Divine/Ridiculous – UGLY TANTRA
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Question: When does UGLY transcend itself and transport us into direct connection with the Divine? When does HIDEOUS become supremely beautiful?
All too often we wish to show ourselves as perfect, beautiful specimens.
This is a mistake.
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THE WORKSHOP:
My workshops draw upon a wide variety of related traditions: These include Clown, Bouffon (the evil twin of the clown), Butoh, Contact Improvisation, Tao/Tantra, Maskwork, Art, Sacred Sexuality and Breathwork.
This will be a potent ritual of giving permission to our ugliest, most grotesque faces, masks and bodies, and discovering how beautiful, powerful, political, important, and side-splittingly funny it can be to reveal these.
Our focus will be more tantric than theatrical. We will create a community of explorers working with these energies in a sex-positive space.
We will be searching for a state of playful innocence, in a dance with the shit we have all lived through - rooted in the totality of our bodies knowing, complete with its unique flaws, wounds, sagging, uneven or twisted bits, wild creativity, dark humid spaces, ego, strangeness, disowned parts, broken dreams, betrayals, histories, secret pleasures and sublime pains.
The paradox is that in sharing the ugly part from a place beyond hate, we make ourselves even more beautiful.
The mask is an important tool here. It will give us what Sue Morrison has called 'mythic distance': one degree of separation from the solemn weight of our personal history. Creativity, make-believe, laughter, and ritual will allow us to merge and release trapped energy into the ancestral, timeless, archetypal realms of Story.
Divine Freaks, Outcasts, Deviants, and Exiles will emerge from the shadows, wearing their warts and scars with fantastic pleasure and pride. Their mischievous laughter will reach deep into our guts and give us glimpses of a love and a beauty that is more real and more juicy than any Disney cartoon ever imagined...
The work will happen through a combination of structured exercises and improvisations, rituals, shamanic/creative journeys, body practices, adornments and costumes, play, and spontaneous combustion.
The point is this: to bear witness to what is, to energise ourselves, to take this special radiance and potential for change out into the world, to add shine and clout to our artistic practice, our actions, life, work, relationships and planet.
No experience is necessary or important.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Question: When does UGLY transcend itself and transport us into direct connection with the Divine? When does HIDEOUS become supremely beautiful?
All too often we wish to show ourselves as perfect, beautiful specimens.
This is a mistake.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WORKSHOP:
My workshops draw upon a wide variety of related traditions: These include Clown, Bouffon (the evil twin of the clown), Butoh, Contact Improvisation, Tao/Tantra, Maskwork, Art, Sacred Sexuality and Breathwork.
This will be a potent ritual of giving permission to our ugliest, most grotesque faces, masks and bodies, and discovering how beautiful, powerful, political, important, and side-splittingly funny it can be to reveal these.
Our focus will be more tantric than theatrical. We will create a community of explorers working with these energies in a sex-positive space.
We will be searching for a state of playful innocence, in a dance with the shit we have all lived through - rooted in the totality of our bodies knowing, complete with its unique flaws, wounds, sagging, uneven or twisted bits, wild creativity, dark humid spaces, ego, strangeness, disowned parts, broken dreams, betrayals, histories, secret pleasures and sublime pains.
The paradox is that in sharing the ugly part from a place beyond hate, we make ourselves even more beautiful.
The mask is an important tool here. It will give us what Sue Morrison has called 'mythic distance': one degree of separation from the solemn weight of our personal history. Creativity, make-believe, laughter, and ritual will allow us to merge and release trapped energy into the ancestral, timeless, archetypal realms of Story.
Divine Freaks, Outcasts, Deviants, and Exiles will emerge from the shadows, wearing their warts and scars with fantastic pleasure and pride. Their mischievous laughter will reach deep into our guts and give us glimpses of a love and a beauty that is more real and more juicy than any Disney cartoon ever imagined...
The work will happen through a combination of structured exercises and improvisations, rituals, shamanic/creative journeys, body practices, adornments and costumes, play, and spontaneous combustion.
The point is this: to bear witness to what is, to energise ourselves, to take this special radiance and potential for change out into the world, to add shine and clout to our artistic practice, our actions, life, work, relationships and planet.
No experience is necessary or important.
Disclaimer: I favour a direct experience of the territory over too much chat. Although there will be open space for discussion and sharing, this is not a therapy session. This workshop is an invitation to adventure. Each adventurer takes ownership of their own level of risk, process and the material created.
