Choreographic Imagination
Phoebe Robinson
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Choreography by Research
Faculty of VCA and MCM The University of Melbourne Produced on archival quality paper November 2014
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ABSTRACT
This research explores the role of the imagination in choreographic practice. As part of this research I have choreographed and performed a new solo dance work, Creature of Habit, and collaborated with artists on the lighting, sound, animation, and costume design to provide a performance environment. The research has looked at how the imagination contributes to the creation, performance and memorisation of movement in ‘set’ choreography. Drawing from established discourses between dance and somatic practices, anatomy, visual perception and the moving image, this research explores the imagination as a phenomenon that is anchored in the body’s sensations and perceptions.
The notion of psychophysical embodiment, as introduced by Mabel Ellsworth Todd early in the twentieth century, has had a broad influence on both dance and somatic practice. The use of imagery in dance making is frequently derived from Todd’s somatic practice. The aim of this project has been to activate these ideas in my own practice, and to articulate how this affects the quality of my movement and presence in dance creation and performance.
This practice-led research project has revolved around two improvisational movement scores, each derived from somatic principles, which have facilitated the creation, memorisation and performance of the choreography in Creature of Habit. The first of these scores I have named the substance score, and the second score is called matching. The way that these scores have informed this research is presented over three chapters that each refer to a different phase of the creative process.
In the dissertation I articulate how I have related to the choreography in each stage of its development. In the research, I have questioned my assumptions about my own process. What is the choreographic process? What is the choreography? And how do I orient myself in relation to both?
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my supervisors, Helen Herbertson and Siobhan Murphy, for their endless patience, guidance and inspiring conversations. I would also like to thank Jude Walton for her encouragement and generosity as a friend and mentor. To my collaborators; Jennifer Hector, Alesh Macak, Kym Dillon, and Maximillian, sincere thanks for dedicating so much of your time and talent to this project, and for being such a lovely team to work with. I would also like to thank the choreographers who feature in this thesis as having had a direct influence on my own work, Sandra Parker, Rosalind Crisp and Joanna Pollitt. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family who have kept asking me, ‘is it finished yet?’, and extra special thanks to Mathew Rolfe, who cheered me over the line.
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DECLARATION
This is to certify that:
This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Master of Choreography except where indicated. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. The thesis is less than 22 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.
Signed: Date:
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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...... 10 The Creative Process...... 11 The Nature of the Research ...... 12
CHAPTER SUMMARY...... 15
PREAMBLE: PARADIGMS OF THE IMAGINATION...... 17 Ideokinetic Imagination ...... 17 Somatics and Dance...... 18 The Wake of Imagination...... 20
CHAPTER ONE: PRE-CHOREOGRAPHIC IMAGINING...... 30 Introduction ...... 30 Imagery ...... 31 Somatic Imagery ...... 33 Visuality...... 34 Soma ...... 35 Anatomical Imagery ...... 36 A Camera’s Eye View...... 39 PART TWO: Pre-choreographic Scores...... 40 The Substance Score ...... 40 Matching...... 41 Conclusion...... 44
CHAPTER TWO: A FILMIC ANALOGY ...... 48 Introduction ...... 48 Precis to the Filmic Analogy ...... 48 ‘A’ Movement ...... 50 Jump Cuts...... 51 Cross Fades ...... 51 Reverse and Repeat ...... 52 Imaginary Editing ...... 52 Embodying Discontinuity ...... 53 Joanna Pollitt: One move at a time...... 55 Recordings in the Body ...... 56 8
Conclusion...... 62
CHAPTER THREE: CREATURE OF HABIT...... 66 Meaning and Movement ...... 66 One’s Own Movement...... 67 Techniques of the Body ...... 69 Transcriptions ...... 71 Natural Movement...... 73 Body Schema and Body Image...... 75 Image: Phoebe Robinson, Creature of Habit. Photography: Rachel Roberts..... 76 Proprioception ...... 77 Proprioceptive Blur ...... 78 Post-choreography...... 79 Conclusion...... 79
CONCLUSION ...... 81
APPENDIX...... 86 DVD Documentation of Live Performance Enclosed...... 86
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INTRODUCTION
This practice-led research project has revolved around two movement scores that were each based on principles derived from somatic practices. These scores facilitated the creation, performance, and memorisation of the choreography in Creature of Habit.1 The first of these scores I have named the substance score, and the second is called matching. By the term ‘score’, I mean a loose instruction that determines how movement is produced. This is opposed to the traditional notion of a score, which is borrowed from music and refers to the notation of previously codified notes or movements.
The idea for the substance score came to me while improvising, but it is also indirectly informed by my personal understanding of the principle of Ideokinesis, especially as this principle is used within the Skinner Releasing Technique.2 The second score, matching, is drawn from another somatic principle that was described in an article by phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke (1995), also titled ‘Matching’. In this research, I have adapted Behnke’s description of Matching as a somatic principle, and used it as a choreographic score.3 Both scores will be described in detail in part two of chapter one: ‘Pre-choreographic Imagining’.
