A wonderful meeting with lots of percolating ideas! Here’s a list of things we discussed, questions, and references. I’m still very much making a ‘practice’ and not a product (this was a great thing to specifically identify). More floating, more struggle, fewer words, and trusting the body as the ‘thinking device’ of this practice.

Insights:

I’m working towards emergences of representation, whereby images emerge, and when they do I just notice them without judgment. This is building a taxonomy of material I can use. Remember Martha Graham.

It’s easier to tap into experience when you’re not trying to create it. Try doing someone else’s scores so I can just experience ‘experience’, and not have to produce words throughout the experience.

Letting the process happen TO you is difficult.

The words are OF the process, and not ABOUT it.

The audio material: it holds the space for the live performance. Having something hold the improvisation space is what allows you to surrender to the experience. Outsourced, structural, protection. This can also be provided by other people, participants, dancers, etc. Thinking about what it means to be an active viewer…

On words:

Is ‘difference’ the right word? There are other words, some of which may be more suitable: fissure (which is also geological), accident, rupture, disorientation, change, rhythm, flow, and Event.

Language is a way of processing attention, but it is not attention. How can what I’m doing be pure attention? This is not possible, but in moments perhaps it is. For me, Event is the moment before something is inscribed, or re-inscribed, in language. This temporary absence of locating signifiers is perhaps the split between signifier and signified. Maybe this is the line of disappearance, or the fissure that I’m drilling for?

Maybe the difference I’m looking for is just a way of perceiving something differently. But the work is more about this ‘way’ of perceiving than ‘difference’…

This process is something that’s going on internally, and it’s complicated, but it doesn’t fit into language, so can I find the word(s) by being in my body

Questions:

Are the words helping or hindering? Is this affecting the way the research is pulling against the studio practice? Consider the push and pull away and towards the words as a ‘stretch’.

What is the work of perception?

How can I write with the same abandon or flow that I’m able to tap into when making the audio recordings? What is this practice of ‘production’?

How to write with the same quality I’m exploring in the studio?

References:

- Zizek and Badiou re: Event (Lacanian Ink website)

- Peggy Phelan re: Event from a performative point of view, not just philosophical

- Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow psychology theory, happiness, and the zone

- Eckhart Tolle re: mindfulness

- Augusto Boal re: Games for actors and non-actors

- Nathalie Goldberg: http://nataliegoldberg.com/books/ Writing Down the Bones and Living Colour

- 5 Rhythms: take a class re: chaos