Lion or Fox Blog

1/20/2021

Arts Writing and Dramaturgy
The Sonorous Figures of Michael Hersch's "Images From A Closed Ward"
Artist Interview with Anne Weshinskey: Experimentation Over Comfort
Youth at the Center: Defining the Future of American Circus
When Fairy Tale Meets New Circus: Eat Sweet Feet by Le Radiant
Wrapped in the Interstitial: Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, and Stephen Petronio at the Fabric Workshop and Museum
CCAFT V4: Anchored in the Past, I fully commit to the present, Maintaining a future we will imagine
Anandam Dancetheatre: Evolving Audience and Expectation
Relay Rewind: A look at the Process of CCAFT’s 2015 Creation Relay
Penasco Theatre Residency: Cultivating Creative Space for Circus Artists in the US
CINARS Biennial Provides Global Connections for Performance Arts and Industry
Montreal Completement Cirque: Material Concept in Circus Arts

Invisible Disability:
Divergent Bodies
Wild Healing on Stage
Suggestions for Working With Vulnerable Artists
Nuance of Invisibility

Creative Content
Body Maps: 8-Week Performance Series Launches
Things That Survived The Winter: Points of Origin
Continuous Deforming Landscape
This Rock (Super Human)
Circus Bomb the Southwest
Spring FREEZE (Artist Book)
Wish For Spirit (Artist Catalogue)

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"Red Tape" - Performance and Mental Health

1/19/2021

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Red Tape from Sarah Muehlbauer on Vimeo.

In May 2020 I created this video as part of an international collection commissioned by Cirqulation for #MayMentalHealthMonth . To view the full film, featuring 5 artists from 5 different countries, follow the thread here on Cirqulation's website.

“Red Tape” is a visual meditation on lines and limits, decompositional creation, and emotional complexities like apathy, acceptance, holding on and giving up. The title and visual metaphor are meant to be a projection ground for structural, institutional, and physical constraints, which are as much in reference to bureaucratic obstacles to well-being, as they are to red flags for physical and emotional distress."

Commissioned by Cirqulation for Mental Health Awareness Month.
Created by Sarah Muehlbauer.
Music byRexedog
Filmed at Warped Studios
May 2020

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Training Your Edges - Thoughts and images

1/10/2021

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Whether you have taken a weekend workshop, followed the App, undertaken a 10-week online course, or more, there are aspects of the Wim Hof Method (i.e. a series of breathing practices, systematized cold exposure and meditation) that can only be understood through a felt sense. Items that cannot be measured with time or temperature. I write this piece with the intention of speaking to those aspects in particular, and not to serve as anyone’s foundational introduction to the practice, which should be done under official Wim Hof instructors and applications, which I do not claim to be.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the challenge is to get to know your “edge”, and how to dance with that shifting line from day-to-day, accommodating your body’s responses. With visualization we can set up our ideals, and with observation we can adjust. Here are a few thoughts and visualizations for others who might be seeking this line.

Visualizations and emphasis for Rapid Breathing:
I find it easiest to fit visualization to sensation while practicing breathing lying; however, if practiced seated, the instructions are the same. WHM categorizes their breathing method as "controlled hyperventilation". I prefer to think of it as oxygen-loading.

Breath through your mouth and/or nose based on personal preference, inflating the lower belly first. Fill your belly FULL, imagining a big, round balloon reaching maximum inflation given its container. By continuing to inhale, move this balloon upward, expanding it into your rib cage, chest, neck, and head, to behind the space where the third eye is signified - your central forehead, just above and between the eyes. Use this time to scan your body. If you find any stored tension as you do this, either active tension in the process of moving the air, or passive tension held in the muscles, use this opportunity to soften and visualize the air expanding into these areas. Try to practice simultaneously expanding internally, while letting your outer layers, skin, fat, muscle, and bone fall heavily toward the floor. You are relaxing the responsibility stored in your outer shell, and allowing only the expansion of the internal cavity to dictate the flow and carriage of your muscles.

Once you have moved the air up to the third eye, relax your breath and exhale. Make a rhythm of it. Let the exhale only last the length of time it takes for you to comfortably move back into a deep belly breath. Think of it as the reverse of an involuntary gasp. A quick exhale. The point is to hold *most* of the breath in the body, but to also create a little “release” so that you can draw more oxygen in. The exhale should be natural, almost an afterthought, a result of taking in the biggest breath imaginable, and in reaching that threshold, releasing the tension of the expansion. If you experience feelings of anxiety, scale back, focus more on the inhale, and lengthen your exhale a bit. Then doing it all again. In succession. 30-40 times. Followed by a breath hold. The whole cycle is to be repeated 3-4 times.

