Dark Moon Collaborators
2017-Ongoing
Danielle Currica
I’m still figuring out where me starts and my gut tub ends. If what I imagine as my full gut tube state is real or trivial, here or intangible...
What I do know is my gut tube is a paradox of sorts; utter freedom with boundaries and rules, tangible manifestations of imagined places and things, harmony in dissonance.
What is important for me as I journey the experience is, to be honest. To trust my gut. To be in constant search of pleasure and of want, while sharing and infecting others with those same pleasures and wants.
Patricia Dominguez
What lingers with me about the practice, that I find myself thinking about during non-rehearsal time, is the moving relationships we create and how we decide to engage with each different interaction. It's beyond a dance rehearsal, it happens everywhere, on the street, at work, etc., this practice brings me a new way of noticing how what is outside can influence what's inside and vice versa. It's like our exterior bodies are just vessels for the wormy tubes that are our guts.
Beau Hancock
Recent advances in neurobiology have shown that the enteric nervous system, which controls your gut, operates largely independently of the brain and the spinal cord, and is often described as the “little brain.” Our gastrointestinal tracts are thinking on their own more than we realize. Shannon’s practices ask us to embody, deconstruct, and question our enteric intelligence, and use our “little brain” to make decisions. This deep summoning of primordial perception lets me come forward in performance in unusual and fabulous ways. Dancing from the gut involves a particular kind of integrity, which I’m working to translate into my daily life. My suggestion: listen to your gut!
Marisa Illingworth
For me, this practice embodies the most visceral of joy- the joy of moving in an earnest, unfettered body, the joy of seeing others unfold themselves to reveal their fabulously peculiar insides, the joy of being seen and being held, of holding others. This practice of taking the time to move from our guts, alone and together, feels so necessary in a world where we are short tempered, instantly gratified, and always judging and being judged. In this practice, we are remembering how to be patient, what it feels like to be ridiculous, unapologetically strange and gross and be loved for it.
Megan Quinn
Cycles of catharsis.
Consensual reality and felt reality are flip-flopped. Substance is no longer atoms, substance is need. Substance is want. Substance is ecstasy and desperation. In me and in you. The world we used to share is now the world beyond. The world beyond is now the world we share. Imaginings are true in this world. It's true that I'm the most powerful witch on earth. It's true that I'm disintegrating, I never really existed, I am nothing if no one holds me. I can see my whole life, the history of my senses in the space around me.
William Robinson
This is such a mess.
Sloppy, sliding, bubbly.
See seeing, be seen.
This practice for me is found in the labor it takes to be in and of community. The labor it takes to decompress and create space for imagined futures that are disinterested in continuing oppressive and corrosive forces. This work is an anti-erasure culture. It asks us to show up and challenge what might be constricting or numbing our impulses to connect and grow. This work recognizes, it acknowledges, and if demonstrates making external internal processes. It performs the building of a complex, sensing network, generated from the consideration of the self as a whole.
For me this work is awesome.
Steve Surgalski
Sub-gutaneous
a primal caring disco
supporting support
joy, week after week
to blur where the push and pull
thankful for phases
moves in quicksand
a squall: both tender and wild
under a dark moon
Michele Tantoco
letting go of the day, shedding the shit that accumulates to dive deep into my own shit. It's temporary but always there, its a ritual a meditation. training myself to feel myself, to feel others. my truth feels like a hollow body, a scaffold, a tiny sunglasses wearing purple big bird at the helm testing for resonance. I want deep vibration and discord and harmony. I must listen, optimistic for the blossoming greatness of the community. gut flora community keeping the balance during times of potential hunger, constipation, too much sugar.
Sara Yassky
I start with the floppiness, the slide, the squishy, the plump and changing voice of my viscera as a beginning. There are landscapes and images - a front porch stoop, a stiff armchair, a light filled room, doling hills, a stage... There is time to find these versions of myself- work to get in first, and then look for the others. I think we end up finding ourselves together form the inside-out- guts first.