Dance Project with Bettie Coetzee Lambrecht

This collaboration, where I danced some of my poems for Bettie's camera, was a rich experience, and has resulted in a book: To Life; Dance It. The current trend towards an interdisciplinary approach to art and life can help us understand each other and ourselves better.

http://www.facebook.com/bettie.coetzeelambrecht/timeline/story?ut=32&wstart=1359705600&wend=1362124799&hash=594915223856875&pagefilter=3&ustart=1

The book and prints of the photographs can be ordered from Bettie: bcbrecht@gmail.com .

Dance with Suitcase

Work in progress - A memoir that rests on movement

An aspect of writing that interests me is how to make form and content work together to enhance the piece. When I started this memoir, I intuitively decided against too formal a structure in which to place the narrative. I wished to honour an analogy between a particular approach to writing and to dance. In this second half of life I am more attracted to free movement than in learning formal steps.

The thrust of the book is towards developing an attitude of trusting body signals and symptoms, and trusting error, as means to invite untutored unconscious material to spill over into awareness. It assumes that non-rational physical and artistic processes have immense value, both in anchoring ourselves and in finding a way forward.

Yet the unconscious is hard to follow, difficult to grasp, as we know from our dreams. I sometimes think of the flow of life as an incomprehensible wash over which we must superimpose a grid or raft – something to hold onto to help us make sense of our lives and the world, to prevent us from drowning.

If we hold on too hard, we can mistake the grid for reality itself and we become rigid, unable to sense the enigmatic flux. But without the grid, we flounder and feel lost.

The art, I think, is to develop an ability to both stable oneself using an approximate raft, and a the same time, to be able to see through the mesh – of words, guidelines, rules, interpretations, models, analysis, structure – so as not to lose sight of the immensity of the mystery out of which we exist and live.

In dance - in movement of any kind - we have schools and forms, cultural practices and rituals, taboos and constraints. Underneath this, and within us all, is the flux and wash of life in all its patterns and guises.

I wish for this memoir – run through as it is by the origins and development of my own movement practice – to pay homage to it all.

Working with your Life Stories

Working with your Life Stories A workshop on writing memoir facilitated by Dawn Garisch ‘here I am once again, disguised as myself’ - from 'About Death and Other Things', poem by Aleksandar Ristovic

Writing is a way of getting to know who you are, what you are feeling and how you relate to people and the planet. Writing memoir focuses this project on the themes or motifs in one’s own life. We each have a life motif that is more or less unconscious. Yet a distinctive and evolving pattern binds our journey from birth to death into a whole coherent piece.

Imagination is an extraordinary tool. In this workshop we will reclaim imagination as a means to release ourselves into awe and creativity, connectedness and purpose, awareness and pleasure. Through becoming conscious of and engaging with the images that shape our time on earth, we will discover ways to live more creatively, as well as finding refreshing ways of putting our personal stories down on the page.

Beginner writers are welcome.

Venue: The Forge, Windsor Rd, Kalk Bay
Fee: R1400
Dates: Mon 21st – Fri 25th May 2012
Times : 9am to 1pm daily

To bring: 

• Unlined, ring-bound A4 notebook and pen 
• A cushion and a blanket or rug. 
• Two objects from the period of your life that you want to write about - one that represents something you loved about it, and one that represents something you disliked about that time. 

To book:  

dawn.garisch@gmail.com

A deposit of R400 secures your place.


References:

“I found Dawn Garisch’s memoir-writing course extremely useful and helpful: she provided a structure that held all of us would-be memoirists firmly to our task, while at the same time helping us to get in touch with our senses, our fears, our dreams, our stories. The image that comes to mind is of holding tight to the golden thread that will allow us to go down to the depths and emerge again, unscathed though not unchanged. The sense of community and support that is born of twenty-odd people meeting daily for four days to address themselves to such a deeply individual task was also one of the unexpected pleasures of the experience. I would heartily recommend this course.”

- Athalie Crawford

“This course helped me to break through the block created by my own diffidence and reluctance, enabling me to find and become confident in the thread I must pursue in order to be true to myself. Dawn created an atmosphere of trust in which the participants felt free to go as far as they wished on this journey into memory and onto the page. The structure of the course was well thought out and effective, both day by day and as a whole. An unusual, highly effective and striking aspect of Dawn’s facilitative work is her insistence that writing, memory and creativity are not simply to be found in the ‘head’, but are lodged in and distributed through the ‘memory’ to be discovered in the body itself. The course was enlightening, stimulating, moving and fun.”

- John Cartwright

"Dawn's memoir writing workshop was a finely crafted and facilitated process that encouraged and enabled us to write. My creativity was stimulated by her use of poetry and prose, her listening and sensing exercises, her considerable knowledge and experience of the act of writing, and her easy manner when it came to holding and guiding the group and the process. In short: an excellent and productive experience!"

- Judy Bekker

“The evaluations from your students indicate that many felt they benefitted greatly from your facilitation and encouragement to draw on their own inner resources to spark their writing, and that through this they gained knowledge about themselves and insights that were highly enriching to the writing process. They were given some methodology and tools and felt supported and enabled to be self-reliant in their work. Although this made others used to a more didactic approach insecure at first, they adapted to it and acknowledged its value.”

- Feedback from UCT Summer School 2012

Short Biography

Dawn Garisch has had five novels and a collection of poetry published, a short play and short film produced, and has written for television, magazines and newspapers. Three of her novels have been published in the UK. In 2010 Trespass was short-listed for the Commonwealth prize in Africa, and in 2011 her poem Miracle won the EU Sol Plaatjie Poetry Award. A non-fiction work Eloquent Body will be published by Modjaji in March. She runs workshops on writing and creative method, is a practising medical doctor and lives in Cape Town.

Eloquent Body

 
Through exploring both the science and poetry of the body, Dawn Garisch investigates how we can determine what to trust. 

“A richly eclectic, deeply insightful text that draws art and science, poetry and medicine, writing and healing into fertile conversation.”
- Ivan Vladislavic 

“Eloquent Body explores the juxtaposition of healing and creativity both from a personal as well as a medical point of view in an open and honest way. This book is required reading for my medical colleagues and for all patients in search of healing.” 
- Anne Pargiter, (General Practitioner)