Please Post your notes below this description. Thank you.
In Class Activity: Find a place in the room. Close your eyes (or lower your gaze), and imagine yourself a point in space. On instruction, “point”
north. Breathe. When everyone has pointed north, open eyes. Check in with compass. 🙂 For a timed improvisation, move towards/or away from directions in terms of how you orient yourself in the world. (NE, SE, SW, NW are also possible)
Are you drawn to where “home” is? Where a memory is? Where you want to be? Where you want to be? Do you pull away from certain places? What other questions arise. Upon completion of the improvisation, draw/write your reflections.
Finding North// Nai’ya
Finding North // Kaya Prasad
Finding North // Nolan Boggess
Finding North // Nolan Schoenle
Facing North – Naomi
I don’t know cardinal directions very well. We—my mom and I—always used “left” and “right.” My step dad, Dave, made fun of us for it.
I located north traveling backwards, down Park, left on 4th, back to my home, looking out the south facing windows.
I went south-west from my X here. I went back home to the rug in front of the wood stove. I lied down. My step mom north of me. My dad south. I sat facing south, nestled with a cup of tea on the couch watching cars move east (?) towards town. Like Mariano, there’s a mountain near by. It helps guides me home.
Facing North // Jin Chang
Our voices are compasses that point us in the direction of home. Those of us impacted by any diaspora find our compass spinning wildly out of control. My Korean spins from Korea to a Minnesotan suburb. My mother’s English mirrors this relation. However, the point that fascinates me the most is the way that language comes with power dynamics alongside our confused compasses. When my grandfather was in the hospital shortly before his death, something peculiar happened with his language. Whenever he would speak with his children he would use Korean. Whenever he spoke with the doctors he used English. One night, I was the one staying in the hospital overnight. I woke up to him screaming, but I did not understand him. Part of me thought it was because my Korean skills were lacking, so we brought in a translator. When the translator came she looked at me and frowned and said “Are you sure this man is Korean?” After a while, we realized he was speaking to me in Japanese. While I could never confirm this, I have a wild theory about how this came to be. My grandfather grew up in Japanese occupied Korea. He used Japanese when talking to his oppressors. My final interactions with my grandfather involved me constantly taking him back to his bed anytime he tried to leave as he could not walk on his own. In this way, our final interactions were oppressive to him. He wanted to leave the hospital, and I would not allow him. Perhaps when he saw me he remembered the times he could not make his own choices.
Zoe Fruchter
How do I come from somewhere that is so far away and yet does not feel distant?
Where does my predisposition towards presence come from?
What is west?
Are we our own internal compasses or are we just oriented to the grid?
How do you maintain self if constantly reorienting (read: re-optimizing) … is that self?
Finding North//Anjali Jain
Homecoming is always an interesting topic or tension for me, as I could describe myself as having two homes. I have no connection to one of the homes, other than the deep connection of my race and my upbringing with Indian people and culture. However, I cannot describe myself completely without describing myself as half-indian. And I would say that I would feel much more at home in India than the “average American”, so there is some connection there. Much of my secret dance then, was moving back and forth between moving west, toward California, while having this pull east, toward India (if I were to fly there, I would move east). It was an interesting and revealing dynamic. In many ways, I felt that tension more when I danced it, rather than simply knowing that the tension exists.
