Current Projects
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Finding Our Footing (For Two)
2017 Finding Our Footing represents a post-positivist research methodology for investigating the embodied creative process and engaging artistically with emergent design. Rather than employing a positivist strategy of imagining an outcome and taking steps to achieve it (in scientific terms, stating a hypothesis and conducting experiments to prove or disprove it), Finding our Footing begins with initial research questions or concepts for practical consideration, but then allows dancers' movement choices and described embodied experience to generate creative material and ongoing exploration. The improvisational structure allows dancers' felt sense of kinesthesia, time, sensory perception and community engagement to manifest design. Other practical tactics for opening possibilities of emergent design based on the embodied experience and creative process of dancers include: *Exploring how the sensation of touch from another person resonates through the rest of the body and can be translated into movement expression. *Engaging in biocommunication and kinesthetic empathy to resource embodied experience and choice-making *Using Authentic Movement as original fodder for choreographed movement sequences that evolve through repetition and kinesthetic reinterpretation. *Exploring how movement explorations designed for embodied communication, both with and without physical contact, build a sense of shared understanding and community belonging. |
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Universe Within from Ashlee Ramsey on Vimeo. |
Universe Within
2015 Universe Within explores how the microcosmic intelligence of the body and the individual experience reflects a macrocosmic intelligence and experience of the universe. Using the body as a resource for connecting to this greater intelligence and higher consciousness, Universe Within plays with embodied knowing as a means for both connecting to and cultivating a creative life force of awareness, joy, empathy, love and community.
Choreography: Ashlee Ramsey Movement Invention: Ashlee Ramsey and Dancers Music: "New Laughter Mode (The Way In)" and "Being Here" by Laraaji Text: Ashlee Ramsey and Dancers Film Footage: Alex Churney and Dr JC Guimberteau Costumes: Janet Gray |
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Entangled/Embraced:
energy / language in / extending from our / my / your / its tiny / infinite room / world 2012 Entangled/Embraced: What do we find ourselves lost within? Where are we in this web of imagination? Who is there with us? Who creates it with us and what do we contribute to this collaborative process of making a moment in reality? How much of this reality lives outside of our own imagination? How do we share the beauty and wonder of our creativity when experiences are so individualized?
Entangled/Embraced represents a choreographic work combining inspirations from sociological concepts such as:
Set within a series of clothesline encompassing the entire performance lab, Entangled/Embraced features four dancers performing in the same space as audience members who receive the invitation to contribute to the work through their very presence and choices of where to stand as well as how to interact with the dancers, the clothesline and with each other. Although the process of creating a structure was directed and developed by Ms. Ramsey, the true nature and character of the work and the place the work existed within can be attributed to all participants, including dancers, audience members, production staff and crew. |
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Stargaze of the Faraway Other
2011 Ms Ramsey choreographed Stargaze of the Faraway Other as a means of exploring and considering the human disposition to compare and classify individuals or cultural groups into assumed brackets of identity, beliefs and purposes. A self-performed solo, Stargaze of the Faraway Other stems from Ms. Ramsey's experience of traveling to India, where for five months she daily encountered a defeating inability to avoid exoticizing members of her host culture, while also becoming the genderized, sexualized and racialized other. Using a combination of her so own so-called self-sourced movement with movement directly derived, or "stolen," from traditional dance forms, yoga and martial arts indigenous to South India, this work questions the boundaries between fascination and objectification, seeking and grasping, curiosity and voyeurism. Through Stargaze of the Faraway Other, Ms. Ramsey ponders the unavoidable and possibly necessary act of “otherizing” a person or people with whom we do not share a culture, race, religion or belief system. At the same time within this dance work, Ms. Ramsey seeks to discover the beauty in human nature's predisposition to love the exotic other. |
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Where Are the Animals?
2009-2010 Where Are the Animals? takes a look at the role of animals at all levels of human life and consciousness - physical, emotional and spiritual. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have turned to animals to provide archetypal symbols of wisdom and life lessons as well as depictions of evil deserving of elimination. Where Are the Animals? analyzes juxtaposing forms of animal inclusion in the human psyche resulting in drastically oppositional and warped methods of animal treatment, while also questioning the line between domestic care versus manipulative dominion. For instance, while many ancient myths and contemporary stories provide a world where we turn to animals as spirit guides and the harbors of moral life lessons, the current method of meat production in many countries completely demoralizes animals and strips humans of all spirit. When do we play hopscotch along the line of compassionate care for domesticated animals and sovereignty over animals' sexuality and procreation? When does petting transform into indiscreet physical access?