1 Creature of Habit is a solo dance performance that was given as the creative outcome of this research. Presented at the
VCA in studio 45, 45 Sturt St, South Melbourne July 24-26, 2013. Collaborative artists involved in this presentation were,
Jennifer Hector (lighting design), Kym Dillon (sound composition) and Alesh Macak (animation). See attached video documention.
2 Joan Skinner’s Releasing Technique uses imagery and visualisation to enhance creativity and performance in dance.
Skinner’s approach is informed by the work of somatic pioneer Mabel Elsworth Todd. See Eddy, M. (2009). "A brief history of somatic practices and dance: Historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance." Collected Work: Journal of dance and somatic practices. I/1 (2009). (AN: 2009-08193) 1(1): 5. (p.14).
3 Whenever I write matching in italics I am referring to my choreographic score, which is based on the somatic principle that Behnke defines, but is not equivalent to it. 10
The Creative Process In order to articulate how the above scores functioned in my choreographic process, I have borrowed the term ‘pre-choreographic’4 from dancer and researcher, Bertha Bermúdez Pascual, who says that pre-choreography refers to the stage in a choreographic process ‘where the content is being created, shaped and tested but not yet part of the selection and ordering process choreography implies’ (Delahunta and Pascual 2013). This definition has informed my understanding of my own process, and has also acted as a springboard for my conceptualisation of the structure of this dissertation.
Bermudez Pascual’s notion of a ‘pre-choreographic phase’ of the creative process led me to question what would be defined as the choreographic phase within my own practice? And furthermore, what might be considered the post- choreographic phase? This notion of three progressive phases of choreographic process has been clarifying and useful to me in articulating this particular research project. In this dissertation, ‘post-choreography’ refers to the stage in my process where I am rehearsing and performing previously choreographed movement. This should not be confused with other uses of the same term, which refer to a more expanded notion of choreography than what I am addressing in this thesis.5
In the creative development of Creature of Habit, I used pre-choreographic scores (i.e. the substance score and matching) to direct my attention in improvisation, and to develop a choreographic focus. As loose instructions, the scores were improvisational, and were conceived through studio practice in the pre- choreographic phase of the research, before I embarked on the process of setting the choreography. I then underwent a ‘selection and ordering process’6 of the material in the choreographic phase.
4 See Delahunta, S. and B. B. Pascual (2013). "Pre-choreographic elements: Scott deLahunta in conversation with Bertha
Bermúdez." International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9(1): 52-60. 5 Birringer, J. (2013). "What score? Pre-choreography and post-choreography." International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9(1): 7.
6 Delahunta, S. and B. B. Pascual (2013). "Pre-choreographic elements: Scott deLahunta in conversation with Bertha
Bermúdez." International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9(1): 52-60. 11
In the post-choreographic phase, I then re-applied the substance score and matching to direct my attention and presence while performing the choreography. By returning to the pre-choreographic scores in rehearsal and performance, it made it possible for me to continue my imaginative engagement with the movement. This allowed my relationship to the choreography to become one of negotiation, rather than submission. This will be elaborated in chapter three: ‘Creature of Habit’.
The above description of my choreographic process, given in terms of three progressive phases, is deceptively simple. In reality, the process oscillated continuously between pre-, mid- and post-choreographic approaches to fragmentary movement sequences, which gradually produced a sedimentary accumulation of the material that was re-worked many times over. In this way, the three phases do not refer to an over-arching timeline, but represent a relative perspective to any particular movements that are yet to be, are currently being, or have already been, ‘captured’ or known to be part of the choreography. Some of the discourse around whether or not movement can actually be captured and repeated will be discussed in chapter two: ‘A Filmic Analogy’.
I am aware that this model seems to imply that choreography must be memorized and ‘set’, before it moves beyond the ‘pre-phase’. In this view, improvisational approaches to scoring dance performance might not be considered choreographic in their own right. I do not hold this view myself, but because the selection and memorisation of movement has always been important to my particular approach to choreography, this model has been valuable in articulating my research.
The Nature of the Research Although somewhat reductive, the concept of a linear progression through pre-, mid- and post-choreographic phases is sympathetic to the pull to linearity that comes with writing things down. Therefore, this paradigm is roughly echoed in the chapter structure of this dissertation. That is, the writing is comprised of three chapters, and each in turn emphasises aspects of pre-, mid-, and post- choreographic perspectives in the creative process. I speak of each of these perspectives in terms of how my imagination was called upon in each aspect.
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Creature of Habit was a momentary surfacing and exposure of this research in the form of a performance. Therefore, in this dissertation I have not focussed solely on Creature of Habit as an isolated work, instead I have articulated my practice- led research in terms of my overall creative practice, and my position in the broader context of the choreographic and somatic practices that have informed it. Although the performance was pivotal, and a necessary pressure cooker for the questions and discoveries that are outlined in this dissertation, as the solo performer inside this work my perspective on it is limited. To give a personal interpretation or description of Creature of Habit as if I were a spectator could only be speculative, and of less relevance to this research aim, which is to explore the role of imagination in the creation, performance, and memorisation of choreographic material.
