Additions:
Event
Freedom of Movement
June 5th 2006 in Berlin, meet Gesundbrunnen S bahn Station
CREATIVE MOVEMENT AND THINKING
URBAN CLIMBING AND GROUP DISCUSSION
BY TREATING THE BOUNDARIES AND LINEAR STRUCTURES OF THE CITY AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR CREATIVE MOVEMENT DO WE BEGIN TO THINK BEYOND THE NEED TO BUILD, POLICE AND PERPETUATE FRONTIERS AND BOUNDARIES WITHIN OURSELVES, SOCIALLY, NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY?
EXPLORE THE URBAN CLIMBING FRAMES OF BERLIN, FIND NEW, EXCITING THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR BODY AND A RAILING, A LAMPPOST OR WHAT EVER TAKES YOUR FANCY. LOOK AT THE CITY WITH NEW EYES, SEE POTENTIAL FOR PLAY. REAWAKEN PHYSICAL AND MENTAL AGILITY THAT'S BECOME LOST THROUGH REPETITIVE UNCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOUR IN THE CITY. TRY NEW MOVEMENTS AND WAYS OF THINKING. IT’S NOT HOW HIGH YOU CAN CLIMB IT'S FINDING AND CHALLENGING YOUR OWN LIMITS.
WE INTEGRATE WITH LINEAR INFRASTRUCTUR IN THE CITY, WHEN RIDING THE UBAHN, A TRAM, THE ROAD OR WALKING THE PAVEMENT, OUR BEHAVIOUR AND MOVEMENTS AND THINKING ARE CONDITIONED AS WE RELATE TO THESE SYSTEMS.
Methodology
An evolving methodology for collaborative meaning making about political and social factors at play in a chosen locality that enables us to move through it integrating the physical with the intellectual by engaging in unfamiliure tasks requiring lawless, deviant, childish behaviour. This results in deepening of engagement with the locality, one's own senses and other group members and provides insights that would be unatianable in a conference situation.
Key Elements
A training programme introducing physical movement and creative interventions with, in , through, over boundaries and structures - physical, social, psychological to develop thinking and behaviour that is embodied and responsive treating obstacles as opportunities for creative engagement.
Contributions from diverse interested participants in the form of special skill, information relevant to the particular issues of the location, personal expereince related to topic of discussion.
Outcome
Insights from the training sessions are presented in a map, a framework that contextualises the insights gained socially and politically.
presently applying this methodology in Berlin on the topics of risk and freedom of movement and in North Greenwich on the topic of public green space. (see AccidentalHoliday)
Berlin
participants include
Henri from the Voice Regugee Forum
Dina - capoeirista
nathan and mara - seven and eight year old children
Nanna Leuth - artist, photographer, theorist
Architecture students from the technical university
Stella Geppert - artist and lecturer at the Technical University
Philip Horst - " "
Mike - yoga teacher
Qilla - eleven year old girl
"The body-mind connection lies in movement - in fact, is movement...
Movement is the constant change and interplay in the relationship between
body, mind, and psyche." Laban, inventor of dance notation.
http://www.malinky.org/files/Video001.3gp∞
http://www.arttransponder.net/34.0.html?&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=5&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=33&cHash=a56e0c22d5∞
Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2008-06-09 04:38:13 by LottieChild []
Page view:
Solo ShowGuide to Risk in Berlin -Exhibition arttransponder, Brunnen Strasse 151, Berlin. July 7th - 31st
The exhibition features
Guide to Street Training in Berlin - map as training program.
Snack packs, provisions to take with you on street training expeditions.
Richtig Klettern Lernen, 10 mins, training video introduced by Quila a nine year old girl who talks you through how to climb in your own back yard, on a phone booth, a recycling bin and all over the streets.
Wall drawing, notation indicating climbing possibilities in the galllery.
