Isabel Bowser

This semester I took a ceramics class with professor Steven Thurston. I concentrated in ceramic sculpture in undergrad and I was excited to reconnect with this way of making while at OSU. I ended up creating sculptural elements for a performance installation to be presented at Urban Arts Space in May. The show, Grieving Landscapes, is a collaboratively curated exhibition with work by myself, Nicole Lawson, Alisha Jihn, Lucy Dillon, Kiki Williams, and Jackie Courchene. 

My section of the exhibition will include sculpture, sound art, dance, and live music. The description of the piece is below:

Beasts of the Field is a performance installation that inters and composts the monocropping, extractive, purity culture of white supremacy by resurrecting the body of a strange and unlikely saint. Isa converses in movement, song and poetry with an unburied effigy of the Beast, a god of death, life, dirt, decay, and mischief. Their bantersome back and forth obscures the sensible, rational, and hierarchical to illuminate a tangled love of bodies and beings large and small. They irreverently pray toward the mess and resist simple definitions. The Beast is a humanish creature emerging from a mound of dirt with snakes for arms and a friendly demon mask that resembles a cow, a dog, a lion, and a number of devils depicted in European medieval sculpture. Isa tugs and twists at her cultures of origin (Portuguese Roman Catholic and German Lutheran) to shape a new personal epistemology in which death is a vivid process of sacred decay and the body is an eruption of uncontainable mysteries of sensuous danger and delight. There is no fall, no sin, no punishment for the snake in this story, only tangled guts, warm hands, and unruly life burgeoning out of cracks in the caverns of the dead. 

Fecund by Isa (ink on paper)

These are the five poems I wrote for my Imaginative Writing class this semester. Themes flicker and solidify and after these poetic explorations I am closer to discerning the This-ness of my creative process. Working in multiple disciplines at once allows each area to spill into the next, to contaminate, permeate, and propagate meanings and makings.

Taken and Given

“When did you know you were?”

He stands at my stove

Thick hack of meat bleeding into the cast iron

“When did you know you were?”

Alive? Hungry? Uncontained?

The smoke of steak pollinates his dense curls, damp

Like the fur on the chin of a lioness,

Feeding.

He is a butcher and a dancer

Sculpting bodies into nourishing bundles

Rich and weighted with life (taken and given)

We laugh as we work

Wide mouthed, wide smiled

Set the table

Call them in

When did you know you were?

Wanted? Wanting? A question, not an answer.

Cheeks bunching full

Licking juice off our fingers

Guilty of much

But no longer hungry

Waking

They like it to be dark

I think

Remembering funerals, I have forgotten so many

Rituals that never happened

Undone, not yet done

Never finished

And forever strangely sweet.

I dreamt of an Orca Whale in a small

Lake

Tail waking 

To push viscous tension,

A pop-release into air.

A spray of water, droplets cool and sharp

One on forehead

One on each cheek.

Moles are places we have been kissed the most

In dreams?

In past lives?

Or prophetically. 

Lending themselves to a present lover’s lips

She forgot some things before

She died

She seemed to live in greener decades

Young.

Cousins and siblings

So many brothers

There with her

For my grandfather, I shapechanged into

My uncle, my dad 

Girl to boy, now to then

She? No.

she never forgot my name

route 21 south

they seem fresh, 

unspoiled for those brought up

          on a palette of sour, stink, rot, red, and green. 

not emitting much smell,

          the sun being tucked behind a sheet of cloud

leaving them uncooked on the pavement. for now.

a white blaze of road paint measuring them longways

and now we are moving them

          scooting their body 

onto a blanket to put in the trunk

revealing a moist, dark oval spot that demarcates their

Place. 

but then we think. 

and we have a hunch burial is a uniquely human ritual. 

they might be more delighted to be devoured by birds 

          piece by piece 

          into the thin sky.

          tufts of fluff and sinew

slurps and stretch-snapping, beak-yanking bites of 

intestine, liver, bladder,

          lungs.

and maybe later, what is left grounded and flattened by rain will 

          erupt with the quiver-shift of resurrection

          pearly maggots tumbling out of orifice 

an invisible hum of the living tucked haphazardly inside the dead   

dispersed into many bellies

          uncontained

          re-contained

cold then warm then cold again

Being Gorgeous

The thing about being gorgeous is this.

This is the thing. And she points to herself like this. 

This.

Being gorgeous is like plucking blossoms from each other’s mouths

And deciding which to leave, let grow

Into fruit, luscious and dense

Like a saccharine riddle

And she says to us when we roll around in the grass

Laughing like wolves

Being gorgeous is for all the beasts, micro beasts, super organisms of this here planet.

