Response 8 - Yoga Time
Dear Marie,
Thank you for this task. What I liked about it was the opportunity and imperative to link the physical yoga (asana/posture) practice directly with writing, and to think about the practice in terms of temporality and temporalities. I haven’t managed to perform the task as precisely, according to your instructions, as I would have liked, and I hope I won’t have disappointed you by once again making my core response in the form of a film—one moreover that reprises the aesthetic of the Dad Dancing Film I made for my previous task.
In Task 8 you instructed me to practice yoga four times during the week, twice in my usual setting of Mysore practice in Aarhus and two additional practices in some way without one or more ofthe usual components of my yoga practice (a different environment, no mat, modified sequence, interruption etc.). In the event, three of the practices took place in the Mysore class context in Aarhus, but the first practice took place in our home without amat or special yoga clothes and at the same time as our daughter Lisa was watching Danish TV on the iPad. Practice 2 was a standard primary series Mysore practice in Aarhus, taught by Miles, while practices 3 and 4 were second series Mysore practices—taught by you! I recorded video of practices 1 and 4, and these films are the basis of the film response, below.
As instructed, I answered four questions you asked in twenty-minute writing sessions as soon as possible after each practice. The four texts are very banal but can be read here, if you insist. I have used them as the basis of the voiceover and text in the film. The film is rough (but took much too long!), but I wanted to do was to try to merge body and text—something implicitly proposed in the task itself?