Studio Advisor Meeting: October 15, 2015

with Morgan O'Hara

If you want to do something big, stop asking for permission.

What am I pushing against?

The convergence of all the things/ too many things. I need to spend the time with each. Like 10,000 hours of time, for the French horn, costumes, make-up, film, text, the character, etc…

The way I’m working is good (letting things come out and explode) but I need to go through a narrowing process at some point as well. Think about the net.

So, what am I doing exactly?

Is it expression? Is that what this is about? Go to the end of everything. Explode first, then refine. If expression is my purpose, then push that too.

Talent is one thing, but what am I doing to do with it? What am I capable of?

Commitment doesn’t hold back. Some things that feel like a risk for me are totally not against the canon of crazy committed physically disruptive artists. Check out Rocio Bolivar, and Stelarc.. Comparatively, there are more intense approaches to performance, so what do I need to say/do/make and how?

The horn. There are lots of ways to sound an instrument. Explore taboos conceptually, then look at them with the instrument. Then push those taboos as well.

Art is transformative, that’s why we do it, and that’s why we don’t want to do it…

But you can only commit your life to something that’s transformative, it seems. If you’re working with your body, go the whole way with it – push the limits, then pull back. The body has its own limitations.

Look at Forsythe teaching videos, re: perception of movement. Is the perception of what you’re doing in a global space, or intimate space?

A: Why would an audience want to see any of this anyway? What’s my beef with the dance world?

M: Questions like this are good. Push against the art and/or dance world, and know why. Deal with the public aspect of it. Getting an MFA means I want to show somebody something. What is it I want to show why? Why isn’t it enough to just do it? Why do you have to promote it too? Talk to Kelly Kivland of Dia Foundation.

The character and the writing: do I have a Catholic background? Um, yes, but only nominally. But still, it’s in there. I’m inhabited by good girl shit: denial of sexuality, expression, resistance, maturity, to look clean and healthy, to handle every situation with grace… All to keep a person dominated. It’s still there in a deep way. It’s an anti-life force. There’s basic decency, but it doesn’t have to be such a package deal. It continually interferes with my behavior. Try to acknowledge its existence, and see it in myself before I can work with it.

 

Crit Group A: Response

Link to Google Doc with Crit Group Feedback: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZkHEXlJwzeXOHKBAxjG0pIo8hNW3HumnTXhFt3QI0_I/edit?usp=sharing

I specifically asked my crit group about their responses to space, what kinds of space registered or were ‘felt’ on part of the video, their responses to the character ‘selfie’ I’ve been generating from my meditation practice, and the sound score as way of embedding subliminal information, and academic text which I slipped in at the beginning of the video. I also asked about technical camera/film info, as I’m not very familiar with the medium yet.

Some points came up in regard to the studio space I filmed in, and that it should be private, but didn’t feel as such. I think this is because of my awareness of the camera as a voyeur in the room, coupled with the non-space of the studio. I might try shooting on location. This makes sense if the final piece were to be a video, and is something to consider, although perhaps differently, in a live performance setting in regard to how the playing space/set/vantage point is constructed.

I like the note of giving more space to the choreography of the camera – something I was going for on the close-up shots, as I was literally dancing with the camera. I want to put in on a trolley or something that can share more of my movements, but at a distance from me/ my arm. This kind of rolling ‘selfie-stick’ might enable other interactions.

'Time' came up in a few of the responses, which is something I need to clarify. I was thinking the camera angles conveyed two different references to time 1) the close-ups as suspended time of inner thoughts and 2) the long shot as the 'real' or lived time. I can do more to play with this, and think about how the sequence reflects back on previous moments, or changes the way they are seen via affect and relation.

Paolo hit the subject of this work, in its narcissistic use of the word ‘selfie’, and I’d like to explore that form a bit more extensively. Blowing the horn into my own genitalia references the masterbatory usage of the word ‘selfie’, but what I’m really getting at is the performance BY and FOR the self, for one’s own personally crafted exploitative self-narrative that is also somehow self-actualizing in its distribution on the internet. It's a falsehood that somehow makes the maker feel like a participant in his/her own life. This self-reflexivity of the ‘selfie’ already has a form, so I can perhaps make more specific reference to that form and culture.

So far, there were several notes to shorten the video, but I think if I can keep the changes happening at the Hollywood-esque rhythm of expectation (the ‘want/get’ need for change) then it could maintain the viewer’s attention, for longer. If it’s really an egregious selfie, I think it should challenge attention spans somehow. I also don’t expect the viewer to watch the whole thing, necessarily. This is still something to consider in going forward, and changes where I might plant 'information' that changes the way the video is watched, like the academic text at the beginning.

Lis of common suggestions: 1) consider the vantage point of the camera, and dialogue with the viewer,  2) this seems like multiple characters still, of the schizoid variety and not fully separate from me yet, 3) explore this character in the outside world/ doing other things, which I think the sound could also offer but I can go further, 4) how does the character choose her outfits? 5) there is an intimate space being portrayed here, and I can take that further,  6) remember selfie ‘culture’, which could also include ‘belfies’ haha! 7) try medium shots, 8) try making the edit really short, it could reveal something about what’s important to me, 9) if this were to become a live performance, how could I translate the effect of the close-up shots to the live moment? Good question! I don’t know yet. 10) In terms of process, the presence of the camera affects my ability to tap the unconscious, and my ability to improvise. THIS IS TRUE! Maybe I can AMPLIFY this self-consciousness, in true selfie-form, and reference the voyeuristic eye of the camera more, 11) how does the French horn player LISTEN to sound? Good question. If I’m going down the French horn hole, I have to go there fully and consider all the possible sounds of the horn, and not just the image of it, or the dancing with it, as an object, 12) commit to the specificities of the character once I’ve identified them, 13) consider that sounds might compete with the images, so try some black screen moments if needed. This, along with slow motion, will change the viewer's attention to time as well.

References:

Ann Liv Young with her alter-ego Sherry

Keiji Haino

Performance at The Issue Project Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW7OXNfdd4Y

Effort” in Laban Movement Analysis

THANKS CRIT GROUP ACE!

Reading Diary: Praxis Enrichment Refresher Course (Cooks)

1. Bike porn, voyeuristic seat design, friendly environmentalism, and deterritorializing the perineum. Form follows libidinal function, or an excuse to wear fancy outfits, hangout at gear shops, and still make it to your destination faster than transit. I’m wondering about super vertical Dutch bicycles, perched on the territorialized ischial tuberosites. Prude cycling or good posture?

2. Hirsch vs Mt. Vesuvius: sensationalism pales against ghosts of natural disaster. What do you do when you’re stuck in your own rut? Premature art explosions must be hard to continue on from. Two movies come to mind: ‘Pecker’ and more recently ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’.

3. Thank you Solnit, thank you hip-hop, thank you genealogical bodies. Don’t underestimate your impact.

A Chinese proverb: to know and not to act is not to know.

4. Idea: viral kitten videos at the Whitney

Image: somewhere, one of those kittens is now a feral cat

5. Un-gendered Beauty-Pretty scales (flow left to right, and right to left):

Beauty – immaterial – substance – pleasure – substrate – material – Pretty  

Beauty – movement – dancing – pleasure – poetry – flowers – Pretty

Beauty – forever – moralism – intoxication – one night stand – brevity - Pretty

Question: is ‘embodying pretty’ an oxymoron?

6. Repetition (Pattern), Yarn vandalism (Decoration), Rococo (Ornament, and a song by Arcade Fire)

 

Reading Diary: Line Beyond Drawing (Avgitidou)

Beginning with Martin Patrick’s article, issues of interest include the choreographic, temporal, and ephemeral shift in art toward engagements in non-space. The work becomes less about the hard objects located within the site itself, but the negative space between and beyond the location, people involved, and the artwork itself via documentation and dissemination strategies. The deterritorialization of a site thus opens its meaning and potential convergences between viewers, histories, contexts, and other unpredictable references. This shift in site-specificity aligns with changes in notions of person-hood and place-hood, becoming more diluted, and transient. Other predominant social changes include the shift from public to private space, spending most of our time etching out individual spaces, and individual experiences, through the lens an iphone for example, whereby even when situated within a public space, a private space can be occupied.

These changes in the notion of public space change how an artwork might be located, and critiqued, to include a more expansive set of parameters. This is of particular interest to works that include political critique, as they become less direct in terms of reenacting a familiar narrative, or the trope of playing out in order to bring attention to an existing political reality. Instead, as in the work of the Yes Men, a changed situation is envisioned and communicated through an existing ‘place’ of the ‘media network’, or a desired response is activated as in the work of Jane Tsong, and an action can be set in motion beyond her own initial involvement, pointing to the ephemeral position of the artist herself. Furthering the ungraspable qualities of space, Toby Huddlestone ventures into the psyche as political territory, again confirming that what transfers between people is a potential space for art. Although these territories become difficult to grasp or talk about, I think that is also their potency. If art sits on the cusp of articulated knowledge and the unknown, then dissent should affect a state of production as opposed to laying out an informed and mediated resource for political research for the ‘system’s guardians’. How might political artwork reinforce the dogma of an existing system, and how might it produce some other possibilities that slip between the cracks? (Apparently revolutions are initiated from and by the overlooked compilation that has slipped between the cracks). How does one not produce, reinforce, recentre, or harden the thing they are trying to change? Should we avoid the reference completely? Or are there parallels that can be traversed?

McGarrigle’s article discusses the lineage of locative art to Situationist International, and its differences. Of particular interest is the argument that SI didn’t succeed in actually constructing /playing out the situations upon which their theories rest, and that locative art is a field in which tactics for such constructions are being produced and experimented with, bringing theory into action in a concrete way, but also changing that theory in the process. She mentions the function of the spectator as not passive, but a co-agent in the activation of a situation. I have questions about the distinction between active and passive viewership, or when exactly a participant becomes a part of the work. Do they have to get up and move around, or do they get to make decisions about the work’s aesthetic outcomes? It is my position that we are never passive, and that witnessing can be just as active and charged as getting up and walking or producing with the work in more concrete ways. Consequently, I disagree with the SI notion that human beings are moulded by situations. Nature is only one part of the equation. And don’t we affect situations, even if not consciously attempting to produce SI's ‘total opposition’? The knowledge that doesn’t know itself is generative, whether we notice it or not.

Detournement feels like the strategy of intentionally psychedelic political satire, rolled into a public art practice. ‘Life can never be too disorienting’ encapsulates the goal of this practice for me. The problem with disorientation is that you might lose intentionality, and the goals of SI seem far too strategic, lucid, and systematic to also incorporate getting lost, and tripping out…

What strikes me about Lynch’s writing is how the ordinary, or familiar, can become imprinted on the individual resident, and collective identity of a city. Despite a city’s density and fragmented sensorial elements, it is their collection that produces the entity 'city', and their segments that qualify the city’s characteristics. I like thinking about the locations in my own city that when zoomed-in on could be anywhere, but zooming out just a little triggers a familiar sighting. No matter how many movies I see filmed in Toronto, but set in New York City, I can pinpoint Toronto-ness (note: I only notice when it works out though. I can’t measure how many times I haven’t noticed Toronto masked as NYC). Traffic lights, buildings, streets, density on sidewalks, or how something just ‘feels like’ Toronto. Is it vibe, or something more quantifiable that triggers my 'Toronto' mental landscape? This blurring is interesting to me.

My response to the homunculus-derived art is that it’s the way the collected data is presented that makes it effective. The volume of the personal information collected otherwise becomes too much to filter through, but if there’s a way to demonstrate patterns, or overarching changes in perception from this research then I experience the possibility of the ‘adaptive solutions’ that individual input can generate. I am either too lazy, or too over-tapped by apps that want me to generate and perform my own version of things to come to some of these works with open interest (in particular, the PDPal example).

I was moved by Rachel Whiteread’s House because of its manner of materializing space, shaping a void, and bringing form to temporal, ephemeral, emptiness. The work stimulates a way of looking, of projecting a story, of contemplating the familiar differently. It’s downright eerie, and despite its material concrete form, it will be demolished. A hard and temporary sculpture. These contrasts are at play in many ways. Note: I have to disagree with the author’s assumption that this work is a portrayal of how we all live. Yes, the desire to have an enclosed space, a home, is shared by human beings, but this representation of that home is of a centred, privileged perspective. I read more into the documentation of middle class architecture than a space we all relate to as ordinary and shared.

In regard to the texts on Francis Alÿs, I appreciated the complexity of his work as presented through a simple action, and how this simple action could produce its own dissemination process or ‘rumours’ due to a twist that provides access to, or indicates to an audience that they are witnessing a performance. I’m interested in not only the line of his walking pathways, but also how his work straddles pedestrian movement and poetic symbolism, activism and absurdity, theatrical tropes with commonplace action specific to his performance location, and documentation with live performance. I enjoyed thinking about how walking, and movements within a city, are what create that city, and how these movements could become a space for articulation, critique, reflection, and play in an art practice that provokes an interruption, or new ways of looking at the familiar.

Notes on the other artworks put forward: I appreciated the differences between works that are articulated as maps, or share a similarity to that familiar object although manipulated to some degree, and works that emerge in other ways, as actions, documentation, or sculptural traces. The map functions as a navigation tool for the artist, or the viewer, or both, and it’s interesting to think about how this mode of documented navigation could be used in process, or represented in product.

Reading Diary: Art After the Anthropocene (Pope)

After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch: This text includes a collection of five scholarly essays that unpack the term ‘Anthropocene’, arguing for the inclusion of a geological perspective that re-centres the planet in political discourse.

The term Anthropocene suggests a period in which human activities are rapidly changing the global environment on a massive scale, and for a profit. The constantly expanding and consolidating impact of capitalism has accelerated the damage, and hardened the divide between the ultra rich and disenfranchised poor, and between human beings and nature. This hardened separation is most ‘embodied’ within urban settings, and has produced a particular pathology of the liberal subject: exhausted, helpless, and unsettled by impending 'natural' disaster.

These texts share a perspective that the issue is no longer ‘what to do’, but ‘how to do it’, and the authors contend that a geological perspective must be included in order to address political change. To me, the crux of this argument presents as an ideological change, one that would provoke a shift in how policies, social processes, and corporate dealings could be reframed, not through fear tactics and potential manipulation, but towards the perspective of a(n) (in)human, increasingly artificial, or expanded way of relating to the planet that integrates multiple forms of agency (some of which are human, some not).

If this were achievable, how, and what might politics look like? If we were to exist WITH the planet, how would our physical composition, or embodiment, change? Dance practitioners have been attempting this for years, although for different reasons, but there is a lot that can be learned through the processes of collective improvisation, transformation, and methodologies that produce the experience of an altered physical composition. Aboriginal traditions and rituals deal with transformation as well, but are more directly linked to the embodiment of nature. I think that researching such traditions could be beneficial to initiating the ‘how’ in regards to change. How to bring nature into the urban? How to bring geophysical forces into a political conversation? How to physically possess empathy and connection for the planet, so that our position is no longer passive?

I found Rowan’s perspective on technology surprising, as I don’t often think about the potentiality of technology, and I group it in with the ‘capitalism/bad’ category (I am aware of my complicity/hypocrisy as I type away on my laptop…). I am interested in how technology produces potential ‘sites’ for political conversation and social change, and how it might be harnessed as a generative force as opposed to exploitative, divisive in its re-centring of the status quo (ok, so i'm using this laptop for good?). Again, the How question arises… And also, what might a geophysical laptop look like or do? (This laptop is making my eyes hurt. I wonder what physical evolution process has already been initiated by this piece of technology? Less body hair, rapid attention shifts…)

The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives: It seems we have a mess on our hands. This article isn’t news, but it lays out a very sobering articulation of the facts. I am utterly ashamed to be complicit in the continued depletion of planetary resources. I am reminded of, and disturbed by, an old-school dictum: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” This kind of hubris, and attitude towards the ‘limitless’ solvency of the planet is disgusting. How how how to make change? How does one go about changing her worldview to a planetary-view?

This article describes the toxic combination of exponential growth, depleting resources, and the exploitation of developing countries to produce that which is consumed by comparatively rich developed nations. There is a demand, and there is an attitude that an endless supply is available. But how did this demand come to be? How could we come to want something that we didn’t even know existed previously, how could we feel entitled for that which has no name, and how have we become so comfortable living on the fringe of constant expansion? This sounds like an addiction to consumption. Is it consumption that we have to grant a new definition? I imagine having the self-discipline to curb consumption, but here I am on a laptop, in Berlin, doing things that cost the planet...