This planet speckled, dimpled, and dexterously windswept. 

And she says to us as we lick our honey-dripping fingers and nibble the 

Throats of our dearest friends

Being gorgeous is not easy. It takes guts. And flesh

Unruly and yearning to be underground.

She proclaims these things to us as she gesticulates wildly

Cracking the pavement and busting through chain-link

She whispers these things to us as she deftly dips her pinky fingernail 

into the intestines of fish

Scooping out clots of microplastics that she then eats

Metabolizing 

like a willow tree in a nuclear waste field. 

Like a mother sucking the mucus from her newborn’s nose 

To urge their first sour breath of air.

We don’t always understand what she means when she says it, but we nod our heads and ponder with earnest dedication

“Being Gorgeous” we mutter over and over.

“Being Gorgeous”

Tails

The skull of a beast

Large and staring

Pale and dry

Mountains

People with tails

Gods are like us

And flawed

In beauty

And dangerous

And wise foolish

And covered in fur

The devil is not the devil

She is a mess

She is a carcass

From which ghost pipes jut

And galax overtakes

The beasts of the field

Would have trampled armies if we had had the chance

To keep the bison around their bones

Padded by muscle and wool

So they never clank

Or make that sunken rattling sound

So that when they bump one another

The noise is mass and carnival

Weighted in bent grass gowns

And rumble sung breath

Out of nostrils in a skull

Like the devil

A darling of the dirt

This class gave me a space to allow the messiness of my research process to unfold without judgement. My anxiety about the lack of clarity I had around what I was researching in my art practice and in my scholarship gave way to an acceptance of the complexity of the process and the unfinishedness that will never really be resolved. Norah joked that every draft of my research paper was completely different. I felt comfortable to keep experimenting, to try to say what I needed to say in ways that felt real. Every draft spoke to different threads, in different ways that were necessary for me to unpack and articulate what is really important. I have a lot more confidence in my own work and more trust in my research interests after this class.

I will take forward the tools of noticing what you notice and finding what has heat and energy. These two methods have served me really well throughout the semester. Leaning into what I am already interested in and seeing research as everything I do has been very generative. 

I developed an awareness of methodology and the power of understanding and defining my own tools and techniques in my research and art creation. A few methodologies that I employ are emergence, friending, and jostling. Emergence acknowledges the intricate webs of association and the ever-changing nature of the work. Friending is a practice of noticing my environment with benevolent and humble curiosity and reminds me to treat all beings, things, ideas, and bodies with respect for their own intelligences and agencies. Jostling is a term I use to describe the literal and figurative need to mess things up, disturb, shake, and rattle in order to create meaningful change in myself and in the world. my methods include creative writing, dance improvisation with and without scores or parameters, the creation of visual art images and objects, dream journaling, conversation as spiritual practice, and many more. 

The digital literacy portion of the class gave me a cultural, historical, and theoretical knowledge of digital and analog technologies that I did not have before. It muddied my assumptions of certain technologies being inherently good or bad and brought me to a more nuanced understanding of our agency in how we use and develop digital technologies and technologies in general. 

In many ways this class was a practice in self-awareness and contexting. We had some form of a check-in at the beginning of every class and that space to share and bring in the rest of our lives made so much room for the research, I think. I was really able to see the context within which I was working and living in new ways by bringing my full self into the class every week. I look forward to continuing my research and continuing to learn and play with the tools and knowledge I gained over course of the semester. 

Abby Z's website

Performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts Nov 17-19, 2022. 

I couldn't stop moving in my seat the whole time. The movements are fast, complex, rhythmic, powerful, human. It feels like the dancers are training to survive the apocalypse, training to be able to care for those who cannot do these superhuman tasks. I see care everywhere, in the way they encourage each other, the way their bodies collaborate in the moment, support and push against each other at the right times for propulsion, compression, tension, or momentum. The way Jensei shouts "I see you!" when another dancer is killing it out on stage. They smile, groan, grimace and shout from the effort. Sweat flies every which way, tracing the waves of energy breaking out of their bodies as they move. I went back to see the piece again the next night and I could have watched it every night for a month. I would have seen new moments, registered different pathways and trains of attention. With Abby's work I often don't consciously "see" the choreography, I am completely taken in by the energy and electricity in the air around bodies, through bodies.  

