connection. This will further convolute this already broken system. This semiotics are also the way the colonizers themselves find ways of connecting to more holistic styles of existing. Unearthing resources and the destruction of land not only uproots the indigenous people but also further removes the colonizer from forgotten memories of coexisting, not occupation of this land and its inhabitants (this includes plants and animals). Soon the definition of colonizer and the colonized bleeds into a convoluted One.

*instructions will be give on arrival.

josie j, Mike Meanstreetz and Z. Vital have collaborated on may projects and events including Parallax Beach (An exploration in primordial development in time).

 
https://mikemeanstreetz.bandcamp.com/
http://poopdood.bandcamp.com

FB Event-  https://www.facebook.com/events/986952711382236/

HR website- http://humanresourcesla.com/calendar-events



  

On Art Practice and Corporeal Reformation

The practice that is this work is not about criticizing colonialism,  it is a allegorical response.  A very personal response that I might sometimes consider a universal response.   The hope is to filter down not the philosophy but the intent, to get to that universalism.  A simple state of being that is efficient only in its holistics.   Free of biases and specialization, my hopes is to find a way to learn and observe, to live and exist, to breath and touch, to forget by remembering.  For now I see this universality as growth, be it cancer, population or regeneration.  Finding the precise balance to explore the external and the internal self is one of the challenges with this exploration of this growth.  Why the self?  It is the first sensor that we are given to understand this Growth.  I theorize then that this must be the best at understanding this Growth, holistically each part of the self canceling out the inherent biases.  

This exploration as it pertains to the physical and movement I have called Corporeal Reformation.  Corporeal Reformation is the act of remembering and learning.  It seems to me that performance work is the most radical thing I can do with art.  It sets no boundaries between active and passive.  We all become part of the community once again.  My question would be which community is this we are suddenly a part of when experiencing a performance.  The performer or the audience?  Are we invading or uniting?  Depending on approach a public performance can be a continuous state of colonizing.  I think the only way to remedy this is by the passive and the active both being in full effect, and transferring between the hosts (the colonized and the settler). 

So it seems that the act of decolonizing can be many messy deeds. In a post-colonial system the colonized and the settler becomes muddled and both become agents of each others restrictions.  They both share the initiation rituals of the colonized.  Both share symbols and stories in which the powers that be, the first settlers have establish.  The colonized start to assimilate the settlers approach,  find new land, growth credited partly from new places that one has never seen nor understood.  The settlers lost in empty promises lose their own heritage in hopes that assimilation and whitism will provide more than what came before, since it has made a few wealthy and untouchable.  Little do they know that the settlers are cattle just as the colonized are the human resource that is a staple of an industrialized nation. 

Release Party (La Cita)/ Toad Removed (Audio Track)

La Cita DTLA Tape Release Event

February 2, Tuesday I will be performing along other artist at La Cita's Experimental Night.  8pm no cover.

 In collaboration with Brennan Lowe part of my set will have video accompaniment. 

Part of the continuing Island of Misfit Toys night at La Cita, this event is also the Parallax Beach/ DivineBrick Tingo Tongo Tapes split tape release.  The tape contains recordings of sounds connected to movements of body once witnessed.  The audio can rightfully stand alone but without the movements that once occurred in tandem, the full concept and experience is lost.  In method of Corporeal Reformation each visceral performance can only have that one outcome.  Context and setting influences the movement.  Truth be told there is video of these particular performances, at a particular place, with movement repeated but not rehearsed, on my site.  Feel free to inquire.

Parallax Beach is a collaboration with Brennan Lowe (movement), josie j (movement), Mike Meanstreetz (sound), Zach Vidal (sound), and Wes Johansan (video).  The tape contains audio from Parallax Scroll a work that explores concepts of primordial beginnings.

FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/1005498732844637/permalink/1011279192266591/


The audio from my solo project DivineBrick is the audio from the winter west coast tour I went on in 2014.  Each track is an individual work with form and mood. Tracks also contain sound from the Butó Flutó a wooden/ electronic headware.  

Here is a sample track from the set.

https://divinebrick.bandcamp.com/releases


Unfolding reforming a motion toward expansion. Meeting points in which this toad will be left for fine.  What will out last the green growth , the crawling friends, the moisture alive? A new form of exploration, fast, but rolling as a troll.  Finding shelter in destruction. Full round we have something oozing out the other end.  Still pulsing still growing. 

Accompaniment by the Butó Flutó.

DivineBrick @ Kunst-Stoff (Winter WHEREAS Tour 2014/15)

Thank you Family. 

::LA CITA/ Los Angeles::Photos

 DivineBrick

 Zero Collective

Photos by Brenn Lowe

::LA CITA/ Los Angeles :: DOMELAND/ Joshua Tree SHOWS NOV-14-18

What does science and religion have in common? They are both trying to figure out the growth, the mechanisms.