One thing I learned from the similarly sobering film ‘Food Inc.’ is that the consumer decides. If all of this mess rests in the hands of consumers, then surely our purchasing decisions could add up to something (Wallmart is carrying local organic products after all). So how can these choices extend to ‘consumption’ on a larger scale, and what can consumption, as a word, also include in its meaning, a meaning that perhaps isn’t so ‘one-sided’? I recently switched to Bullfrog Power in Canada: a company that purchases my energy usage from sustainable sources, like wind power, and something called ‘green natural gas’ (an alternative to fossil fuel-based natural gas). OK, so consumption in this sense produces support for renewable energy, or the production of very real options. Is it possible that the mutual beneficiary of our choices could be the planet?

Thinking about 'location'. This word includes where products are from, how they are manufactured, how they are distributed, and the political systems that support their production and exchange. I’m very happy purchasing produce from a local CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture), but I often think about the people I’m not buying from anymore, who perhaps bought into cash crops, or can’t afford to transition to organic practices, or are stuck in a contract with a multinational food corp. (Monsanto…). But is it really possible to only support companies with which I share an ideology? And isn’t that dangerous, like bordering on closed-minded, xenophobic, and prejudicial thought lines?

Accountability is a slippery topic too, but from the research presented in this article it is clear that developed countries must be accountable for the damage they have created, and incur the cost of change from this point going forward. To me, the lone consumer, it means dropping a bit more coin to activate this term consumption differently and remember its mutual beneficiary.

This article also delves into some possible solutions, and brings up the ethics of manipulation, and human interference with nature. The synthesis of a bacterial chromosome is discussed, alongside geo-engineering approaches to changing the earth’s atmosphere to have a brief cooling affect (even though the possibility of many consequences are present, including toxic sulphuric pollution). To my mind, the whole problem comes down to an attitude: the audacity of a small privileged group who get to make decisions on behalf of entire populations, and consequently affect the planet that we are supposed to share, and respect in order to keep this whole mess afloat. 

There should be some kind of ‘global permission’ to act, and only act if the whole world is ‘IN’. How impossible! But utopian... A ‘no tolerance’ principle that puts a stop to greed as the main consumer motivation. And hey, that might make us a little bit uncomfortable! Good.

A note on technology: instead of spending billions on synthesizing new life, why not invest in the conversion to alternative energy? And why is Canada so embarrassingly greedy right now?? Harper-oil Conservatives please go away.

Reading Diary: Alienation (Koebel)

A Short Organum on the Theatre: My impression of Brecht’s text characterizes the Alienation Effect (A-effect) in theatre as a didactic assemblage of incongruent parts with the shared goal of pleasure, entertainment, and social critique. To represent human interactions on the stage is to not lull the viewer into a 'trance-like state' of passive enjoyment, but stimulate a cerebral response that catalyzes a way of looking at the world, presently. It is a general technique applied in a specific way, depending on a combination of factors including script, the historical period it represents, the actors as individual agents, and the individual production elements. Brecht was curious about how the scientific age was changing the interactions of men (and women!), as it has the ability to alter our 'perception of our surroundings'. I’m curious about this too in terms of how we interact nowadays: less frequently in person, and more through technological devices, and what that might imapact in terms of empathy and (mis)communication.

A-Effect strikes me as a collage, where each component part shares an end goal, but the way it is represented is rough, unsmooth, or placed together without ‘crossfade’. It seems to me that the only effective way to use, and also witness, this kind of work, is to have a very clear understanding of who you are as an individual participant or audience member, and your own critique of the social climate surrounding the work. This fissure between an independent worldview and the material being presented creates a distancing, a space, for thought and questioning as to why, how, or in what ways the material in question ‘could be’ something else. My issue with this process is that it makes a lot of assumptions on part of the audience, as I don’t think we can ever really know what an audience is thinking, especially in regard to presenting works within cultures that are unfamiliar to the creator. This position contrasts a more open attitude of exchange that the theatre can also impart. (Also, as a dance artist, I have to say that transgressing cerebral, articulated knowledge is of particular interest to me, and I wonder if there’s a way to apply this technique that is less outwardly prescriptive, but still operates like a collage, maintaining the integrity of its parts, and their capacity to disorient a familiar worldview.)

On Alienation in Chinese Theatre: Brecht narrows in on the techniques of the A-effect, and relates it to similar effects in traditional Chinese theatre, whereby a subtle detachment is present among actors who use unusual ‘gest’ to portray emotions of the characters they are representing, but gest that is often strange, and not dependent on empathy, or the audience’s identification with recognizable emotion. The actor often appears 'cold', there are no illusions to the stage being separate from the audience (no fourth wall) and the actor produces distance between herself and the character she represents. Helpful A-effect techniques include:

1)   transposition into the third person

2)   transposition into the past

3)   speaking the stage directions out loud

The combination of these technique creates a healthy dose of detachment where the audience can witness the actor’s ‘portrayal’ as separate from her, on a conscious level, and not ‘suffer’ the deadpan stares of an ‘emotion infection’ that is a the seemingly fearful operation of the subconscious. I understand how this is a destabilization of the Bourgeois dramatic form, and it may be considered radical to corrupt the space of theatre, and therefore its function, whereby the newly democratized stage allows the individual audience member to cast her vote. However, I feel that this vote is being cast from dominant position of the individual’s frontal lobe. What about the body, and what about affect? Can't and don't we also cast our vote from these areas of knowledge? Also, I’m not so sure the body isn't a part of this operation, because I don't really think you can separate emotion from intellect, or understand emotion from a purely intellectual position. AND, is it really possible to enjoy anything, be it learning or social critique, without some kind of dopamine high/ emotion infection?

I wonder if a computer program could re-create plays using the A-effect? This seems like the stuff of equations, causal or predetermined outcomes, and strategy. I wonder, is the kind of social critique Brecht is looking to achieve, of a certain political lenience? How egalitarian in meaning production was he? I wish I could watch a rehearsal…

Understanding Brecht: I’m interested in Walters’ point about one of the main achievements of epic theatre: that it makes gestures quotable. This notion suggests that gestures are specific to a time and place, and have the ability to communicate via social encoding and widespread usage. Having not seen an epic play performed, I’m curious how this could work, but perhaps that is the whole point – to watch one version played out, and the spectator decides if it could have been something other.

I’m also interested in how this plays into representation, and not reproduction, nowadays. Are the gestures attached to an actor ‘of’ the character, or the actor herself, or ‘of’ the time of the play, or all three? For example, is there a difference between the ways ‘mania’ is expressed through gesture now and 100 years ago? I’m not convinced of this fine line between representation and reproduction, as if reproduction couldn’t have the same affect of distancing a gesture from an opposing text, or the actor’s externalized thoughts. Is it that the gesture has to come out in a somewhat organic way, or seem authentic to the actor (because the character’s gestures have already expired if staging a historical work), in order to work?

So, I am typing frenetically and thinking about a manic character. Could frantic typing be a gesture in a play, say, about the War of 1812? Can I include a laptop as a prop in this staging of 1812 in order to represent a typical gesture of 2015? What other incongruent elements could be present? An interruption from a stranger, or maybe Laura Secord, whistling something by Miley Cyrus, then a door slams, and I say something 3rd person and flat about my character like “She is very contrary and hates rice pudding on Tuesdays”, and then of course I would place my laptop in a bathtub.

I think I understand the concepts but not how to put them into practice, or how to read them in action. And is anything really ever incongruous? It’s possible to produce connections between all kinds of seemingly random things. Last question: how is this NOT absurd? Where do we place the lucid social critique, and how can this be staged. I’m going to google some examples…

Aesthetics and Politics: Walter Benjamin’s diary offers immediate insight into Brecht’s inner world while playing chess, aa Brecht ponders up a new game in which the moves don’t "stay the same, the individual pieces become stronger or weaker, or there is some development over time". To me, this is a metaphor for Brecht’s impulse to change the structure, or foundation, upon which society unfolds, or an obsession with analyzing the surface upon which society plays out, in time.

Opposing opinions on Kafka: Adorno praises Kafka’s ability to arouse fear, whereas Brecht would rather examine fear empirically, stating that there is nothing to be found in Kafka’s ‘depth’ except a ‘separate dimension’ where nothing is to be seen. I simplify this argument to the affect/effect dichotomy. Affect is felt, and non-causal, and in regard to theatre it cannot be predicted, strategized or influenced. You can only concern yourself with structure, form, and the autonomy of the object itself, without adding a desired emotional end point. Effect is measurable, causal, cerebral and falls under a strategic formula whereby an effect is ‘produced’ because in some sense it has already been articulated/determined by the artist. Brecht points toward society in a reflexive fashion (effect), and Kafka presents the 'feeling' of societal pathologies (affect) through his dystopian narrative on paranoia. Adorno argues that deploying effect, or pointing out a social pathology, simultaneously upholds the systems and/or horrific realities that the artwork is responding to, bringing an ‘endlessness’ to them, and quantifying or inscribing them in some way through an aesthetic reduction. So what’s the magic combination? How does one sit at the precipice of articulated knowledge and the unknown? How do you hold an opening? Instead of re-affirming the existing reality for rumination, is it possible to produce a contemplative space that also produces new alternatives? Or perhaps this goal is too concrete. Adorno lands on the following: “Art, which even in its opposition to society remains a part of it, must close its eyes and ears against it: it cannot escape the shadow of irrationality. But when it appeals to this unreason, making it a raison d’être, it converts its own malediction into a theodicy.” So, how does one source the un-inscribed, the slippages, the fissures, and still manage to exist in, and respond to this world here and now? Deleuze and Guittari have stepped into that pool by making cheese and endless collapse. Sounds like Adorno’s answer is to step away from pumping intellect into the work. The answer must be: only make bad art!

Brecht’s Berlin: I was so moved by this article, and got a vivid picture of the ‘stage’ on which Brecht’s writing took place. I was surprised by the optimism and humour the author describes as a young boy in Berlin, but I suppose the full throttle of Hitler’s psychotic vision hadn’t become entirely visible. People still believed in the a greater thrust of humanity, and when the author describes that humanity at the end of the war, on his return to Berlin at the roof-less performance of Three Penny Opera, I understood the sentiment and hopefulness that Brecht’s work really provided. To be able to perform Three Penny Opera was the liberation from living it, and marked the moment when the freedom to critique society was possible again, out in the open air. I take it for granted that I'm allowed to be critical, that I can hold a contentious or subversive position without fear. This article made me thankful for that. 

Reading Diary: Intensities - Extending Bodies and Voices (Book)

Architectural Body: This article relates the practice of Parkour with concepts of Landing Sites by Arakawa and Gins, and Deterritorialization by Deleuze and Guittari. My impression is that Parkour is both rhythmic and efficient, and therefore contingent on momentum. It is as if the Parkour body doesn’t move over or under an architectural ‘obstacle’, but somehow moves through it, as the up and down vectors are streamlined and momentum pushes along a horizontal axis/ the most efficient path.

There is a moment upon which the organism-person-environment articulates with a landing site that is unknowable and produces momentary affect/ deterritorialization: zoom-in, ultra slow motion, a foot contacts a surface, the force of the surface is absorbed up the shin through the thigh, pelvis and spine, counterbalances follow in a wave, sensation is felt through a closed kinetic chain, but then, the kinetic potential of the surface itself pushes the body into a space that no longer has resistance, form, or pressure. This moment in the atmosphere, along a horizontal trajectory of determination and momentum, is possible to field, but within a variant of surrender and unknowable factors. I think it is this space, before and after contact, that is the deterritorialzed ‘affect’ space, before and after the meeting of the organism and the architectural body, as they both affect each other through a pre or post convergence of sensation and force, and intention and function. The building and the body change each other post-contact, and how, is up to the particular moment of affect, and level of practice (a slip off the ledge seems like a terrible affect-moment to endure… As this failure, or success is noticed via perception, a series of contingent fielding is set-off, but still at the behest of momentum.

Stammer, Mumble, Sweat, Scrawl, and Tic: This text points toward the unspeakable gaps in the legible, and how “an instance of legibility produces its own shadow: the illegible”. In the ‘zone of illegibility’ a kind of corporeal communication is transmitted through a stammer, mumble, sweat, scrawl, and tic. So, what is it that we understand, but don’t really know? What immaterial energy does legibility produce?

I enjoyed the references to withdrawal, particularly in Mumble and Sweat. In Mumble, to inhabit ‘confusion’ as a means of evading an articulation that could be used as fodder for a measurable ‘side’ is a tactic of non-compliance, or embodied activism, that may appear to be the only possible act of defiance in an impossible situation. This state, however, is not passive. It is a passionate thrust into incoherence in the face of ‘legible’ conflict.

In Sweat, the cognitive images of the cerebral cortex question what can be articulated within silence, and through the suggestion of language. How are imagination and action different in terms of a mental process? Imagination can trigger action, as in a dream walk, whereby a person’s motor cortex lights up and sends signals for movement. A movement response coming from an imaginary process, coupled by research in neuroscience that proclaims the plasticity of the brain... To me this signals that the imagination requires great care, and that it is dangerous to assume that the divide between action and thought is so definitive.

In response to Tic, I wondered how ‘contemporary/capitalist’ romantic encounters might be framed as a series of affordances and investments, if the individual’s subjectivity were granted the same stock value as any other commodity in trade. This is a terrible thought. My face is making weird Tics.

Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language: Leaning forward, looking closer, this text leaves pixelations on my scalp. Porousness, ectoplasmic new age-y but full of references so I can go there (which is revealing about my personality and need to legitimize from a canon of thinkers with historical cred). This text is a vibrational sound wave with like two sub woofers. Porousness is the collective, and moving through it is a ‘leakage’ of inarticulate anti-language that pushes and pulls and moves the body as it amplifies. And the stutter as an escape portal, a sly pulling the rug out from beneath the pompous word flow that centres the wordsmith. I keep reading and this whole thing both elevates and bottoms out, scratching at the edges of grammar, with little blips here and there, I question spelling, last names, things sound and feel slightly off in a synesthetic experience of sound via screen image text chewed up as they bypass my frontal lobe. This text dances and runs and it wags lots of fingers.

Utopian Body: Foucault, you are personable and sensitive in this text. I feel invited to read more of your work. Thx.

On the body, on placelessness, on transcendence, as utopia. The formless form as pure, unattached sensation, which has no location, but feeds back to a central nervous system. Extending through costume, ritual, adornment, uniform, and modifications to the outward appearance of the body, wrapping as it to amplify, are all possible, visual, methods. I notice the same imbalance toward visual stimuli Foucault, as you discuss the boroughs and strange ledges of the body, but relate primarily to the ‘front’ body, and the two windows of the head (eyes) when there are many others (mouth, ears, pores, nostrils) that can be sensed in other ways (temperature, balance, sound, touch). And love, Foucault, brings the body into the present space, the present containment as ignited by another’s gaze and touch, but orgasm is the uncontained eradication of the body, the self, the mirror, the corpse right? A blank space, a blotch of emptiness where nothing has no concept of anything, no self, no mummies, no mirrors, and no differentiation. So love is a means to loss of self, of momentary blankness, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cyborg Manifesto: The time of distancing human and machine are long gone, and along with it has passed the totalizing, united wholeness of socialist-feminist political discourse. We are not one, but a multitude of many, differently composed, and differently affected by our historical and genealogical roots. Our commonality is that we have been thrust into an age of science and technology that is subservient to new divisions of labour, class, and gender. The Cyborg is a new type of existence, whereby man-made evolution has also produced new appendages that can be used to benefit techno-capitalist production and Western ideologies, or they can be used as subversive mechanisms that unite women along lines of pixilation and refraction as opposed to sameness.

In response to this critical point: “An important route for restructuring socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations.” How do we hijack our own imaginations, or how do we reassert the production of our own imaginations, which in turn will change the course of social relations? Perhaps hijacking technology as a proactive strategy, or disarming communication by disrupting it, and/or breaking down systems of flow that disperse and inject capital. I don’t really know what this means. But perhaps that is enough. To inject discourse into the imagination, and let is ruminate. Then try to access it via technology, tap it like a maple tree, or in this case, something related to oil…  To invest in our own future capital is to invest in money that doesn’t exist yet. So, can technology access and adapt our imaginations for some kind of potential revelatory blossoming? I keep using these nature-based metaphors, but maybe there’s some bio-engineering involved.

