Miss Othmar’s Meetings with Teachers—EP2

Miss Othmar’s Meeting with Frank Traynor and Moriah Evans – with Timmy Simonds

How do you express an inside? Is it something you crack open or something that you allow to remain hidden, resorting to shocking it out or associating it with the environment around you?

Empathy means “feeling into” another.

That border crossing can be generous—helping someone out and making gifts—

but it also can be invasive—my body your voice—

Frank Traynor sits at the table gently leading the listener and openly inviting those in the room--me and Ezra Marcus--to join him in making ornaments out of the interior of walnuts.

The listener is addressed, so are others in the room, he speaks to his preferences, leads the processes of making by example in real time, and admires what others are making.

-Instructing the revealing of a hidden thing.

-Teaching is warm.

-Comfort, Advising, Simultaneity.

Moriah Evans recites definitions of “dance,” counts through the steps of a square dance and guides me through “organ work” an approach to dance that focuses on our organs as bodies in relation to each other.

The listener is not addressed, I am addressed in the room, she criticizes established ideas and offers an alternative, she leads the movement by example in real time, and encourages my private exploration.

-Instructing the expression of an invisible thing.

-Teaching is by contrast cold and then warm.

-Alienating, Right/Wrong, Transition to All-Accepting, Simultaneity.

MISS OTHMAR is the name of that teacher of Charlie Brown’s that’s heard and never seen. Her voice carries no words and transmits no facts. Her professing is an undulating song. Nevertheless C.B. and his classmates seem to follow along.

MISS OTHMAR is teaching over radio. MISS OTHMAR’s Meetings with Teachers is a series that collects the voices of different teachers and facilitators from a variety of fields and their approaches to leading the listener through exercises over radio.

https://missothmarschoolforteachers.info/

Frank Traynor was born in Miami and has worked as an art teacher, sailor, pumpkin carver, costume maker, and Christmas tree salesman. He is the founder of No School, an artist-run arts education program that employs creative problem solving, mindful experimentation, collaboration, and ecological sustainability to promote social-emotional skills as well as a broad sense of wonder, joy and possibility. Frank is also the former Education Director of 2727 California Street, an art and education initiative and artist-in-residence program in Berkeley, CA. He was the first artist in residence at the Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York from 2021-22 and is currently collaborating with other artists and organizers at the progressive art studio, Studio Route 29 in Frenchtown, NJ. https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2020/12/07/artist-frank-traynor-is-the-social-architect-we-need

Moriah Evans creates site-specific performances, theater productions, installations, symposiums, and texts. Informed by her research into somatic techniques and feminist critiques of visuality, her works aim to deconstruct the default hierarchies between notions of flesh, body, self, and subject. Recent works include: Remains Persist (Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, 2023; Performance Space New York, NY, 2022), REPOSE (Beach Sessions, NY, 2021), Be My Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021), Configure (The Kitchen, NY, 2018), and Figuring (SculptureCenter, NY, 2018). She was Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal (2013-2020), Tanzkongress Curatorial Advisor (2017-2019), and Dance & Process Curator (The Kitchen, 2016-2023). She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2023-2024 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/arts/dance/moriah-evans-remains-persist.html

Timmy Simonds is an artist interested in the ways we perceive education and our expectations of the teacher cross culturally. He broadcasts regularly with Montez Press Radio and WGXC.