Window drawing, notation indicating movements to do on the structures outside the gallery.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malinkychild/page9/∞
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malinkychild/page10/∞
stills from Richtig Klettern Lernen
http://www.malinky.org/LOTTIEPRINTFRONT2.pdf∞
Guide to Street Training in Berlin
This is your guide to Street Training; it invites you to stray from your usual modes of moving through city and reawaken physical and mental agility that has become lost through repetitive unconscious behaviour. Please take this guide and refer to it as you move through the streets.
What is Street Training?
Street Training is creative movement and thinking, it’s looking at structures and boundaries both visible and invisible in the city as opportunities for creative engagement with one’s self, others and the built environment. Street Training is misusing and repurposing the walls, barriers, fences, bridges and lampposts that delimit the city for playful research and development.
It’s moving in unfamiliar ways such as walking with one foot in the road and one on the pavement, transgressing thresholds of expected behaviour inorder to reveal social and self-imposed limits. Street Training highlights boundaries, borders and controls inherent in urban built infrastructure with aims incompatible with our own. Climbing on, jumping off, swinging from buildings and street furniture transforms the streets and the ways we experience them. The term Street Training is used here but there are many forms of creative urban movement including Le Parkour or Urban Free Flow and urban climbing. This guide suggests such movement can be for all of us in our own ways.
You don’t need any special skills for Street Training; everyone has their own ways of thinking and moving. It is hoped that after you have tried out the suggested moves and found a few favourites you will use your own abilities and disabilities to move freely and creatively.
Collective activity
Street Training is primarily a group activity. As movement, thought and discussion are integrated it becomes possible to see things from other people’s viewpoints as well as seeing the city from other perspectives. Insights into the dynamics of public space and wider consequences of the ways we move, think and behave become possible. As research for this guide the notion of freedom of movement was discussed and insights gained through direct experience, wandering as a group from the Wedding district to the Mauer Park. The people at the training sessions included architecture students from the Technical University and their lecturers, Philip Horst and Stella Geppert, Quila an eleven year old girl, Dina Walter a capoeirista and her two children Mara and Nathan, Nana Luth, artist and Mike Schumacher, yogi.
Architectural/Town Planning Critique
Many buildings in Berlin such as the Senats Verwaltung fur Ineres provide excellent climbing opportunities. The recently built Gesundbrunnen S bahn station, Berlin is a generic, hyper-sanitised transport hub existing only for shopping and commuting. On the 5th June 2006 a group of people spent forty five minutes moving around five sets of stairs and their hand rails, sliding, climbing, rolling, bending, reaching, jumping…. introducing a seemingly irrational dynamic to this public space where all other human activity is reduced to working and spending.
Physical Education
The body and mind are totally connected, the ways we move affect our thinking and vice versa. When climbing for example fear moves between body and mind. Actually putting yourself in a situation where you feel frightened and learning to make decisions rather than losing control is excellent training for challenging situations including personal/emotional confrontations with authority and directly intervening in situations of social injustice.
Insurance Policy
Street training creates an awareness of the consequences of our actions not usually felt so directly in cultures where risk assessments and health and safety policies abound.
Responsibility for ones own safety and those around you is integral to street training. You must judge whether a ledge will take your weight, if you can fit through an opening or if you can lift yourself up onto something. These are things no risk assessment or health and safety policy can replace. An awareness of the effects of your actions on yourself and your surroundings, means you grab responsibility for our own physical safety back from the realms of health and safety into your own sweaty palms.
Risk
Controls in all sorts of contexts are useful, providing protection and order, essential in cities with huge populations. If we become accustomed to imposed constraints we may not realise that our abilities far exceed them. Discovering the arbitrariness of some limits of our surroundings and of other people provides us with insights that allow us to go further and be more active on many levels.
What Street Training Does
It expands your repertoire of movements beyond the usual walking down the street with your walking down the street face on.
It changes the way you see your environment, ledges become handholds, everywhere you see opportunities to climb and play.
It can help you to develop useful responses for dealing with a variety of other rigid structures, social, civic or psychological.
Street Training resists the privatisation and degradation of public space by misusing and repurposing the built environment for play.