Possible platforms for proactive change: YES to incoherence, noise, interruption, inefficiency, taboo fusions, writing at the borders of language, and hijacking communication technologies. NO to goddesses, total systems, the feminization of Work, embodying western male ideologies, dualisms as we knew them, and reproductive politics.

MCP 504

PART B – Second Year MFA Proposal Outline

 01 – Title of project

Choreographing Vibe, Embodying Space

02 – Name of student and any collaborators and their roles

Andrea Spaziani (student)

Alicia Grant (collaborator and dance artist)

Julia Male (collaborator and dance artist)

03 – Suggested advisors for studio and for research element (first, second, third choices, if any). Explain your choices.

Morgan O'Hara (studio) and Simon Pope (research)

04 – Description of proposed project or body of work – practical element

On a recent rip to Hydra, Greece, to study social choreography at the Ricean School of Dance, a local resident told me “This rock will show you who you really are.” As a person accustomed to making work from within the studio, and then planting it in a theatrical/performance space, this statement has inspired me to do the opposite. I’d like to find spaces that ‘show me who I really am’, that push me around, and produce a kind of collaborative, improvised choreography. How does space affect me, and how do I affect space? How can I attune myself to noticing this affect?

For the practical element of my project, I’ll be using my body to explore the affect, and possible definitions, of space. By space, I mean something to be entered, or a temporal containment field, not necessarily organized by hard physical objects, but outlined by multiple modes of perceptive information. This initial definition is very open, and I will work towards its specificity throughout the year. I will consider abstract space, imaginary space, sonic space, the materiality of social space, and any other systems that may come through. I will start with my improvisation dance practice, and use other media such as film, sound, and documentation and produce proximal works. I will consider the editing of this material as choreographic.

1) PRACTICE: The listening body, the sensorial map  

My daily practice will include developing a technique for translating space into a physical experience – of listening, and moving, or not, and communing with space as I understand it with my body. This is a continuation of my practice from last year, where I worked with ‘hyper-empathy’ as a strategy to extend, even by imagination, the possible stimulus for movement, and activate a version of my body that absorbs information beyond the physical boundaries of my skin. This mode of ‘fielding’ is inspired by the writing of Arakawa and Gins in Architectural Body. I will engage in this practice over a cross-section of physical spaces in and around Toronto, and elsewhere depending on my travel itinerary, working over long durations of 4-5 hours. I will allow myself to wander, and improvise, and I will document this practice using audio recordings, video, and writing, with the goal of producing a series of ‘sensorial maps’ that depict my perceptive experiences. I will experiment with these maps as choreographic scores, and bring them into the studio where I will transmit them to other collaborators.

I will explore improvised dancing as a modality of being in the world differently, and listening to my surroundings differently. I will consider dancing as a mode of ‘attention’ or ‘attunement’.

2) PERFORMANCE: the self as collection site, and performative body mapping.

In-studio, I will engage in my meditative practice from last year on exiting (familiar) perception, and activating projection. This meditation mines the subconscious, and in my experience with it, it has brought out deeply personal material. I’d like to use this material to produce a character, a version of myself as generated from my internal ‘space’, the space of my personal history, memories, and imagination. I want to wear and activate my subconscious, and bring my projections into a physical manifestation, or convey them as physical data.

Also, continuing from last year’s attempt to ‘inhabit the body differently’, I will engage in personal territories that I don’t typically visit, but I receive information about via my surroundings/media/culture. These territories may include extreme emotions, aggression, humour, trauma, egomaniacal behavior, or any combination that surfaces. Once this character/ ‘anti-hero’ has been established, I will engage him/her in dialogue, interviews, and self-reflexive conversation. The space between myself and an incarnation of myself will be explored. I’m guessing it will reveal something about how my imagination has been co-opted by western capitalist ideologies (the space in which I live), and/or imprinted upon by the social space in which I receive, and have received, information over my lifetime. It is a personal excavation of the affect of social space. I use the word ‘excavation’ in reference to the work of Michael Klien. I will research artist interviews as material for the Q and A sessions I will engage in with this character, and I will research artists who disrupt social space, and/or produce new kinds of social space in their work (ie/ Marten Spangberg, Jerome Bel, Maria Jerez, Pussy Riot).

I will capture this character’s behavior on film, shooting as if a documentary, or an egregious ‘selfie’. I may also produce some short scenes, depending on how it goes, and experiment with performance. I’ve been invited to perform in Toronto at Flowchart curated by Amelia Earhardt next spring, so I will consider performing this character study at that time.

3) DISSEMINATION DANCE: appropriating and embodying virtual space (in response to Marten Spangberg’s lecture on Hijacking as a Proactive Strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P6spiZS8UY )

In continuation of my Lone Dancer trial in 2014, I’ll be appropriating internet dance memes (ie/ Harlem Shake, US troops Call me Maybe parody, etc) to perform/deliver 30 days of choreographic prompts, and produce a space for proliferating dance, pushing it into the familiar spaces of the participant, and inviting the participant into the experience of the performance by initiating his/her body. This does not have to include actual movement, or production on part of the participant. I think the prompts are enough, and the words can carry the dance into the imagination of the doer (I will reference the active/passive spectator argument in participatory art from Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells). I will initiate this trial over 30 days in November, 2015. I will disseminate prompts over email, twitter, instagram, and facebook. I consider this dissemination ‘the performance’ in and of itself, and will test how the web interface can be used to produce social space. I will make the scores in immediate response to my daily internet observations, my ‘Google bubble’, and I will respond to how the space of the web affects me, and its information moves me to improvise. I will condense this improv into a directive/prompt of one or two sentences, and send it out to the Lone Dancer list daily. The scores will be collected and published on a website. For an example of the 2014 trial, please see www.lonedancer.ca

05 – Description of project report or thesis – written element

I will be writing a project report for my final assignment. It will continue from my previous research on Event, according to Alain Badiou’s definition in The Handbook of Inaesthetics, chapter six: Dance as a Metaphor for Thought. In this text, he describes six principles that inform the link between dance and thought. With the first principle, “The obligation of space” (63), Badiou discusses how dance is intrinsically tied to space, and it “…symbolizes the very spacing of thought.” (63). This is a more specific territory of Event, in that it is localized, it is ‘of the here’, and therefore necessitates space. I’m interested in how dance and space might operate together to produce an Event, or produce thought, and what these emergences could reveal if I can find ways to use dance as “…the event before naming…” (63).

I am currently researching Gilles Deleuze, Brain Massumi, and Erin Manning (of Montreal’s SenseLab http://senselab.ca/wp2/ ) specifically in relation to concepts of ‘immanence’ and ‘differential attunement’ which I’d like to bring into my understanding of affect, space, and performance in relation to my studio project. Others of that lineage include Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead, who I may also reference this year, or in future research.

It is my understanding that ‘immanence’ is a mode of organization that comes from within the process, which is essentially a process of perpetual change and differentiation on part of all things. It is not a unification of all things or ‘oneness’, but that all things are unified in their continual process of differentiation. This concept is opposed to ‘transcendence’, which maintains the existence of the ‘other’, or duality, as something that affects from outside the subject, and upholds the existence of the singular, separate, subject. The immanent entanglement and relational affect between all things is what I’m curious about, and the starting point for my research is in ‘how’ I experience this entanglement, and how I might witness my own change in conjunction with another changing agent. I consider this kind of witnessing, attunement, or deep level of attention as ‘dancing’, and it is therefore dancing that I will deploy as a methodology for this project. And if dance is obligated to space, according to Badiou, then I will try to uncover the flows of information and change that connect dance and space through a trajectory of affect. The ‘in between-ness’ of dance, space, and affect that produce an entanglement of change. This idea is still obviously fuzzy, but it’s a start.

To bring this theoretical research into the here and now, I’m interested in initially situating my project in Toronto in order to understand what that dances I make could reveal about the spaces, social constraints, and cultural atmospheres in which I presently live. If I can unlock a connection, then how might choreography enable an ability to affect, or imprint, upon other surroundings? I will look at artists who engage in observations of, and interactions within, social space such as Diane Borsato, Maria Jerez, John Cage, Michael Klien, Janet Cardiff, Jenny Holtzer, Francis Alÿs, Fluxus, William Forsythe, Pina Bausch, Kazuo Ohno, Pussy Riot, Pauline Oliveros, Guy Debord, Bruce Nauman, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Vito Acconci, Kazuo Ohno, KG Guttman, Jess Cutis, and Keith Hennessey. I’m sure this list will change as my research progresses.

06 – Project results, e.g. documentation, performance, script, intervention, website, exhibition, book, journal

1)   Sensorial Maps as Choreographic scores

2)   A space that performs (I’d like to install this at Uferstudios next year)

3)   Lone Dancer virtual performance website

4)   Character performance, film documentation, and interviews (included in Uferstudios presentation)

07 – Brief description of research method

I insert myself into studio experiments, and I deploy dance improvisation as an investigative methodology. Concurrently, I write scores and use technology to capture surveillance-type material, to witness my activities, and help consolidate emergent ideas. I then look for research materials that support what has been generated. I often start with a huge scope, and work my way toward specificity. I consider the editing of material as the choreographic process when producing finished work.

I work with attention, and I’m aware of what it is to ‘notice’, or place attention on an action in order to produce a shift in how I experience that action, and affect the action itself. To me, this is dancing, and improvisation at work.

Once I have a grasp of my entry point, I invite interdisciplinary collaborators to bring other considerations into the process, to intentionally undermine my vision, and help me understand how my process may or may not be disseminated.

08 – Initial bibliography for written element

Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Bachelard, Gaston, M. Jolas, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Kindle file.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Kindle file.

Cage, John. "Lecture on Nothing." Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1961. N. pag. PDF.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print.

Friedman, Ken. Fluxus Performance Workbook. Trondheim, Norway: Guttorm Nordø, 1990. Print.

"The GODLOVE MUSEUM - by Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn - Entropy8Zuper!" The GODLOVE MUSEUM - by Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn - Entropy8Zuper! N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Sept. 2015.

Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage in Association with the Open U, 1997. PDF.

Hewitt, Andrew. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Kindle file.

Hunter, Victoria. Moving Sites: Investigating Site-specific Dance Performance. London: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Kholeif, Omar. You Are Here: Art After the Internet. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Klien, Michael. Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change. Limerick: Daghdha Dance, 2008. Print.

Kwon, Miwon. "One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity." October 80 (1997): 85. Web.

Lally, Sean. The Air From Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come. Zurich: Lars Muller, 2013. Print.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. PDF.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell, 1991. PDF.

Lepecki, Andre. "From Partaking to Initiating: Leadingfollowing as Dance's (a-personal) Political Singularity." Dance, Politics & Co-immunity. By Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2013. N. pag. PDF.

Lotringer, Sylvère. Schizo-culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013. Print.

Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006. Kindle file.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960. PDF.

Maoilearca, Laura Cull O. Theatres of Immanence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.

Massumi, .Brian. "The Autonomy of Affect." 1. THE AUTONOMY OF AFFECT (n.d.): n. pag. Web.

Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Print.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Richard Rand. Corpus. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Kindle File.

Nold, Christian. Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self. S.l .: S.n., 2009. Web.

Sabisch, Petra. "Choreographing Participatory Relations. Contamination and Articulation." Dance, Politics & Co-immunity. By Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2013. N. pag. PDF.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000. Print.

Suri, Jane Fulton. Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2005. Kindle File.

Yee, N., J. N. Bailenson, Michael Urbanek, F. Chang, and D. Merget. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being Digital." The Nonverbal Communication Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2008. N. pag. Print.

NOTE: the Deleuze/Massumi/Manning lineage is somewhat new to me, so I’ll be adding more of their texts to this bibliography as I go. I will also look into journals that address themes of ‘attunement’, ‘immanence’, ‘becoming’ and ‘space’ in relation to affect and performance.

09 – Research question or hypothesis for thesis. For project report only if applicable.

How do I affect space, and how does it affect me? What does this data reflect about the spaces in which I engage/live/exist, and how can choreography capture and/or present this data?

10 – Intended audience

My project will initially be conducted for an unknown, and unknowing audience, made up of people who happen to be present in the spaces where I conduct my choreographic research.

I will perform my character profile as part of the Flowchart series in Toronto next Spring, and that audience will include a wide demographic of practitioners and supporters of experimental dance and performance.

The Lone Dancer project will be disseminated to participants from the 2014 trial (approximately 75 people) including a small faction of dance artists, but mainly non- dance practitioners from a variety of backgrounds. Because it is an online work, I hope it will be passed around to a wider circle than I might not have access to initially. I will use social media channels to access wider audiences outside Toronto. I will also promote the project through local organizations with reach, such as Hub 14, Dancemakers, The Toronto Dance Community Love-In, and the Transart Collective.

11 – Short statement on your current practice

My practice mines expanded modes of perception, and the borders of consciousness through experiential choreographic projects. I work with improvised movement to deploy action in space, and call attention to the present by way of immediate response. I use choreographic scores as a way to contain improvisation, and form constraints that function to open towards unpredictability, and uphold difference and agency on behalf of participants. I use technology as a tool to capture moments that deliver information about what has happened within the practice. Sometimes the results produce other, proximal works, ie/ films, which are related to the practice, but have become something else.

I have crafted a movement meditation/technique that places attention to my actions differently, and produces an ‘open embodiment’ that transgresses the familiar. It is a way of exploring what the body could mean, and how dancing might operate to produce knowledge or new kinds of unpredictable thought.

12 – Formulate entire project in 2-3 meaningful sentences.

How do I affect space, and how does space affect me? I will deploy improvised dancing as a methodology for exploring the affect of space, and how choreography might be used to capture and share this affect. I will expand my definition of space to include any territory to be entered, such as subconscious space, abstract space, or virtual space as a way of extending perceptions and sensitivities to space, and the information that is projected through it.

The dances I make will be reflective of experiential engagements in the spaces I inhabit, and I hope to reveal the immanent interconnectivity between the live body and its present surroundings.

13 – Technical description and production process including medium, quantity, size or duration

1)   Sensorial Maps as Choreographic scores: Video, text, and/or audio, as well as a studio performance and documentation with a trial group of 10-15 collaborators

2)   A space that performs: to be set up at Uferstudios next year, an interactive space, or a social choreography experiment, in which participants are moved by the space somehow

3)   Lone Dancer virtual performance website: text and images as a collection of prompts submitted to participants. Participant feedback will be collected as well

4)   Character performance, film documentation, and interviews: I’d like to integrate this into #2 (a space that performs). A choreographic space, and intermittently, a solo performance occurring in that space. Film projection, sound, and lighting will be incorporated. I will look for a production/technical assistant in Berlin to help with the set-up and run cues.

14 – Connect past and future project

Building on my previous project, I will shift my research on identity, agency, and control to an outward territory: from exploring the body one inhabits, outward to the spaces that the body inhabits, and are inhabited by/within the body.

15 – Connect studio and research project (if separate), explain how they inform each other.

n/a

16 – Brief description of conceptual motivation

See 05) Written element, re: Deleuze, Massumi, Manning, and terms “immanence”, and “differential attunement”, and Badiou on dance as a metaphor for thought, and the obligation of space.

17 – Short description and abstract (50-100 word) of written element

How can the attention inherent in dancing provide an opening to seeing and experiencing a person’s surroundings differently? I will discuss the relationship between improvised dance, the way it is structured by choreography, and how it might operate as a tool to produce knowledge about the present time and place, or the space if its immediate action. I will discuss how dance operates as a moment of ‘attunement’ that is both productive and reflective: it produces affect and is also reflective of affect in the way it ‘receives’ information, and enacts it moments before it can be inscribed by language and meaning. Dance points towards a horizon of continually vanishing gestures, and in this seeming vacancy, this emptiness of space, what might emerge, and how can it be framed by choreography?

18 – Proportion of written/practical element

I’m not sure how to answer this.

19 – Possible location for the project

I will engage in wandering in and round Toronto, and the meditation/studio practice will take place at Hub 14 in Toronto. As I travel throughout the year, I will bring my work with me. My itinerary is not yet determined, apart from a week in Vermont in October, a week in Los Angeles in December, and 2 weeks in New York City in January 2016.