Using tales from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories along with music from the animation Aristocats, spoken text from the U.N. website and from Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals by Brian Luke, Where Are the Animals? not only looks at the juxtaposing and extreme visions humans hold of animals, it also questions the human tendency to see in these visions our own projection and thus reflection. The result ties humans and animals together, creating possibilities of debilitation and demise for both species. |
Communal Imagination
2010
2010
At the outset of my latest site-specific performance project, I entered the process with the goal of using the creation of a new dance work as a method of investigating some of my artistic inquiries that I believe relate to avenues of ethnographic study that I find interesting. The resulting dance work, titled Communal Imagination, became a process that investigated how the disciplines of ethnography and artistic practice, in the context of dance making and sociological theory, may indeed possess simultaneous roots, interests, and endeavors. Throughout this final synthesis, I describe how I interpret ethnography while explaining some of the theoretical bases for Communal Imagination and how a pursuit of them in a dance making practice held ethnographic and sociological foundations.
As a dance artist interested in collaborative dance making practices and social constructions of creativity, especially through means of embodied learning, I began Fall semester 2010 with research into sociological theories that relate to my interests. The theoretical basis for Communal Imagination involves inquiries into common knowledge and discursive consciousness, social constructions of knowledge, continuous and public processes of creativity, and lastly, embodied and kinesthetic understanding of other humans and our environment. Underneath and throughout the process of creating Communal Imagination, I kept an open eye for how my arts practice and ideas of ethnography represent facets embedded within one another. In a reading and conference course titled Ethnography as Artistic Practice, I have found the discipline of ethnography far-reaching, complex, and developed. To me, ethnography and sociology share similar shades when the ethnographer becomes curious about and studious of the choices that people make as individuals in order to sustain and recreate a group construction. How do we work as inhabitants entangled and integrated with a material and social environment? How do we manifest our experiences and imagination through physically embodied actions and behaviors? In making Communal Imagination, the answers to these questions became the truth of the work as it's definition developed to encompass the circumstances and contributions of our group, public participants, and audience members. Although I provided intellectual inspirations and activities for experimentation, the presence, collaboration, and manifestation of experience of all participants revealed the raw and beautiful nature of who we are and what we create. Indeed, the dancers’ choices represent a major aspect of Communal Imagination’s artistry, while the beauty of the piece existed within the ability of the participants to make decisions and construct the work through their own momentary creativity.
Throughout the rest of this entry, I highlight sections of Communal Imagination by sharing my thematic thoughts and inquiries behind them in terms of both my artistic practice and my views on ethnography. A video clip of each section follows literary text that might list questions, describe a process, or explain literary inspiration or backing from other artists.
Communal Imagination: Theoretical Concepts
As a dance artist interested in collaborative dance making practices and social constructions of creativity, especially through means of embodied learning, I began Fall semester 2010 with research into sociological theories that relate to my interests. The theoretical basis for Communal Imagination involves inquiries into common knowledge and discursive consciousness, social constructions of knowledge, continuous and public processes of creativity, and lastly, embodied and kinesthetic understanding of other humans and our environment. Underneath and throughout the process of creating Communal Imagination, I kept an open eye for how my arts practice and ideas of ethnography represent facets embedded within one another. In a reading and conference course titled Ethnography as Artistic Practice, I have found the discipline of ethnography far-reaching, complex, and developed. To me, ethnography and sociology share similar shades when the ethnographer becomes curious about and studious of the choices that people make as individuals in order to sustain and recreate a group construction. How do we work as inhabitants entangled and integrated with a material and social environment? How do we manifest our experiences and imagination through physically embodied actions and behaviors? In making Communal Imagination, the answers to these questions became the truth of the work as it's definition developed to encompass the circumstances and contributions of our group, public participants, and audience members. Although I provided intellectual inspirations and activities for experimentation, the presence, collaboration, and manifestation of experience of all participants revealed the raw and beautiful nature of who we are and what we create. Indeed, the dancers’ choices represent a major aspect of Communal Imagination’s artistry, while the beauty of the piece existed within the ability of the participants to make decisions and construct the work through their own momentary creativity.
Throughout the rest of this entry, I highlight sections of Communal Imagination by sharing my thematic thoughts and inquiries behind them in terms of both my artistic practice and my views on ethnography. A video clip of each section follows literary text that might list questions, describe a process, or explain literary inspiration or backing from other artists.