This kind of relationship to audience feels different. A new culture of performance (at least in the western concert dance context) is born in the space. There is a permeability, a vicariousness, in the way we engage energetically and vocally with the performers. We shout their names. Even if you don't know the dancers going into it, they shout to each other and soon you can start to discern who is who and attach a name and a subjectivity to each performer. We go from audience to witness, holding them in our here-ness. We showed up for them and they showed up for us. My experience of the western concert dance model has been that the audience in some way must validate the performance, that the judgement of the audience defines the success of a piece, the gaze of the viewer giving a reason for the performance, defining the importance of what is viewed. Abby's work turns this self-conscious, external relationship on its head. If I were to perform in Abby's work, I would not be nervous in the same way. I would be nervous about exhaustion, about the struggle of effort, about whether I could do it, but I would not be anxious to impress, to please, or "perform" in the way I have felt in some instances in the past. Here, performance is a space to feel something together. To perform as yourself, to be feeling how you are feeling, to show it on your face, to be fully in the experience. There is something metabolized through the force of bodies and it feels to me like it needs to happen whether we are there or not, and yet our presence facilitates the happening. I'd like to think we help those dancers through the labor of the piece with our encouragement, our investment, our empathetic presences.

Performance Excerpt

Excerpt of my new solo Predator and Prey Alike to be performed as part of our informal, first year MFA, end of semester showing. This will be an opportunity to receive feedback on the piece from professors and peers. 

                                                                                               Beast Trio by Isa Bowser (Hard ground on steel plate)

Pounding and relentless percussive recorded music looping over and over. Maybe 8 dancers moving so slowly and with so much fluidity, never stopping, not speeding up. Their bodies forming tableau after horrifying tableau depicting abjection, violence, pleasure, sexual deviance, derangement, joy, and rage. Intermittently, throughout the piece the dancers would shift into fast, gyrating, repetitive movements in complex patterns and configurations. This thrusting, bouncing, shaking movement was in direct contrast to the honey-spilling slowness  of the rest of the piece. Naked bodies, pulled, carried, stretched, sat on, ridden. Clothing removed and put on imperceptibly as we watched another area of the stage. A strong feeling of overwhelm, anxiety, stress, and fight or flight in my own body the whole time. Also felt like a kind of trance state, stretching and contracting time and space. Heightened sensitivity, hyper awareness, wishing I could look away at times, on the edge of it being too much and at that very moment it would diminish in intensity just enough for me to keep watching. A balance of reciprocity in the inflicting and inflicted upon violence. Penises shaken under dresses, grabbed and yanked around. Full frontal nudity, male and female bodies. Bodies painted blue, gold, a world of grotesque, of violence. Then moments of playfulness, that almost didn't seem real. I spent a lot of time de-objectifying the dancers in my mind, reminding myself that it was a performance, that they had trained and rehearsed to be able to do these things, and hoping they were being taken care of in the process. 

The elements of immersive, time bending trance as well as the strong sense of world-building are things I found so artful and exciting about this piece. The kind of intensity of experience evoked by the deep dedication of the performers both physically and emotionally really brought me as a viewer, out of my mundane experience and into a heightened state of awareness. There were powerful political implications of the movements and tableaus created by these dancers of varying genders and races. Knowing the company is based in Brazil gives me some context for the way it may be speaking to colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism in ways similar yet distinct from the ways we struggle with those structures here in the U.S. I am also interested in how our cultural realities are reflected and challenged through art and performance andwas a profound example of a viscerally potent performance work bringing us closer to the complexities of our cultural realities.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit it 

Everyone has an owl and everyone has a dog inside them 

is it true, is it true that you like pets more than wild animals, answer carefully 

would you, would you share your meal with predator and prey alike, answer carefully 

Do you bow when you are less right, do you bow when you are less wrong, answer carefully, answer carefully 

Do you LOVE to FEEL the BODY, do you realize you’re a BODY, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully, answer carefully 

Begin by walking to the place that is right. Get down onto all fours and look left on the diagonal. Tuck legs and sit on butt, feet flat on the floor, knees bent. Begin to sing and do not stop singing until you have finished all of the movements leading up to the closing sequence. Begin singing softly as you rock forward and back, lowering haltingly to the ground. Feet tap out a different rhythm than the song and arms wrap around the invisible planet, round and shrinking by the second. Jolt and then splat and then throw, throw, around and curl. Keep singing, raise the octave to get even louder. Come to standing and fists gather and shoot up, jumping into double step wide arms around and wrap body, leg tucks in like an injured wing, repeat again and again and again and again. Out of breath, song shaky, out of tune, tired and then step lunge back back, and again and again until you are too tired so you stop. Head lolls to one side knees float up and arms gather a wispy substance into center then press down with knee and hand. And again. Later, you will find stillness and catch your breath as you sing the high part, trailing index finger from neck to belly button then both fingers from neck to shoulders. Hands gently rest on top of head. Lead to right side and spiral down to the floor index fingers together then spreading apart like a vision test at the doctor’s. Hug self and walk backwards to slump into crosslegged position. Arms out wide then closing in and CLAP.