20 – Timeline for realization of project

October:

Outdoor mapping practice

In-studio meditation and character development

November:

Outdoor mapping practice continues, and trials with transmitting sensorial maps to collaborators

In-studio character development, including interviews and film documentation

Lone Dancer trial begins mid-November

December:

Work on turning sensorial maps into a space that ‘choreographs’

Lone Dancer continues, and documentation continues

Edit character film

Work on character performance

Think about what to present in NYC for residency and develop that

Throughout:

Read

Learn German

Practice piano, French horn, and attend Muay Thai Kickboxing classes (a component of character study)

Winter/Spring 2016 timeline TBD

21 – Budget $6000

EXPENSES

Studio space: approx. $1000 for the year

Dance artists: Julia Male and Alicia Grant. Rehearsal and performance 1 month, approx. $1000

Long Dancer Website: $200

Books and research materials: $1000

Miscellaneous rentals in Toronto and Berlin (audio recording equipment, lights, video equipment): $1500

Documentation Materials: $300

Technical Assistance in Berlin: $1000

22 – Additional supporting information

n/a

Synthesis

01 – Write a concise description of your studio project

The focus of my studio project was developing an improvisation movement practice that would lay a foundation for future projects. This practice is a guided meditation on ‘exiting perception, and activating projection’, in an attempt to inhabit my body differently, and also teach others how to do the same. By the end of the project, I had used this practice to make a performance trio, a handbook of choreographic scores, and the beginnings of a sound piece, and video work.

My advisor brought me to the question: how does a person inhabit his/her body in the first place? To answer this, I decided to work from what I considered a familiar, everyday, or neutral state, where minimal differences stand out (from the perspective of the doer), and could be considered a general state of being at the time. However, a shift in attention, focus, or intention could serve to change that state entirely. Therefore crafting these shifts in attention became the methodology of the improvisation scores – a methodology akin to meditation techniques. I questioned how I would find the words to both describe, and teach, this practice, so I decided to let them emerge through movement exploration, and then edit afterward.

As I was moving, making up, and being affected by my meditation score, I was also describing it and documenting it with an audio recorder. I used the audio material to make a sound collage that acts as a background for an improvised performance, and I also made a handbook of choreographic scores detailing exercises on exiting the body, and projecting another kind of body. In both instances, the words were generated by improvised movement. They came from an experience of my body that I captured in real time. Therefore, I have also been developing a mode of production, or a way of making words, thoughts, ideas, self-deprecating admittances, and stories as they surface through movement. The words are the material generated by, and for, the moving body.

One of my goals was to interrupt my familiar modes of perception for a more open, stretched, and inclusive kind of embodiment that I refer to as ‘hyper-empathic’. This stretched mode of perception includes working with the peripheral gaze, and imaginary expansive sensations. I tested these proposals with two collaborators: Alicia Grant and Julia Male. Together we made a trio entitled “Rafters”: an improvised performance set the sound collage from my audio documentation. It externalizes the inner voice as a metaphor for the subconscious pushing through, and what isn’t said, but is still communicated.

In “Rafters” we all play id, ego, and superego at varying points. We propel each other, we appear to produce the words, and the words appear to produce us. Because it’s a trio, someone is always left out, and someone’s attention is always being diverted. It is a perpetual flurry of movement generation, and shifting control. It questions influence, and presents a way of looking (at each other, the viewer looking in) and wondering what’s going on in the mind of another person, how much of that can we actually know, and how much of it we project.

Throughout the project, I have also been documenting on video, and considering the editing aspect of video work as a choreographic action. The video looks at similar constructions of identity, and the shadow as subject. In a way it is another trio, between the camera, my shadow self, and me. My presence is there, but never fully, and I’m using the camera to indicate this presence, and a perhaps splintered identity.

I am curious about how we come to know who we are, and what might interrupt those perceptive signals. In the gap of ‘perceptive discrepancies’, where you lose your body for a brief second (an attempt of many of my movement scores), there is a moment of production. This moment of production pushes some other identity through the skin, and it is what I’m attempting to witness, capture, and perform in the works that have come from this practice. The self as a surprising moment within a continuum: a slip, a fissure, an ungrounding.

02 – How did the research impact upon your project and your working practice?

I initially thought the research and practice would be more separate, with the research differently ‘formal’ and sourced through academic writing. However, I came to understand that my performative way of producing text led to a similar performative style of writing. The studio crept into the research. Concepts like hyper-empathy, perceptive discrepancies, and peripheral aesthetics all had their origin and contextualization in the studio. As I continued the research, I also noticed these concepts had a counterpart, or shared a similar definition. For example, in the way I was thinking about perceptive discrepancies, it was sounding very much like Alain Badious’s concept of ‘Event’, which then led me to Zen Satori, and artists like John Cage. Hyper-Empathy led my to Susan Leigh Foster’s writing on kinesthesia and choreographing empathy.

The process of writing was generative in that it helped me deepen and clarify these concepts popping up in the studio. Furthermore, I then found ways of supporting them through the words of others scholars and artists. This helped me to clarify whose work I am not only drawn to, but share a conceptual synergy with. I discovered the lineage I fall into by using the studio practice as a guide.

In moments, the research also opened up a flood of ideas that made me feel quite overwhelmed in the studio. My productivity splintered, because I kept letting the project grow tangentially, when in fact it was time for me to deepen, and produce a finished work. Improvisation can often lead to a state of perpetual production: a ‘sauce’ of endless movement. It was hard to take these concepts and seal them, call them ‘finished’, so I could move forward in the studio. To me, moving forward meant ending my ‘development phase’ of the practice so that I could actually USE it as a practice. I wanted my movement practice to produce a state with a hyper-aware, sensitive, and imaginative charge, and then build FROM THERE. It is an amazing place to go from. It brings me to an open, re-calibrated position, and provides a way of entering other situations with a differently considered body. This is why I decided to finish the year with a handbook – something concrete that could hold the potential improv space for any participant.

I came across a great resource that helped me link my research and studio ideas. It’s a chapter by John Britton in a book called Encountering Ensemble. It helped me consider the pedagogical aspect of this practice, and how to provide specific parameters for collaborators, but also leave space for agency – agency supported by offering these clear parameters. It sounds conflicting, but it’s possible for improvisation to be too open. When no one knows what to do, how to listen, or how to manage situations, it can become an unsatisfying situation. Britton’s writing helped me consider what to offer collaborators, and how to frame improv without pinning it down.

03 – What directions does your project suggest for further research?

Scores and words operate to control and contain a choreographic situation. Apart from language, what other symbols can make these kinds of suggestions? I’m interested in how the space, the way it’s delineated, and the way audiences and performers interact with it, can affect the movements that unfold within. How does space become choreographic, and how do you make a choreographic space?

Throughout this year I’ve been preoccupied with social space, or how the interrelations built within the studio can serve as a social template. How can a way of interacting extend outside the studio? How are social configurations aesthetically produced and instilled choreographically? The way choreographers collaborate is specific, and contains valuable information for a society I perpetual movement and change. Can these principles transcend the studio through performance? Or is some other format required?

Similarly, in my collaboration with Julia and Alicia, I came to consider the space between people as a dynamic territory. What is it that communicates between bodies, and how thin is the line between performative action and pedestrian action? I’m considering subtle performances, or physical interventions, in public for an unknown, and unknowing audience. I believe this kind of practice contains valuable information about what can be communicated in the space between people, even in the absence of a formal performance frame.

Final Process Blog - May 15, 2015

My studio project culminated in a score-based improvisation practice called ‘Exiting Re-Existing’. The goal of this practice is generating different ways of inhabiting the body. It starts with ‘emptying perception’, or a departure from identity and familiar physical imaginings in order to enter a state of  ‘open embodiment’. From this state, the dancer then shifts to ‘activating projection’, using movement scores that allow subconscious material to be reflected back, or made visible, to the dancer. It is this ‘material’ that I believe I cannot impose from the external position of choreographer/author, and opens the practice up to the agency and multiple perspectives of individual participants.

The language in the scores was generated through introspective meditative exercises from which I captured audio recordings of my experience. I described my actions, and allowed them to affect me. This kind of self-surveillance brought an attention to my inner dialogue, but it still maintained a certain performativity brought on by the audio device. I’m interested in what is performed to the self, even in the seemingly private space of thoughts.

This practice/ mode of production has manifested in several projects:

1.     A handbook, with abbreviated text that allows the reader to insert herself into the proposed actions. Accompanying the text are images I made using a scanner – a metaphor for ‘flattening’ the three-dimensionality of the body, and the possibility of seeing it in another way.  Here is the HANDBOOK LINK

2.    A  sound score of the Exiting Re-Existing practice. This score can be followed in-studio.

(I'm interested in making a sound piece using a similar entry point, whereby a dance 'performance' could be presented without the physical presence of the dancer's body. The audience follows the dancer's actions based on her words, descriptions and experiences in the room. I will present this finished piece in Berlin at the summer residency.) 

3.     A performance trio: myself and two collaborators (Alicia Grant and Julia Male) follow and subvert guidance from the sound score (that I composed and edited using my ‘self-talk’ audio recordings). The piece reveals both the influence  of words, and that which is transmitted in the spaces between words. It's about influence, or what isn't said but is still communicated through the subtlety of gesture, intension, and  subconscious transmission. The work was performed in December 2014 in Toronto at Hub 14, and in January 2015 in New York at 100 Grand Dance. It will be performed again in Toronto on May 28th at Dovercourt House

5.     Video documentation turned dance film: I've been making these 10-15 minute pieces throughout the year to reflect my process, but they are presenting themselves as works in their own standing. They combine sound, text, are derivative of the practice, and play with the transformative affects of the camera, its perspective, and a choreographic approach to editing. I will present the finished video piece at the Berlin summer residency.

It is my hope that the meditative affect of my practice will come through in these works, and the possibility for experiencing the body differently could be transmitted to an audience, or participant using the practice. I am interested in the experiment of 'audience as collaborators' in terms of transmitting affect, and experiential tactics for providing an audience access to the practice behind the work.

What these pieces have in common is an attempt to provide space for the viewer to insert herself, her beliefs, her history, ideologies, etc. into the work. I’m interested in how scores can specifically offer this, and the production of their language can come from movement improvisation. Scores offer a metaphor for structure – one that contains and enables movements that are characteristic of said structure. In future research, I’m interested in the relationship between structure and action: how structures affect an ensemble's dynamic within a dance space, but also how the interactions and body-based practices generated from within the dance space can affect ensemble, or 'social' dynamics on the outside. 

Crit Group C Response - April 9, 2015

Had a great chat with crit group C.

Amy responded by saying my most recent video was the closest to a finished work, whereas the the others felt more like documentation. She responded to the minimal frames, whereby not everything was visible in the picture, and she enjoyed wondering what was happening outside the frame. The element of wondering was present for her. She also mentioned a desire to follow me, and enter the exploratory nature of the work with me, if possible, and she brought up the idea of an abstract improv video, where I guide the viewer to doing the scores with me. She mentioned Event for an Unknown Person from the Fluxus workbook. I think this was in response to the Face Score that I tried on the streetcar ride home, and other ideas around furtive practices, or performances for unknowing audiences. I like the idea that even though you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. This makes me think about the work of perception, and the practice I’ve been developing.

Marion felt trapped or enclosed by the space I shot the video in, and proposed it could take on some other dimension. I’ve been thinking about this too. During my crit in New York it was put forth that the space had distracting elements, like the power outlets and ceiling rafters, and I might consider a void space, with a complete absence of visual clutter, perhaps via green screen. Marion suggested hanging fabric, or something to illustrate the walls. She also mentioned she loved the camera work shot from the floor, looking up the wall, and suggested different dimensions of close, medium, and far along these planes. She brought up the notion of an ‘actual projection’, or dancing against a backdrop of my own video image, to see me moving against myself. I like this idea of multiplicity.

Margaret responded to the sounds, and the vocal tones that I layered using a score of ‘finding the middle tone’, as well as the shadows, making her think about Peter Pan, identity, the subconscious… The shadow self came up, and Amy sent me a pdf of The Shadow from a Buddhist Perspective by Jason Espada. The idea of 'exhausting something until something new emerges' came into conversation, and she recommended The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarey, as well as On Longing by Susan Stewart.

Ana also picked up the theme of Identity. This is something that resonates strongly with me, as much of this work is centered on abandoning my perception of identity, or the façade I present to the world that is both in response to the world, and also supports the continuation of things as they are. We are complicit in the perpetuation of communication codes. But there are also small changes over time... Ana also asked me about my intended relationship with the audience, and we discussed my interest in ‘sharing the experience of dancing’. The ‘experiential’ force of the work is something I want to be more direct with in future incarnations. I also loved Ana’s reference to Masters paintings (in response to my Face Score) whereby they captured emotions and states through the face. I then discussed the importance of the score for me in relation to emotion, in that emotion might be depicted, but only by virtue of following the score.

Other references and themes of interest:

Ruth Zaporah Action Theatre

Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

Edward T Hall – anthropologist, The Dance of Life

Transformation

Embodiment

AND we all want to set up a sensory deprivation tank in Berlin. It could happen…

Studio Advisor Meeting - April 9, 2015

GO DEEPER, with attention to completing something.

The question “where is the work?” has returned. I’m curious, but also floating, and Laura has challenged me to complete a piece something by the May 15th deadline.

I’ve returned to the Exiting/Re-existing score, and am transferring it to text to inscribe it as a complete practice that I can then use as a practice. If this is the finished work, then how is it encountered by the reader? The surface, the way the words are played out, a book, a webpage..

Observations from the video:

- There is tension between documentation and performance. This is the closest I’ve gotten to a finished work. I could just complete this video as an option.

- There are some aspects I can only deliver in the video format. What do I want to show, and will I be limiting myself in performance?

- It would be great to step out of my comfort zone and make a video. Especially because I don’t know anything about video. Use my choreographic brain in the editing process...

- How would the work change if it was a video? This will force me to think on what the work is about, and help me focus on my proposal for next year.

- Finish something with ATTENTION to its completion. What are the shades of orange? It’s time to contemplate detail and let go of process. To see things with more clarity rather than a continuum

- the task is not to touch it after it’s done

- look closely at work by other artists I admire

References:

- Nancy Stark Smith ‘The Underscore’ – Broaden first, deepen next.

Realizations:

I’m starting to understand the performative style of my writing. Digging it.

On academia: good writing is good writing. It’s just about being convincing, not ventriloquism. Go to what I know, and what I know about delivering the text.

MCP503 Final Paper

Andrea Spaziani

Research Advisor: Angeliki Avgitidou

MCP 503

15 April 2015

 

Evental Bodies

I. Introduction

II. (Dis)locating the Peripheral Body: Improvisation Movement Strategies

A. Scoring Affect

B. Meditation for Hyper-Empathy

1. Further, Emptier

C. Lines of Disappearance

1. Flow and Rhythmic Event

D. Navigation Strategies

                        1. Reality Vectors

                        2. Emotion Vectors

III. Conclusion

IV. Future Research

 

I. Introduction

‘Difference’ infers the existence of a split: a point at which something becomes other than what it was, or its definition changes. I am interested in this split, and see it as a cavernous fissure, or a ‘Line of Disappearance’, whereby experiential reality slips into subliminal territories. I will consider this split as both temporal, and ‘Evental’: something “...that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things… and emerges seemingly out of nowhere...” (Žižek 2). What intrigues me about this territory is that it emerges indirectly, and unpredictably, through constant flows, fluxes, and movement. If this movement were to be curtailed, delineated, and specified, it could be categorized as choreography, and in the following discussion, I will draw parallels between structured improvisation, choreographic systems, and their potential to produce an Event that generates unpredictable knowledge.

This research positions Event as an experiential shift in the body that leads to a generative moment of reframing. In the activity of reframing, knowledge is produced. This knowledge can belong to the performer, choreographer, or viewer, is generated by the dance, and is retroactively inscribed in language. I will reference improvisation techniques as approaches to producing these shifts, and discuss how its emergence is marked by a moment of ‘perceptive discrepancy’: a gap in experience, and a ‘differently inhabited’ body that opens toward an unforeseeable perspective, characteristic of Zen ‘Satori’: “…the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of the dualistic mind.” (Suzuki 611).

I will consider improvisation and meditative approaches that expand physical attention, and the knowledge acquired from this ‘hyper-empathic’ state as accessed by a ‘peripheral body’. I will reference contemporary choreographers such as Jérôme Bel, Jonathan Burrows, Susan Rethorst, and Mårten Spångberg, Neo-Dada artists such as Yoko Ono, and the postmodern perspectives of Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage. I will also reference my personal artistic research.

