From 12-14 January 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, a centre for choreography and performance in Vienna, held its annual Winter School, on the theme of classism in dance and performance. I attended the three days of workshops and talks, offering a presentation as well as in the role of participant and audience for other’s contributions (I had to miss the evening sessions, due to childcare commitments). I’ve recorded my experience of the Winter School below as a series of poems and doodles. Some of the poems came out of prompts given during the first workshop session held by the performer, poet and showwoman Livia Kojo Alour — others are my attempt to document core ideas, sensations and themes. The sketches and doodles are part of how I made sense of talks in the moment, and also how I attempt to capture something of the character and energy of the people I meet when I attend these kinds of events. Increasingly, I find the academic essay form limiting in terms of giving space to the embodied, emotional, relational and affective aspects of learning and sharing knowledge. I’m experimenting with different modes of writing about knowledge.

Here

You are…
…discovering a heartbeat
or traffic’s raging peal, over a bridge, after a traffic jam clears;
a familiar sense —  like what you didn’t yet know — settles in your bones
as sleep does,
or family.

Yowl!

Yowl baby, at things you want, like a queen let wild, scratch their eyes out baby if they won’t, scrawl your colours, sincerity got you this far, anger gets you further, chuck up, muck up, fuck up if you must queen, don’t give in – hard stare and under it humour, tread heavy across this earth, mark everywhere with your scent baby, a cat among feral dogs.

Responding to Anne Clark

In the rush of a whisky-soaked euphoria
I lean into you, the way I never can sober
Open, utterly, without defences
The fizzing whole of me fizzes at the fizzing whole of you
So we get past our differences
A glass; something cold — and then, an opening out
Spilling into hazy orange hours
Joy still pumping, still pumping
All tiny tingles, and the lights light the dark path home.

Lived Experience

Smooth as cracks on a south London ceiling, 
I roll over on a new body.
Again; again — what you thought you were – 
rolling on, like a spliff in Gib’s room,
back in 2001, or whenever it was. 
More fleshly than these women, all bones.
Body is a flesh house.
Home feels sticky, like the other side of truth;
I bend it for my purposes, 
Return there when I need to.
The elemental rumble of community —
authentic spice.
They keep speaking down; my mumbles
rise up the tall thin streets in writhing echoes.

A Conference Recalled in Scrambled Snatches

Effects of social disadvantage accumulate over the life course/My body is a working-class body; tense but strong/Formal language dominates the social reality/Bourdieu/Impoverished authenticity/The movements of labour in modernity/Interpellation/A different body produced a different woman: Active, Reflective, Curious/Earmarked, like cattle/Painted white/Dance as a spontaneous ideology of capitalist social relations/Fascism/Uncontested capitalist relations/What about fascism?/What about the British Empire?/Imperial relations/Modernity was historically undecided/I made a lot of money/I stole your testosterone/As a working class person, it gave me a lot of freedom/Anti-emancipatory democratisation/I need to work to reveal the labour of two dancing bodies in contact/I think people have a responsibility to acknowledge colonialism/Post-industrialist neo-liberalisation/Sex work/Optimise and accelerate imperialist semiotic flows/Obfuscate socio-technical processes/We can also discuss class in terms of people who are unable to afford two meals a day//Move slowly/I feel a responsibility, to say this in this space/Spectacular virtuosic dancing/Erased through Whiteness/Focus on the micropolitics of our daily working practices/Normalise labour identity/Desire and doubt—Does that make sense?

Farming lives in my body, she said

I keep thinking about tiny turkey chicks.
She said their soft, tiny bodies — 
She said the low lamps kept them warm;
Crammed together in trays, fluff on fluff, chafing.
Tiny, feathery, pecking at grain.
Necks thrusting forwards and back, forwards, forwards, back again.
I keep thinking about the thick, meaty musk. Too many tiny chicks.
Soft bodies crushing soft delicate necks.
She said their broken necks lolled limp in her hand,
Still warm, she said.
Broken necks cracked like frost on trampled leaves.
She said it stays with you, that movement;
Bending to right the fallen chicks.
Discarding the dead ones.