ALWAYS ALREADY
a public dance art project
About the project:
Always Already is a public, participatory dance art process directed by Miriam Wolodarski. The project is about purposefully using movement and mindfulness to practice remembering ourselves as part of nature, and nature as part of us. I am personally not a Heiddegger devotee, but if "Always Already" connotes "Dasein" for some, that works. Always Already is an evolution of a project called Scores in Public: a participatory installation project that repurposes famous or favorite postmodern dance scores. Each score is accompanied by a brief attempt to contextualize the practice in relation to the place — texts will be in a physical zine, and also appear right here on this web page. You can read more about the idea, and about its first iteration, which took place at the UC Davis Arboretum, here.
About the place:
Cesar Chavez Park is built on top of a bayside dump. It has one of the oldest and largest human-planted native plant areas around, which was started when the place was still a dump. It also has protected habitat for burrowing owls, a marsh, a dog park, a methane gas flare complex... lots of hills to roll down. It's a complex place. Recently there has been some public attention to the methane gas handling, and possible radioactive materials from waste dumped in the 80s. I approach outdoor environments not only for their beauty, but also as reminders of ourselves an active part of nature, for good and ill. You can read a Berkeleyside article about some of the recent controversies here, and/or check out the park conservancy page.
SCORES
PLACETIME
RECEPTION
SISYPHUS THROWS A PARTY
SLEEPING BEAUTY
BURROWS
LEAN ON ME
WALK EVEN SLOWER
PEOPLE ARE FLOWERS, ARE FLOWERS PEOPLE?
GREAT VIEWS
THE AUDIENCE IS PRESENT
COMPOSITION PICNIC
100 WAYS TO BE (UN)COMFORTABLE
FOR THE RECORD
PLACETIME
Talk to someone.
Talk about something you know
about this place and its history,
and about something you don’t know:
something you feel curious about.
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Do we know where we are?
How do we know that we know?
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For thousands of years, this has been the land of the Ohlone people. Today, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe is seeking federal recognition. (muwekma.org) Separately, the confederated villages of Lisjan are organized through villagesoflisjan.org and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (sogoreate-landtrust.org). Ohlone spirituality is place based, and many Indigenous Bay Area people are today involved in the rematriation of shellmounds, traditional places of prayer and communication with ancestors; the rematriated West Berkeley Shellmound is close to here. What about this very spot? Long ago, before it became a dump, and later a city park, this could have been a marsh, full of birds, reeds, bear, elk. A marsh is liminal, escaping the grasp of fixed definitions. We make from what we know, and we know from what we make. I wonder if resting in not-knowing could at times be useful in undoing the legacy of the brutal colonialism that later marked this coast.
RECEPTION
See color, shape, image, light.
Hear tone, tempo, rhythm.
Feel it move your
breath, limbs, spine, fluids.
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John Cage famously practiced and developed chance operations as a compositional method. One of his favorite aids was the I-Ching, the Book of Changes. From this Confucian classic, we have received the following instruction:
“This is a time for dealing with reality as it is, not as you would have it be.
If you realize that in this situation you are the receptor, not the transmitter of the stimulus, you will find yourself reaching goals that seemed unattainable under your own steam.
If you persist in futile efforts to be the Shaper rather than the Shaped,
you will completely miss this unique opportunity.“
Is receiving a creative act?
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“The history of the Berkeley waterfront since European settlement, but particularly in the 20th century, was one of trashing the beaches.”
So notes Martin Nicolaus, the Chavez Park Conservancy CEO, in his indictment of the recent draft of the city’s “Berkeley Waterfront Specific Plan”, which proposes to add a density of hotels, a ferry, and other infrastructure and amenities to the Berkeley Marina. Current controversies around the plan include the nature of the area’s substrate, to what extent building on it risks gas leaks and seismic instability from the underlying garbage, care for wild animals and plants, and the transportation needs of the visiting public. It is a drama driven by the unfettered creativity of enterprising humans in a culture increasingly focused on the commodification of leisure experiences.
But there’s another protagonist, too: the Bay itself, it’s shore receiving wave after wave of impact from both the waters of the Pacific, and the settlers on land. The Bay endures and responds, the decomposing land buckling the asphalt roadways, the tides eroding and collapsing the piers, the wind and fog blasting curious visitors back towards the hills.