I will bring this investigation to the body, the senses, and the subconscious, and discuss techniques that catalyze rifts in perception, enhance ‘peripheral’ senses, and indirectly produce a ‘lost’ notion of self and identity.

II. (Dis)locating the Peripheral Body: Improvisation Movement Strategies

A new form of consciousness, one that takes in the exterior, the landscapes of experience, requires a new aesthetic and more explicitly choreographic practice – a discourse of the body’s interiority, breath, residues, smells, taint of flesh and emotion, moving alongside affective traces of the landscape itself. (Joy 352)

I will begin by addressing what I mean by ‘peripheral body’: that which the senses inform and are within our control, that which the senses inform and are not within our control, and that which the senses do not inform at all, but nonetheless produce a sensorial response via imaginary stimuli. This peripheral territory therefore must include some semblance of fiction, whereby there is no ‘real’ initiating sensation, but an imagined sensation produces a virtual real. Tapping into this territory is a mental exercise of focused attention, or meditation, and it opens the dancer to a re-configured sense of her body.

Dance techniques design attention to the senses in specific ways, forming an inner dialogue between the dancer and her body. This dialogue produces various qualities of choreographic ‘material’ whereby sequences of perceptive stimuli are played out in time, and over space. However, what if these sequences were interrupted, or their signals diverted? What if the specificity to attention is also what dislodged that attention, rendering its source(s) expanded, virtual, or somewhat impossible to grasp within the familiar reality of the body? “Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.” (Solnit 14). The question becomes: how does one go about achieving this lost state? Improvisation is a useful strategy, and how its parameters are constructed and delivered are critical to its efficacy in guiding collaborators toward ‘lost’ experiences, and producing movements by necessity (as opposed to mimesis).

A. Scoring Affect

As Susan Leigh Foster states, both choreography and performance “…offer potential for agency to be constructed via every body’s specific engagement with the parameters governing the realization of each dance.” (5). It is my position (and shared by many) that the improvisation score functions as a common point of departure, and its parameters open towards heterogeneous expression as each individual dancer differently interprets how to carry the score into action. An especially transparent example is seen in Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theatre (2012). Jérôme’s proposals (for example, ‘make up a solo dance to the song of your choice’) are announced one at a time over a microphone, and then the audience witnesses the resulting action, as generated by the performers. The proposals are stark, with minimal descriptions (‘walk out on stage, one at a time, and look at the audience for one minute’) and as the audience observes how they are played out, the audience is also implicated by its own assumptions about the performers. In this case, it appears that Bel removes himself from conventional authorship apart from the score, but it is the score itself that provides the footing upon which the work is extrapolated, no matter how minimal his involvement may appear. The rupture in this instance is within the perspective of the viewer, as representation, and its possible associative prejudices, become the work’s contemplative material.

In regard to this way of working, Claire Bishop writes:

…delegation is not just a one-way, downward gesture. In turn, the performers also delegate something to the artist: a guarantee of authenticity, through their proximity to everyday social reality, conventionally denied to the artist who deals merely with representations. (4660).

It would appear in the case of Disabled Theatre, the authenticity and joyful movements of the performers permeate and transcend the score. It is as if the score, along with the theatre, function to amplify the intensity that is their dance. I posit that it is this intensity that mines a perceptive fissure, and makes way for possible Evental ruptures.

Scores, either improvisational or choreographic, leave the intricacies of action up to the agent/dancer. As these actions unfold in real time, the performers play out spontaneity, chance, and a consideration of circumstances, ignited both by the present moment (via the improvisational score), and the overarching sequence (via the choreographic score). Some approaches leave the options for action more open than Jérôme Bel does, but still require a specific methodology that equips collaborators with tactics for how to deal with various possible encounters.

Usually ‘ensemble’ training has an intention more fundamental than the acquisition of technique; it promotes the development of shared sensibility, enhanced sensitivity, common vocabulary, collective understanding and even… shared ethics. (Britton 274).

What therefore becomes embedded in the score is a system of engagement that determines how to collaborate, and the way performers manage events over the choreographic timeframe.

The subsequent question becomes: how are these scores are produced? Are they pre-imagined, or perhaps invented retroactively by observing what has already emerged in the process? Is the outcome the performance, or is reading the score itself enough? In Jacqueline Baas’ essay The Sound and the Mind, she references Yoko Ono’s ‘instruction painting’ Smoke Painting as “…at once a meditation aid and a comment on the value of painting…” and “…perhaps, best performed in the mind.” (Iverson 100). I assert it is ‘best performed’ in the mental space of the viewer because Ono loses control of the painting’s aesthetic outcome, and therefore her control over its causal effect in favour of an unknowable affect: “…a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness.” (Clough 1).

It is my assertion that this type of affect, or what is in ‘excess of consciousness’, is what makes way for Event. It requires a conscious effort to bypass consciousness, and excavate “… the ‘unknown knowns’, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves.” (Žižek 9). What can their unearthing reveal retroactively, and how can the peripheral body operate to mine the subconscious?

B. Meditation for Hyper-Empathy

John Britton describes the paradox of the ensemble as “…based on relationships between strong individuals.” (320). What tools guide individuals within the ensemble to an egalitarian situation, whereby methods for responding to, and dealing with situations have been clarified for all? In my practice of locating my peripheral body, I have also developed and captured a technique for collaborators to locate theirs.

The power is no longer in becoming authentic, but indeed, in the production of simulacra as simulacra. Translated to bodily practices this means, simply, to invert somatic practices. Fake them, invent them, and perhaps we can find another body hidden away somewhere under a forgotten chair, or in a vacant space next to. (Spångberg 121)

Inspired by Spångberg’s rhetoric, I performed a fake meditation practice alone in a studio. I captured it on an audio recording device while I was doing it, while I was inventing it, and also while I was being affected by it. In playing back the audio score, it guides the listener through two activities: emptying perception, and activating projection. These activities are meant to bring forth a new way of sensing the body, and transmit or project this new body into the space. This exercise disrupts, and redirects signals delivered by the senses, rendering the body ‘porous’ and its actions ‘phantasmic’. The resulting perception of the once familiar body is lost, and rendered as a formless form, even though a kind of shadow sensation is still ‘present’. From this territory of emptying, the body becomes an open trajectory of desire, or a subconscious playground, and receives information through disoriented, peripheral, and refracted senses.

It is in this state that the peripheral body has become activated, and its movements become ‘Hyper Empathic’, as it simultaneously integrates and projects, or consumes and heaves, the perceptive reality of the objects, persons, and/or movements within the peripheral body’s imaginary reach. This stretched perception elicits an immediate kinesthetic response. It is a proactive strategy in that it 'takes' sensation, and then immediately embodies and enacts it, therefore 'giving' sensation back to the ensemble through movement. It is a dance that produces itself, as the dancer projects her/his “…three-dimensional structure into the energy and action of the other.” (Leigh Foster, 10)

The score for this mediation also ‘produced itself’ through my improvised meditation. The words, images, and concepts were all derived in the moment of their inception. In this way, I allowed the dance to think, and the words to become an emergent byproduct. The moments of linguistic recognition were captured in the immediate moments after the dance produced them, which according to Alain Badiou, could indicate Evental emergences:

…the only way of fixing an event is to give it a name, to inscribe it within the “there is” as a supernumerary name. The event itself is never anything besides its own disappearance. Nevertheless, an inscription may detain the event, as if at the gilded edge of loss. The name is what decides upon having taken place. Dance would then point toward thought as event, but before this thought has received a name – at the extreme edge of its veritable disappearance; in its vanishing, without the shelter of a name. (61)

1. Further, Emptier

“If you are thinking ‘about’ (or having opinions about) what you are doing, you are not fully doing it.” (Britton 320)

How does one go about emptying perception? In the Zen notion of Satori, there must be “… a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for new life; there must be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from a hitherto undreamed-of angle of observation.” (Suzuki 771-772). John Cage offered these new angles of observation, whereby found sounds, or framed silences, brought attention to sonic possibilities of composition, and to noticing the fullness of the material carved out by the compositional frame. “If one is making something which is to be nothing, the one making must love and be patient with the material he chooses. Otherwise he calls attention to the material, which is precisely something…” (Cage 114)

In attempting to empty perception, one must first exhaust the senses, render them mute, and position them in the background, in order for some other provisional capacity to make itself known. For example, I’ve been working on expanded capacities of the gaze, and in one exercise I guide dancers to focus their eyes on something in the room, widen to a peripheral gaze from that position, and then move toward something blurry within their field of vision. Eventually, the peripheral landscape takes on a new life through this new attention to it. However, it can only ever exist as a peripheral landscape, because its features disappear, or change in definition when attempting to move towards them, or ‘see’ them. There is curious information in this blurry territory that is alluring, magnetic, and only exists when not looking at it directly as it is held in the peripheral body’s expanded senses.

Similarly, I made a physical meditation that guides the dancer to emptying her gross anatomy throughout the space, dispersing skin, fluids, muscles, and bones across various points in the room. The duration and imagery of this exercise (including actual fatigue) leads to a numbing of delineations, or a formless form, that is experienced like an electrical 'current'. “Satori comes upon a man unawares, when he feels he has exhausted his whole being.” (Suzuki 742). It is from this place of energy emanating from an exhausted form that a new form can be imagined, and the subconscious can project out along imaginary vectors of intensity. The score can craft these vectors.

C. Lines of Disappearance

In any dance situation, and at its most reductive, the dancer’s movement options are to go with, go against, or to change. It is my argument that this moment of ‘change’ is what marks a physical discrepancy as a dramatically ‘felt’ fissure. I call this fissure a ‘Line of Disappearance’, similarly described by cultural theorist Paul Carter as “…the arc of a spear in flight as a relational connection between two spaces made visible through its passage.” (Joy 475), but perhaps without the necessity of a ‘relational connection’. Sometimes incompatibilities are equally productive…

You will only come to know this change if you embark on it. It has to be carved out by the dance. It is the space between existence and non-existence, here or there, one perception of reality and another. It produces difference in the sense that something is not the same anymore. This change happens in time. It is something to notice. It could hold the key to a work’s context, set off a trail of investigation, or help build a lexicon of material to build from. It could also be nothing. Whatever it is, it can emerge as both a research tool, and a distinguishing performance trait.

(Simone Forti) scattered bits and pieces of rags and wood around the floor, landscape-like. Then she simply sat in one place for a while, occasionally changed her position or moved to another place. I don’t know what her intent was, but for me what she did brought the god-like image of the dancer down to human scale more effectively than anything I had seen. (Rainer 195-196)

1. Flow and Rhythmic Event

How is flow, a force that burrows out cavernous rock, rivers, landscapes, or mental spaces, responsible for cracking the ground in half and producing a Line of Disappearance? How can flow shatter the configuration of the body, self, or identity, rendering it incompatible with previous definitions?

In movement, I consider flow not as a singular, unperturbed stream, but rather something that is pixilated and unpredictable, and its unpredictability allows it to carry affect. It is pure inertia along a series of corners, a rogue bicycle bumping downhill, light refracting through elements in deep space, or a river that curbs, flips, and bumps over a textured rock bed. “Flow is an accident of the attempts to get from one event to the next event... However, if you let everything flow then we’ll have nothing against which to read the flow.” (Burrows 118). The tiny moments that redirect flow are what I consider Rhythm, and these blips, or the timing of when these blips happen, give texture and dimension to choreography.

To engage in flow, is also to engage in rhythm, as the stops, starts, and changes form bridges for flow to travel along. In order to test the material of these bridges, one must experiment with rhythm, and then wait and see how flow moves along. For example, I set the improvisation task of ‘Always going a little bit too far’, which results in both a delayed and urgent rhythm to each step, as if each step is necessary by virtue of saving myself from toppling over. The result is a strange grappling dance of near misses, where flow is momentarily interrupted as it tries to connect between moving targets. In the moment right before falling, there is an essential grab for the next rhythmic post, or ‘step’. It is in this moment of wild flow, between steps, that I am temporarily not myself. I am suspended from judgment, ability, identity, and self. It is a miniature Line of Disappearance, where difference is etched out by provisional actions of the peripheral body.

I think ‘rhythm’ is another word for ‘score’.

“With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like that of body and soul.” (Cage 92)

I think ‘flow’ is another word for ‘grace’.

Grace also carries affect.

D. Navigation Strategies

The point of becoming lost is what is gained in becoming ‘unlost’.

To navigate the seas of improvisation, strategies are essential in order to bring the flows of movement into representation, semiotic encoding, and see that the work becomes a work. This notion of ‘becoming’ implies a trajectory, a vector, and an outward propulsion from the internal life of the creative process. To connect more than one Line of Disappearance is to create a sequence. This sequence can be used as a compass, and it can be captured, for example in the text of a score, or on video, in order to fasten it and hold the future space of the dance.

1. Reality Vectors

The dancer holds a position in space. In this position, she visualizes a small, concentrated area of the body: a ‘heat-ball’. She then visualizes a trajectory of this heat ball along a specific vector through space: right elbow arcing towards studio light bulb. Without any physical preparation, the dancer ‘sees’ this path until it is absolutely clear, and proceeds to thrust the heat-ball along its imagined vector. It never works. The body never follows the precise trajectory of the imagination. What is experienced is a discrepancy between perceived reality and imagined reality, in what becomes a rift is reality itself. What is more real: the projected path or the physical outcome? Virtual action or embodied action? What is gained or lost in this rift? “…we leave behind our false Self not when we keep reality at a distance, but precisely when we totally, without reserve, ‘fall’ into it, abandon ourselves to it.” (Zizek 56).

2. Emotion Vectors

The difference between emotion and mood is that emotion points towards something. “I love you, I hate squirrels, I’m proud of myself,” and so on. These vectors project out from the subject, point at something, and an emotion is identified retroactively that points back to the subject. This implies circularity.

These emotion vectors can create circularity between dancers, or pushing and pulling at the same time: a give and take. For example, if we go back to the peripheral body as 'taking' hyper-empathic sensation that is then immediately projected outwards, and then place another person engaged in that same activity within spatial proximity, a circularity comes into play, whereby empathic signals are coming from the other person, and are also being projected back towards her, which she again projects in return. This closed system of simultaneously sending and receiving the subconscious by virtue of the peripheral body (receiving) and the projected imaginary (sending) presents a strange magnetism. The vectors are trapped, orbiting between, and because they still have ‘directionality’ they have the ability to carry emotion, both towards the other person, and simultaneously towards the self. Am I sending you ‘joy’, or do I feel joy because you are fulfilling my desire for joy? What does this dance look like? What is it to see yourself through another person’s body – a body you are also affecting?

In his Following Piece (1969) “…Vito Acconci set himself the task of following a randomly selected stranger walking in the street while remaining himself unobserved… he called this activity ‘Performing myself through another agent’.” (Iverson 16). This is also just ‘what we do’, but by taking it to a precipice of attention and amplification, perhaps it could be used to further test the perceptive discrepancies produced between bodies, and peer into the Lines of Difference erected by the subconscious.

III. Conclusion

Every genuine instance of thinking is subtracted from the knowledge in which it is constituted. Dance is a metaphor for thought precisely inasmuch as it indicates, by means of the body, that a thought, in the form of its evental surge, is subtracted from every preexistence of knowledge. (Badiou 66)

The productive force of the dancing body, in both the dancer’s internal experience, and what is transmitted through performance, has the capacity to disorient and transcend habitual modes of perception. These interruptions bring conscious attention to the present moment, and reveal a spectrum of knowledge perhaps incongruous with daily existence. To notice something within the familiar, that also transcends the familiar, is a productive moment. Dance knows this well. Dance relies on its techniques to attend to the physical challenge of a moment, but at the same time, makes way for an underlying flow of affect, carrying new kinds of knowledge that cannot be predicted. Dance is therefore an opportunity for an encounter that is simultaneously operating above and beneath the surface. It is pinned by its parameters within time over space, the implications of representation, and the limits of language, but it stretches outwards towards an intensity that exists in its own disappearance. Its meanings emerge within this vacancy – just look closer.

IV. Future Research

It is my position that 'how' an artist deploys action within the choreographic framework is what determines the balance of control and agency within the creative process, rendering it a possible template for social processes. How we engage determines what we make. I will introduce this line of research to a choreographic consideration of ‘social’ space: the active space between and surrounding bodies.

