PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT: An Interview with Sigrid Lauren
The complete interview with Sigrid Lauren. For an introduction, please refer to May’s newsletter.
Sigrid eye view of a rehearsal.
Miles: What's this cavity in the skull where you can feel your eyes move?
Sigrid: First of all, I told you that via text, and now I don't remember. But we were feeling the muscles in the back of the skull respond to our eyes moving in the front.
M: You don’t have a very scientific anatomy spiel?
S: I don't remember it. It's related to the... I don’t know how to pronounce it. I'm pretty sure I didn't read about it in a book. It would be weird to read that in a book and immediately apply it. Did you catch that?
M: No.
S: Siri got triggered and said “I didn’t catch that.” But yes, sensing these muscles was very powerful for me. I'm pretty sure it was a yoga teacher who taught me about it. To emphasize that a lot of people don't really pay attention to where they’re looking, going or how their head is positioned when they’re moving. Where your eyes go is where your body goes, where attention goes, energy flows. There's all these little catchy phrases that I love, they're very cringe, but they've helped and inspired me. Where attention goes, energy flows. What you're looking at, what you see, this is where the rest of the body goes, this is where your whole consciousness goes.
M: So what do we see? Where does our attention go?
S: Where do most people's attention go? To self-ruminating thoughts. Well, it varies, but I think if you were asking me that seriously right now and I were to answer it seriously, I think that currently attention is too often placed on obsessive celebrity culture and beauty standards, really superficial shit. Personally speaking, too.
M: How do you use the skull trick in classes or was that workshop performance at Soloway the first time you’ve tried it in a group?
S: No, I usually do that as one of the first things in my workshops. I’ve done it with you before! I used to call them Ignorant Gravity, but now I call it 'How to Throw a Body Away'. I usually do that first to make people conscious of where the eyes are looking, how something so subtle as a directional shift of the eyes changes the whole body. Everything is internally connected and maybe we know that, but we don't really really know and value the extent that is true. When people have injuries, they think the cause might be specific, like “Oh, I threw my arm out…" OK, Siri is popping up again. Say, there’s a pain in your hip, it might be related to your foot. Something entrenched by the way we hold our bodies, the habits, the everyday patterns. For many, our body molds into shapes that reflect our daily tasks, habits and lifestyle patterns.
Anyways, I love this podcast Liberated Body. Now it's called Liberated Being because it focuses on meditation, which I don't really like so much. The old ones from 2018 and before I love. She interviews different practitioners. One episode that I've listened to six or seven times, it's called “Body is the Soul,” is with an embryologist. I see some fault because he’s saying the soul is in the belly right away, and I'm not trying to get pro-life. Maybe he doesn't even get into anything like that though. Back to the thing about how the body is a reflection of your tasks - well, for many people. This doesn't always mean you're gonna look like this one shape if you run or whatever. Each body is a system of itself, so when I put myself into some other system like yoga practice or walking to the store, the system inside me, all these systems inside of me, respond differently.
I’m getting off track. Motion is primary and form is secondary. The first thing that ever exists in a lot of religious texts is the utterance of a word or a sound. In order to make a sound, there has to be movement first. I just love to imagine that thought as it relates to creating form and structure within our bodies. Body is a process and performance, always changing and reshaping every day.
M: I’ve recently encountered this idea that your skull trick illustrates really well in researching unpopular, though influential stuff like Scientology and William S. Burroughs and I wonder what you’d think. Burroughs tried Scientology, but I think this underpins the media and addiction theories he was writing about before he met and decided he didn’t like them. So, you’re responsible for what you perceive, not just how you perceive it, your attitude toward it. By virtue of catching something in your perceptual field, you’re in charge of that thing itself, not just your reaction to it. They talk about this idea in a therapeutic context, Scientologists about anxiety and PTSD and Burroughs with regard to media control and drug addiction. They’re both addressing this thought to people who feel they’re under siege, always reacting to their environment. And they make the case that perception is a completely active and never a passive thing and just to frame it otherwise causes a lot of pain.
S: Perception is active rather than passive. I agree with that in the sense that perception is a choice and there's an opportunity to shift your perception- but many people are not taught to see or know their innate power. Society teaches us to be passive and wear horse blinders. Many of my teachers talk about imagination as a muscle. I'm sure there's some fucking infographs on holistic IG pages that talk about it too. But it's true, people witness and perceive things in a way that has to be practiced, so that it can grow and imagination becomes more vivid, you begin to see more.
I feel like what I try to subscribe to is a Buddhist ideology of non-attachment. Some of the performance stuff I used to do would be very personal, about trauma, whatever, but its no longer fitting. I don't want to define myself by those experiences because as I grow I'm understanding them, myself, and their impressions on me differently. And I recognize these traumas are impressions on the physical body and there's no separation between the body and mind, whatever you are thinking your body knows. There's a mediation to be done to process. There’s a lot of research done on that and working out. If you want to lose 40 pounds and that's all you care about and you're stressed out about it, your nervous system knows. It’s you. It knows everything, so your body won't respond to the workout as efficiently as it would say there was some compassion or accepting routine. Repulse and resistance in the mind extends to the same in the body. What’s the expression I’ve heard teachers use? I’m saying teachers because I take a lot of classes from different schools. They're more movement teachers or dancers themselves, but they teach philosophical inquiry, like what I was doing with Ignorant Gravity. Anyways, the reason why you're doing something is as, if not more, important than the thing you're doing itself. Intention and attention you keep them omnipresent in your mind, it's clear the direction you're moving. That application obviously can be applied for beautiful or terrible things.