In Street Training your body teaches you, follow your desires. This may mean lying down on a sculpture or wedging yourself into an alcove.
It provides an opportunity to gain embodied understandings into the effects of movement and behaviour in the constant fluid process by which we produce our environment.
By moving consciously it can take you beyond blind familiarity to direct face on engagement.
By no means everyone can move freely in the street, one needs a body not too hindered by illness or social restraint. To muster the will to occupy public space goes some way to resisting and moving beyond the limits these states impose on us.
How To
Start to explore what your body can do in relation to architecture and street furniture you can do it anywhere at anytime. You can take this map with you, get some people together, try out some moves. Notice your feelings and responses. See what happens as you move through, onto, across, over, under the structures you encounter. You don’t need any special equipment or footwear and you don’t have to be fit. Having a hangover, limited movement, wearing heels or having kids with you can be advantages to you finding your own ways to move and discover your own skills and challenges.
Experiment with dragging, lying down, not touching the ground, rolling, walking sideways and climbing to explore the possibility of creating new routes not only spatially but in a neural sense as well, burning new pathways in the brain rather than moving in ever deepening ruts.
Lottie Child June 2006
Many of these ideas where developed with Kate Rich
Thanks to Stella Geppert, Lisa Glauer, Constanze Eckhert, Climbing Club London, Philip Horst,Tenyen, Isabelle Courtney-Guy, Heath Bunting, Christine Huterman, Mike Schumaker, Nanna Luth, Dina Walter, Enrique, Quila, Greer Marshall and the architecture students at the Technical University Berlin, The Voice Refugee Forum, Senzala Capoeira Group.
Conversation Map
these things were said on the streets of Berlinl, some of them while street training
Freedom of Movement
5th June 2006 a group of people went Street Training to devise a route and discuss freedom of movement asking: By treating the boundaries and linear structures of the city as opportunities for creative movement do we begin to think beyond the need to build and harshly defend frontiers and boundaries within ourselves, socially, nationally and internationally?
“In the run up to the world cup there is media debate around designated ‘no go’ areas because of attacks on people who are migrants or look like migrants.” Nanna Luth
“This means that we’re not dealing with people who attack other people because of their skin or because of their ethnicity that the people who look different and who are already marked by this shouldn’t have the freedom to go where they want to go.”
“You are not allowed out of the district you are registered in if you leave you are arrested, that you are a criminal, I consider this to be apartheid as was practiced in South Africa. Even though Germany claims to have broken down the wall there is this invisible wall that is still existing Germany and that is existing between the refugees the migrants and the German citizens.” Henri, Voice Refugee Forum
“We go to asylum hostels to talk to refugees to tell them about the law and also to be aware not to accept what the authorities propose to them. Its important to be politically active otherwise if they deport you nobody knows. There are so many factors – when you are active they find it harder to treat you in an inhuman way people who are not get treated very badly.” Henri
“They put more stress on you. If you are strong and active but you mustn’t go back or withdraw, if you do they will over rule you and you become useless?
There are obstacles in our way but this doesn’t mean that you should just withdraw.” Henri Voice Refugee Forum
“Mostly we were being careful but not being constrained, then students walked in front of a car, the car had to wait. We were talking about the way the roads are designed for the car there is no alternative route you have to follow a small strip next to the car lines.” Enrique architecture student at the Technical University, Berlin
“When I was dancing at a festival I changed inside I stopped thinking. Slowly slowly came the beat in the body then came the dance then I thought let me look at the world from this view, if there was an ouch in my body then I went to this place I want to improve myself I go to the ouch, and it reduces. Usually if some one has an ouch in their body they won’t go near it they will limit their movement so as not to go to the ouch.”
“It’s all about climbing, falling and remembering”
“There is no way out of the social codex, we have to constrain to fit in to the frame otherwise we become an oddity and unacceptable.”
“I used to come to Berlin 16 years ago I had the impression of being on an island surrounded by a hostile enemy. It seems like the middle ages, that people couldn’t revolt against it.”
“What’s on the other side?”
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StreetTraining