 

 

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. "Dance as a Metaphor for Thought." Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Standford: Stanford UP, 2005. 57-71. Print. Badiou’s essay discusses the relationship between dance, Event, and the emergence of genuine thought. He takes the position that dance, as a technique combining restraint and abandon, mimics a thought ‘remained undecided’ as they are both un-fixed. If the emergence of genuine thought is to be considered an ‘Event’ (a spontaneous and non-causal emergence), and an Event is unfixed and pre-linguistic (as the only way to fix an Event is to inscribe it in language) then it can be said that dance points towards the moment before both Event, and genuine thought can be inscribed in language. Therefore dance should not function as a causal communicator or information that is already preconceived, as this is conversely the function of theatre.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Kindle file. Claire Bishop unpacks the social art practice as a trend originating in the 1990’s with post-relational art. She describes an attempt to counter the commoditization of the art object through an alternative preoccupation with participation and collaboration on part of the viewer as ‘co-producer’. Situations have replaced objects, and recent art history may be more aptly seen through a lens of theatre and performance.

Britton, John. "'Self-with-Others': A Psychophysical Approach to Training the Individual in Ensemble." Encountering Ensemble. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 273-362. Print. An approach to collaboration, training attention, and working with a performance ensemble not as a whole, but a collection of strong individuals. Britton’s pedagogy describes a practical learning curve that includes processes for embodiment, use of the senses, scores and physical action, listening, reflection, and other principles to create a cohesive and democratic environment for an ensemble to function, while maintaining individual agency. It is a useful guide for collaborative creative processes and performance tactics that craft responsiveness to the present moment.

Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer's Handbook. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010. Print. A handbook of practical tools, definitions, and approaches to making choreographic work that considers how to navigate the complexities of composition. Using open-ended questions drawn from Burrows’ experience as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer, he references practical uses of scores, specifically related to time signatures and text, and the semiotic implications of structural elements in performance work.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Pdf file. A collection of lectures and autobiographical stories related to his work in indeterminacy in music composition, and composition for dance (in particular Merce Cunnungham) that incorporate Zen principles of emptiness, and ‘found’ or non-deliberate sound in his compositions. Particular chapters of interest include ‘Lecture on Nothing’ and ‘Four Statements on the Dance’ that reconsider the materials of dance and music, as well as shared rhythmic devices.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean O'Malley Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Kindle file. A compilation of essays relating to the ‘affective turn’ within humanities and social sciences, relating emotion and the body to social phenomenon, technologies that represent the body, and founded Baruch Spinoza’s theories on Affect which relates the thinking mind and the acting body as parallel, but having an indeterminate causality. To transform “passions into actions” is thus an effort of an internal schema that subverts external influences (including cultural and political), and makes a case for contemporary practices of sensitivity and open embodiment.

Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge, 2011. Kindle file. Foster investigates the intrinsic connection between dancer and viewer, and ‘choreography’, ‘kinesthesia’, and ‘empathy’ as tied into the specific composition of dance movements that produces affect between bodies, and generates a shared feeling. Drawing upon theories on performativiity and the self, Foster bridges audience and dancer by way of the choreographic attention to ‘how’ physical material is constructed, and it is the meticulous crafting of ‘how’ that acts as the mechanism for producing an empathetic response from the viewer.

Žižek, Slavoj. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin, 2014. Print. Zizek examines the concept of Event from the perspectives of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, and pop-culture. He defines Event as something divergent, shocking, and interrupting the flow of regular relations. He uses the following categories to unpack possible evental occurrences: the disintegration of a frame through which reality appears, a religious Fall, Budddhist Enlightenment, Truth, the self as evental occurrence, illusion, trauma, flow, political rupture, and the undoing of an event.

Iversen, Margaret, ed. Chance: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. Print. An anthology of biographical and autobiographical portrayals of contemporary artists who invite indeterminacy, unknowingness, and uncertainty into their practices, and leave the outcome of their pieces open to effects that are un-authored. It illuminates strategies and perspectives on how and why an artist might choose to surrender his/her agency over to another kind of author. There are many references to the use of scores, including Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Bruce Nauman, and Allan Kaprow.

Joy, Jenn. The Choreographic. Cambridge: MIT, 2014. Kindle file. Joy’s book on takes a contemporary look at the choreographic in terms of an attitude, an approach, or a trajectory that extends across distances, as opposed to a fixed or closed operation. She references the work of artists such as Meg Stuart, DD Dorvillier, Jeremy Wade, and Miguel Gutierrez (among others), and grapples with dances that evade representation, counter linguistic signification, enact philosophical contexts and produce knowledge, enact feminist theories that link to conditions of placelessness, and attempt to move away from inscription and causal relations, although impossible.

Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006. Pdf file. Lepecki examines the work of contemporary European and North American choreographers who challenge conventionally upheld and reproduced ideologies that categorize dance, and it’s bind with movement, arguing that dance’s “relation to movement is being exhausted”. He relates dance’s unity to movement to the epoch of modernity, and how this relationship has been used to legitimize dance, and characterize experimental approaches as insignificant, or non-dance. In addition to movement, he investigates other polemic elements including: solipsism, the linguistic materiality of the body, stillness, the vertical plane, racism, politics, and the melancholic drive. Artists mentioned include: Bruce Nauman, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy, Jerome Bel, Trisha Brown, La Ribot, William Pope.L, and Vera Mantero.

Rainer, Yvonne. Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. Print. Rainer’s autobiography, detailing her involvement as a dancer, choreographer, and co-founder of the Judson Church, the New York art scene from the late 1950’s and early 60’s, and her postcolonial and feminist films of the 70’s and 80’s. Alongside details of her life, influences, and how she constructed her dances and films, she portrays the parallel careers of her colleagues, including Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, whose work reflected the post-modern climate, and politically driven concerns.

Rethorst, Susan. A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. Helsinki: Theatre Academy Helsinki, 2012. Print. A collection of autobiographical essays reflecting Rethorst’s phenomenological approach to the body as an untranslatable archive of knowledge that can be trusted to navigate the choreographic process. She proposes an intuitive approach to constructing dances, and recognizes the inescapability of a creator’s subjectivity, and authenticity in determining the emergence of meaning, expression, and content. She works from ‘proposals in action’ and continuous self-evaluation in order to position her work as self-revelatory.

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking, 2005. Print. Solnit’s book positively uncovers presence through absence, or abandoning the familiarity of known internal and external territories in order to re-orient along another mode of existence. Through personal and historical stories, she illustrates encountering the present by virtue of lost-ness, or entering the void in order to discover a hidden potentiality.

Spångberg, Mårten. Spangbergianism. Stockholm: S.n., 2011. Pdf file. Spangberg presents a work of choreography through text. Crafted over a typical dance rehearsal timeframe of three months, he exorcises a series of essays that annihilate and upend the European dance market, common tropes, studio practices, and even his own dysfunction in making work that is not more of the same, or conventional. He criticizes the dance world in a cathartic cry, and motivates readers to consider how global capitalism has infiltrated dance’s modes of production, identity politics, and the very core of creativity. He proposes strategies for bypassing subjective desire in making art. He references the philosophical writing of Deleuze and Guittari, and proposes tactics for creating rifts in order to collapse the influences of capitalism.

Suzuki, D.T. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New ed. N.p.: Stellar, 2014. Kindle file. A guide to the foundational concepts of Zen, and made from a collection of articles written for the "New East" published in Japan in 1914. Suzuki discusses 'Satori', or the acquiring of a new viewpoint, through allegorical examples, and the rigorous discipline of Zen that brings attention to that which operates outside logic and dualism.

 

Process Blog: April 15, 2015

Performative writing.

I’ve gone back to the Exiting/Re-existing score, but inscribing it in text and audio.

I’ve been expanding it to include more physical, perceptive, and projective functions and activities I’ve tested in the studio.

My process has been:

Start with the category (ie, ‘bones’)

Move from the bones for 20-30 minutes in the studio.

Exhaust their movement possibilities.

As descriptive words emerge, say them aloud (and record via audio)

Write down the score-version of this exercise on poster paper (I’ve always had an affinity for poster paper. It makes me write differently, and it has a presence when hung in the studio)

Edit an abbreviated audio clip. (approximately 10 minutes)

This is what the bones score looks like, and some others too:

Exiting categories include:

Skin, Breath, Fluids, Muscles, Bones, Fascia, Nerves, Emotion/Guts, Digestion, Attention, Smell

Re-existing (Projection) categories include:

The Gaze, Words, Representation, Rhythm, Expectations, Vectors, Balance, Copying, Sound, Wrapping, Taste

I also made some drawings. I used the following improv task:

‘Move the pen until something I can identify emerges.

Keep going.’

There’s something about ‘waiting for the moment of identification’ that has been present throughout the entire year…

Laura has asked me to complete one piece by the May 15th deadline, I think this is it. I want to wrap it up and put it away. I also want to use it, experience it as a practice, and stop adding to it.

I’ll have to consider how to present this work. Angeliki proposed a handbook. I like this idea, but have always had an affinity for poster paper. It makes me write differently, and when hung in the studio it has a presence.

Bold statements on big paper.

Perhaps a handbook with a poster insert.

Perhaps this is the second incarnation of Lone Dancer.

Also, I took Laura’s advice about experiencing other people’s practices over the past month. My experiences were both related to language. I worked on a verbatim dance project with Catherine Murray, and a dance theatre production with Meagan O’Shea. Both positioned dance in relation to language differently. The verbatim project was a method for generating movement from language (specifically from interviews), and the dance theatre project used narrative to enact dance. However, both started with language and moved toward dance.

I want to be careful about how I frame my connection to language. I want to make sure that it’s a byproduct of movement, and that it’s generated through the body, and not vice versa. It attempts, but doesn’t’ fully capture, the movement poetry of dance, and it therefore needs the dance. It provokes movement because it needs to be fulfilled through the dance’s intensity. More on this to come.

For fun:

I’ve been playing with furtive practices this month, specifically one related to representation, and noticing my outward appearance, and its possible interpretations. I performed a face score (as seen in the last two process videos) in which I used the following score:

‘Follow the sensations of the face like a pen dragging across paper.

Continuous.

Stop when you notice a face that has a name, be it a Feeling, a State, a Mood, an Attitude.

Just notice this face, don’t judge it.

Continue.’

I tried it on the subway home. It can be extremely subtle. It makes me aware of my internal dialogue and at the same time, my perceived outward mood.

Crit Group C - April 9, 2015

I’m still churning out this meditative, score-based, improvisation practice, and doing it mostly alone. It produces an inner dialogue/words, helps me abandon my identity, and changes the way I inhabit my body. I’m thinking about improvisation as a ‘mode of production’, and the moments when I arrive at ‘identification’ (or words/images that indicate what I’m doing come out) as ‘vectors’. These vectors point at words, they point towards signifiers, they are my subconscious pushing through my skin, and they form allusions that can catalyze the viewer to find multiple meanings.

My questions at this point are:

  1. What is the work of perception?
  2. How can I inhabit my body differently? How do other people inhabit their bodies? What affects this?
  3. How do you hold an opening? (I’m considering improvisation an opening, so how do you hold the improv space?

PART 1

Here’s my latest process video.

Some things I’m playing with are:

1) Always step ‘too far’:

In this movement improv, I’m trying to take steps that are uncomfortably too big.

This was inspired by the idea that an emotion always has an object (ex/ I’m afraid of ‘you’, I love this ‘beer’, I’m proud of ‘myself’) and therefore has a vector that points at something. I then imagined the emotion-vector of a person who, for example, desires closeness: a close-talker, or someone who is overly confident of him/herself, and therefore always steps ‘too far’. There are lots of ways to interpret this.  

I’m trying to take emotion into space as a physical action or trajectory.

I’m thinking about it in relationship to my definition of ‘social space’ as the space ‘between’ people.

If I were to do this dance with another person, I would try giving her an opposing emotion-vector task, like 'repeat each step twice, the second time retreating'. This may be indicative of a person fearful of close proximities, for example. There are still lots of ways to interpret this.

In short, I’m thinking about emotion-vectors that establish spatial relationships as a way of setting up dramatic action between dancers. I need to test this.

2) Sound: Where is the centre?

My score is:

Sing a note.

Sing another note, higher or lower.

Sing the note at the exact centre between the higher and lower notes.

Repeat.

3) Shadows:

How do they play, how do they alter images? What are the shadows of my mind? Are they represented by the text that comes through?

4) Face score:

Follow the sensations of the face like a pen dragging across paper.

Continuous.

Stop when you notice a face that has a Name, a Feeling, a State, a Mood, or an Attitude.

Just notice this face, don’t judge it.

Continue.

This score makes me aware of facial movements, and at the same time it makes me aware of how I think they could be perceived, or what they might look like from the exterior. It is a study on representation, and can be transmitted to include the whole body, whereby iconic positions come through. This score helps build a lexicon of images that each dancer can produce him/herself.

This score can be extremely subtle. I tried it out on the streetcar home. I almost missed my stop…

4) Reconfiguring existence by reconfiguring the camera position:

The wall starts to look like the edge of the earth. The corner starts to look like a doorway. I’m thinking of this approach as an alternative to the GoPro footage I shot in the fall.

Questions for you:

  1. What do you notice?
  2. What was your experience watching the video?

PART 2:

In continuation from NYC, I’m still working on Emptying Perception and Activating Projection. The score on emptying projection is almost finished. I extended it to include emptying all of the physical catergories I could think of (I shared an audio recording of this with you in the fall. It is long. It included skin, fluids, muscles, and briefly bones. Honi tried it with me in NYC. She exclaimed “I feel like I have a different body!” afterward and I smiled. I interpreted her response as success).

Here are photos of the scores written out. I thought this would be faster to communicate than the audio versions. They are provocations that lead to improvised movement. The premise is to render these physical categories ‘mute,’ or to ‘exhaust' them and thus enable a different experience of the body to emerge. Something beyond the familiar. Something projected from a formless form.

There are some drawings here too. I'm interested in how they were made. I used an improv task:

Move the pen until something I can identify emerges. 

Keep going.

There’s something about ‘waiting for the moment of identification’ that is registering strongly for me in all of this work.

I talked to my friend Irvin, a dance artist and Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor. He said some of the words I was using like “calcification” and “drying out” made him think about mummification and death rituals. I’ve done some Buddhist death visualization exercises. Perhaps more on this. However, the purpose of all of this emptying is what happens AFTER, and how the doer proceeds to 'rebuild' life through an expanded sensorial experience/ projection exercise/ utopian consciousness. What kind of dance can come from THIS state, this mode of operation? Can the dancer become more responsive to stimuli, more empathic, more aware of how she interacts?

This was a lot. Sorry friends. I hope it was somewhat clear. I’d love any suggestions, insights, or references, you might have.

Studio Advisor Meeting - March 11, 2015

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

Process Blog 5: March 15, 2015

The feeling I’m not alone/ I think this is a solo for three selves

Shadow, the present absence, and pushing through the skin: all of this material is an introduction to other parts of myself, and the binary between self and other has become less stark in contrast. Going deeper. The shadow metaphor for the shadow self is a test in response to feedback from NYC. It transmits a kind of multiplicity – a  trace and also a foreshadowing – that moves with the body, in unison with the body, but is a fractured representation that also modifies the features of the subject. More on shadows to come… Thinking about Nietchze’s theory of midday (LOOK up artist), when there is no visible difference between the object and its shadow. Looking into more Rebecca Solnit, and Plato’s cave, and how no representation is ever complete. There’s something about shadow captured by video that interests me – where is the subject in relation to her shadow, where is the subject in relation to the camera… Sometimes the shadow has its own life. This looks like an exorcism.

I tried floating in and out of the frame more, to play off the fixed position of the camera and its limited peripheral sightlines. Instead I’m thinking about the blurry images as ‘peripheral’ so the body becomes a globular outline, a mass of fuzz, and not the representation of a person in the same way that the focused image delivers.

I’m experimenting with the axis of the wall and changing the plane of the camera. This offers a kind of disorientation that is differently dizzying than the GoPro stuff from the Fall because in moments, even though it’s obvious that I’m moving against wall, the body becomes something else. It is suspended with a different sense of gravity. I’m noticing this month how the camera is a tool for transferring the meditative affect of physiological change via changes in attention.