An Intermedia collaboration between Alisha Jihn, Elizabeth Sugawara, John Cartwright, and Isa Bowser.

What Are You Looking Forward To? was created for our Intermedia class taught by Norah Zuniga-Shaw. In this piece, we explore the layers and overlapping nature of our identities, experiences, and surroundings. We began the process by interviewing each other on the question: What are you looking forward to? This could be in an immediate sense, a cosmic sense, a longterm or short term sense, etc. We recorded these casual interviews and used them as the soundtrack for the piece. 

Texture and sound were further explored when Elizabeth brought a ream of crinkly cellophane into the space and John improvised with the material against a projected live feed image of him with a kaleidoscope Isadora filter. The sound of the plastic was reminiscent of waves crashing, breathing, leaves rustling, paper shuffling. All things that implicitly and explicitly showed up in our interviews. 

The kaleidoscoping projected image generated a feeling of mystery and associations of birth, primordial goo, composite bodies, strange beasts, amoebas, and many more. All the while, Alisha typed out and documented what was happening during the performance. This stream of consciousness score was projected backwards onto the wall behind the scrim. 

Each of us held the space in different ways. John took on the role of active generator of meaning and associations. His movement ran parallel to the spoken interview and aligned with and contrasted our words at different moments. Alisha observed and documented the experience in real time, allowing her thought processes to become seen yet semi-obscured by the backwards projected text. Elizabeth and I set the space by laying out the cellophane in preparation for John’s solo and then closed the space by laying out fabric around John after he came to rest and lying down next to him in quiet stillness.

Would you, would you share your meal with predator and prey alike, answer carefully.

There are sites and spaces where the mundane, everyday world is suspended and a mythic, more-than-material world is evoked. Is it possible to use performance as a site of such trans-dimensional experiencing? What are the political and cultural implications of utilizing dance and performance to envision enlivened worlds that reject colonialist, white supremacist, capitalist, heterosexist stories? How do I navigate my own positionality as a white, western, cisgender, queer woman in the process of such performance? What traditions am I drawing on and how can I collaborate with and learn from the more-than-human world using cultural technologies both inherited and chosen? The objective of such inquiry is to build performances that exist within a continuum of time and space, that activate kinesthetic modes of awareness and storytelling to generate rich worlds. This process acknowledges and leans into the possible ways that performers, makers, and witnesses carry their experience of a performance with them in their bodies and their lives.   

In this process of creating worlds, I will hone a methodology of care and attention. I strive to understand how magic functions as an epistemological and spiritual tool within art making. In dance, I often embody contradictory aspects of self as well as creatures and beings whose subjectivities are less knowable to me. In doing so I hope to honor experiences beyond my own and find embodied empathy. I acknowledge the role that imagination plays in these processes. Surrender to not-knowing is an intentioned step away from dominator culture and helps situate me within a space of continual change and growth. 

My emerging methodology is rooted in practices of what Diedre Sklar (2008) refers to as kinetic vitality. To be incarnate is a visceral, sensual joy and as an artist, I consistently seek to create from that place. Movement practice is the center of everything I create and the site in which I feel most vividly alive and able to articulate that aliveness to others. However, the kinesthetic sphere is not the only site of this life-affirming creation process. Other methods include a mess of gathering, noticing, pretending, and attending to. I gather to step outside of myself and imagine what it is like to be someone else. I notice to fill in and enliven the world around me and the worlds within me. The word pretend is potent and complicated for me. Much of my self-education around magic occurred in childhood through an almost unceasing state of make-believe. Intuitive creativity and metaphor drive my process as a maker. I often reach a point in the creation process of a dance when the piece declares to me what it wants to be. 

Creating the work involves many collaborators and witnesses. I have worked with other dancers, musicians, poets, installation/video artists, and visual artists. The intention is for the performances to function as immersive events that speak to the entanglement and complexities of being. Voice is not separate from movement, place is not arbitrary, music is not an add on, and images are not disconnected from the bodies who created them. My research will extend my collaboration to the more-than-human world and more intentionally invoke forces outside our ordinary reality. I am curious how the art functions as a spiritual technology, capable of generating actionable change within the performers and within the worlds they inhabit with or without an audience. I hope that the work functions to enliven the senses of the human witnesses and bring them closer to their own magic.