Communal Imagination: Theoretical Concepts
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Common Knowledge
At the basis of my artistic inquiries exists the idea of common knowledge – the operational knowledge that we use most of the time without awareness of it, and with similar understanding as our fellow humans. For example, we all know that we walk on the sidewalk, the sidewalk is hard and made of concrete, we make contact with the sidewalk using the soles of our feet. With further research I have learned that in sociology the idea of common knowledge can be compared to Schutz’s definition of a common stock of knowledge – recipes or conceptions of our environment that categorize objects into types of things, such as cars, trees, nature, technology, animals, humans, insects, etc. (Wallace and Wolf, 1990). Giddens refers to Schutz’s term as mutual knowledge incorporated in everyday behavior and encounters (Wallace and Wolf, 1990). Although we share knowledge and assume that we all know certain things, I am most inspired by how our experience of this knowledge happens on a very subjective level. For example, the associations we make with and the memories we have of the definition of a sidewalk exist as personal, intimate, and unique. So, what information can we define as shared knowledge? Can an arts practice in the context of dance making and movement investigation find the manifestation of this shared knowledge while also revealing the less disclosed, personal and deep-seated experience of our social and material environment? The following clip represents a section of Communal Imagination where participants of our group attempted to investigate common knowledge by searching for common movement. Through a literal interpretation of the idea, group participants improvised within a space and with the intention of finding a common movement with others whom they encounter. Interestingly, we found the notion of common movement in its truest sense nearly impossible, replacing it with imitation and mimicry. In most cases, participants had a hard time slowing down enough to discover genuine common movement, replacing it with imitation and interchanging leadership and mimicry. Only when participants moved extremely slow, were we able to find simultaneous, shared knowledge of occurring movement. What might this tend towards imitation imply or indicate about how we socially acquire information? |
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If videos do not appear above, please follow links:
http://youtu.be/1_fztNlEE3I http://youtu.be/LmJ-yJiT5SU |
Discursive Consciousness
Giddens describes his notion of mutual knowledge as lying outside of discursive consciousness, that is, behavior and decisions that we are self-conscious of (Wallace and Wolf, 1999). Wallace and Wolf agree that the knowledge that we experience self-consciously represents only a minute amount of knowledge that we use to operate while we take for granted and automatically use an enormous amount of Schutz’s stock of knowledge or Giddens mutual knowledge. Wallace and Wolf go on to explain Garfinkle’s origination of ethnomethodology, a theory that strives to make problematic the taken for granted, commonsense, everyday activity of reality. Simultaneously, ethnomethodologists study how groups of people make sense of their world by invoking “certain taken-for-granted rules about behavior with which they interpret an interaction situation and make it meaningful” (p. 262). In attending to the questions of common knowledge and knowledge that lies outside of discursive consciousness, I question how we might behave if we imagine that we do not know anything about typically understood phenomena within our space, such as the sidewalk, a light post, our own bodies, or the bodies of others. |
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Public Processes of Creativity
As members of a place, whether public or private, we possess a role in creating what happens in that place at all given moments. For this reason, we live as constantly creative beings who own the responsibility of helping to create the world as we know it. In situations of public place-making, how often do we become aware of and appreciate the amount of creativity that happens in order to create the situation, ever-changing as it may be? As we walk along the sidewalk, not only do we contribute to creating place by our very presence, but we also sustain social creative establishments while also recreating them in new ways. We maintain the social creation of the meaning of the sidewalk as a platform to walk upon while performing this meaning in a slightly new way all the while creating a situation that has never happened exactly the same as before. Our decision to walk on the sidewalk, while it serves some personal purpose in the drive of creating our own life, is also dictated by our role as a sustainer, creator, and re-creator of a social construction of meaning. I question how, as artists, what happens if we put obvious acts of creativity inside of the public creativity that we often ignore, take for granted, or consider mundane? Can a process of obvious creativity reveal the creative contributions of all members of an environment? What happens if we change the meaning of the material of the environment? The sidewalk becomes something you roll on, or walking through a place can also include running, walking extremely slow, falling down, and falling in tandem with someone as you make a physical, visceral, weighted connection with another human on a different path from yourself. How will passersby internally negotiate their own creative existence within an environment, when they experience new meanings of the construction of a place? If a passerby sees someone fall to the sidewalk and begin to roll, how will her perception of and her relationship to what the sidewalk commonly means change? How will she perceive and experience her own embodied presence as a sidewalk user? |
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Embodied and Kinesthetic Understanding of Other Humans and of Our Environment