Where the two walls meet presents an opportunity to represent difference. Two screens, meeting at a porous intersection, and then me: it is a unison trio. Trio A thank you Yvonne Rainer. Sometimes the shadows appear to have their own agency, as if their movements are independent of mine. The difference between a body and the representation of a body, as filtered through lens, lights, sound, etc. The formation of identity is also the splintering of identity.

A happy accident: there is a reflection on the floor for one dance sequence. I remember a piece that was entirely viewed through the floor reflection (LOOK UP, mtl artist), with the curtain lowered to only reveal shins and feet, and the rest was seen through the floor. The way reflection distorts physical orientation could be useful to pursue.

I’ve been working with vectors in previous dance scores, and noticing the difference between imagined pathways and physical outcomes of actually traversing those pathways. The imagination doesn’t calculate.

What if emotions were also considered vectors, since they are only emotions (and not moods) because they reference something (mad at someone, proud of myself, afraid of bears, etc). Emotions are thus relational and imply energetic movement towards or away from their object of interest. If they move, then they are also fluid. Can they have a material presence in dance form? I thought about people who talk too close to your face, or operate with different measurements for negotiating space. I translated this into a movement proposal of continuously ‘stepping a little bit too far’. I like the urgency of this study, and the quality that emerges, where hesitancy, calculation, and grappling, provisional movements, all pull at each other. This proposal is at the brink of something. It makes me think of walking down stairs, and thinking there’s an extra step, but the floor hits surprisingly sooner than the mind had calculated for, sending the knees buckling.

Emotion as vector creeps into the face movement improv, although with more subtlety, referencing pedestrian signifiers. I keep remembering that the biggest distance is the space between two heads. I think I heard that in a movie. I watch myself in these videos and feel the same distance, between my present head and my video head(s). The gap between selves: maybe this is the perceptive line of difference I’ve been locating?

A movement improv often reads as something other than the parts of its construction/ more than what I’m actually doing. The desire, or automatic activity to produce meaning is there, whenever the other/object of difference is encountered.

The sound score this week is more of a collage. I layered drone hums from a score where I sung a note, then a different note, and then wherever I thought the perfect centre note would be between the two. A, C, B. Singing the zero.

1 + 1 = 0

My friend Coman introduced me to this Buddhist riddle.

Maybe it should read 1 + (-1) = 0

The collage includes more blatant overlapping of the sounds from within the room, the camera itself (focusing), rehearsal music from within the room, and my inner voice (singing and dialogue). They become cacophonous, but also form a wash of noise that the viewer has to make selections from in order to hear anything specific. Interior and exterior found sounds, and a selective listener. Is this the active/passive binary of participatory art?

Next: rhythm as a force for representation and structuring choreography.

MCP 503 Draft Paper

I. Introduction

II. (Dis)locating the Peripheral Body: Improvisation Movement Strategies

          A. Meditation for Hyper-Empathy

                    1. Emptying Perception and Activating Projection

          B. Generative Ruptures

                    1. Flow and Rhythmic Event

          C. Navigation Strategies

                    1. Prefixes and Modifiers

       2. Vector, Emotion, and Dynamic Sublime

III. Choreographic Structures: The Score

          A. Deploying Action: The Choreographic Body

IV. Future Research

---

I. Introduction

‘Difference’ infers the existence of a split: a point at which something is no longer itself, or its definition changes. I am interested in this split, and see it as a cavernous fissure, or a line of disappearance, whereby reality slips into liminal (space) and subliminal (consciousness) territories. I will consider the emergence of difference as ‘Evental’ (Quote: Zizek, Event). What intrigues me about this territory is that it is never fixed, and emerges indirectly through constant flows, fluxes, and movement. If this movement were to be curtailed, delineated, and specified, it could fall into the realm of choreography, and in the following discussion, I will draw parallels between the emergence of Events, and structured improvisation, in a choreographic consideration of movement. This research seeks to understand difference by exploring the possibility of inhabiting the body differently, how improvisation techniques offer an entry point into doing so, and how this newly inhabited body might interact when a dramatic reframing of reality has been produced.

I will reference improvisation techniques as approaches to locating Event, and discuss how its emergence is marked by a moment of ‘perceptive discrepancy’: a dramatic perceptive shift of the everyday, which is also a characteristic of Zen ‘Satori’: (Quote: Suzuki, Intro to Zen Buddhism).

I will consider this enhanced physical attention as a ‘peripheral body’, the actions from this charged space of attention as performance, and the space between bodies as ‘social’ space. I will reference contemporary choreographers such as Jerome Bel, Jonathan Burrows, Dave St. Pierre, Keith Hennessey, William Forsythe, and Marten Spangberg, and Judson Church, Fluxus, and Neo-Dada artists such as Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage. I will also reference my personal artistic research.

I will bring this investigation to the body, the senses, and the subconscious, or ‘shadow self’, and discuss techniques that catalyze rifts in perception, enhance ‘peripheral’ senses, and indirectly produce a ‘lost’ notion of self. I will then introduce this investigation to the ‘social’, or the space between bodies, and consider how the choreographic process resembles a micro-society, providing a template to play time within space under a series of conditions that test an artistic proposal through actions of the body. But what if one could inhabit the body differently, and extend the perceptive abilities of the body into the space beyond its physical borders? This moment of fissure could then extend out into the social space, the space of interactions, and become a territory for generating and performing Evental difference.

II. (Dis)locating the Peripheral Body: Improvisation Movement Strategies

What is ‘difference’ from the perspective of a peripheral body? I will first address what I mean by peripheral body: that which the senses inform and are within our control, that which the senses inform and are not within our control, and that which the senses do not inform at all, but nonetheless produce a sensorial response via imaginary stimuli. This peripheral territory therefore must include some semblance of fiction, whereby there is no ‘real’ initiating sensation, but an imagined sensation produces a constructed real. Tapping into this territory is a mental exercise of focused attention, or meditation, and it opens the dancer to a re-configured sense of her body.

Dance techniques design attention to the senses in very specific ways, forming an inner dialogue between the dancer and her body. This dialogue produces various qualities of the choreographic ‘material’. This dialogue is also what distinguishes one body from another, feet from floor, right arm from left hand, or ‘difference’, and the dancer can learn to track, memorize, and repeat these subtle differences over the course of a performance, rehearsal, class, etc. Much of dance history includes works that are composed by this process of encoding and replicating sequences of differential stimuli. However, what if, at the heart of the technique itself, is an attempt to blur this inner dialogue, to unharness the focal point, and lose the pathway? What if the activity itself – of precise focused attention – is also what dislodges that attention, and renders the source of attention, and the information it is gathering, somewhat impossible to grasp? The resulting actions of this dancer’s body become of a provisional nature, an explosive exorcism, or a necessary recovery that could not be preconceived, and are OF the technique. The body produces the expression, by necessity, and by way of a conceptual entry point, as opposed to a physical duplication. It is from this perspective that I will discuss improvisation as a generative tool. (Quote: Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Jen Joy, The Choreographic).

There are many examples of improvisation methodologies that offer conceptual entry points that catalyze movement, affect its qualities, or establish relationships between dancers within time and/or space. I will focus on those that deploy scores, or language-based proposals, which describe a framework for action, but leave the resulting intricacies up to the agency of the dancer (and sometimes spectator) in real time. This interpretive response often becomes part of the fabric of the work, whereby spontaneity, chance, and a continual assessment of the circumstances are played out in real time. This approach requires a specific kind of training, whereby attention and listening become differently activated than when a dancer is replicating movement. (Quote: John Britton, Encountering Ensemble, Jonathan Burroughs, A Choreographer’s Handbook re: score definition, and Exhausting Dance, Andre Lepecki, plus examples: Simone Forti, Jerome Bel, Dave St. Pierre)

In an ensemble, the improvisational model allows collaborators to contribute from within the process, and foster a work that ‘produces itself’ in terms of its final expression. What therefore becomes scored is a system of engagement that determines how to collaborate, and how to manage events over the choreographic engagement. These scores can include a myriad of descriptive features, including dramaturgical materials, causal relationships, images, spatial parameters, time delineations, and if there is any room to make concessions or deviate from the score itself, etc. The subsequent question then becomes: how are these scores are produced? Are they pre-imagined, or are they invented retroactively by observing what has already emerged in the process? Or are they a combination? Do they strategize a predictable effect, or do they open up towards an unknowable affect? (Quote: Patricia Clough, The Affective Turn) Is the outcome the performance, or is reading the score itself enough? (Quote: Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly, Keith Hennessey, re: Dance on Economy, Yoko Ono re: Grapefruit). It is my assertion that in order to open the process up to Event, then affect must be in play, and in order to open up to affect, then the score must open towards a previously unknowable outcome. The performer enters the score with: “I am prepared, but I don’t know what is going to happen.”

A. Meditation for Hyper-Empathy

The paradox of an ensemble is that it is composed of strong individuals (Quote: John Britton, Encountering Ensemble re: paradox). What tools are offered that guide individuals within the ensemble to an egalitarian situation, whereby methods for responding to, and dealing with situations have been clarified for all? In my practice of locating my peripheral body, I have also developed a technique for collaborators to locate theirs.

This technique is a meditation, whereby an audio score guides the listener through two activities: emptying perception, and activating projection. These activities are meant to bring forth a new way of sensing the body, and then transmit or project this new body into the space. This transformative mental exercise consciously disrupts, and redirects signals delivered by the senses, rendering the body ‘porous’ and its actions ‘phantasmic’: embodying and projecting the subconscious into the space. The resulting perception of the once familiar body is lost, rendered as a formless form, even though a kind of sensation is still ‘there’. From this territory of emptying, the present notion of the body can then only be an imaginary projection, a trajectory of desire, or a subconscious playground. This body is a manifestation of disoriented, peripheral, and refracted senses.

It is in this state, where conscious reality and the imagination are operating in tandem, and are (in this case) indiscernible, that the peripheral body has become activated. The activities of this peripheral body are what I refer to as ‘Hyper-Empathic’, or the act of internalizing the physical reality of objects and persons within the peripheral body’s reach, and consequently producing movement. It is a methodology of stretched perception that elicits a physical response via imaginary stimuli. It is a proactive strategy in that it 'takes' sensation, and then immediately embodies and enacts it, therefore 'giving' sensation back to the ensemble through movement. It is a dance that produces itself. 

1. Emptying Perception, Activating Projection

How does one go about emptying perception? In the Zen notion of Satori, there must be “… a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for new life; there must be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from a hitherto undreamed-of angle of observation.” (Suzuki 771-772). John Cage offered these new angles of observation directly to the audience, whereby found/unperturbed/site-specific sounds were framed by his compositions, and he redefined the sonic possibilities of music (Quote: Cage, Silence, re: Lecture on Nothing)

In attempting to empty perception, one must first exhaust the senses, render them mute, and position them in the background, in order for some other, provisional capacity to make itself known. For example, I’ve been working on expanded capacities of the gaze. In a mapping exercise, I guide dancers to focus their eyes on something in the room, widen to a peripheral gaze from that position, and then move toward something blurry within their field of vision. Eventually, the peripheral landscape takes on a new life through this new attention to it. However, it can only ever exist as a peripheral landscape, because its features disappear, change, or come into definition when attempting to move towards them, or ‘see’ them. There is curious information in this blurry territory that is alluring, magnetic, and only exists when not looking at it directly as it is held in the expanded senses.

Similarly, I made a physical meditation that guides the dancer to emptying her gross anatomy throughout the space, dispersing skin, fluids, muscles, and bones across various points in the room. The duration and imagery of this exercise (including actual fatigue) leads to a numbing of delineations, or a formless for, that is experienced as a 'current'. It is from this place that projections of the subconscious can occur, and another kind of body can be imagined.

But if there are no borders, there can be no inner world. What if, once the peripheral body is activated, that its hyper empathic response produces an immediate projection? As if there is nothing separating the vulgarity of inner thoughts with outward action, and there is only response without restraint? Deborah Hay says “Ready, Fire, Aim”, and Susan Rethorst talks about Proposals in Action, as if projection not only has a direct link to the subconscious, but is immediately enacted. This immediacy puts the body into play as a precursor to conscious thought, a precursor to language, as though identification is temporally delayed, post-action. It is only the dancers’ intrinsic technique that intervenes, that offers restraint, or saves the mover from injury, and produces new kinds of physical patterns. This idea of the body as an immediate projection site resolves performativity in that the dancer never has to ‘perform’ in the conventional sense, but only to stay active within the directive, and allow herself to be seen. In this way, the structure and framework of the score affect the dancer’s way of operating or ‘being’, and the dance makes itself happen. It has been given its own inertia.

B. Generative Ruptures

With all of these active flows of improvised movement, how is context produced? If considering that improvisation can be used as a tool to generate knowledge, or to test and observe what emerges from the (sub)liminal, how or when do we know something has crystallized into an idea, a motif, or something ‘good’, or ‘bad’? In the case of structured improvisation, or attending to a task over time, there are binaries of flow and event, resistance and surrender, or directing and re-directing that play off the rhythms of how the improvisation plays out. Essentially, in any situation, and at their most reductive, the dancer’s movement options are to resist against, to go with, or to change. It is my argument that this moment of ‘change’ is the emergent Event, is not always a conscious choice, and can lead to something previously unknowable happening. The Evental change marks a physical discrepancy, or difference as a dramatically ‘felt’ rift. (Quote: Felix Guittari, Chaosophy, re: rational being etched out of the irrational) (Quote: Jen Joy, The Choreographic, re: the arc of a spear, making difference visible through its passage.)

(Quote: Suzuki, Intro to Zen Buddhism: “Satori comes upon a man unawares, when he feels he has exhausted his whole being.” (742) This perceptive shift emerges like the ground bottoming out, and in an Evental sweep something, even something terrible, comes into being. It is pre-linguistic, utterly unfamiliar, and once it becomes inscribed it can also become instantly boring. The thrill of live performance is the hunt for this feeling, this vague shift that momentarily ruptures identifiers, logic, and convention. It is what continues to sell tickets, it is the shudder of life, or something becoming. It is different. So different that it has no name, and emerges from a darkness that I call the Line of Disappearance, or the space between existence and non-existence, here or there, one perception of reality and another. It is something to notice. It could hold the key to a work’s context, set off a trail of investigation, or help build a lexicon of material to build from. It could also be nothing. Whatever it is, it can emerge as both a research tool, and a performance trait. (ex/Steve Paxton's 'Satisfyin’ Lover')

When this sudden shift takes place, it is disorienting, and I am interested in the contingent moments that follow. How does the body pull itself through, negotiate from abstract to real, or play out these immediate moments in space? What does this kind of dance look like?

1. Flow and Rhythmic Event

How is flow, a force that burrows out cavernous rock, rivers, landscapes, or mental spaces, responsible for cracking the ground in half and producing a Line of Disappearance? How can flow shatter the configuration of the body, self, or identity, rendering it incompatible with what previously existed?

In movement, I consider flow not as a singular, unperturbed stream, but rather something that is pixilated and unpredictable: inertia along a series of corners, a rogue bicycle bumping downhill, light refracting through elements in deep space, or a river that curbs, flips, and bumps over an ever-changing rock bed. The tiny moments that redirect flow are what I consider Rhythm, and these blips, or the timing of these blips, are what form a horizon for the movement landscape, and give texture to choreography. (Quote: John Cage, Silence, re: rhythm).

To engage in flow, is also to engage in rhythm, as the stops, starts, and changes form bridges for flow to travel along. In order to open up these bridges, to test their materials, one must experiment with rhythm, and then wait and see how flow plays itself out, perhaps arriving at a tepid pool, but occasionally a surprise waterfall. For example, I set the improvisation task of ‘Always going a little bit too far’, which results in both a delayed and urgent rhythm to each step, as if each step is necessary by virtue of saving myself from toppling over. The result is a strange grappling dance of near misses, a clunky mess where flow is momentarily interrupted as it tries to connect between moving targets. In the moment right before falling, there is an essential grab for the next rhythmic post, or ‘step’. It is in this moment of wildness that I am temporarily not myself. I am suspended from judgment, analysis, ability, identity, and self. It is a miniature Line of Disappearance, where difference is etched out by unconscious actions of the peripheral body. (Quote: Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism, re: no attempt can create Satori)

C. Navigation Strategies

To navigate the seas of improvisation, strategies are essential in order to bring the flows of movement into representation, collaboration, semiotic encoding, or see that the work becomes a work. This notion of ‘becoming’ implies a trajectory, a vector, and outward propulsion from the internal life of the process and/or technique. To connect more than one Line of Disappearance is to create a sequence. This sequence can be used as a compass, and it can be captured, for example in the text of a score, or a video camera, in order to fasten it and hold the space of the dance. For example, Meg Stuart uses a video camera as a tool to capture moments in her process that are then re-learned, step-by-step, by the dancers in order to duplicate the improvisation sequence in performance. For her, nothing is quite like the first time, so she tries to capture something of the energy of improvisation, but with an exact repeatability.