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Daniel about himself
My name is Daniel Hernandez. I am an itinerant theatre-maker exploring the ritual roots of performance. My research since 2008 has led me to study under several of the most respected clown and mask teachers currently alive, including 2 years of training with renowned theatre master Philippe Gaulier.
The deeper I have dived into teaching, performing, and living in this field, the more I have seen archaic/ shamanic clown and trickster cosmologies become fascinating and colourful routes into individuation: particularly those of the North American Hopi and of Haitian Voodoo, which contain a vast treasure-box of rituals, dance, liminal states, grotesque archetypes and clown-lore.
Whilst many of the modalities I draw upon are interpreted in the modern world as 'Theatre' practices, my passionate belief is that the work has a transformational potential that is highly relevant and resonant to all who seek.
My own experience has convinced me that theatre's roots in far more ancient, ritual, and, dare I say it - shamanic settings reveal it as a powerful means to accessing that juicy, bubbling, wellspring of GUMBO that makes us feel vital, vigorous, honest, connected, open, free.
I facilitate colourful, creative, physical events, full of grand gestures and experimental movements.
My first calling was as a DJ, and there is still a lot of music, cabaret, and party in my practice. A strong energy of celebration, mischief, and fun grounds visceral excursions into a fundamentally challenging, entertaining and fascinating territory.
The deeper I have dived into teaching, performing, and living in this field, the more I have seen archaic/ shamanic clown and trickster cosmologies become fascinating and colourful routes into individuation: particularly those of the North American Hopi and of Haitian Voodoo, which contain a vast treasure-box of rituals, dance, liminal states, grotesque archetypes and clown-lore.
Whilst many of the modalities I draw upon are interpreted in the modern world as 'Theatre' practices, my passionate belief is that the work has a transformational potential that is highly relevant and resonant to all who seek.
My own experience has convinced me that theatre's roots in far more ancient, ritual, and, dare I say it - shamanic settings reveal it as a powerful means to accessing that juicy, bubbling, wellspring of GUMBO that makes us feel vital, vigorous, honest, connected, open, free.
I facilitate colourful, creative, physical events, full of grand gestures and experimental movements.
My first calling was as a DJ, and there is still a lot of music, cabaret, and party in my practice. A strong energy of celebration, mischief, and fun grounds visceral excursions into a fundamentally challenging, entertaining and fascinating territory.
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MORE QUESTIONS AND COMMENTARIES ON THE WORKSHOP
WHAT IS A CLOWN/BOUFFON?
The clown is a grounding spirit who makes us laugh and keeps us connected with our humanity and vulnerability, protecting us from solemn ego-trips, judgements and mind-games. Bouffon is the evil twin of the clown who laughs at you and doesn’t give a shit if you laugh or not. Clown is a fantastic idiot. Bouffon is a fantastic bastard.
WHAT IS A MASK?
A mask is a powerful and ancient tool with which to dive into archetypal realms and conduct dream work in the waking state. Both clown and mask challenge us to free ourselves, and are highly entertaining to watch. The paradox is that in wearing a mask we liberate our life-force energy from our habitual character. Through playing/hiding, we reveal something vital and truthful about ourselves. This way of working is not restricted to using a physical mask covering the face.
UGLY TANTRA?
Scenario:
You are gradually approaching orgasm with your lover, and, by that miracle of the flesh, you have found just the rhythm and pressure that threatens to undo you both totally and finally.
But wait! What is happening? Your anus contracts, a strange numbing tension builds up beneath the coccyx.
Ah! You are holding on to a huge fart.
Almost subconsciously, that most stubborn of tricksters: the mind - making a sick joke out of societies ridiculous ideas of romance - commands the body to hold on to it.
You enter into an oscillating confusion of contradictory sensations and opposing muscular contractions, you lose your sense of rhythm, your face becomes rigid and waxy - momentarily unreadable to your loved one, who nevertheless toils onwards hopefully, in service to your pleasure…
What to do???
Recently I have been testing the hypothesis that the pungency of my farts is directly related to the amount of shame I attach to their release. Try it - do your own research if you like. Fart, without shame, you may be surprised.
It is shame that stinks. Ask any child. The shape and sound of a resounding and totally shameless fart is Divine Music to ears of children, and in my cosmology, children are the teachers.
Dare I say it: farts, squelches, belches, slapping noises, groans, grimaces, smells, bodily fluids and other 'disgusting' emissions are of equal, if not greater importance to any dedicated tantric explorer or sexual magician than that holy utterance "OHM"
"Tantra was attacked in some historical periods as uncivilised or subhuman, and celebrated in other periods (particularly our own) as a precivilised unsullied original state, a sort of Eden before the Fall when harmony prevailed, when sex was free and unrepressed, when the body had not been subjected to modern western prudishness and hypocrisy.”
(Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy Politics and Power in the Study of Religion)
What is this blasphemy?
And what, then, is beauty?
If the laughter of children be one indicator of it's presence, then it is far more than we might suspect.
In Tibet it is thought that the ugliest and most terrifying demons are in fact nothing but the guardians of the highest prize.
All the way back in the garden of Eden, Eve became the first rebel.
When the flood came, when Noah chose only the perfect ones to board his boat, what happened to sinners like us?
In medieval times, hunchbacks, dwarves, sexual deviants, witches, pagans, and all sorts of freaks were banished from the villages and churches and forced to live in swamps. Many were made to wear bells so that the ‘children of God’ would not have to look on their unholy forms. Only in certain times would they be called upon to dance, to scare away sickness, plagues, and demons. What strange healing power did they hold?
WHAT IS A CLOWN/BOUFFON?
The clown is a grounding spirit who makes us laugh and keeps us connected with our humanity and vulnerability, protecting us from solemn ego-trips, judgements and mind-games. Bouffon is the evil twin of the clown who laughs at you and doesn’t give a shit if you laugh or not. Clown is a fantastic idiot. Bouffon is a fantastic bastard.
WHAT IS A MASK?
A mask is a powerful and ancient tool with which to dive into archetypal realms and conduct dream work in the waking state. Both clown and mask challenge us to free ourselves, and are highly entertaining to watch. The paradox is that in wearing a mask we liberate our life-force energy from our habitual character. Through playing/hiding, we reveal something vital and truthful about ourselves. This way of working is not restricted to using a physical mask covering the face.
UGLY TANTRA?
Scenario:
You are gradually approaching orgasm with your lover, and, by that miracle of the flesh, you have found just the rhythm and pressure that threatens to undo you both totally and finally.
But wait! What is happening? Your anus contracts, a strange numbing tension builds up beneath the coccyx.
Ah! You are holding on to a huge fart.
Almost subconsciously, that most stubborn of tricksters: the mind - making a sick joke out of societies ridiculous ideas of romance - commands the body to hold on to it.
You enter into an oscillating confusion of contradictory sensations and opposing muscular contractions, you lose your sense of rhythm, your face becomes rigid and waxy - momentarily unreadable to your loved one, who nevertheless toils onwards hopefully, in service to your pleasure…
What to do???
Recently I have been testing the hypothesis that the pungency of my farts is directly related to the amount of shame I attach to their release. Try it - do your own research if you like. Fart, without shame, you may be surprised.
It is shame that stinks. Ask any child. The shape and sound of a resounding and totally shameless fart is Divine Music to ears of children, and in my cosmology, children are the teachers.
Dare I say it: farts, squelches, belches, slapping noises, groans, grimaces, smells, bodily fluids and other 'disgusting' emissions are of equal, if not greater importance to any dedicated tantric explorer or sexual magician than that holy utterance "OHM"
"Tantra was attacked in some historical periods as uncivilised or subhuman, and celebrated in other periods (particularly our own) as a precivilised unsullied original state, a sort of Eden before the Fall when harmony prevailed, when sex was free and unrepressed, when the body had not been subjected to modern western prudishness and hypocrisy.”
(Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy Politics and Power in the Study of Religion)
What is this blasphemy?
And what, then, is beauty?
If the laughter of children be one indicator of it's presence, then it is far more than we might suspect.
In Tibet it is thought that the ugliest and most terrifying demons are in fact nothing but the guardians of the highest prize.
All the way back in the garden of Eden, Eve became the first rebel.
When the flood came, when Noah chose only the perfect ones to board his boat, what happened to sinners like us?
In medieval times, hunchbacks, dwarves, sexual deviants, witches, pagans, and all sorts of freaks were banished from the villages and churches and forced to live in swamps. Many were made to wear bells so that the ‘children of God’ would not have to look on their unholy forms. Only in certain times would they be called upon to dance, to scare away sickness, plagues, and demons. What strange healing power did they hold?
All content copyright Daniel Hernandez 18.09.2015
SLEEPING: We can host workshop participants directly in the studio. The cost is 10 EUR a night per person.
Daniel Hernandez presents
December 04- 06
Friday 7pm-9:30pm
Saturday 10am - 8pm,
Sunday 10am - 5:30pm,
180 EUR per person /
140 EUR for s7 members
Registration: schwelle7(at)gmx.de