Kevin O’Connor

Workshop:  A Precarious Crossing: Touching Fascial Relations

In this workshop we will touch into and explore the bio-tensegrity model of the body in relation to fascia research through a movement score.  A score can be thought of as open-ended rules to a game that people play within. We will examine how the score might orient our touch, and by extension the sociality of those participating in new ways.  We ask, how might our touching in this score always be collectively made?

Fascia can be thought of as the viscous goop that connects, divides, and slides between muscles, organs, skin, and cells. It has also been found to be active, intelligent, communicative, and a sensory organ, liquid, solid and mucus. Fascia research stretches between communities of biologists, massage therapists, clinicians, anatomists and pathologists, yoga and pilates teachers, embryologists, pharmaceutical researchers and doctors, and dancers, where each is partially connected to each other. This practice-as-research workshop thinks with the performance method of scoring to track the emerging science studies on fascia as this 21st century biological-cultural material comes to form. Through scoring, we touch into a tensegrity model of the body and attend to attention to track the political and social assumptions within fascia research.

Bio: Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary artist working as a choreographer, dancer, improviser, circus artist and installation artist from Ontario, Canada and now based in the Bay area. He is involved in a decade-long artistic collective exploring participatory de-colonizing performances within polluted watersheds in Ontario. Over the last few years, he has worked with NAKA dance in Oakland, Shakiri and Skywatchers in the Bay Area, Oncogrrrls feminist art collective in Spain, and collaborated with Inuit hunter and designer Paulette Metuq on a project in Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. He has been learning with the Axis Syllabus community for over a decade and is a biodynamic CranioSacral practitioner. He completed an MFA in choreography and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in performance studies at UC Davis. He is working at the intersection of arts, sciences, practice-as-research and improvisation theory and practice. His research examines anatomies, body performance capacities, interventions and imaginations in relation to science studies, including the material-bio-cultural tissue called fascia.