BRIDGE BOOKS: “Instructions for Living” by Michael Workman
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Instructions for Living by Michael Workman
Instructions for Living is a collection of performance scores, civic prompts, and poetic directives that invite readers to reconsider how they move through space, language, memory, and one another. Blurring the boundaries between choreography, writing, sculpture, and social practice, the book offers a series of instructions-each designed to activate the body as both instrument and inquiry.
Across its pages, simple gestures unfold into complex propositions. Stand still and observe how architecture instructs you. Imagine a small circle at your feet and refuse to step outside it. Choose a single word; break it into sounds until breath reshapes your spine. Approach a sculptural element as if it has asked for help. These prompts operate as "choreographic objects" in textual form: frameworks that structure attention, alter posture, and reveal the invisible systems-civic, emotional, historical-that pattern our behavior.
Rooted in Michael Workman's decades-long interdisciplinary practice, Instructions for Living draws from performances, workshops, and exhibitions developed in collaboration with dancers, artists, and communities. The scores reflect an ongoing investigation into how bodies are shaped by architecture and urbanism, how movement encodes power, how grief and memory inhabit gesture, and how even the smallest shift-an inch, a pause, a reversal-can become choreographic microcosms.
Both intimate and collective, the book functions as a portable studio and a public tool. It can be read privately, enacted alone, or activated in groups. It asks participants not simply to perform, but to notice: the routes others carve through space, the ways presence can be rehearsed or undone, the difference between becoming data and becoming deviation.
At once poetic manual, civic meditation, and choreographic archive, Instructions for Living proposes that instruction is not control but invitation. The body is a sentence. The space is punctuation. Between them, a new language is always forming.