Lastly, I question how our understanding of our fellow humans and our material environment takes place within kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensations and responses. When we recognize a friend from a distance, we look for the shape of his body and how he physically carries himself. When we walk through a public setting, we use our bodies to both maintain how people in our particular culture walk while also making our own contributions. We understand our friend according to the thickness of their thighs, the curl of their lips, the flicker of their gestures, or the weight and pulp of their flesh. How do concrete buildings resonate within our bones versus our organs or how do we perceive water fountains according to proprioceptive awareness of the wetness of our mouth or the heft of our urine-filled bladder? During the making of Communal Imagination, participants silently chose another group member with whom they investigated personal embodied inspirations and understandings. My own example might suggest that I understand another member according to how she moves her shoulders when she talks. When I think of this member, I may likely picture her shoulders moving. I might kinesthetically empathize with the movement of her shoulders, allowing myself to feel as if my own shoulders were moving similarly and in tandem with hers. Along in my bedroom, I practice moving my shoulders like this other person and I might even catch myself unconsciously adopting and using her ways of shoulder expression while talking. The following clip demonstrates a section in Communal Imagination where participants were asked to play with giving weight to both the building and to each other. I wanted to see how a person might choose to give weight to a building and the kind of movement characteristics and effort they use to do so. I also question how they might approach the task of giving weight to one another versus giving weight to a concrete building - what choices did they make and can we distinguish a difference in quality and availability? How does it feel as a spectator to see someone alternate giving weight to another human body, giving weight to a concrete building, and receiving weight from another person? |
Communal Imagination - Conclusion
In Marking New Directions in Performance Ethnography, Della Pollock (2006) describes a shift in "the object of ethnography to performance, redefining the cultural field that the ethnographer writes as broadly composed of radically contingent, omnipermeable, micro- and macroperformances" (p. 325). Jane Bacon (2005) calls for a theoretical perspective in performance studies, and eventually performance ethnography, that "embraces the creative processes involved in the making of performance which are also fundamental to the analysis of performances. Bacon uses Ronald Pelias as an example of a writer whose text fulfills more than the function of documenting performance, but also serves as a poetic act of performance process and product within its own right. I like to think of the process and product of Communal Imaginations as a similar example, where the entire creative process and production serves as an act of performativity and research, on both micro and macro levels. The rehearsal ground did not exist as a place to sculpt preconceived ideas and images; rather, it became a place where, with an idea in mind, the reality of the perceptions, knowledge and experience of all participants could flourish and become the truth of the work, for that moment on that day. As a structured improvisation, the work allowed participants to simultaneously seek, perform and document their knowledge as it became available during the rehearsal and presentation processes. Using audience interaction and participation resulted in the ability of Communal Imagination's presentation to transcend the typical "showing" of a work, to become an open to chance process of creativity within itself. As I search for ways to describe how an artistic and ethnographic practice might be enmeshed, intertwined, or even, in some cases, considered to be the same thing, I suggest that the entire journey of creating Communal Imagination involved a search and revelation of how individual members work according to their unique and subjective experiences while also working within the social and material fabrications that they consider shared and intersubjective.
In Marking New Directions in Performance Ethnography, Della Pollock (2006) describes a shift in "the object of ethnography to performance, redefining the cultural field that the ethnographer writes as broadly composed of radically contingent, omnipermeable, micro- and macroperformances" (p. 325). Jane Bacon (2005) calls for a theoretical perspective in performance studies, and eventually performance ethnography, that "embraces the creative processes involved in the making of performance which are also fundamental to the analysis of performances. Bacon uses Ronald Pelias as an example of a writer whose text fulfills more than the function of documenting performance, but also serves as a poetic act of performance process and product within its own right. I like to think of the process and product of Communal Imaginations as a similar example, where the entire creative process and production serves as an act of performativity and research, on both micro and macro levels. The rehearsal ground did not exist as a place to sculpt preconceived ideas and images; rather, it became a place where, with an idea in mind, the reality of the perceptions, knowledge and experience of all participants could flourish and become the truth of the work, for that moment on that day. As a structured improvisation, the work allowed participants to simultaneously seek, perform and document their knowledge as it became available during the rehearsal and presentation processes. Using audience interaction and participation resulted in the ability of Communal Imagination's presentation to transcend the typical "showing" of a work, to become an open to chance process of creativity within itself. As I search for ways to describe how an artistic and ethnographic practice might be enmeshed, intertwined, or even, in some cases, considered to be the same thing, I suggest that the entire journey of creating Communal Imagination involved a search and revelation of how individual members work according to their unique and subjective experiences while also working within the social and material fabrications that they consider shared and intersubjective.
Header photos by Christopher Wrenn Tanner.
