Performance Tempel

Dignity in the stuck and underwhelmed with progress + Being okay with inactivity that turns into the gestational period of being the work in progress. This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 400degreezpole.substack.com

Prologue

Wasp’s Nest — A Virtual Symposium Event that is a sexy window for some brilliant key holders is happening on Sun, April 7th, 2024. This part A, a two-part installment, is framing the panes of practice. I ‘chop-it-up’ with Kennie, who is one of those brilliant keyholders. We track her current idle state and the revelations she’s discovered. There’s also a sick read for the state of our reality there too.

Tickets are now available to attend the inaugural Wasp’s Nest Symposium event. Put your presence where your philosophy is: https://performancetempel.com/rear-end/

Chat Notes

In the first segment (0:00-30:31) Ashley introduces Akeyna, called Kennie, as a brilliant artist in an idle era of her artistic practice. The conversation takes off as Kennie lays out a read of the creative economy as deprived of options for substantial recognition outside of influence and/or conforming to an audience’s demand. She talks about wanting to have agency over her creative output and production, where she feels she’s sacrificing her material survival in order to share at some rate of consistency to be validated with trust online. Ashley expresses her opinion about external validation and its need for everyone. Ashley also poses the question, “Is practice only deserved by those who are privileged with leisure time?”. Kennie also brings up the competitiveness that is forced upon creatives and artists to vie for audience attention. She takes it a step further than the external validation to be seen, but also the regard she has for her work, knowing that it’s worth it and that it deserves attention. This is where her internal struggles kick up dust. She talks about how her practice has stopped progressing in terms of her dynamics and technical ability, but how she still practices her artistry. Ashley gives Kennie her flowers for not forcing the funk, accepting the idle time, and embracing the authenticity of being exactly where she is. Ending the segment, Ashley calls attention to the boringness and receptiveness of an idle state of practice and how she feels like that is a lost art.

Being at the altar in practice, Divorcing the pole as an apparatus and also the sensual, erotic and the obscenity of the process of practice. This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 400degreezpole.substack.com

TW/Disclaimer: This episode carefully discusses death, near death experiences and makes mention of unalived ideations. There are also ideologies and language from Human Design, Biblical text, Yoruba, Mayan and other ethnic, spiritual and astrological heritages involved. Please listen with full consent, check in with yourself.

Prologue

This one is for heavy human excavation . You’ll meet Tiara J. without introduction but you’ll soon feel her as a dancer, mover, film maker, oracle, scholar, writer and Black Queer Fat Femme.

Full disclosure. I am a tough critic about the unethical use of scholarship, divinity, politics, astrology and new age wellness ideologies in pole dance education. As I have witnessed it being no more than a marketing ploy with a lack of studied/lived experience, consensual boundaries and integrity of care for those engaging with it. Too, I believe that the spirit realm has space and there are times where the spirit space intersect with our space. That sort of weird woo-woo happens in this episode. I want to honor my ethical commitment to not indoctrinate those that learn with me against their beliefs and I want to offer the critical thinking to dismiss or disagree with what may be shared with respectful recognition.

It was a joy to discuss some of these topics that are characterized as heavy. I genuinely believe it will lighten someone’s load and they’ll get free from some of the shit that is actually weighing them down. Take a listen.

Curiosities with my Black sex scholar friend on how does the evolution of location and time affect practice? What are the complexities of origin? What does practice look like when pole is your career? This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 400degreezpole.substack.com

Prologue

Mo has been riding with me since the beginning of me transitioning into teaching. Some of the things that we discuss are controversial— debatable; but the receipts don’t lie, those documented and the oral histories. Over the next 30 days I’ll be publishing more in support of Wasp’s Nest because there is no marketing budget for it— so I got to get it how I live. Willing this event into existence, hopefully with your support. Take a listen, use the comments to tell me what you think. You are welcome to cite and share.

Chat Notes

(0:00 – 28:30) In the first segment Mo talks about how she came into her current pole dance practice and how a veteran stripper put her on game, positioning work as something worth considering worthy to craft. She talks about the experiential difference between being around a pole in the pole studio space and the unexplainable connection of the strip club space and her body specifically there. Her and Ashley break open a truth about geographic realities using Mo’s move from the dirty south to Los Angeles and the way the club industry presented barriers to entry that Mo did not necessarily experience in the south. Ashley and Mo then shift to ‘home’ as a space to learn, the need for privacy in the creative process and the way that Mo’s conception of practice has evolved over the years into something that is constructive

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 400degreezpole.substack.com

Chapter Markers

• 0:52 – The Rush
• 3:39 – The Lightbulb Moment
• 7:43 – Practice as Tinkering
• 15:18 – Conscious Awareness
• 22:28 – The Stool
• 26:57 – Emotional Regulation
• 32:57 – Sensing vs Experiencing?

Prologue

For years now I’ve been cookin’ up and imagining this idea around installing a “museum” of dancers who interpret a concept. This idea evolved from a live experience of dance performances to a collection of how people are processing after or before the fact. I can’t remember when I settled on the mutation into a symposium, but last year was when I began to structure what a virtual installation of the idea may look.

It’s coming together currently as the Wasp’s Nest (https://performancetempel.com/rear-end/) (click the link to get info for the symposium event). Leading up to the first digital get together this spring (date to be announced soon) I’m finding myself preparing by choppin’ it up with my girlfriends. Us just talking on the phone. It’s helping me to distill but also not be so nit-picky about this ‘symposium’ word that is traditionally used in academic scholarship settings. What I don’t want is status elitism projecting onto the vision. The vision is birthed of a down to earth god-complexity. An oxymoron in itself, that is a counter to all the spiritual and intellectual bypassing I observe with activities like art and dance. Take a listen and use the comments to expand thoughts or revelations that you experience while hearing.

Chat Notes

An Interpretation of Practice

In Part 1 (0:00 – 39:24) Ashley and Rachel jump in headfirst, in continuation of a previous conversation, discussing her interpretation of practice. Rachel sets the stage as a “Tinkerella & Tinkertoes”, names given to her by her mother, reminding us of how much our childhood grows with us into our adulthood still.

Emotional regulation, neurodivergence and overdoing it become a beat that is followed into how Rachel addresses stimuli and rituals in her practice while simultaneously calling Ashley out for overdoing it. Ashley shares a recent example of when stimulus input is nonexistent and how easy it is to overdo it when there is no sense-feeling happening.