Ewa Hubar on Re–Directing: East 2020
The main thing I brought to the seminar was my work with dreams. It is a well-defined practice that I've been learning from Bonnie Buckner for several years now. It is a method enabling us to better understand the connection between the body and the mind; to discover the inner potential inside every human being. By this, I mean the potential to grow, to understand both oneself and others, and most importantly, to my mind: to live the exceptional experience of perceiving the world and reality in a multidimensional way, not just on a linear, unidirectional level. Dreams grant us access to layers of life, memory, body, matter, non-matter, energy and intuition that are unavailable to us in our everyday lives. To put it another way, we make them unavailable ourselves by drowning them out. My belief is that we can re-learn how to access them once again. That's right – re-learn. To many cultures over the centuries, the world of dreams was just as real as the one we call "material". When it comes to learning and mastering that practice, I am inspired and fascinated by the Australian Aborigine culture. "Dreamtime", to them, is the time of their forefathers and the creation of the world, yet at the same time it is their “right here, right now”. They practice Dadirri – inner deep listening, calm awareness and waiting. It is done through listening to songlines, dream tracks leading through lands, heavens or the human body. Those mark out Dreamtime routes: routes of the time of genesis. It is an almost spiritual skill based on respect and being present in the moment.
Within the practice I offer, we aim to hear our inner and intimate primal language of dreamed images coming straight from our bodies. The body itself and the act of embodiment are also important in my practice. I am a choreographer, a massage therapist, and an anthropologist. The body and the context surrounding it have always occupied a central place in my activities. That is why it is fascinating for me to search for links and tangible connections between the experience of the body and art, history, relationships and, most of all, dreams. The amazement, curiosity and potential for intimacy connected with opening up our dreams are the principal qualities I wanted to contribute to the seminar.
During one of the sessions, someone used a fantastic term: hearing experience. The moments when we turned off the cameras and focused on hearing our voices, stories, dreams and silences were a truly great experience for me. A very intimate one. We created an exchange zone of sorts. I guess that, for a moment in my life, I didn't feel the need to give it a name or define it. It's rather like with poetry: it is born somewhere in between the words and their juxtapositions. Likewise, something happened between the voice I heard and my body. I guess this is how I would describe our seminar and its participants: intimacy and magic happened somewhere in between. Just like in a dream.
Participants of the seminar are answering two questions: what was their contribution to the seminar and how has taking part in the seminar influenced their perception of the online realm.
Photo: Ania Bystrowska
