Video
scores for listening, resting, moving
listening, resting, moving
Leah Wilks is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher based out of Brooklyn, NY and Durham, NC. At times, she is also a gardener, an elder-care companion, a musician, + a writer. Her research revolves around embodied memory, monuments, and death + dying practices.
Warren Enström makes sounds — but not always! Their works exist across various mediums, including installation art, sonic composition, sculpture, performance art, and more. Often, their work brings audiences to see the world around them in new, detailed ways, encouraging a curiosity towards all aspects of life.
Mauriah Donegan Kraker is a midwesterner, a collaborative performance maker, a walker, improviser, teacher. She is an advocate for slow travel: walking around the block and through the city as a means of attending to choreographic unfolding of time cycles in the body + land.
The river current is fast, conversational, pulling south. I match and follow, my stride excitable. I am excited, readying to introduce Leah + Warren to each other via phone call, explain the curatorial process I’d liked to embark on, with them, with Loculus. Introductions occur while walking; we share what we are seeing, sensing, in each separate geographical place we are in. We give reports about the ground under our feet and the little dramas around us colliding in time (white pumpkin floats down river, spinning gently to the right.) Later, I’m listening to the slowness of Leah’s speak and the time it takes for Warren to describe the blue building that rises up in the center of the downtown. My walking pace slows, stride lengthens. I am aware of the space between my fingers and the pleasure found in the swing of arms. There’s the smell of coming snow in the air, and over there! Coho salmon swim upstream. I slow and watch their late push towards home.
I think of this walk as I handle, arrange, layer Leah and Warren’s work. This is what they’ve given me permission to do, gently introduce their materials to each other, pull forward what I see as little excitements, collisions of image and sound. Both artists are moving slow, deeply invested in the messiness of their own processes; Warren (Wisconsin) in a year-long residency recording image and sound along the Milwaukee River Basin, working solely on public-access land. Leah (North Carolina) at a week-long stint at the Culture Mill Lab, attending to place, both interior and exterior, through movement, photo and sound. Below, Leah's images fade into and rise up out of Warren's photographs. Warren's sound recordings of place accompany Leah's scores for meditating on evening, ending, inevitability. Or maybe it is Leah's sound that accompanies you through the following images and prompts. That's for you to choose.
The guide for moving slowly through this page goes something like this: select a soundtrack, select a moving image and a score. Experience what you choose in the way that makes sense to your body, your mind. Maybe you read the scores with both feet touching ground, back meeting chair, eyes soft and deep belly breaths. Maybe you push your coffee table to the left to lay down on the floor and physically find movement, based on Leah's prompts. Maybe you write or draw or light a candle. To use Leah's words, take comfort in what connections you find, let time become uneven, send your spells.
-Mauriah Donegan Kraker
select a score to follow
SCORE FOR EVENING
When the sun goes down.
How do you greet the ending of this solar day?
Take a minute (or twenty) to transition into the absence of daylight.
Light a candle, or read a poem,
or sit quietly and watch the light remove itself.
SCORE FOR SOLITUDE
Lie very still and feel your heartbeat in your stomach.
Move as slowly as you can – with the greatest of care.
What is this roll of my skin? What are these fingers? Where did they come from?
Find a path. One shift at a time. Remember Deborah Hay and turn your fucking head.
SCORE FOR CONFRONTING THE INEVITABLE
Find a space on your own. Walk the perimeter, or the margins. This might be your roof, a corner of your bedroom, a spot in your backyard. Outside is preferable, but indoors will work too - especially if you can see out a window.
Find a location. Root your feet. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
Put on a piece of music in your headphones that is what you like.
Begin to rumble.
Let your attention wander. Follow planes/birds/the skyline.
Notice what is blooming. What is still in winter.
If it is cold, tighten your jacket down around your face and let it be cold.
If you are sweating, feel it drip down the small of your back.
Shake off like an animal.
This is a fearful time.
It is okay to be scared. And it is okay to feel things.
If you weep - fantastic.
If you laugh maniacally - fantastic.
Look to the graveyard, to the hill, to the buildings, to the silver of the roof coating, to your busted shoes.
Remember that we have always been here in this moment doing this.
Take comfort in what connections you find, let time become uneven, send your spells.
