Quote of the Day:
"The most common element we share, you & I, is being human bodies. The technology we come into this world with--our capacity to feel, sense, imagine, intuit, cognate, think, reason, improv, and dream, with soulful responsiveness--is the 'techne' by which empathy is cultivated. We are fluid, airy, malleable, intelligent substances,--possibilities struggling toward a future. This is the medium of my artform, and our bodies will not be algorithimized” ~ L. Martina Young
"Our several senses, which feel so personal and impromptu, and seem at times to divorce us from other people, reach far beyond us. They’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals, across time and country and happenstance. They bridge the personal and the impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individual with the universe, all of life on Earth" ~ Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
THE SWAN LECTURES©
facilitated by
L. Martina Young, Ph.D.
artist, educator, speaker, and movement investigator
"Our bodies are a series of joints—levers; thus we are made to lift one another, body and soul."
facilitated by
L. Martina Young, Ph.D.
artist, educator, speaker, and movement investigator
"Our bodies are a series of joints—levers; thus we are made to lift one another, body and soul."
Overview of Content and Philosophy
THE SWAN LECTURES© is an immersive and experiential somaesthetic lab designed to return us to our bodies (and the bodies of others) as primary speaking subjects. We do this by cultivating our listening and responsive witness selves while building the deepest connection to empathic being. CONTENT Learning a daily, anatomically-sound movement practice, engaging in mutual discourse, perceptual and contemplative writing, deep inner and outer listening and reflection time,-- this generative work has a living aesthetic ethos, one that recognizes and brings awareness to the need for cultivating bodily being as both site and bridge to corporeal compassion. PHILOSOPHY Rooted to a philosophical view that recognizes confluences between aesthetic life, ethical behavior, and corporeal ways of knowing, THE SWAN LECTURES© actuates use of the whole of our beings -- bodily, cognitively, soulfully -- the integration of which underscores experiences of embodied wisdom. WHY The ‘swan’ image has long captured the human imagination throughout history; it is as equally rich an image today. Listening deeply and responding to the call and significance of what the archetypal symbol of the swan offers us, facilitator L. Martina Young creates a body-mind-soul entrance into ways of thinking, feeling, and acting on the evocations therein, bringing us as individuals and as community toward meaningful, wholly (holy) responsible, and qualitative approaches to our lives and the lives of others in our shared world. |
Continuity Graph of Relational Aesthetics
There are two kinds of cultural artifacts:
* Generativity in essence describes a self-contained system from which its user draws an independent ability to create, generate, or produce new content unique to that system without additional help or input from the system's original creators. In semiotics or epistemology, generativity refers to a form of communication that possesses compositionality and the ability to construct complex messages. |
About L. Martina Young, Ph.D.
"Our bodies are a series of joints—levers; thus we are made to lift one another, body and soul."
L. Martina Young is a dance artist, writer, and scholar on a poetics of the body, somatic theory and practice, and the mythic imagination. She is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship and is one of the first Nevada-based artist to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Project Grant for her collaboration with exiled Chilean poets Emma Sepulveda and Marjorie Agosin, adapting, together with the Nevada Shakespeare Company, their published book of letters, Amigas: Letters of Exile and Friendship.
Martina’s doctoral work on a poetics of the body proposes new thought on corporeal compassion and the intersection of aesthetic experience and empathic being. Her life work, SWAN: a poetical inquiry in dance, text & memoir contextualizes these interests where symbolic image acts as a portal into the human imagination across time and culture as it continues to address its own evolution,--psychologically aesthetically, ethically, and poetically.
The third performance installation of SWAN, “Heiros Gamos,” was invited to premiere at the 2014 International Exhibit of Contemporary Art at Gallery Le Logge, Assisi, Italy. While in Italy she joined L.A. composer and multi-instrumental improviser Vinny Golia and experimental and jazz saxophonist Gianni Mimmo for an evening concert of improvisation dance and music in Pavia, Italy. She will present her next installation of SWAN for the 2016 International Exhibit of Contemporary Art, following completion of her artist residency at Arte Studio Ginestrelle.
Writing on author Toni Morrison’s poetics of the body in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Beloved Bodies: Gestures Toward Wholeness” was published in the anthology, Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing by Bucknell University Press (2011). She has also written on the work of choreographer Ralph Lemon, (itch journal, 2012), and on the mythic imagination (Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theater, 2013). As an essayist she writes for Reno’s arts and culture magazine, Reno Tahoe Tonight. Her column, The Swan Lectures, appears monthly.
Since 2000, L. Martina Young has maintained a private practice as a movement and somatic therapist, combining a vast knowledge and lifelong engagement of the work of Clara and Joseph Pilates, Ideokinesis, and Functional Anatomy.
Together with her work as a performing artist and studies in archetypal psychology, L. Martina Young is a workshop facilitator of rare and gifted skill, sensitive to creating the kind of learning environment that time and again has proven deeply insightful and illuminating for each and every workshop participant.
Martina’s doctoral work on a poetics of the body proposes new thought on corporeal compassion and the intersection of aesthetic experience and empathic being. Her life work, SWAN: a poetical inquiry in dance, text & memoir contextualizes these interests where symbolic image acts as a portal into the human imagination across time and culture as it continues to address its own evolution,--psychologically aesthetically, ethically, and poetically.
The third performance installation of SWAN, “Heiros Gamos,” was invited to premiere at the 2014 International Exhibit of Contemporary Art at Gallery Le Logge, Assisi, Italy. While in Italy she joined L.A. composer and multi-instrumental improviser Vinny Golia and experimental and jazz saxophonist Gianni Mimmo for an evening concert of improvisation dance and music in Pavia, Italy. She will present her next installation of SWAN for the 2016 International Exhibit of Contemporary Art, following completion of her artist residency at Arte Studio Ginestrelle.
Writing on author Toni Morrison’s poetics of the body in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Beloved Bodies: Gestures Toward Wholeness” was published in the anthology, Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing by Bucknell University Press (2011). She has also written on the work of choreographer Ralph Lemon, (itch journal, 2012), and on the mythic imagination (Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theater, 2013). As an essayist she writes for Reno’s arts and culture magazine, Reno Tahoe Tonight. Her column, The Swan Lectures, appears monthly.
Since 2000, L. Martina Young has maintained a private practice as a movement and somatic therapist, combining a vast knowledge and lifelong engagement of the work of Clara and Joseph Pilates, Ideokinesis, and Functional Anatomy.
Together with her work as a performing artist and studies in archetypal psychology, L. Martina Young is a workshop facilitator of rare and gifted skill, sensitive to creating the kind of learning environment that time and again has proven deeply insightful and illuminating for each and every workshop participant.