Complementary to the pre-, mid-, and post-choreographic structure of this dissertation, there is also a second way to interpret the progression of each chapter, which takes an optical and filmic metaphor of ‘zooming out’. For example, chapter one is a ‘close up’ view of my practice, at the level of the body in the pre-choreographic phase; chapter two is a ‘mid-shot’, which looks at how I develop choreographic sequences in the choreographic phase; and chapter three is a ‘long view’, which reflects from a greater distance, and also with hindsight, on some of the broader issues of imagination and choreographic practice, which have informed this research. I also consider chapter three to be a continuation of some of the ideas presented in the preamble: ‘Paradigms of the Imagination’.
In this dissertation, the writing has engaged in both theory and practice simultaneously to the dancing, albeit in different ways. Dance scholar, Siobhan Murphy (2014) has made a distinction between ‘exegetical’ and ‘dissertational’ writing in artistic research. She notes that while both forms of writing may be present and useful in any thesis, she makes a case for the value of dissertational writing, wherein ‘the written and artistic components are regarded as autonomous but related modalities that together comprise the thesis’ (P.179).
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“Art-making is often construed as practice, and academic writing as theory, and this splitting is detrimental to both activities. One consequence can be that artworks come to be seen as ‘illustrating’ theories. Another is that academic writing comes to be seen as a tool for ‘explaining’ artworks. Such configurations deny the degree to which academic writing and art-making can be ongoing and interrelated activities, resulting in a synthesis of multiple modes of intelligence.” (Murphy 2014, p.178)
In the creative outcome of this thesis, Creature of Habit is just one example of how the matching and substance score could have been used creatively and performatively within my choreographic practice. Furthermore, I do not feel that the creative work ‘illustrated’ these scores to the audience, nor was it my intention that it should. As Murphy (2014) says, ‘sometimes important outcomes of artistic research are found not so much in final artworks, but rather in tools, insights, relationships to other fields or communities, etc., developed during the period of research’ (p.181). These tools and insights, once put into writing, have the potential to inform the researcher’s, as well as a reader’s future practice.
“The research in this instance is a period of development that will bear fruit in future collaborative relationships, teaching, workshops, and artworks. Dissertational writing provides scope for the articulation and dissemination of such findings.” (Murphy 2014, p.181)
Through the writing process of this research I have articulated the thoughts, sensations, strategies, decision-making processes, and the somatic images, which are all a part of how I make my work. This was not easy to put into words, and in the process of writing, my perception of what I do, and how I do it, has been transformed. How this will inform my future work is not yet known, but some anticipatory remarks are given in the conclusion of chapter three. The tools and insights that I have articulated in this dissertation are no longer private to me, and therefore may be picked up, and/or challenged, by anyone who wishes to participate in a similar enquiry of their own.
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
Preamble The preamble briefly introduces seemingly conflicting views of the imagination; first of all from a somatic first-person perspective, and then from a historical perspective, which borrows from Foucault a genealogical notion of history. In the preamble I demonstrate how both perspectives continue to influence the ongoing development of modern and postmodern dance practice.
Chapter One: Pre-choreographic Imagining Chapter one defines key terms and articulates my understanding of somatic approaches to movement, especially those practices that have been informed by the tradition of Ideokinesis. In this, I discuss the influence of anatomical imagery and somatic imagery on the view that I have of my own body, and how this attention within my body is useful in the pre-choreographic phase of my practice. By comparing somatic visualisation techniques to a ‘camera’s eye view’ of my body’s interior, I draw attention to the interrelations between the third-person perspective of visual representation and anatomical study with the perspective of Somatics, which is largely concerned with a first person perspective (Hanna 1986). I relate this integration of first and third-person perspectives to Drew Leder’s post-phenomenological perspective of the ‘ecstatic body’ (Leder 1990). In part two of chapter one, I describe the matching and substance scores, and how they were used in the pre-choreographic phase.
Chapter Two: A Filmic Analogy In chapter two, I present a ‘narrative of practice’ (Murphy 2012) to explain how cinematic technology has informed the way I conceptualize choreographic structure. In this, I take filmmaking as an analogical model for illustrating and analysing the choreographic phase of my process. The ways that I have chosen to abstract certain concepts of editing technique, and appropriate these into choreographic strategies, is detailed in this chapter. Chapter two also addresses performance theory tropes of ephemerality and capture, as they apply to my choreographic practice.
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Chapter Three: Creature of Habit Chapter three reflects on how I relate to, and embody, choreographed material once it is known, and how this relates within a practice that is otherwise concerned with the activity of undoing previously established habits. In this way the post-choreographic phase may be perceived as a brief period of sedimentation. This chapter also draws from Agency and Embodiment by Carrie Noland (2009a). In this book, Noland proposes a solution to the problems arising from an ideological gap between phenomenology and constructivist theories of embodiment. Drawing on French sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss’ famous essay, Techniques of the Body (1934/1973), Noland uses Mauss’ insights to propose a perspective of ‘phenomenological constructivism’ (p.21-22). This chapter builds on some of the ideas that are first introduced in the Preamble.