During breath hold: More body scans, moving from your toes inch-by-inch to the crown of your head, noticing sensations. Picture the interior of your body as an empty building, still water, or deep space. Once you begin creeping toward your retention limits, you may experience a wave of anxiety telling you to (gasp!). If need be, know that it is perfectly alright to release! But if you are comfortable, try to bear that microsecond and settle into a deep chest-knowing that you are not yet out of breath. In truth, the body’s “breathe NOW” response kicks in when there is plenty of oxygen still in the bloodstream. If you only find a few spare moments of “peaceful” hold before you must finally inhale, or even if you find none, know there is growth in the space between your perceived edge, and the one that your body knows a bit more deeply.

ICE IS NICE (unless it's not)
Your body’s relationship to the cold may change day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour. The overarching guideline of the practice is to “not overdo it”. But what does this mean? What do we monitor, and how?

In my view, “not overdoing it” means taking an aerial view of your health, your training, your stress and your nervous system, so that you can make the most objective choice in exposure time, temp, and suitability. People’s bodies vary greatly. 30 second cold showers are a great starting point, but even that might be too much for some, depending on body composition. 2-3 minutes is a great baseline to work toward to reap most of the benefits. I recommend the 10-week online Wim Hof course as a week-by-week guideline for most people, which is long enough to establish the practice as a self-perpetuating habit. I would like to emphasize the accountability aspect of the course and practice. It is advised that if you find a particular week’s work too challenging, you should repeat it. When starting out, there are a lot of new sensations and reactions to integrate, and it can be hard to sort out what is what, and whether or not it is time to increase exposure.

Backing up a bit, the mind-changing capacity of the cold is deep. For many, it is incredibly psychically challenging to approach the cold at first. It can be torturous just getting up the nerve. It may be important to remind yourself that you don’t do this for punishment, but for the positive physical and mental health benefits. Act accordingly. Luckily these benefits are powerful, and once you have established a practice, it is easier to remember the reward and not get hung up on the entry.

When entering cold water, it’s important to relax. To breathe deeply, and exhale slowly. To let nature into the body, to welcome it. Practice inviting it in. Ask the element what it can teach you, and thank it for its daily lessons. If you are practicing at very low temps (i.e. 45F and below), particularly with immersion, you will get flooded with intense sensation. I often like to close my eyes, so that I can tune in more closely to my heart rate, willing it to thump at the pace I want. I picture the blood vessels in my skin, my hands, and my feet, flexing open. I continue this once I’ve left the water, and often take a moment before I leave the waterfront to close my eyes and imagine my fingers and toes warming in the sun (even if it’s not out), which inevitably they do. You will learn you have some control over blood flow through visualization and conscious will.

I begin leaving the water when I experience a transition that feels more like pain than aliveness. It is hard to quantify, but important to be brutally honest about, and it may take some time to develop. When in doubt, start modestly, and monitor how you feel the rest of the day. If you experience “kickback”, being unable to warm up naturally afterward, or out-of-the-ordinary, bothersome physical symptoms, you have exceeded your edge. Which is fine, if you use this as information to “tune it down”. I would be surprised if not everybody encounters this when developing a practice. My blanket recommendation if you’ve crossed your line is firstly, take a hot shower. If a 15 minute movement practice hasn’t brought your body right again (this is still considered “natural”), then you need to manually warm yourself up, and give your system a chance to relax. Depending on the severity of your boomerang, you may want to take a day or two off cold plunge. When you return, drop your time back to a place where you experience no symptoms. Train at this level for 1-3 weeks. Then add 15-30 seconds and see how it goes. There is no race to win, only positive cumulative effects. If you bounce your nervous system regularly, you are putting unhealthy stress on the body.

When practiced responsibly, cold exposure is designed and intended to produce positive physical stress, giving you energy, greater health and positivity. To stay in right alignment with your practice also means you are exercising humility, honesty, and commitment to developing a positive relationship with your body’s limits.

