Joy

Joy is a source, a force, an energy that spreads like water. Flowing everywhere it can glide, slide, follow. It produces an exciting way of communicating, one that believes and imagines at the same time as it thinks. It’s a state that provokes the will to communicate. It's a state that brings news with it. One of our concerns is to know how to evoke a state of JOY in everyone who comes to our laboratories. In this context, we understand JOY as an inner state of warmth and well-being that is worked on internally, day after day, rather than some kind of permanent euphoria filled with laughter. It is knowing how to move towards feelings that comfort us and make us available to the other, to what happens around us, and to what we propose as artistic practice. It’s essential to be familiar with the things, people, places, actions, thoughts, memories and desires that provoke us to be JOYFUL – to know what they are and where they will be. In this way, we can choose to embrace that experience whenever we want. Inner JOY can be compared to a filter that strains out sadness, tension and pessimism from our own unique system. To this end, throughout these two years of practice, we have developed areas to reach strong levels of comfort. Live music is a case in point. When it reverberates through less welcoming spaces it creates a hearing sensitivity that takes you into a tactile sensation promoting in everybody the wish to dance, think, draw, smile. Feeling welcomed is another focus of our work. It comes with the feeling that we have prepared something on purpose and enjoy it together. There are surprises that emerge for our enjoyment: It may be something like a Bollywood dance, a song from the mountains of Nepal, or a set of landscape photographs between East and West that ground us in common territory. The light within the body is a human quality that everyone can access. We just need to do the exercise of knowing where each person's JOY is. Naturally this will differ from person to person. Animals also enjoy this quality. Pleasure can be found in sharing, in being able to stretch out on a wool rug, being able to reach out and play an instrument or play pingpong on an old table. Beautiful books to browse through as the music starts to play can help people find something that can be of use in a moment of the performance. We start telling little stories that lead to relaxation and the feeling of having stepped out of everyday reality, if only for a couple of hours a week. Let's also take JOY from the dark within us. It's under our hair, inside our skull, in the place of emotions somewhere in an area of the brain that is embodied in bright thought, flowing and circulating inside the body.