Eroca Nicols | Queer Kinship ritual, Death Encyclopedia (Working title)
Can choreography be a method for practicing being prepared to die?
Through observing how grief is embodied by mourners, how healers and practitioners utilize their bodies in ritual contexts combined with reflection on my own choreographic and dance practice, a series of embodied solo practices have emerged. I have developed tools and tactics to process my experiences and I believe they have wider application and potential to be of service to others. For me, these practices a have served as embodied processing, allowing me to stay light in the face of some incredibly emotionally and spiritually charged conditions. I call them ESP or Embodied Support Practices.
ESPs, although not necessarily directly related to death, may provide creative structure and support to those dealing with death in their everyday lives. ESPs have future utility for people encountering death from different perspectives: occupationally, e.g. hospice or other healthcare workers, imminently, e.g. people with terminal illness or their loved ones, or conceptually, e.g. Humans interested in mortality and curious how to interrogate and integrate the knowledge of dying into a practice of better living. ESPs potentially buttress these processes.
Based on performance encyclopaedia a project instigated by Public Recordings will do a choreographed collective writing practice around topics of death, grief catharsis, rebirth, dying, the body..Public Recordings says, “…writers gather to rehearse and publish a performance in the shape A a book – an encyclopaedia of making and witnessing that’s readable only in the highly contingent and social conditions of performance. The book stays in print for just an hour. In that time it invites its creators and its audience into an historical present where reading is a convivial, political act and writing produces not objects but temporal and collective experience.”
Each publication ends with the death of that iteration of the performance. Together with Ame Henderson, I will host a “rehearsal” process over the course of two weeks with invited public. “Rehearsals” are the only designated writing times and the “performance” is the publishing/ live group reading of the book.. This is a test period for the possibility of a very large scale collectively written book on death done in many different contexts.
Eroca Nicols is an international performance art and body nerd. Her alter ego and company, Lady Janitor combs the globe looking for places to incite radical moments of art chaos, consume massive amounts of coffee, wear amazing unisuits and confer with movers and thinkers of all varieties.
Eroca is currently known a dancer/choreographer/teacher but her multiplitous practice stems from a family of semi-mystical nomadic trailer people, years working as a janitor, and a BFA in video/performance art and sculpture from California College of the Arts (formerly and Crafts.) Her teaching, dancing and training are deeply influenced in her continued study of ritual, biomechanics and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
She teaches and performs all over the world including stints as Teaching Artist in Residence at The Whole Shebang in Philadelphia and at various festivals and institutions including The School of Making Thinking in NYC, P-af/performing arts forum in France, aceartinc in Winnipeg, ImPulsTanz in Vienna and Studio 303 in Montreal. Eroca is a Chalmers Research Fellow, investigating death, ritual and performance with healers and conveners around the planet.
Credits
Choreographer : Eroca Nicols