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PREAMBLE: PARADIGMS OF THE IMAGINATION
In order to speak clearly about my intentions within this research, this preamble is a brief introduction to historical perspectives on the human imagination. In this, I compare somatic perspectives with a broader genealogy of imagination, as traced by contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney (1988) in The Wake of Imagination.
Ideokinetic Imagination The notion of psychophysical embodiment, as introduced by Mabel Ellsworth Todd in The Thinking Body (1937), informs this research and my practice generally. According to Andre Bernard (2006), Todd presented one of the earliest methods in the west for using the imagination as an intentional device for bringing positive effects to postural alignment. Todd’s students, Lulu Sweigard and Barbara Clark, continued Todd’s teaching methodology, which much later came to be known as Ideokinesis after Sweigard published Human Movement Potential in 1974 (Bernard, Steinmüller et al. 2006).
Sweigard (1974) explained the ‘ideokinetic power of imagination’ to come from the effect of imagery on ‘subcortical planning of muscle action’. She said, ‘visualise yourself growing tall and, in doing so, stand upright with greater ease’ (p. 170). Rather than correcting alignment through top-down control, Ideokinesis works on the premise that the body will adjust to a more ideal alignment of its own accord, if there is a clear image to support it (Sweigard 1974). According to this principle, movement habits are programmed into the nervous system, and cannot be altered by direct and conscious will, but can be influenced by imagery.
Ideokinesis identifies a kinaesthetic connection between mind and body, and considers the imagination to be as much a physical as it is a psychical phenomenon. This perspective has been especially valuable and useful to dance practitioners. On the other hand, the conceptual paradigms that Kearney lays out have also had implications for the evolution of modern and post-modern dance, in ways that are harder to pinpoint, and are therefore less acknowledged. This will be discussed later in this preamble.
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Somatics and Dance The use of imagery in dance, often derived from somatic practice, comes out of a shared history. According to Somatic practitioner and dance researcher, Martha Eddy (2009), there is an ‘historical connection between the birth of modern dance and the development of somatic theories and practices’ (p.9). Eddy refers to modern dance pioneers, such as Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Laban and Mary Wigman, who at the turn of the 20th century not only ‘shaped the culture in which the primary somatic pioneers were working’, they also simultaneously developed ‘non-Cartesian approaches to movement’ (p. 10).7
In ‘A Brief History of Dance and Somatic Practices’ (2009), Eddy has identified three main branches within the diverse field of Somatics. They are, somatic psychology, somatic bodywork, and somatic movement (p.7). According to Eddy, somatic movement was developed throughout the 20th century by ‘a second generation of somatic pioneers, who were predominantly dancers’ (p.7). My practice-led choreographic research draws from these somatic movement practices, which teach movement awareness.
Prominent teachers in the dance-related trajectory of somatic education include Lulu Sweigard, Barbara Clarke, Andre Bernard, Irene Dowd, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Lisa Nelson, Eric Franklin, Joan Skinner, Mary Fulkerson, and many others (Eddy 2009). Most of my mentors and teachers are connected to at least one of these people in some way. As an undergraduate student at the WA Academy of Performing Arts (1997 – 2000), under the auspices of Nanette Hassall, I was first exposed to Ideokinesis, Body Mind Centering™, and the Feldenkrais Method,
7 By non-Cartesian, Eddy is referring to a resistance against the paradigm of mind-body dualism, as espoused by the French Philosopher, Rene Descartes in the 17th century. Mind-body dualism may also be referred to as the ‘Cartesian paradigm’, ‘Cartesian dualism’, or sometimes simply ‘dualism’. Elizabeth Grosz summarises Cartesian dualism in Volatile Bodies (1994):
“Dualism is the assumption that there are two distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances, mind and body, each of which inhabits its own self contained sphere. Taken together the two have incompatible characteristics. The major problem facing dualism and all those positions aimed at overcoming dualism has been to explain the interactions of these two apparently incomposible substances, given that, within experience and everyday life, there seems to be a manifest connection between the two in willful behavior and responsive psychical reactions. How can something that inhabits space affect or be affected by something that is non-spatial? How can consciousness ensure the body’s movements, its receptivity to conceptual demands and
requirements? How can the body inform the mind of its needs?” Grosz, E. A. (1994). Volatile
bodies : toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.(p.5-6) 18
taught by Reyes De Lara and Alice Cummins. This direct experience of somatic movement education was beneficial to my skill as a dancer, and consequently has also informed my choreographic practice.
Somatic modes of attention make it possible to sense subtle movement patterns, develop new patterns of co-ordination, and find unfamiliar ways of initiating movement. When somatic principles are applied to a choreographic practice, it opens doorways for enquiry that - beyond bringing positive affects to postural alignment or personal wellbeing - may instead be used to explore new movement for choreography, through attention and awareness of the body. I describe this as a mediated use of somatic principles.
