Articles and Papers
Article 'Free your mind' - An Interview with Barbara Chabior about workshops for Blackbirds Leys Choir (June/ July 2009 edition of The Singer). Relates to The Singing Estate, a Channel Five/ Five Cities Arts television community project and television series.
Barbara Chabior, extract from 'Divide and rule: a call for an integrative movement in care and therapy' (2012)
"... In my presentation I will attempt to illustrate the power of naming and the human need for plucking unthinkably difficult knowledge out of their ‘nameless dread’. I will suggest how and why these names are born. I will also explore how every moment in our life, if we truly engage with its depth and quality, has the potential totally to change our feelings, thinking, sensations, actions, language, etc. Finally, I will explain why I feel our research should be open to common ideas shared with other disciplines and the possibility of developing a synthesis of therapeutic methods and approaches, to create effective paradigms that are potentially greater than the sum of their parts. Lateral thinking is not a sign of weakness; rather, I believe it is essential if we are to understand the common values and shared experiences of the many evolving approaches to the human mind and develop collaborative and integrative methods of addressing every individual client’s unique needs...."
David Read Johnson, 'Developmental
Transformations:
Towards the Body as Presence' (2009)
Build and re-build Self/many Selves by Play… An enactment of the here and now through your sensual reality….
09 November 2009
Summary and Rationale for Body and Voice Workshops
Proposal was presented on 09 November 2009 to Changing Faces, the UK’s leading charity supporting people with a visible difference/disfigurement. “Beauty Inside and Out”, a one-day Workshop for Women, took place on 16 November 2009 at the Changing Faces headquarters in central London.
Conflict or Dance of Polarities
"... That which we are most afraid of is what thrills us the most.’ (Krishnamurti, 1969: 34).
In this paper I argue that all rational processes, whether of the mind or realised in society, are created from the motion of contradictions, the resolution of mutually exclusive, opposing tendencies. The interdependence of contradictory aspects present in all things, and the struggle between these aspects, determine the life of all things and propel their development forward. Without contradiction we would cease to exist: conflict keeps us alive. We develop the capacity to organise the friction of contradiction, which paradoxically fuels our development and creates integrity in our lives, the ability to live consciously with difference.
Literature and history would not have such an impact on our lives today without the presence of conflict and contradiction. Historian and author Elie Wiesel, for example, describes contradictions as being essential to the nature of Hasidic Jews: ‘Hasidism teaches humility and pride, the fear of God and the love of God, the at once sacred and puerile dimension of life …. What does it prove? Only that contradictions are an intrinsic part of man.’ (Wiesel, 1984: 19).
Lenin, drawing on Hegelian models, illustrates the universality of contradiction with reference to warfare. He observed that in war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the other. Two aspects are at once in conflict and interdependent. This constitutes the totality of war, pushes its development forward and ultimately solves its problems. (Lenin, 1914).
Another example of conflict’s enriching role is musical counterpoint. Counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices, independent in contour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony. Music following contrapuntal rules is called polyphony and has richer, more interesting, multilayered textures than simple monophonic or chordal pieces. Polyphony offers perfect integrity and independence of the various melodies in their flow, simultaneously creating dissonances that are almost invariably resolved into consonances.
Like polyphonic music, certain dance theories are based on bipolar contradictions that apply at the kinetic level: fall/recovery, excitement/rest, danger/safety, tension/relaxation contraction/expansion. The dancer struggle to maintain balance in movement and adjusts the preceding polarities to attain coherent movement within limits imposed by such polar opposites.
In music and dance, just as in everyday life, confrontation/friction can transform into energy, with which constructive, mutual agreement can be achieved."