The Bay is always dancing.
SISYPHUS THROWS A PARTY
Crawl up this hill
Roll down this hill
Repeat
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Here is a straightforward invitation to enjoy our lot.
Like Camus’ proletarian hero, we are probably going nowhere, fast or slow. Nonetheless, we have this hill, this little time, and our bodies, for as long as they will carry us.
(The French writer Albert Camus illustrated his philosophy of absurdism through the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned by the gods to roll a heavy boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again, a cycle repeated for all eternity.)
Why not?
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The internal politics of dancing in times of war, genocide, famine, climate change, elections, housing crisis, and rising far right tendencies can be insufferable. Not only are artists mostly just pretty darn powerless, but to admit our powerlessness has been made weirdly taboo. Instead, we are charged with constantly trumpeting possibility, power, and joy, too often becoming the moral standard bearers of a cynical philanthropic complex of foundations and fat-cat family funds. We, their unwitting red herrings, dance to distract from the uncomfortable complicity of our funders with the very oppressive structures we so loudly denounce, scrapping with each other for the penurious resources on offer. Hours spent on each grant application, the sum of which means a mountain to us, while to them it is often just sawdust shavings of interest off the trunk of their capital, which is invested such as to last forever. Forever the rich roll their wealth larger. Dung beetles!
SLEEPING BEAUTY
In order to experience the felt sensation
of the biomechanics of another human body,
any number of Princex are invited to touch and/or manipulate Sleeping Beauty.
Do not attempt to drag this beauty outside the realm of the mechanical.
[biomechanics / plural noun {treated as singular}
the study of the mechanical laws relating to the movement or structure of living organisms.
manipulation / noun
the action of handling something in a skillful manner.]
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Manipulation of the female body is an age old trope in Western concert dance, from ballet through contemporary and experimental works. In one of the earliest works of participatory installation art, Yoko Ono’s famous Cut Piece, from 1964, she sat still while the audience was invited to come up and cut pieces of her clothing off.
What is passivity? What are the powers of a passive body?
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On the northern edge of the outcropping that forms this park, there is a sectioned off habitat preserve. There, Western burrowing owls, a “California species of special concern” with rapidly declining numbers, are to be left in peace. Burrowing owls like to live and hunt on the ground, making them particularly vulnerable to land predators. The area is protected by a decorative fence: Opening Circle, by artists Jeffrey Reed and Jennifer Madden. However, the fence installation is deterrent only in the rhetorical or prescriptive sense— off-leash dogs and humans routinely and easily trespass. Dog owners, either honoring their animals’ innate love of roaming, sniffing, and tracking, or simply succumbing to their own passivity vis-a-vis the wills of their canine charges, routinely battle with bird lovers. Park activists and conservation societies perennially lobby the City to erect better fencing and spend more on seasonal maintenance, belying just how much strife and effort appears to be involved in “let it be”.
BURROWS
An “underground” resting concert.
An orchestra of birds, people, cars, dogs and power tools, playing for you.
Listen and rest.
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Jonathan Burrows is a postmodern English choreographer, who favors complex, indeterminate and rule bound treatments of movement and music, often going to great lengths to use formal structures to try to subvert narrative and meaning making. And, as his collaborator Matteo Fargion concedes in their performance Cheap Lecture: “Maybe what you prefer is to close your eyes and listen to the music.”
How does structure determine feeling and desire, and vice versa?
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There are a lot of ground squirrels in this park. People feed them (though they shouldn’t), snakes, raptors, and the occasional lucky dog feed on them. In 2001, Alameda County vector control tried to sterilize them. In 2014, the City of Berkeley almost went through with a plan to exterminate them, among paranoia that their network of tunnels and burrows would vent toxic fumes from the waste underfoot. Evidence of this proved absent, but a more deciding factor against decimating the cutest of nuisance rodents was that squirrel burrows are also used by Western Burrowing Owls, a burrowing species we humans have conversely decided we are keen to protect and defend. In the end, motivations for these actions and non actions, these this-species-not-that decisions, remain decidedly murky in their logic, intuitive, and dare we admit, sentimental.