1. Prefixes and Modifiers

An effective model for navigation also lies in looking at change itself. If a rhythmic blip resists, goes with, or changes flow, how or what is the nature of this change? I propose looking at this change as a starting place that produces flow, as opposed to trying to identify the change by exclusively concentrating on flow. To start with 'how' something is modified can in turn produce the before and after conditions of its modification. These prefixes also find their way into language and scores, but are open-ended, so the verb that normally follows is produced by movement exploration. For example, improvising with the prefix ‘Re’ transformed into Direct/Redirect. To look at change itself, or the moment of difference, and to then change the way we change, is inevitably what will rupture, produce contingent movement, and make way for new perspectives.

2. Vector, Emotion, and the Dynamic Sublime

The difference between emotion and mood is that emotion has an object. This could also imply the existence of a vector, or force with direction, towards or away from that object. For example, the object of fear might be a bear, which would suggest a movement away from said bear. However, something else might happen. What if this vector ‘away’, was also accompanied by a vector ‘towards’, due to an equally forceful curiosity for the bear? There is a simultaneous magnetism and retreat, control and helplessness, resistance and surrender, where an imagined consequence (being eaten) and a physical reality (being immobile) are competing in the present moment. Is this what Kant meant when he talked about the dynamic sublime as movement simultaneously towards and away? (Quote: Jen Joy, The Choreographic, re: Kant)

Go with, go against, or change.

What if this tension between imagined consequence and physical reality could be re-produced as a tool for creating perceptive discrepancies? Is Kant’s dynamic sublime tapping into the same experience, and can we re-produce it in the kinesthetic by using two incompatible or contrasting vectors?

The dancer holds a position in space. In this position, she visualizes a small, concentrated area of the body: a ‘heat ball’. She then visualizes a trajectory of this heat ball along a very specific vector through space: right elbow arcing towards studio light bulb. Without any physical preparation, the dancer visualizes this path until it is absolutely clear, and proceeds to thrust the heat ball along its imagined vector. It never works. The body never follows the precise trajectory of the imagination. What is experienced is a discrepancy between perceived reality and imagined reality, in what becomes a rift is reality itself. What is more real: the projected path or the physical outcome? Virtual action or embodied action?

The difference between emotion and mood is that emotion has an object, but emotions of heightened intensity can also operate retroactively (Quote: Zizek, Event, re: love as Evental) and imply a circularity. These emotional vectors can also create tension between dancers, or a circularity of pushing and pulling at the same time. For example, if we go back to the peripheral body as 'taking' hyper-empathic sensation that is then immediately projected outwards, and then place another person engaged in that same activity within spatial proximity, a circularity comes into play, whereby the empathic material is coming from the other person, and is also projected back to her, which she in projects in return. This closed system of simultaneously sending and receiving the subconscious by virtue of the peripheral body (receiving) and the projected imaginary (sending) presents a strange magnetism. The vectors are trapped, orbiting between, and because they still have ‘directionality’ they have the ability to carry emotion, both towards the other person, and simultaneously towards the self. Am I sending you ‘joy’, or do I feel joy because you are fulfilling my desire for joy? What does this dance look like? What is it to see yourself through another person’s body, which you are also affecting?

III. Choreographic Structures: The Score

The choreographic are structural capacities that delineate moments in time over space. It is the ‘over space' of this definition that infers the necessity of movement, vectors, and trajectories. (Quote: Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance) Some of these trajectories are organized as linear narratives, in the instance of ballet, some as abstract, such as Merce Cuningham, deconstructionist, such as William Forsythe, and some take philosophical cues, like Marten Spangberg, following the lineage of Deleuze and Guittari, and presently speculative realism. Some borrow from the mathematical abstraction of numbers (Anna Theresa de Keersmaker) or physical theatre modalities (Dave St. Pierre) or transferring the choreographic to other technologies (Peter Welz) or shamanic ritual practices (Guillermo Gomez Pena, Keith Hennessey). What interests me is how these artists produce the choreographic, or how intentionality, causality, and accident produce the work that is witnessed on stage in direct relationship to how the choreographer collaborates with the dancers, and considers the dynamic of agency and control in his/her process.

In my experience as a dance artist, I have been involved in two different scenarios: the first is extremely open, whereby the choreographer is looking for something (which he/she can’t always identify) and the dancer is left to produce it, or some kind of 'surprise'. Often the dancer has no idea what she is supposed to be doing, but is still trying to produce something worthy of attention. The second scenario is extremely closed, and the situation is one of precise duplication of the choreographer’s movements. Sometimes there is room for differences in ‘style’ (Quote: Jonathan Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook). These examples are polar opposites, and there are many artists who work differently, or have found a way of reconciling the two.

It is my position that 'how' an artist deploys action within the choreographic framework is what determines the balance of control and agency within the process, and renders the creative process as a template for, or reproduction of, a social process. How we engage determines what we make.

It is my proposal to consider the choreographic body as a BODY in and of itself, and to understand choreographic interactions as a macro template for the way an individual deploys action. Therefore, the social construct that determines the interactions between people is also what affects the individual agent’s options: the social body as having governance over the physical, individual body. (Quote: Guittari, Chaosophy) Guittari argues that it is no accident that paranoid schizophrenia is a resulting pathology of global capitalism. The way we are structured to engage with each other changes the way we inhabit our bodies.

If we take this proposal to the choreographic, and consider it as a platform for human connection, then we must consider how the individual body acts as a direct result of how the choreographic body has been organized. What controls are in play? I look to the score as a transparent guideline, one that is fundamental to understanding the ‘way of being’ within a performance context. The score considers both agency and control, as it gives enough information for the dancer/performer to follow, to navigate from, but also allows room for his/her agency, and to deploy action with the consideration of a bigger construct of engagement.

B. Deploying Action: The Choreographic Body

If operations of the choreographic body parallel the individual dancer’s body, then we can apply the previously discussed principles of locating the peripheral, hyper-empathic body as a way of inhabiting the body differently, and how flow and rhythm open situations up to the emergence of Event: the ungrounding, repositioning, and disorienting shift that allows us to the see a situation differently.

So what are the peripheral senses of this macro choreographic ‘body’? Starting superficial and going deep, I will consider the identities, personalities, and characteristics of the collaborators as this macro body’s superficial membrane or 'skin', the movements through, in between, and across the space as the soft tissues, 'muscles', and force of this macro body, and the rules of engagement, and tasks that occur over time as the 'bones' of this macro body. By bringing attention to these three ‘physical’ characteristics of the macro choreographic body, I can deploy the same processes for inhabiting the choreographic body differently, thus opening up the choreographic performance to Events of perceptive difference that can be shared with an audience. The experience of the audience and the dancer become synonymous, or the experience of dancing is transferred through the choreographic body.  (Quote: Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy)

The first peripheral territory is the ‘skin’, and is composed of the individual dancers that form the macro choreographic body.  They are the first line of choice making, and respond to changes, each other, the audience, the feeling in the room, the subtleties of corporeal communication, and the vague ‘vibe’. When they make a change, it is causal, or because of some force, some provisional action, a slip, a mistake, a luscious accidental lift. They are the fastest communicators of the dynamic exchange that occurs between people, and if they are the primary responders to the changing landscape of the work, then they should be equipped to do so via shared techniques (Quote: John Britton, Encountering Ensemble). However, what if the information they are sourcing is stretched, as far as possible, outside the choreographic body? Could they then somehow respond to more, to bring information from beyond the room into play? Could the choreographic body become hyper-empathic? What might this dance look like, if it is dramatically open to being affected by the present moment of performance?

This ‘skin’ is also the who and the what, and is the primary enactment of representation as we see the characters of the work, and all of their iconic associations, in action.

The second territory is the macro body’s muscles that operate as the transitional movements through the choreographic landscape. How does the dancer get from one place, or moment, to the next? Here we encounter dance’s dependence on space (Quote: Badiou, Dance as Metaphor for Thought). This is also where technique comes into play, and the ‘dancing’ is seen as a series of transitional flows between, across, through, or under, space. On a macro level, the balance of flow and rhythm throughout the space becomes visible. The length of sections, and the dynamic canvas of choreographic change becomes visible and communicative. When and how moments transition are of importance, and these transitions produce emotional vectors through the space, and outward to the audience, as witnessed through force, flow, how the piece moves, and when rhythm interrupts. What if this macro territory of vectors was also able to receive vectors, or emotional information, from a peripheral source? Could the audience provide that source? Could this body produce the 'dynamic sublime'?

The deepest operation, the bones, are the structural capacities, directives, and tasks that instigate action. This is the where and the why. This is the influence of the space in which the dance occurs, the circumstantial construct, or the urban landscape that seeps into the subconscious. (Quote: Marc Auge, Non-Places) It is an operation of frames, and points towards the meaning of the work, the goals, the research, the dramaturgical information, and the score. But what if these seemingly hard corners, platforms, and spaces that hold the dance were as porous as the hyper-empathic, peripheral body? What if they were collapsible, responsive, dynamic, or open to interaction? Can we make the surfaces upon which the dance exists open to more information? Moving platforms, or changing the order of events, because the choreographic body chooses to make it so? This kind of interplay acknowledges that there are rules, but there are also changes, and they are what keep the choreographic body alive and acknowledge its impermanence or decay. To dance with the aesthetics of the dance, and not be subjugated by them, or beholden to recreating their previous formations. To reassess at every turn. To become lost, and only recognize you’re lost after the event is over. (Quote: Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells)

How can change be identified, and what is its trace? To understand difference implies a split, a before and after a change, and references to ‘before’ can only be understood when compared to against ‘after’. How does this operate in terms of affect, and can it be measured? If the choreographic body can be ‘alive’ in the manner described above, then perhaps it can also experience affect, or the ungrounding phenomenon of Event, or the dramatic and unexpected reframing of perspective, which at a certain scale could also be called ‘revolution’. (Quote: The Affective Turn, Clough)

IV. Future Research

I will continue this line of research by considering how the organization of bodies, and the space between bodies, can transmit affect, and the possibility for this transmission to lead to the mobilization of movements, revolutionary tendencies, and change.

 

MCP 503 Intro Paper

1) Research question or specific inquiry

What is ‘difference’ from the perspective of a peripheral body? What is difference when self and other are difficult to distinguish? I will discuss how improvisation techniques and choreographic scores offer entry points into an expanded, peripheral, sense of the body, and the resulting affect this may have on communication, representation, and collaboration within the performance arena. In addition, I will consider social space, and its shared characteristics with the choreographic score in terms of delineating, containing, or influencing movement.

2) Outline (10% of your paper, 200-400 words)

I. (Dis)locating a Peripheral Body: Improvisation Movement Strategies

     A. Hyper-Empathy

          1. Disability and Perceptive Landing Sites

          2. Meditation and Fake Practices

     B. Events and Emergenc(i)es: Context as Produced by Movement

     C. Flow: Resistance and Surrender

     D. Discrepancies, and the Line of Disappearance

          1. Projection as Generative

     E. Navigation Strategies

          1. Prefixes and Modifiers

          2. Expression, Exorcism, Contingency: Moving by Necessity

II. Choreographic Structures: The Score

     A. How Scores are Crafted: Intentionality, Causality, Accident

     B. Deploying Action: Agency and Control

          1. Collaboration

          2. Chance Procedures

III. Environments that Push

     A. Non-Space, Present Absence, and Buddhist Emptiness

          1. Encountering Shadow

          2. John Cage, and Crafting Attention

     B. Audience and Convention

          1. Transparency, Access, and Representation

     C. Social Space as Choreographic Landscape

What is ‘difference’ from the perspective of a peripheral body? I will first address what I mean by peripheral body: that which the senses inform and are within our control, including that which the senses cannot inform and are not within our control.1 The senses capture information and inform perception, and also position the body in space in relation to this sensorial information. Dance techniques design attention to the senses in very specific ways, forming an inner dialogue between the dancer and her body. This dialogue is what produces variation, restraint, and various qualities of the choreographic ‘material’. This dialogue is also what distinguishes self from other, feet from floor, right arm from left hand, or ‘difference’, and the dancer can learn to track, memorize, and repeat these subtle differences over the course of a performance, rehearsal, class, etc. Much of dance history is entirely composed of this process of encoding and replicating sequences of differential stimulus.

How might this work when considering the peripheral body? Artists like Deborah Hay have made attempts, proposing action on a cellular level for example, and the resulting process enters an imaginary realm. It’s impossible to move all of our cells in different directions, but it can be imagined. However, this activity tends to live in the imaginary, like a forceful ejection or dismissal of the body and the feedback it’s sending (whether the dancer is ignoring it or not). In my research, I propose activating both imaginary and perceptive functions by carrying the senses to an endpoint. To engage with a peripheral body by stretching its capacities, expanding the senses, and amplifying the signals they are already processing. This activity may stretch into the imaginary, but it is founded in sensorial reality. I call this engagement ‘Hyper-Empathy’.

How can improvisation frame a practice of hyper-empathy? Take the case of Karl Dahlke, the blind mathematician who solved the polyomino puzzle in his mind, Arakawa and Gins point out that “…imaging landing sites act, for Dahlke, as stand-ins for perceptual ones.” (16). By limiting one perceptive landing site (visual), the others become heightened (imaging), and amplified in function, endurance and ‘reach’. The puzzle pieces that Dahlke experienced in his mind were really ‘there’, and possessed a real physicality. Perhaps by reconfiguring assumptions of disability, there lies the possibility for advanced ability.

I have taken this concept of expansion through limitation into improvised movement scores, starting with the gaze. I chose the gaze because of its primary function in empathic response when witnessing dance performances via mirror neurons: “synaptic connections in the cortex that fire both when one sees an action and when one does that action.” (Foster, 1). I developed a score for mapping the space using peripheral vision, and moving towards the blurred spots within the gaze. Chasing the unrecognizable in a continuum that has you chasing about the room. The score then tips into the imaginary through synesthesia, whereby information within the gaze is newly associated with a sensation of the body that is not within the dancer’s vision. I see the chair leg, and I feel the back of my right knee. In this process, the information taken in by the gaze is dislocated through an imaginary process of re-locating.

3) Introduction (300 words)

‘Difference’ infers the existence of a split: a point at which something is no longer itself, as defined by the perceptive and linguistic codes of a conceptual map. I am interested in this split, and see it as a cavernous fissure, a line of disappearance, into both liminal (space) and subliminal (consciousness) territories. A present absence, where distinctions become blurry, and categorizations dubious, but something unquantifiable is nevertheless ‘there’. What intrigues me about this territory is that it is never fixed, and emerges indirectly through constant flows, fluxes, and shifts. It is temporal, and temperamental, and akin to Buddhist notions of emptiness: a ‘positive’ space (unlike a true void/nothingness) that is part of the composition of all things in existence.

I will frame this discussion of locating ‘difference’ from the perspective of improvised movement techniques and choreographic scores, both historically, referencing artists such as Jerome Bel, Jonathan Burrows, Meg Stuart, John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Yvonne Rainer, and personally, referencing my own studio research. I will bring this investigation to the body, the senses, and the subconscious, or ‘shadow self’, and discuss techniques that bring about rifts in perception, the experience of ‘peripheral’ senses, and indirectly produce an ‘event’, unpredictable rupture, or lost notion of self. If there is no ‘self’, how can there be ‘other’? This research seeks to understand difference by exploring the possibility of inhabiting the body differently, how improvisation techniques offer an entry point into doing so, and how a differently inhabited body might encounter social space.

Place, space, and cultural signs all produce the construct in which humans act, move, and affect, or are affected by. Although intentionality may be different, situational constructs are similarly crafted within improvised dance and choreography, in which a framework of codes establishes a way of being and moving within the creative process and/or performance engagement. In many ways, the choreographic process resembles a micro society, and is an opportunity to play time within space under a series of conditions that test an artistic proposal via actions of the body. But how is the body considered, and in what ways could re-considering the body affect its interactions?