Alt Prepping at Guest Projects
Alice MacKenzie. 2016
Alt Prepping is a monthly, day-long practice in which participants structure the day in response to the idea of Alt Prepping – thinking about what kind of dance, choreographic, movement or aesthetic practices can we share, learn or devise to prepare for unknown futures. One session took place at Guest Projects on 20 April 2016 as part of The Rebel Man Standard festival. Alice MacKenzie wrote this about it:
We sat with the potential awkwardness of an open structure and an open group in the balance between talking and doing. And silence. For me it was a comfortable, live, curious kind of silence that felt as though it could happily stretch on into forever.
Words followed. Proposals were made, and then time and perhaps our group’s emerging structure meant that we then tried out the proposals for the rest of the day, one by one, with fairly minimal conversation about whether they were still the thing we wanted to do in that moment. Our talking and planning came all in one go in the beginning and then the rest of the day was enacting: trying, giving time and attention to each proposal in turn. Time, which had started as a long stretch into the entire, sunny day, begun to feel short and perhaps a little precious. Too precious to spend discussing? Had we decided to value lived experience over discussion perhaps? Or time as a structure for fairness?
Preparedness, readiness, and self-care. When the future is so uncertain, as it surely always is, perhaps the only possible way to prepare for it is to practice improvisation and self-care. Prepare for change, prepare to change. Self-care and the care of others, each other, to prepare not just the individual for the future, but practice support for each other.
We practiced relinquishing control of our bodies to others, whilst also asking for what we wanted. Trust and control and care and power. We practised Aikido and meditation, and this curious possibility of preparing for an unknown future through established, even ancient, disciplines.
London, we spoke of you. And the kind of cultures, value systems and ways of living built into the infrastructure of a city, into the size of a city. There are not enough places to nap in London. In Tokyo, the possibilities for napping away from home are numerous.
London how do I live in you? Work with you? Is being adept at making the best of any situation the kind of prepared we, or I, want to be? What about being prepared to enact change? If it is also my resources and privileges that allow me to coast, to weather change and uncertain futures, what does that mean for others who do not have those same resources? Why does the idea of prepping in my mind assume a future of disaster, or at least something to be survived? Prepping for distopia rather than utopia? How would one prep for the possibility of a utopia? Mentally? Emotionally? Physically? “What if there is already enough for everyone”?
Conversations that happened inside my head and outside of it. How swiftly our group appeared and disappeared.