[Just to be extra, extra sure, WHM is done at your own risk, and this is not medical advice. Follow the professionals mmmmkay ;)]

-Sarah

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Divergent Bodies

7/8/2020

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It strikes me that folks probably don’t really understand what it looks like for a person with an invisible disability. Below I’ll share some common experiences from my personal life that are generalized and I think could be informative for people who haven’t had to go through these kinds of discrimination.

In jobs:
Scenario 1:
I apply. My resume contains years of project leadership, disability related work, many job disruptions due to homelessness and prejudice. I am “outted” from the start.
No interview.
Receive form letter, “Thank you applicant. We have received much interest in the position and we inform you that we have moved forward with another candidate.”
Internal monologue of potential employer, “This candidate can’t possibly be as effective as a non-disabled candidate. I am not willing to interview and consider the worth of their alternative experience, but this does not make me prejudiced. I am just being practical and conforming to capitalist standards of productivity. There’s no way this person can economically benefit my company. Hiring them would be some form of charity, and we don’t have the margins for that.”

Scenario 2:
I'm hired:
Inner monologue of employer: "Oh good, she's disabled but not so disabled that she "needs" anything.
First time I ask to sit down, eat at a different time, ask for a schedule accommodation: "Let me get the manager (Dean, boss, whatever), we don't normally accommodate “special requests”. Followed by "this just isn't going to work, why don’t you go home for the afternoon and we’ll call you" and/or screaming/ scolding/ belittling/ gaslighting.
Unemployed (again).
Left without professional references/ support.

In personal relationships:
“Why don’t you “get your life together”. [Delivered while working 4 different ways, during a peak disability experience]
“You have no right to have an opinion in MY department”. [Delivered, screaming, cornered in my studio, after asking for a disability accommodation].
“You’re such a liar. You do XYZ (acrobatics, occasional travel, etc), and you’re “so disabled” that you need sympathy, support?! All you do is lie to people.” [Delivered by a troll who used all of my disability writing over the years to target me in a vicious series of internet attacks. Reflects a larger societal perception].
“Your life must be so hard because you’re an artist” [Delivered many times, by many different people, choosing the artist-as-irresponsible, artist-as-tortured-genius skewed narratives -- discounting my constant attempts to participate in “standard” society while erasing the prejudice that keeps me from inclusion].
"I don't see how you represent disability in your work" [Reads: if you don't look disabled, or conform to pre-fabricated, external expectations of social justice practice, we don't hear anything you're saying about disability].

There are many other examples, and many different versions of the above that I’ve experienced. Awareness in itself is powerful for undoing stereotypes, so thank you for reading.

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Wild Healing on Stage

7/15/2019

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Writer's Note: Set the intention for a piece that’s redemptive. But also true.

It seemed to be a fundamental riddle, to create a piece about art, performance and healing... when healing in a chronically ill body is never finished, and performance is so ephemeral, so diffuse. How to capture this in an essay? So much as this body, this piece remains unsettled--between ecstasy and struggle, resolution and unwinding.

At some point, human experience leaves every person with aspects of their narrative that feel “unresolved”. This trauma. That failure. This person who never loved me back. Those forms of (physical/ emotional/ spiritual) lack. Struggle toward assimilation is a wildly universal force. Some of us hide it. Some of us can’t. Here, welcome the disabled as your mirrors, displaying authentic vulnerability, need, and emotion at unregulated times, breaking apart assumed roles and structures in their wake. Scary as shit, I tell you. Like wildfire. And also brilliant.

Photo of Sarah Muehlbauer by Elliot Polinsky

I started making art about the experience of chronic illness to locate and heal aspects of myself that couldn’t be absorbed in a logical way. No one wishes for disability. I did not. But illness in society became a fascinating puzzle for me, a series of human mysteries to solve daily/ weekly/ hourly/ minute-by-minute sometimes, much like the dilemmas I now solve on stage. If dealt with constructively, there are more wins than losses.

As a creator, my simplest goal is to reveal something human as a gift to my audience. Something built from observation and experience. What is this? Illness roots me HARD to my basic needs. To moments of crises in 3-D reality. To the freezing and extending of time. To the feeling of flesh. To scar tissue. My hydration, my heart rate, my body temp. My neurons firing. In this body, I am bound to fluctuations in mental clarity. My joints. My adrenaline. My gut feelings. I ground daily to presence or absence of this pain or that. When my energy is high or low. When to rest or push. How many days I think I might have left on this earth... and how many of them might be good ones.

