Ubiquitous Dividend: A Day-long celebration of Robert Kocik’s ‘Supple Science’

Workshop: 2:00–5:00pm
Performance: 6:00–8:00pm

Poets House presents an afternoon workshop and concert celebrating the works of poet and prosodist Robert Kocik through a variety of disciplines—poetics, visual art, performance, architecture, disability studies, design, medicine, economics, and politics—to explore what Kocik calls the “sore, over-sensitive, insecure, and supple sciences.” This event is also the release of Supple Science: A Robert Kocik Primer, recently published by ON Contemporary Practice.

The workshop will ​introduce the Prosodic Body​: Beginning with a general tuning, letting go of physical, emotional and mental blockages to open broader energetic and interoceptive connections, then working intensively with the correspondences between speech sounds (phonemes) and various bioprocesses, and finally opening the field of choreoprosodia (the fusion of poetry and movement.) The underlying premise of the workshop: a heightened sense of prosody deepens creativity, health and compassion.

At 6​:00​pm, The Commons Choir, co-directed by Kocik and Daria Faïn, with composer(s) Ben Barson and Gizelxanath Rodriguez, perform an investigative musical called the “Ubiquitous Dividend” —a mix of speech, movement, reparative tones and tunes arguing that generosity and evenly shared material prosperity are intrinsic to who we are.

Co-director: Daria Faïn

Poets: Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Lee Ann Brown

Performers: Workshop Participants, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Emily Skillings, David Thomson, Cecilia Vicuña

Performer/ Collaborating Artist (in presentation of the meal): Athena Kokoronis

Composers: Robert Kocik, Ben Barson, Gizelxanath Rodriguez

Robert Kocik is a Brooklyn-based artist. He is a writer, prosodist, builder, artist, caregiver, and economic justice activist. Kocik’s cross-disciplinary writings move through the hard, soft and sore sciences to comprise a field called Supple Science. His publications include All Peoples Calendar (2009), E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E (2012); and Supple Science (2013). He attended the New College of California Poetics Program in San Francisco.