Part of the Public Program of Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song
Study Sessions on Sunday afternoons:
23 March, 13 April, 4 May, 25 May 2025 (details below) /
Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
Find a note on accessibility under the program outline. RSVP via info@casco.art
Lines and Fields is a proposal for embodied study wherein different lines of thinking and making intersect with Serena Lee’s research on taijiquan. Between March and May, four sessions unfold within the gallery, inviting us to inhabit study. Shaped in collaboration with Leonardiansyah Allenda, the atmosphere shifts with every session as Serena plays with different aspects of taijiquan in conversation with Lee Su-Feh, Magdalena Górska, Joy Mariama Smith, Rajni Shah, and Nuraini Juliastuti.
Lines like the way things flow; fields like the resonance between things.
Lines and Fields is an attempt to translate an internal practice into an open space for collective study. This framework unfolds from Serena’s writing on practising taijiquan — How the line curves — reconfigured as a shifting constellation of materials, processes, and exchanges with Study Partners. Each study session finds a different centre of gravity, proposing an expansive ethics of knowledge production, subjectivity, and interrelationality.
What might we learn from taijiquan? Or rather, how?
An internal martial art practiced for slowness and smallness, qi (vital energy) is circulated and force is generated from spirals seen and unseen.
We learn to notice how breath grounds us, transforming from empty to full, and everything in between.
Noticing transformations, we find different ways of asking: how do we know what we know?
How else might we perceive, do, relate? How might we live in a world within this world?
Find the outline for each study session below, along with details on accessibility. The sessions have limited capacity to ensure that we can carefully cater to the needs of the group within our team’s capacities. Spontaneous participation is also embraced. Please RSVP at info@casco.art.
Session #1: On breathing, inquiring, resisting
with Magdalena Górska and Lee Su-Feh
23 March, 13:00–15:00
How can we ask questions through the body?
This first study session begins with breathing. Situating ourselves in this foundational process of qi (vital energy) cultivation, we wonder how breathing might offer a way of posing questions through the whole body: breathing as thinking. This study session extends from Serena’s writing on taijiquan in relation to self-as-process, and strategies of soft resistance: focusing on somatic experience, we confront the interplay of forces, connecting martial, ethical, and political lines of thought. In conversation with Magdalena Górska in Utrecht, and Lee Su-Feh joining from Kuala Lumpur online, we ground our questions in embodied knowledge to reflect on interrelationality, forms of resistance, obliqueness that decentres power as a matter of ease. Our gathering intertwines movement and discourse–we are invited into dialogue with Serena’s writings on qi, process, and force, Su-Feh’s somatic scores, and Magda’s provocations, whereby reading, thinking and moving form a continuum of study.
Tea, coffee, and snacks are provided during and after the session.
Session #2: play with with play
with Joy Mariama Smith
13 April, 15:00–19:00
Please wear something pink and/or gold!
This second study session welcomes the pink full moon.
Guided by Joy Mariama Smith, we meet at the intersection of play and with, pink and gold. This session extends from Serena’s writing on taijiquan as difference, as verb, as study. Cross-pollinating movement practices, we make sense and non-sense of opposition, the in-between, and the liminal.
We extend a special invitation to:
Pan-Asian Diasporic Folx
BIPOCs
Trans*/ Queers
…those who want/need to be there
Drinks, including tea and coffee, along with sweet and savory bites, are provided. Prepared by Casco team members, our tea time offerings also follow the pink and gold dress code.
Session #3: A small and ever smaller part
with Rajni Shah
4 May, 15:00–18:00
Reflecting on taijiquan as a practice of emptying, Study Session #3 with Rajni Shah is an invitation to quiet. In our time together we listen for:
detail — holding complexity
inner landscape — where we are connected at the centre
spiral — how time moves through us, how we move through time
Drawing on Serena’s writing on yin qualities of taijiquan, our gathering will follow Rajni’s practice of attending:
to be less complete
to trust (in community)
to focus on the small and ever smaller
to gather, in quietness, in shyness, in queerness, in shadows, in in-betweenness
We invite you to join us in a simple practice of gathering, attending to silence, and sharing food.
For this session, we will eat and drink together as an experience beyond consumption.
We request that participants bring a simple food or drink, to be offered to the group along with the things we will prepare at Casco.
Accessibility
The sessions includes light movement. People of all abilities are welcome, with various ways and paces of engagement encouraged. Due to steps at the entrance and internal staircases, our space is unfortunately not wheelchair accessible at the moment. Companions, assistants, and service dogs are welcome. We also welcome small children and babies and provide a diaper-changing cushion. Our office has a small, gender-neutral single-stall bathroom, with a slightly larger gender-neutral bathroom available on the first floor. Exhibition materials are provided in English and Dutch, and while the sessions are led in English, we encourage participation in other languages and accommodate translation as best as we can. Casco is a meeting place that embraces mixed-ability, skills, insights, and identities. We welcome feedback and to join us as we improve our accessibility. You can also check our Access Note for more information.
Biographies of the contributors
Rajni Shah (they, them) has been making performance since 1999. They are queer, quiet, trans non-binary, and a feminist killjoy. They care about listening and gathering as creative and political acts. In 2021, they published Experiments in Listening, a book and series of accompanying zines, as part of the Performance Philosophy series with Rowman & Littlefield. They are currently a researcher and head-heart of the THIRD programme at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, University of the Arts Amsterdam (AHK). But they spend most of their time learning about unlearning, writing songs, and practising collective healing.
A native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, NL, Joy Mariama Smith’s work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in their work is: What is the interplay between the body and its physical environment? Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator, researcher, dramaturg and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning over 20 years. When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces. Joy studied at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem, the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego, L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and Oberlin College in Ohio. Their work has been performed internationally, including at If I Can’t Dance Edition VI – Event and Duration, Amsterdam; SoLow Festival, Philadelphia; Ponderosa Movement & Discovery in Stolzenhagen, Germany; Freedom of Movement: Municipal Art Acquisitions 2018, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Currently, they teach at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam.
Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. Together with Dr. Jamila Mascat she is also a co-coordinator of MA Gender Studies Programme. Magdalena Górska’s research focuses on feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability. Her book Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability develops a feminist engagement with breath and breathing through a nonuniversalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment where human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional politics. Her work offers intersectional and anthropo-situated while posthumanist discussions of breath, human material agency and focuses on the quotidian bodily and affective practices of living as political matters. She is the founder of the Breathing Matters Network.
Lee Su-Feh (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, performance-maker and teacher of voice and movement. They split their time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where they were born and raised; and xwməθkwəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where they make their home. Over the past 35 years, they have created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. As Artistic Director of battery opera performance, (“fearlessly iconoclastic”, “brainy and bawdy”), they have worked both alone and in collaboration with others. Alongside this trajectory in performance-making, they have pursued a lifelong study and practice of Chinese martial arts, Qigong and Daoism, all of which informs their approach to dance and movement. Since 2010, they have been a student and practitioner of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and are currently a certified Lead Trainer of the work. They are a member of the Advisory Group of the Fitzmaurice Institute and participate actively in the international community of Fitzmaurice Voicework® teachers. Some of their current preoccupations involve creating somatic algorithms, and exploring the relationship between voice and movement.
