Davina Cohen

Blessed Unrest’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream closed in April and Darth and Lobster picked up the baton and hit the ground running.  For those who don’t know, Darth and Lobster are the alter egos of yours truly and Sophia Remolde.  Sophia and I began collaborating through the SITI Company in 2007.  Our first project together was Finding Om, a dance theater duet inspired by Siddhartha, Sesame Street, and seemingly endless amounts of water. The Inbred Hybrid Collective presented the piece as part of its Book Club Burlesque series in 2008.  Next came our Hamlet-explosion, EVERYONE DIES…RIGHT? directed by J Ed Araiza at the SITI studios.  Then while I was touring my adaptation of Deborah Hay’s I’ll Crane For You in 2009, foolsFURY invited us to present Ring, in which YouTube homages to Beyonce meet Shakespeare as “Single Ladies (“Put A Ring On It”) collides with Viola’s “ring speech” from Twelfth Night in a passionate duet for two women.  Ring’s exploration of drag and the objectification of women’s bodies is sexy and comedic and features an absurd surprise ending.

Prompted by my Singaporean director/writer/filmmaker/sometime performer friend Mei Ann Teo, Darth and Lobster entered a dance contest to win a trip to Singapore. We are still awaiting the final results, but in the meantime have made some very silly videos.  You can check out them as well as an excerpt of Ring here.

In other news, while I am in California I’ve got some studio time lined up with Katarina Eriksson and leaf Tine, my collaborators from The Safe Way, an ensemble created during our E|MERGE residency at Earthdance.  We’ve been invited to present more work at Earthdance in November, so this is an exciting opportunity to reconnect and continue the process we began in February.

I will perform on June 19 at Le Petit Versailles in the East Village as part of the "Chakra Cabaret". Touch Me, Thrill Me, Squeeze Me, Grill Me, my new site-specific work supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, will take place at NYC Greenmarkets in August and September.  Stay tuned.

I am sad to announce the closure of Yogaworks’ Midtown location.  I am still teaching at Yogaworks, but for now only as a sub until I find a new home within the Yogaworks system.

When I return to NYC in June I will begin teaching a Monday AM class at Yoga People in Brooklyn Heights and subbing at Abhaya Yoga in DUMBO.  You can always check the calendar on this site to find out where and when I’m teaching at Yogaworks, Crunch, Akasha, Abhaya, Yoga People, and elsewhere.

At the beginning of June I will do a special asana and philosophy workshop with Douglas Brooks, Sianna Sherman, and Mark Dyczkowski at Yogakula in Berkeley.  I look forward to sharing new insights into the Shiva Sutras with all of you.

In the practice of pranayama each cycle of breath has three components: the inhalation, the exhalation, and the moment of suspension (“kumbhak”) between these two things we more readily identify as the actions of breathing.  “Prana” means energy, life force, vitality and “Ayama” control and extension, prolongation, deliberate sustaining.  “Kumbhak” means “pot” (no, not that kind – though smoking is most definitely a form of pranayama, but more on that later), specifically a pot that is simultaneously empty and full of potential.  There’s this incredible moment in between, akin to what theater director Eugenio Barba termed the “satz” (the moment of suspension before the main action), where anything is possible.  What a savory challenge it can be to remain in that space and what a sweet reward it is when we truly permit ourselves to do so.

Try something: exhale all your air and then let your lungs fill anew.  With that fullness you have some options.  You can hold on to your breath for dear life, straining to stay as buoyant as you were when the breath first entered your body. You can actively expel the air, forcing it out.  You can pause and do nothing, allowing the breath to remain there and release from your lungs when your body tells you its time to let go and permit the air to pass through you.  Experiment with these options and the many possibilities they encompass.  Notice how you feel, physically and emotionally, with each one.

It’s fun and useful to experiment with the kumbhak in your practice; but let’s look at the moments of pause – the moments in between things – in life in general.  If you’ve just had a particularly ecstatic experience – something new and joyous – that has come to an end, it can be tempting to cram as much of that as possible into your pot, slam the lid on it, and let it simmer, hoping that maybe it’ll bubble over for a long time to come. Similarly, during or after particularly trying experiences, sometimes it’s all you can do to refrain from dipping in there with the biggest ladle you can find and scooping all the stress of the experience out of the stew.  But very often when we try either of these tactics, what we find is that the contents fester – the empty pot becomes so full that it can’t contain everything we’ve tried to throw in there or even though we’ve hoped to empty the pot entirely, we’ve still got the sticky residue from whatever was mixed in there before.  The way to really revel in the kumbhak – to feel that fullness and emptiness at the same time – is to do nothing except pay attention.

Pranayama teacher Douglas Keller writes in Refining The Breath, “The clear, steady quality of the Ujjayi breath is described in the yoga tradition as being like a steady, unbroken flow of light clear oil or ghee (clarified butter), so steady that although in motion, it seems motionless.” As ever in yoga, the breath uncovers the dust on that magical union of opposites.  We don’t have to create the union of stillness and motion, we are invited to notice that the two are already there, coexisting at all times.

Speaking of clarified butter, spring is an especially good time to feast on raw dairy from grassfed, pastured animals.  If you’re in NYC, check out the Traditional Nutrition Guild, an excellent source for raw dairy and local, grassfed, pastured animals.  If you’re in San Francisco (where I have the great fortune to be this month), Rainbow Grocery is a good source for raw dairy (though they do not sell any meat).

The Midsummer run continues apace!

Audience reviews are glowing, but it's no easy feat to interest the media in a production of a classic that's not studded with celebrities.  There's also a Midsummer opera at BAM right now, but you know, keep your expectations at bay, since they've got a much lower budget than we do. ;)

Here's a link to the one review we've had thus far:

http://famenycmagazine.com/

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE:

http://blessedunrest.org/whatson.phtml

Get 2-for-1 tickets to the Sunday 5 PM and Monday 7 PM shows. Just buy one via the website and then email info@blessedunrest.org to reserve the second ticket.

See you at the theater!

Blessed Unrest's A Midsummer Night's Dream opened to a full and raucous house last night!

Get your booty in a seat and keep revels with us Fri-Mon with a couple of special Thursday night performances.

http://blessedunrest.org/whatson.phtml

Rehearsals are in full swing for A Midsummer Night's Dream.  We're deep in the "blessed unrest" of creation, which always involves a lot of experimentation, a little conflict, and more questions than answers.

Come see what alchemy the process yields when we open on March 20th!

Greetings from Worthington, MA! I'm in the Berkshires with a crockpot and a week's worth of food, on my way to E|MERGE at Earthdance. It's cold, quiet, and beautiful here.

Blogging in earnest and/or silliness will commence shortly.

For now, I'm thrilled to announce that I am a recipient of a 2010 Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant for Touch Me, Thrill Me, Squeeze Me, Grill Me, a series of site-specific performances inspired by and taking place at Manhattan Greenmarkets. Thanks, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council!

Stay tuned and stay warm,
Davi