LEAN ON ME
Give your weight to the surfaces of the world.
Can they support you? In how many ways?
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Earth’s gravity pulls each and any body at the same rate: 299,792,458 meters per second. And yet, each body experiences falling and/or not falling quite differently. In her discussion of ability and disability in dance, Ann Cooper Albright quotes Mario Russo:
“The grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.” *
How do we fall? —apart?
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Look eastward from the Cesar Chavez Park shoreline, and you will see the lone masthead of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. In the late 1990s, the unusual, sleek, and highly controversial bridge design was approved as a replacement for the old span, parts of which had collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. As construction started, the old span began to come down, chunk by chunk like a hulking, defeated beast. Lone ghost spans loomed in the water as piece by piece was shipped off for parts. When all was said and done, the new bridge span came in at $6.5 billion, the most expensive public works project in California history. Billions of dollars over budget and years past deadline, it has weathered continuous, raging storms of controversy about seismic safety issues involving water leaks in the foundation, rust on the cables, trouble with the anchor bolts, and cracks in the roadway, as well as flying accusations of corruption and various shades of ineptitude. The new span is somehow a landmark both of the awe-inspiring ability of humans to harness mechanical physics on a massive scale, as well as of our fragility, pettiness, uncertainty, and bumbling vulnerability. How well these clashing facets of our collective being can support us is sure come into relief again when—not if—the next big earthquake hits.
PEOPLE ARE FLOWERS.
ARE FLOWERS PEOPLE?
Look at a person as you might a flower:
their colors, their shapes, their scent.
Look at a flower as you might a person:
their drama, their personality,
their need.
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Nancy Stark Smith, co-inventor and art mother of the practice of Contact Improvisation, often instructed participants in the introductory circles of her workshops to “Look at the people and things around you as if they were all flowers.” The intention in this appropriation of her words is to use her clever commingling of subjectivity and objectivity in service of unwinding our relentless anthropocentrism.
What is visible? Who is seen?
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On one of the western hillocks of the park lies the Cesar Chavez Solar Calendar Memorial, by artist Albert Orozco: a place to contemplate the interwoven powers of light, wind, landscape, water. Many public places in California are named after Cesar Chavez, a centerpiece in our local pantheon of progressive heroes whose fabled 1965 Grape Boycott has become synonymous with solidarity with immigrants and laborers. In the image of Chavez we see our connection to those who work the soil and the natural elements, and their collective power. Less visible are more uncomfortable historical details, such as the reality that the scab workers sent to break the grape boycotts were primarily new arrivals from Mexico towards whom the UFW was openly hostile, going as far as to organize deportation of undocumented immigrants through its “Illegals Campaign.” From the artists website I learned that Chavez’ birthday aligns closely with spring equinox, with it’s equal parts light and darkness, a season of promise, of virid complexity.
WALK EVEN SLOWER
Your feet push the earth
and the earth pushes back
Your breath mingles you with everything.
Hundreds of tiny adjustments
and hundreds of tiny falls are taking place.
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Slow motion is a ubiquitous tool in meditative, contemplative, and embodied practices. In her “Delicious Movement Manifesto”, Eiko Otake exhorts: “Move to experience time is not even and space is not empty.”
Can changing speed be subversive?
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Things that happen slowly can go unnoticed. Like climate change.
When the sea level rises and floods this place — that will be subversive! Immersive submergent subversion!
Will there emerge some new status quo here? Will it include us?
There’s a race on to halt climate change, or at least mitigate it. Accelerating the pace of technological advancement and slowing down the frenetic pace of our energy consumption can feel like strategies at cross purposes, but we could also think of them as a part of a natural polyrhythm. Think of how many time signatures the Pacific Ocean has: swelling and crashing, rippling and ebbing. It will be here long after we have sped up and slowed down.
THE AUDIENCE IS PRESENT
Sit across from another person.
Keep your gaze on them.
Do not look away. Breathe.
Speak things you notice about your partner in real time.
Do not speak about vourself.
Say only what you see.
For example:
Do Say:
“Your hair is brown.” Or “Your eyebrows are furrowed.”
Do Not Say: “You are beautiful.” Or “You seem upset.”