I inhabit an excruciating, exquisite corpse. Much like any body’s. Much like yours.

In earlier years I seldom claimed to represent disability as an artist, in part because the experiences are so… normal. As a chronically ill artist, I crossed disciplines and collaborated often to explore psychological dynamics of embodied experience, with and through the creative lenses of my peers. Collaborator = translator. Naturally, these contemplations led to aspects of care, structurally and creatively, both given and received. I studied the body as an earthly home, as a site for the self, and as a dynamic physical object in the environment.

The relationship between identity and body, body and environment, can be wholesome, fluid, gritty, perilous, calculated, playful, limiting, and endlessly changeable. For better and for worse. I think about this in the human-climate connection. If we use our responsible and dynamic creative force, then we can repair our ecosystem. But if we DON’T choose that... as bodies, as humans, we experience the outter world collapse, seemingly out of control, despite the structures we wished to rely on. Irreconcilable grief. Move to another planet. If that’s an option…

Disability experience is similarly double-edged, individually and in a collective environment. On a given day, I can approach my roles and abilities with the mental ecology of an athlete and an artist -- determined to create within the means granted at the moment, with an eye toward improvement and longevity. I can also approach (my self) or (my body) as a failure, a scapegoat, a social reject, a trash body. Something someone else should fix. A thing you can get rid of or leave behind. A descent. A divorce. A ghosting.

In the late version, time expands where you don’t want it to, and contracts where you do. This is the place where the earth dies, and so do we.

When I work with other artists and companies, my mind-body needs scream silently and grate against the fabric of our connections and expectations. It’s a 24/7 job introspecting deeply to monitor and form ready-to-go complex resolutions before/ after/ or during the space of communication. Labor mounts, sustainability talk takes on a languid pulse. Yet the healing also exists in this space. For all of us. And it’s not just in the breakdown of what needs to change, it’s in the active reconstruction. The artists’s mind stays curious, the athlete’s mind sustains.

Collaborator Anne Weshinskey with video design by Dan Cole. Photo by Elliot Polinsky

Clear divides between professional and private life are often shattered in a model based on healing. The “uncomfortably close other” is held. The necessary labor of care is acknowledged, and the window is open for new questions. Here again we touch base with not just disability justice, but human healing needs more broadly… in the field of arts performance and in the performance of roles in our lives. Intimacy and productivity are drawn together gently like strings of a spider’s web, gluing cause and effect, strategic choice to physical and mental health outcomes.

In the world of our creation, we show up with the stones in our shoes, our coverings and trappings, our flows and our stops. We are encouraged to do the unpacking. Introspect. Assert. Create. Sometimes the new ground laid will knock us off our feet. Grate against our skin. Slow us down to a pace we fear we’ll never recover from. But authenticity and respect are never wasted, and so too are creative efforts of any size. When working together, success lies in the quality of relationships, the individuality expressed by all, and the profound ripples of wild healing.

-Sarah Muehlbauer

Post-script.
This piece is illustrated by stills from the performance of “Ripple/Quake”, photographed by Elliot Polinsky. The live performance features the work of Dan Cole (video artist and musician), Anne Weshinskey (concept artist and performer), Simon de Aguero (tensile fabric designer), Will Turnbull (metal fabricator), Dan Bogan (musican), and myself, Sarah Muehlbauer (writer, spiderweb weaver, fabricator, concept artist, and performer). It was made with a Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant (‘18), and the Leeway x Icebox Project Space residency (‘19) I received. Performances of “Ripple/Quake” were accompanied by free public workshops “Body Maps” (taught by me), “Yoga Nidra” and “Yoga for Chronic Pain” (taught by Elliot). More info about the original event is available on Leeway’s event page. To inquire more about the performance and workshops, or to bring them to your area, contact info.lionorfox@gmail.com.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

"Red Tape" - Performance and Mental Health

Training Your Edges - Thoughts and images

Divergent Bodies

Wild Healing on Stage

Sarah Muehlbauer

Archives

TABLE OF CONTENTS﻿

"Red Tape" - Performance and Mental Health

Training Your Edges - Thoughts and images

Divergent Bodies

Wild Healing on Stage

Sarah Muehlbauer

Archives

TABLE OF CONTENTS