Through my work as a dancer for Australian choreographer, Sandra Parker, I have received valuable insight into the ways that somatic principles may be integrated and transformed in choreographic practice.8 Parker draws on principles from Ideokinesis to develop choreography.9 In her process, phrases are often communicated and shared amongst her dancers by describing movements as sensations with a distinct anatomical focus, such as ‘rotate the bone of the femur’, or ‘drop the left sits bone’. My experience of her choreography draws upon a deep understanding of anatomy. Movements are initiated anatomically, but also informed by thoughts, and by interrupting or layering movements over each other, so as to leave traces of movement actions that are visualized in the moment of performance but are not fully executed.
My experience in Somatics, which has been both direct and mediated via choreographic processes, has informed my thinking and is responsible for the fact that imagination came into my view as a subject for this research. Somatics have provided me with a valuable resource of techniques, methods and principles that I want to question further in relation to my own choreographic practice. The aim of
8 I was involved in Parker’s creative research for her PhD dissertation, Locating the trace : an exploration of tracing and the choreographic process, (Parker, S.J, 2010) and worked with her as the performer in the solo work The Very Still, which she choreographed as part of the research. Previous to that, I was a member of her former dance company, Dance Works, since 2003.
9 Parker studied with Irene Dowd, who was a student of Sweigard. See Parker, S. J. (2010). Locating the trace : an exploration of tracing and the choreographic process / Sandra Joy Parker. Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and
Music, University of Melbourne. PhD. (p.43) 19
this project is to activate these ideas in practice, and to articulate a personal methodology of using the imagination to direct qualities of movement and presence in dance creation and performance. This research has also led me to think more broadly about the genealogy of the term ‘imagination’, and how its evolving status has affected the development of dance and somatic practices in the last century.
The Wake of Imagination In The Wake of Imagination, philosopher Richard Kearney (1988) traces ‘the historical genesis of the Western concepts of imagination’ since pre-modern times. In this, Kearney identifies three main paradigmatic shifts of imagination, which he says have also altered the perceived role of the artist. Kearney works with a ‘genealogical notion of history’, which is borrowed from Foucault, and interprets history as ‘a plurality of mutations and discontinuities rather than a single continuum of some absolute spirit or material dialectic’ (p.402).10 Kearney’s three paradigms are given as a ‘flexible hermeneutic’, which means that, although each paradigm is associated with a certain period in history, its interpretation is ‘not binding in a chronological sense’ (p.19). Therefore, the various symptoms of each paradigm may be seen to co-exist, or be exhibited by artists living in another period. As a general guide, however, Kearney’s three paradigms are, the pre- modern ‘mimetic imagination’, the modern ‘productive imagination’, and the postmodern ‘parodic imagination’ (p.17).
In the pre-modern ‘mimetic paradigm’, Kearney says that the artist is seen ‘primarily as a craftsman’, who can only copy the ‘‘original’ activity of a Divine Creator’. This ‘mimetic paradigm’, according to Kearney, is supplanted during the (historically) modern eras of the Renaissance, Romantism and Existentialism with a ‘productive paradigm’, wherein artists are seen as the ‘original inventor’ of a unique vision. During the 20th century, however, technological advances and post- war disillusionment led to a suspicion of subjectivity and personal expression, by critical theorists and artists alike. In the ‘parodic paradigm’ of imagination, the role of the artist shifts from the position of individualist author, to that of a bricoleur, who cannot invent anything new but can only rearrange what has come before (p.12).
10 See Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York, NY. 20
“The modern aesthetic promotes the idea of the artist as one who not only emulates but actually replaces God [...] But this anthropocentric paradigm is itself overturned in post-modern culture. Now the model of the productive inventor is replaced by that of the bricoleur; someone who plays around with fragments of meaning which he himself has not created.” (Kearney 1988, p.12-13)
In Kearney’s analysis, the paradigmatic shift from the productive imagination to the parodic imagination responded to a growing mistrust in the autonomy of the human subject.11 In postmodern thought, the imagination is criticised for its associations with romanticism and is therefore tied to similar notions of subjectivity. Although the modern paradigm of a productive imagination still prevails in mainstream understanding of what the imagination is, the postmodern critique of originality and authenticity gave rise to the parodic imagination.
“Right across the spectrum of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist thinking, one notes a common concern to dismantle the very notion of imagination. Where it is spoken of at all, it is subjected to suspicion or denigrated as an outmoded humanist illusion spawned by the modern movements of romantic idealism and existentialism. The philosophical category of imagination, like that of ‘man’ himself, appears to be dissolving into an anonymous play of language.” (Kearney 1988, p.251)
Kearney’s three paradigms of the mimetic, productive and parodic imagination, are not as distinct as they first seem, however, which he himself acknowledges. As critical theorist Carrie Noland (2010) observes; Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970/1997) also identified a similar pattern as Kearney did, of an ‘institutional critique’ of illusion and subjective expression. Adorno says this critique propelled
11 ‘Death of the subject’ is a key issue in continental philosophy especially. See ‘Chapter Seven: Postmodern Narratives’, in Kearney, R. (1988). The wake of imagination : ideas of creativity in Western culture / Richard Kearney, London :
Hutchinson, 1988.
