Support Jamila's Acupuncture Training

Aim

Artist Jamila Johnson-Small / SERAFINE1369 is training to become an acupuncturist, can you support them on their journey?

I've been working as a dancer and choreographer since 2010. This work has taught me that our bodies hold knowledges and traumas from this lifetime and from our ancestors, and that movement is a way to dialogue with these knowledges and traumas. 

I have moved from choreographing work that others perform, to collaborating closely and performing in duos, to performing solo, to making installations and designing spaces where I am not present. These shifts expose my attempts at navigating what it is to direct or choreograph the body of another, politically, ethically, emotionally. This work has taught me, sometimes through violence, that no-one else can be an authority on someone else's body, and that we each are our own oracles. I have come to understand choreography as a practice of listening and facilitation and it brings me deep joy to hold space for people to be themselves, share themselves and reconnect with themselves in/through dancing. 

I see and feel that this is where we can come into alignment with ourselves, feel ourselves, meet ourselves and our environment whilst trying to survive in systems that require our lack of feeling and alignment and continually trigger us into dysregulated and dissociative states. This work has also politicised me. I see the connection between our ability to move our bodies and our wellbeing. I see that as amazing as medical science is, the compartmentalised delivery of healthcare can work miracles and simultaneously leave us damaged and confused. I can't believe that we still live within systems that function on Cartesian ideas of a mind/body split.

There is so much violence and neglect that comes with this and I've wanted to be able to offer some holistic support that counters this, and so I've started studying Acupuncture. I want to be able to support my communities - and anyone who comes to me - in returning to sensation, in feeling some agency over their minds/bodies/hearts. I am based in London, an increasingly hostile city, where those people who are most violently affected by the failures of healthcare and housing are those in queer and black bodies. Acupuncture is a practice that can support our bodies' capacities to heal themselves and I see an urgency around such approaches in the world right now.

I am undertaking a two year training whilst continuing to work as a freelance artist (I have no desire to leave this work behind!) and the course cost is £17950. I want to give as much as I can to these studies and not hobble through burning out from the pressure of having to make this figure, so that I can be the best practitioner I can be. Anyone who donates to this crowdfunder will be added to a mailing list where I will offer free and discounted treatments once I've set up my own practice in early 2025(!). It is a long way away but your supporting me at this stage will not be forgotten. 

Thank you for reading.

With warmth and love,

Jamila

/

SERAFINE1369

More about the training - 

Acupuncture is a preventative system of medicine that originates in East Asia and works with the insertion of very fine needles into specific points along energy lines (referred to as meridians) that run throughout our bodies. Energy is stimulated at the different points in order to nudge our bodies into their own healing, bringing us back into balance so that we can be in more harmonious relation with ourselves, others and our environments. And hopefully bring whatever it is we each have to bring to this world with more clarity, power and sensitivity.

I have been fascinated by the states that acupuncture can stimulate and have worked with acupuncturists across various performance projects over the last 5 years. The training I am undertaking is a 2-year programme with a small group focused on sharpening sensory awareness and learning theory, practice and philosophy from a community of acupuncturists. The course proposes practical and embodied ways of learning, resonating with my own working methodology which is intuitive and relational, and my learning style. 

More about my practice -

The political implications of my work as SERAFINE1369 encourage an anti-colonial, anti-assimilationist practice concerned with the integrity and efficacy of structures (bodily and social), collaboration, hosting and an interest in somatics, semiotics and symbiotics from a body-led, experiential position.

Of Caribbean descent, born and based in London, UK, and trained at London Contemporary Dance School, I have an art practice on different scales and across genre, nationally and internationally. I appreciate the range of people, places and contexts I get to work in and offer one to one consultations, workshops, dramaturgical and choreographic support. This work prioritises listening and is responsive to the person/people and specificities of the context. In general my work with others is concerned with opening up embodied channels of connection and flow, practices to access and utilise body/sensing/emotion as oracular resource, locating desire and refining and understanding positionality.

www.basictension.com

This project successfully funded on 26th June 2023