What do these two shows have in common?  Potential for Corporeal Reformations,  the Sound is the Symbol.

*     *     *     *     *

WHEREAS droppin it all haaard in da dezzzert, November 14th @ Domeland with

A'rk

Atala

Sorxe

Tuesday Nov 18th @ La Cita Bar in Dwntwn LA

The Zero Collective - NoiseBored.com

Eric Ostrowski - EricOstrowski.bandcamp.com - Vimeo.com/user1039630

Bandito Overlord - Facebook.com/BanditoOverlord

DivineBrick


Doors at 8, show at 9 - No Cover

Winter West Coast Tour 2014: Into the Forest of the NorthWest

DivineBrick @ WHEREAS Warehouse photo by Amy Darling

Excited to share the Corporeal Reformation this winter.  I will be traveling the west coast with a sonic wave bending into light:


XOVER (Danilo Casti) : Electro-power-noise audiovisual performance

The project Xover is an electronic sound and visual performance that
runs around glitches, drone noises, field recordings played by digital and analogue
electronics instruments, a mixture between digital and analogue sounds, programming and
circuit bending, idiomatic shapes, abstract sound objects and absurd musical architecture.


PRESENT is a Los Angeles based quartet performing femininly heavy-experimental music since 2012.Their compositional process is shared between members with most passages crediting all four. As PRESENT is the seminal group for half of its members, their writing and style is idiosyncratically colored as outsider. The tone of their music invokes influences of 20th Century Classical, Black Metal, Japanese underground, Anarcho Punk, art and free jazz. Live shows have been regularly accompanied by performance art, live video, and improvised noise artists also performed with in non-PRESENT iterations.
Saxophonist Erin Worra is trained in classical brass, and singer Angela Gleich has studied and performed flamenco singing. Since 1997 drummer/sequencer Mike Meanstreetz has performed/shown/installed on both coasts of the US (including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) and extensively recorded and worked in such varied forms as musical free improvisation, experimental music, installation, video, painting, costume, performance art, noise, dance, punk and metal.
PRESENT's recordings have been released on a split LP and various compilations by meta and
micro labels based in France, the Czech Republic, Oakland and Los Angeles.

Their atonal compositions abandon guitars and lyrical form in favor the angular dissonances of female saxophone, synthesizer, and vocals seated atop a hectic percussive intensity. Non-traditional linear song gives way to free form passages, often in collaboration with other artists. On this tour, Mike Glover supports performing noise.

Video


Ian Hawk (of Tecumseh)  
soundscape and drones set to film

Tecumseh




Keep up on tour dates here
Tour Dates


Winter tour kick-off show December 20th in LA at the WHEREAS warehouse!!
featuring:
Bad Acid Trip / Bandito Overlord / Xover (Danilo Casti, Sardinia) / DivineBrick / PRESENT 


DivineBrick will be performing  "Tale of a Toad".  On this tour.  The ritual was first performed in Long Beach.  Time will only tell its growth by the end.


Teaser

DivineBrick Research Projects traces the steps that connect all practices.  The goal is to manifest a practice that informs and awakes performer and witness.  An exploration in sound and movement this project continues the exploration of Corporeal Reformation.  Self accompanied (drum machine, the Buto' Fluto' {a wooden head piece decked out out with circuit bends and an analog synth}, and loop pedal)  josie j structures a landscape to present "Tail of a Toad" a non-linear long lost story of transformation and corruption. The product is not a performance but a ritual cleansing.  An intense exchange in which something is always gained as some thing is burned.

WHEREAS- HOWEVER- a Bonanza 2

Lighting by josie j and Brenn Lowe

 

 

 

heavy improvisation, desert dirging, angular arabesques & fleeting spectrums

WHEREAS HOWEVER summons the shamanistic landscape of a sonic arc lit by video projection and traversed by a troupe of performers whose movement tells the tale.

Constituted of the seamless procession several groups, each piece gathers momentum overlapping into the next in moments of collaboration between like and un-like.
Happenstance erodes whilst invigorating contrasts galvanize.

The night also heralds release of CT ASSAULTS' and PRESENT's cassette split on Sanity Muffin Records!

performances by:

Joey Molinaro (NY)
http://youtu.be/ElGEcDAwMw0

S&ndc&stl&
https://soundcloud.com/sndcstl

A'rk (Joshua Tree)
http://youtu.be/Wte6p1i0Xxo

CT ASSAULTS
http://vimeo.com/80446033

PRESENT ::
http://youtu.be/kbmpXakaBFU

Nagual Sun
https://soundcloud.com/nagual-sun/jaws-of-a-shark-live-the-down

DivineBrick performance troupe
+Present setting the landscape, DivineBrick Troupe will be performing
 
Ritual: "Dinner for the Peasant Dog" with performers Grace Smith
(WI), Brennan Lowe, and josie j
 http://youtu.be/0ziU4HpY_IA

$5 donation


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