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the major art movements of the 20th century, through Impressionism, Expressionism to Constructivism. However, and most importantly for this research, Noland also makes a point of saying that this well established chronology did not apply to dance in the same way as it did to visual art and literature (p.50). She says,
“During the era of cubism, when a constructivist aesthetic was clearly gaining ground in painting, writing, and musical composition, Isadora Duncan was still performing supposedly natural gestures and emoting supposedly lyric passions on the international stage.” (Noland 2010, p.49)
According to Noland (2010), it is generally considered that it was not until Merce Cunningham’s choreography emerged in the 1950’s that modern dance is seen to ‘catch up’ and fall in line with the other arts.12 But rather than interpreting this as simply an inability for modern dance to ‘keep up’ with the times, Noland proposes that ‘the messier story of dance […] tells us something about the inadequacy of the Greenberg-Adorno model [of modern aesthetics]’, which have tended to ignore dance (p.49).13
“The historical trajectory Adorno establishes for art in general—its increasing autonomy and formalism as a result of industrialization and secular “disenchantment”—is neither applied to nor tested in any rigorous way against a concrete example of modernist (or any other kind of) dance.” (Noland 2010, p.49)
12 Cunningham’s ‘constructivist’ approach to sequencing movement, with the use of chance procedures, will be discussed further in chapter two. Cunningham’s partner, collaborator, and composer, John Cage, first devised the chance procedures that Cunningham adapted to his choreographic process. This ‘cut up’ approach to choreography was designed to get beyond what he saw as the limitations of his own imagination.
13 In making this point, Noland (2010) quotes Jill Johnstone in Manning, S. (1993). Ecstasy and the demon : feminism and nationalism in the dances of Mary Wigman / Susan A. Manning, Berkeley : University of California Press, c1993. p.24 She also paraphrases Susan Manning;
“Dance stands in an a-synchronous relation to all other twentieth-century forms of expression.
It does not evolve at the rhythm it should, or else the story is more messy than one would
like.” (Noland 2010) p.49 22
Although there is some debate as to whether Cunningham was modern or postmodern, in some respects he seems to fit into Kearney’s paradigm of the postmodern ‘parodic imagination’.14 Cunningham may be considered a bricoleur because he did not invent new movements, but instead worked with a traditional vocabulary drawn from ballet and modern dance. As Noland observes in Coping and Choreography (2009b), Cunningham was interested in ‘enchaining movements in new ways, not primarily on inventing new movements’ (p.3).15 Nonetheless, Cunningham’s use of Cagean methods in his choreography posed extreme challenges to the anatomical limitations of his dancers. As Noland observes;
“A constructivist, procedure-orientated aesthetics presents a particular challenge to dance, and it is therefore important to examine how chance operations impact choreography, specifically. In dance, the medium involved is the human body; this body is an organic unit with a bipedalized, cephalised, symmetrical, mobile-through-the-midline structure. It is not as infinitely manipulable as, say, words on a page, or notes on a staff” (Noland 2009b, p.2)
Noland reveals that the problems posed by ‘procedure-orientated’ approaches to choreography can only be resolved within a dancer’s own body. This throws into question the status of the choreographer’s authorship, and also highlights the agency of the dancer.
14 For different but interesting views, see Banes, S. and N. l. Carroll (2006). "Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern
Dance." Dance Chronicle 29(1): 49-68. And Copeland, R. (2004). Merce Cunningham : the modernizing of modern dance
New York ; London : Routledge, 2004. (p. 229 – 245).
Banes and Carroll assert that although Cage may be considered postmodern, Cunningham was a modernist because he worked with a refined and stylized vocabulary. Copeland on the other hand has claimed that Cunningham was more postmodern than the Judson Dancers. In my opinion, Trisha Brown’s movement was no less refined than Cunningham’s, although it is less codified. These opposing, but very informed views, indicate that the lines which delineate postmodern dance from modern dance are not absolute.
15 Noland’s quote was referring to Cunningham’s ‘affinity with Robert Rauschenberg and the aesthetics of collage’
(2009b, p.3). I have taken this to describe Cunningham as a bricoleur in Kearney’s paradigm. 23
As a dancer in Cunningham’s company, Joan Skinner was notable for her ability to sequence extremely difficult and inorganic chains of movement.16 In this, Skinner was not only a medium for Cunningham’s work; she was also an agent who learnt to alter her own motility, in order to ‘enchain movements never enchained before’ (Noland 2009b, p.1). Skinner developed her Releasing Technique, which was based on the principle of Ideokinesis, after she had left Cunningham’s company.17 Nonetheless, it is reasonable to speculate that Skinner’s experiences in Ideokinesis, prior to and during the period she was working with Cunningham, may have helped her to continuously develop the new motor patterns required to perform his choreography.