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In 2010, Marina Abramovich presented her famous exhibition and performance piece “The Artist Is Present”, during which she sat in a chair in the MOMA gallery for days, inviting others to sit across from her and gaze silently into her eyes. Asked what she learned from the experience she said,
“It was [a] complete surprise…this enormous need of humans to actually have contact.” * Are we as hungry for contact with each other as we are for contact with a star of the arts world? Here we remove the soloist, and invite ourselves instead. We also add optional instructions, which are purloined from Sanford Meisner, who developed them as part of his acting technique.
What makes a moment momentous?
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The Adapting to Rising Tides program has an interactive online tool, ART Bay Shoreline Explorer, that models different scenarios of sea level rise in the SF Bay Area. The tool is meant as a didactic aid, but it’s complexity quickly overwhelmed me. Though its sliders and buttons are self explanatory, I felt both stupid and tired trying to understand the tides, not to mention humanity’s impact on them, and how that impact might be refracted back on us and our infrastructure. My cognitive ineptitude does not exempt me from the impact of rising sea levels, but it does appear to push the impact further into the obscurity of the future. When a levee is physically breached, something penetrates immediately, making something which was up to that point only accessible to the mind, suddenly inescapably felt by the senses. Is the moment of grasping a future possibility as momentous for those who understand it, as it will be for those of us who can only gape in shock when the thing actually comes?
COMPOSITION PICNIC
Take turns with any
number of people.
At each turn, add, remove, or
rearrange an object on the table.
This installation references Yvonne Rainer’s postmodern improvisational classic “Continuous Project Altered Daily”, a title that itself referred to an eponymous Robert Morris sculpture, assembled live at the Whitney Museum in 1970. Barbara Dilley (formerly Lloyd), who performed in Rainer’s piece, later developed a contemplative and compositional classroom exercise titled “The Red Square”, of which this “Composition Picnic” is a derivative. French choreographer Xavier LeRoy said of his own 2013 homage to “Continuous Project”: “… if art can be passed down, it is first of all because it is itself the operator of the collective without which no transmission could ever be achieved.” *
What collectives transmit through your choices?
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DAWN was the name of the collective of botanists, landscapers, and local activists who in the 1980s created the Native Plant Area directly atop the covered dump that underlies this park. They were supported in their efforts by, among others, the California Native Plant Society, the Sierra Club, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the East Bay Shoreline Advisory Committee, and the California Coastal Conservancy. Besides the City of Berkeley, of course. Detailed accounts of their labors can be pored over on the website of the Chavez Park Conservancy, a group that sprung up in 2019, primarily to advocate and care for the area, which had by then lost steam and governmental support.
These are just a few of the human collectives moving their hands over the land of late, selecting criteria for denominations like “native plant” and “invasive”, terms which perhaps dissolve at other time-scales. The plants themselves surely form another collective, not to mention the fungi and bacteria in their root systems, all with their own histories and dramas. The Park Conservancy itself reflects on how the temporal, permutable, and collective nature of living relationships rather complicates the notion of making a choice, noting: “Even the otherwise obnoxious acacia, a legume, contributes nitrogen to the soil and makes it more fertile.”
GREAT VIEWS: Have one!
View with an Infant Eye:
See without naming. Rest in the visual experience, inhibiting knowledge of the thing you are looking at. Notice light, darkness, color, line, direction, pathway, pattern, etc.
View the Space Between:
Notice “negative space”: the gaps between objects and people, between torsos and limbs, legs and chairs. Let go of seeing things and people. Rather pay attention to distances from one point to the next, to the next.
Bird’s Eye View:
Make a mental map of what you are seeing as it looks from above.
Track details, changes, and the unknown.
View with Soft Focus:
Relax your eyes and broaden your field of vision as much as possible.
Resist focusing on any particular object.
Take in as much as you can.
View from Within:
Take a mental snapshot of what’s in front of you, then you close your eyes. Notice the impression of what you saw. Reconstruct details.
Imagine what changes might be taking place. If your mind starts to wander, you can open your eyes again to take another snapshot.
Or, enjoy wandering.