M: What is your intention when you do these group exercises at shows? I’ve seen you do open workshops as a performance a few times. It’s not a style I can endorse because I’ve seen others try to get audiences moving and it’s been very hokey pokey infantilizing, but you pull it off. And with an eclectic audience too. There’s the punk who’s been on a bender for three days and some of what you say might be totally beyond their depth at that moment. On the other end, there’s someone who’s super into healthy living and this is like the only art thing they’re attending that month. Somehow you’re able to get people who are rarely in the same circles moving together. So what intention do you bring in getting people actively participating in movement?
S: That they sense the aliveness of themselves and one another, our interconnectivity. When you are moving, you get lost in the timelessness. Shit, Siri again. You get lost, time doesn't exist in motion. And I think in that one, I was talking about the non-dual duality of consciously witnessing and experiencing. But people come to a show to witness something. Why do they want to look at something?
Off topic, but I went to this party and someone was doing tattoos there, and I was like, I don't even want a tattoo, but I got a tattoo. Afterwards I was like, “This is everything!” I met up with the girl later because we had to keep working on it and I said, “It’s brilliant to do this!” People go to a party or a show because they're looking for all kinds of things. Whether they want to hook up, get fucked up, see friends. There's a quest, you're on a journey, the Hero's Journey. And the tattoo is so beautiful because I received something tangible, this physical memory of a time that won't ever happen again. So there is a preciousness and preciseness to it.
So, for one, when I watch a performance I want to be moving with people because I know it feels good. That’s what heaven is in my mind - moving together with ease and without objective. I prepped the performance with a backflip on my face. That shows, “Trust me, I didn't get hurt.” And it’s a seduction, showing that maybe there's something I can do that you can't, so listen to me. Or you can do more than what you think you can do.
M: I think without that shock at the start people wouldn't be as open to instruction.
S: Yeah, their nervous system is hit.
M: Opening with the shock stunt is crucial. Fidel Castro rode his bicycle into a brick wall in front of an audience before he left to train for the Cuban Revolution. And a lot of my favorite movies start with an explosion, even if it's the most expensive thing that happens in the movie. It’s really important even in a low budget melodrama, I think of Marriage of Maria Braun, to open that way. It shows how far they're willing to go, so it gears you up to travel farther to meet the idea.
S: Yes, it provokes imagination and curiosity. I can show you how to have an explosion, come into my hands. Then catch them. It’s a fine line with corniness and cheese.
M: Horniness and cheese?
S: Corniness!
M: Of course. So you nosedived into pavement. How many injuries have you sustained from dancing?
S: Well, I recently had a revelation, I’ll get to that in a sec, but I haven't had too many. You would think I would have a lot more because in the FlucT performances there is this practice of the “freak-out.” The way I approach that is I'm trying to be fully taken by spirit and throw my body in whatever way that it can go, using as much energy as possible. One time I probably had a concussion because I hit my head, blacked out, and had this whole dream. I came to and I was just standing, I sat up as if nothing even happened. And my head was bleeding. I've had little things like my knees are fucked up.
Now I'm doing a lot of restorative care. I just started doing Rolfing. I'm not a wizard on the particulars of it, but it's supposed to reset your posture over 10 sessions. The first time I went it was incredible. If you Google it, it says it's very aggressive, but they work with your nervous system, not against it now. So she's massaging you and it's really beautiful and it's intense, feels great. She gets on top of the table, I'm lying on my back, and she looks at my hips and she’s at it and I notice she's confused. I asked “What's going on? What do you see?” She's says, “Well, I just never seen it before. It looks like your whole left pelvis is pulling in towards the center, I've never seen this before.” I never even thought about this or even acknowledged this consciously, but it popped into my head immediately; I fall on my left side. I always fall over my left side when I slam down, I don't think I ever fall on the right. It seems scary to fall on the right to me. I always fall on the left and I roll over my left shoulder. And I’ve done that repetitiously for like 10 years. I had no idea that was even a thing. When she said that I was in my body thinking about being in my body, and I realized, oh yeah, I've been throwing my left side of the body onto the pavement for a long time.
M: You never noticed that?
S: No, I didn't. There is no symmetry in the body, there's no straight line in nature. I couldn’t tell so if my body seems a little different I don't think about it. She said it was something that will take a long time to adjust, but I didn't realize. No serious injuries. Because you prayed before. If I am going to throw my body on the floor, I always pray verbally. The FlucT prayer. I learned to pray in college.
M: Back to the sound, the utterance.
S: Me and my friend would look into each other's eyes and say, “I will not black out, I will not black out tonight.” Lo and behold, we didn't black out. It may not be true right away, but if you verbalize physically an idea or an intention, that’s movement, that's motion. Energy moves towards you, you are moving towards that, you've taken it out of the mental and made it physical.
M: Well on the note of making things real, are there any upcoming projects you wanna plug?
S: I hope to teach more workshops regularly, I’ve a hard time finding spaces. Right now, I don't know what it will look like, but I'm working on a little book. Very early stages and it isn't something I’ve done. It’s based around stuff we’re talking about. There are things about the body that are true and I never knew and what if our power was emphasized to us when we were a child? There's so much information in the body, it is so powerful, it is where we live, and maybe our soul too. So it will be these different little tidbits forwarded from many teachers that I feel people should know about. I don't know what it’ll look like. I don't know if there's gonna be images or if it's gonna be a long text kind of thing. Ideally, it’ll be really digestible and provoke curiosity.