Although chance methods may be considered a ‘general avant-garde technique’, Noland (2009b) points out that Cunningham was the first to apply these techniques specifically to movements of the body (p.2), but he was not the last. Cage’s influence on the Judson group, via Robert Dunn’s workshop, is quite well known.18 Yvonne Rainer (1981) has described the ‘Cagean effect’ as providing ‘methods of non-hierarchical, indeterminate organization’, that she tended to use ‘selectively and productively’ in her own work (p.67). As Rainer says,
“My early dances (1960-62) employed chance procedures or improvisation to determine sequences of choreographed movement phrases. At that point, for some of us who performed at Judson Church in New York City, repetition, indeterminate sequencing, sequence arrived at by aleatory methods, and ordinary/untransformed movement were a slap- in-the-face to the old order, and, dimly beknownst to us, [also] reached straight back to the surrealists via the expatriated Duchamp” (Rainer 1981, p.67)
16 See Noland, C. (2010). "The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression." Dance Research Journal 42(1): 46-60. 17 See Gaby, A. and J. Moran (2002). "In its Purest Form." Animated(Winter): 20-22. The use of Ideokinesis as a practical method for altering inscribed habit will be discussed in chapter three. 18 See Banes, S. (1993). Democracy's body : Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 1993. 1-33 24
Whereas Cunningham was content for audiences to find their own meaning in his work,19 Rainer was interested in challenging the desire for meaning altogether. Rainer’s interest in the ‘objective nature of the human body’ and her attempts to present ‘its status as a physical thing’ in the dances she made during the 1960’s, also has parallels with the concerns of Rainer’s contemporaries in Minimalism in visual art (Lambert 2004, p.49). Dance theorist Carrie Lambert (2004), explains the historical context for Rainer’s ‘anti-anthropocentric and anti-expressionist’ view of the body (p.49).
“Both Minimalism and Postmodern choreography were part of a period attempt [in the 1960s] to counter assumptions that Rainer's generation often labelled "humanist" and associated with the New York School in painting and Martha Graham's expressionism in dance: expectations that art reveal the subjectivity of its creator, that it express universal values or the essential nature of the human condition, that even in abstraction it transcend the merely material.” (Lambert 2004, p.49)
Rainer’s aversion to self-expression and her attempts to emphasize movement over the person dancing, demonstrated a preference for the materiality of the form, over the personal expression of a performer. The influence of postmodern thinking on Rainer’s work is relevant to this research because of her influence on those who have influenced me. If I am to speak about my own choreographic imagination, it inevitably starts with what came before me. But Rainer herself acknowledges that her influence does not remain static, and she reminds us that her minimalist ‘No manifesto’ was never meant to define or prescribe choreographic practice for all eternity.
19 See Noland, C. (2010). "The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of
Expression." Dance Research Journal 42(1): 46-60.
“For Cunningham, no movement performed by the human body can ever be lacking in
expressive content, either because the human body always communicates some kind of
dynamic or because the audience member maps onto the moving body a personal
meaning”(p. 50)
25
“That infamous “NO manifesto” has dogged my heels ever since it was first published. Every dance critic who has ever come near my career has dragged it out, usually with a concomitant tsk tsk. […] It was never meant to be prescriptive for all time for all choreographers, but rather, to do what the time honoured tradition of the manifesto always intended to do: clear the air at a particular cultural and historical moment” (Rainer 2006, p.98)
Although I could not say with any certainty what is required in our historical moment, I feel that Noland (2009a) is onto something as she advocates for a perspective of ‘phenomenological constructivism’. As Noland says, ‘phenomenology has frequently been cast by poststructuralism as naively positing the authenticity of the subject’s perspective and thus at odds with poststructuralism’. On the contrary, Noland suggests that the ‘opposition between phenomenology and poststructuralism is exaggerated’, and that ‘phenomenology is sometimes caricatured in order to assert a clear distinction’ (p.227).20 This point will be taken up further in chapter three.
In my research I have found that somatic education already accommodates a ‘phenomenologically constructive’ view. On one hand, somatic practices are aligned with ‘existentialism and phenomenology’, and have drawn ‘theoretical support for experiential learning and sensory research’ from these modern paradigms (Eddy 2009, p.6). On the other hand, Somatics have also played an important role in postmodern choreography, as a tool for finding ways to move more ‘efficiently’, to reduce idiosyncratic habit, and also by providing practical methods for experiencing the ‘objective nature of the human body’.
20 See also, Franko, M. (2011). "Editor's Note: What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology?" Ibid.(2): 1,
Ness, S. A. (2011). "Foucault's Turn From Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies." Dance Research Journal
43(2): 19-32, Pakes, A. (2011). "Phenomenology and Dance: Husserlian Meditations." Dance Research Journal 43(2): 33-
49. 26
Somatic practices have been thoroughly adopted by dance over the last century. Somatic principles have not only been used to improve dancers’ technique and postural alignment, they have also underpinned the evolving philosophy and aesthetics of modern and postmodern dance (Eddy, 2009). In my own experience, having studied anatomy, Shiatsu, Feldenkrais, Ideokinesis, Alexander Technique and Body Mind Centering™ to varying degrees over the past fourteen years, I have accumulated an assortment of tools, images and approaches that I draw upon selectively as a dancer and choreographer. However, I consider myself a bricoleur of Somatics, rather than a dedicated expert of the field. This research does not define or develop any one style of somatic movement practice, but instead refers to Somatics in a general way, first of all from my perspective as a dancer/choreographer, and secondly as a student (i.e. not a practitioner or teacher) of Somatics.
