What are bodyportals?

Everyone has a right to feel safe and at home wherever they are.  My way in, when I feel disoriented, is to start with my most intimate surroundings, my body.  My body is my way to reconnect to land.

What does it mean to be natural?

To feel natural in the true sense, not as an aesthetic style or convention – but owning my right to feel, speak and act in the way that is truly natural for me, whatever land I am standing on.

Individual Bodies

This work is about helping people connect to the felt sense of their individual unique body.

Dominant styles or forms have been created by and for a standardised body/mind, and mostly don’t honour individual variations.  I’m interested in bringing an inclusive alternative approach to the mainstream.

With these body portals I create containers that give you freedom to explore your own individual body beyond how it compares to others.

The Felt Sense

The conventional way that we gain knowledge is usually through intellectual ideas or concepts.  But intelligence and knowledge can come also from a felt sense.

Sound Comes From The Body

As a musician and sound artist I work from the felt sense.  I create sound that supports the pace of the body, which can be in a very different timing to that of the conceptual mind.

I prefer to play music that comes from a felt sense, whether it is with a living entity, an instrument or a machine. In this project I focused on creating sounds in connection with natural entities and living things, such as grass reeds, water droplets, minerals or wood. I then mixed and produced tracks with these samples, aiming to keep my felt sense alive as I worked in the studio.

This work was available online for free, for a year from Aug 2020 – Aug 2021, funded by Arts Council England. It was a labyrinth of creative resources that was made from, and for, the visceral senses. It wove photography, soundscapes, poetry, dance, guided meditations into movement, a storytelling audio piece diving into the inner landscape of your body, and puzzles for you, your body and the people in your life.

Some of the audio work is available on bandcamp to listen to –

click to enter : bodyportals to listen to

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Sound, music and spoken word created and recorded by Jan Lee
Movement and text by Jan Lee
Photography without body* by Jan Lee
Photography and video with Jan’s image* by Algy Behrens
With thanks to Arts Council England for funding in the initial phases of this work.