I write from my moving, breathing, dancing body. My writings animate the narrative and poetics of experiential material and exist as essays, scores, poems, and articles.
Flood Drafts: A Field Guide for Sensuous Repair
Edited by Tyler Rai and storm budwig with contributions from members of the Hungry Mothers Collective
LOAM
2021
Flood Drafts: A Field Guide to Sensuous Repair is a collection of scores, essays, artifacts, and prophecies for reconstituting an embodied commitment to this Earth, constellated by members of the Hungry Mothers in artistic partnership with Loam. This guide is meant to accompany you — in your respite, your gathering, your solitude, your practice.
Flood Drafts has an expansive origin story: emerging and taking form across multiple biospheres, regions, watersheds, and moons. We welcome slowness as we bear witness to and reflect upon these places, because we believe that our attention is a tool to guide us in relational practice. We hope this field guide takes you through portals, provides points of departure, and offers tools for sharing your own offerings and gifts. How can we reconstitute an embodied commitment to this Earth? How do we practice it daily, iteratively, alone, and together? We have learned from creosote, from mycelial networks and sweetgrass, from cultivating and composting, from bearing witness and holding space — that meanings emerge from connection and entanglement. Through this collective offering we hope to extend our reaches of support, and expand our meshwork of kin. We hope if you are moved, you come and find us.
Altered Forms: Inheritance
by Tyler Rai and alexx shilling
CONTACT QUARTERLY UNBOUND: dance and improvisation journal
October 2020
I am sitting to write these words on hauntings and traces during a global pandemic. It seems to be still the early throes of a virus that—within a few months—has radically disrupted the economic, political, and social structures of our late-capitalist society. Surely we have been here, in some way, before.
My most intimate engagements with hauntings have been in relationship to a disappeared glacier. It began as I was working on a dance piece, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. I was living in what is known today as Queens, New York. Each week I would rehearse in a tiny studio wedged on a corner underneath the M train. Every eight minutes the whole studio would rattle, providing the sensation of seismic disturbances. I was researching what are called glacial erratics—the boulders and geologic debris that get picked up by a glacier’s traveling body and deposited in a new location. I was reading about the glacial history of New York City and how the bedrock on which the city now sits was formed 20,000 years ago by the Laurentide Ice Sheet. I became curious about Laurentide and how its movements were a version of a creation story for the city of New York. This particular ice sheet is the creator of lands and habitats throughout New England. Its final advance, before dissolving completely, became the land mass of Long Island. The furthest advance of a glacier’s body is called a terminal moraine. It is the last reach, or the final horizon, of a glacier's forward movement. As a glacier recedes and its form vanishes, it leaves geologic wreckage and a ghost of itself behind.
reverberations of a rupture
by Tyler Rai
TENDON MAGAZINE: a medical humanities creative journal
published by Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine
2020
trauma
a rupture or disturbance to the regulation of a living body
a disruption in perceived trajectory
desecration of living systems
inheritances
amelie died of leukemia one year ago on new years eve. the rupture that slowly cut its way into the fabric of my body came at different variations of tempo; sometimes short, sharp pangs, or prolonged slow encounters as i watched her dying, fighting, living, fleeting body.