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Here we borrow Barbara Dilley’s “5 Eye Practices”, adding some personal inventions, in order to practice resisting a visual culture that increasingly folds its viewing into a rectangular frame. Dilley’s art practice draws greatly on the teachings of the complicated figure of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, lineage holder of the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and founder of Shambhala training/ Vajradhatu. Trungpa Rinpoche once said: “… genuine artistic talent is experiencing a sense of being back to square one. Being completely bewildered by that… if we feel that we are back to square one and completely bewildered, we have a beautiful white canvas in front of us.”*
How do we disentangle viewing from capturing?
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The western edge of Cesar Chavez Park is lined with benches from which visitors may enjoy sunset views of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mt. Tam. People love photographing sunsets, also themselves at sunset. The entire phenomenon that we see and recognize as a distinct individual person is a kind sunset photo phenomenon. Permanence defined by impermanence - we live because we die, and so on. Maybe sunsets help us understand this, and abide it. Still, to do so fully in a moment can be intense! Profound! Frightening! Destabilizing!
Pretty colors help. It is easier to abide the solidity and continuity of a picture of things, than things in their actual movement.
Despite incessant warnings of impending climate catastrophe, many of us struggle with apathy. If we can’t stand the encroaching darkness, how can we rage against the dying of the light?
100 WAYS TO BE (UN)COMFORTABLE
Stand, sit, or lie.
What is un/ comfortable?
What would you like to change?
Shift. Repeat.
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The contemporary dance practice of Contact Improvisation depends on developing the ability to be comfortable in many physical positions, including ones of disorientation. The degree to which we are able to rest in unusual or unstable situations depends on any number of factors: what surfaces of the body are meeting what surfaces of world, the position of the joints in space, the state of the nervous system, and the real or perceived danger of attack, reproach, or judgement, to name a few. Through their project Improvising While Black, Mayfield Brooks explicitly points out the absence of BIPOC students and practitioners in this dance discipline, highlighting overlooked dimensions of dis/comfort.
What conditions permit you to be comfortable, and— are you comfortable with them?
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The walking paths around the perimeter of Cesar Chavez Park and to/from the dog area are paved and accessible to wheelchair users, though the same is not true for the paths through the native plant areas. The park is most often accessed by car — there is ample parking along Spinnaker Way. The City of Berkeley recently spent about $8 million paving the famously potholed road into the Berkeley Marina. (In 2024, Public Works Department had the largest projected budget expenditure of any city department: at almost $200million, it is about twice what the city spends on Health, Housing, and Community Services, about twice the Police Department budget, and about four times what the city spends on Parks & Recreation.) The 51B bus to the Berkeley Marina stops a 10minute walk away. Another popular way to reach the park is by bicycle, using the pedestrian bridge to pass over the 880 freeway. For years, the University Ave. freeway exit #11 had an encampment that housed about 130 houseless Bay Area people. The encampment was cleared by CalTrans in 2021, and replaced with large jagged boulders, the kind of seek-no-rest-here landscaping commonly referred to as “hostile architecture”. (The waterfront has a long history of encampments, going back to Rainbow Village, a sanctioned encampment that in the 1980s even had recycling services, water, and an official address.)
FOR THE RECORD
(510) 831-6106
Text or Call
to share your impressions of what “this” is “all about”.
Possible subjects may include bodily sensations, feelings, facts, or opinions.
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A multi-million dollar legal battle has unfolded in the past year over the handling of the methane that off-gasses from the 60+ year old garbage that Cesar Chavez Park is built on. The park conservancy organization, whose website usually runs articles with endearing titles like "Cormorant Bags Big Fish and Celebrates”, has offered a dense journalistic play by play of various related proceedings, with enough bureaucratic loopity loops to satisfy the most Kafkaesque among us. You can check that out at chavezpark.org/gas-war-in-park Here is a select gem:
“The City of Berkeley’s current contract with SCS Engineers to maintain the landfill gas system at Chavez Park runs to $714,022. What emerged from the first day of the hearing is that the principal beneficiary of this system, the main reason to keep it running, is the Hilton Doubletree Hotel…Apparently, a class of beneficial bacteria resident in the upper layers of the park soil has been very effectively cleaning up methane without the need for expensive hardware. But those bacteria can’t operate south of Spinnaker Way where the hotel sits because that area is almost entirely paved over.”