27
28
“She knows that the content of her thoughts consists entirely of what she’s read, heard, spoken, dreamt, and thought about what she’s read, heard, spoken, dreamt. She knows that thought is not something privileged, autonomous, originative, and that the formulation “cogito ergo sum” is, to say the least, inaccurate. She knows too that her notion of “concrete experience” is an idealised, fictional site where contradictions can be resolved, “personhood” demonstrated, and desire fulfilled forever. Yet all the same the magical, seductive, narrative properties of “Yes, I was talking…” draw her with an inevitability that makes her slightly dizzy. She stands trembling between fascination and scepticism. She moves obstinately between the two.” (Rainer 1981, p.66)
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CHAPTER ONE: PRE-CHOREOGRAPHIC IMAGINING
Introduction Since a young age I have been interested in the imagination. I remember when I was about five or six I asked my mother how to imagine something. She told me to think of anything and I would see a picture of it. From this instruction I expected to have a full cinematic experience of whatever it was I was trying to imagine. I often had vivid dreams, and remembered them, and so this is what I expected to be able to ‘turn on’ if I deliberately tried to imagine something. As I recall this memory, I also have a mental image of it. I remember that we were in the car, in the driveway to our house, that the car was a red Volkswagon, and that the seats were flesh-toned vinyl. I no longer expect these images to be as vivid as dream images.
The anecdote above illustrates how frequently images pass through the mind. Author and psychologist, Dorthe Berntsen (2009), would call this an ‘autobiographical memory’. In autobiographical memory, mental images may occur in relation to real events or as imagined scenes of past, present or future. As either accurate memories or as fantasies, mental images often arise spontaneously by association to a scent, colour, or a familiar face, and are involuntary.21 On the other hand, as Bernsten says, mental images can also be brought to mind deliberately, such as when we re-trace our steps to remember where we have left our keys, or try to imagine a new arrangement for our furniture (Berntsen 2009). What this clearly indicates is that mental images may be either intentional or involuntary.
In this practice-led choreographic research I have explored methods for using the imagination intentionally to direct qualities of movement and presence in dance creation and performance. This is not to say that involuntary images have not played a part in my creative process, but that I cannot work directly with an involuntary image without it first becoming intentional.
21 Just as Proust famously discovered while eating a Madeleine biscuit, in Remembrance of Things Past.
See Berntsen, D. (2009). Involuntary Autobiographical Memories [electronic resource] : An Introduction to the Unbidden
Past, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009. (p.x) 30
Imagery The term ‘imagery’ comes up frequently in dance and in dance-related somatic practices. In an attempt to clarify this difficult term, I look to WJT Mitchell, an American professor of English and Art History. In ‘What is an Image?’ (1984), Mitchell observes two things about imagery in general:
“The first is simply the incredible variety of things that go by this name. We speak of pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas as images […] The second thing that may strike us is that the calling of all these things by the name of image does not necessarily mean that they all have something in common. It might be better to begin by thinking of images as a far-flung family which has migrated in time and space and undergone profound mutations in the process.” (Mitchell 1984, p. 505)
Mitchell has usefully outlined a ‘family of images’ to provide a set of terms that clearly identify various types of imagery.22 In this, Mitchell has grouped images into categories of Graphic, Optical, Perceptual, Mental and Verbal,23 and has defined each in relation to certain intellectual disciplines. Graphic images (i.e. ‘pictures, statues and designs’) are relevant to the art historian; Optical imagery (i.e. ‘mirrors and projections’) belong to physics; Mental imagery (i.e. ‘dreams, memories, ideas and fantasmata’) are related to psychology; Verbal metaphors and descriptions are significant to the literary critic; while Perceptual images (i.e ‘sense data’ or sensory perception) reside in a liminal space, between disciplines (Mitchell 1984, p. 505).
22 Mitchell’s ‘family of images’ is based on Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, and the notion of ‘family resemblance’, wherein a group of ideas can appear to be similar and therefore share the same name, but in fact have underlying differences.
23 Whenever I use these terms with a capital letter, I am referring to Mitchells’ concept of each term. 31
“Perceptual images occupy a kind of border region where physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, art historians, and students of optics find themselves collaborating with philosophers and literary critics.” (Mitchell 1984, p. 506)
Mitchells’ conceptual separation of different types of imagery is clarifying, and indicates myriad applications for the term ‘imagery’ as a word. In lived experience, however, Mental, Perceptual and Verbal images are not so clearly separated, as Mitchell also acknowledges. For example, the anecdote I tell at the start of this chapter involves Mental imagery, and since I have written it down, it simultaneously becomes Verbal imagery of a red Volkswagon with flesh-toned vinyl interiors. In turn, these Mental and Verbal images evoke for me personally a Perceptual image of scorching the back of my legs on the vinyl seats on hot days, and sticking to the seats.
The physical impression that is felt in the body, as a result of being in contact with a hot car seat, is given here to be a kind of Perceptual image. In Mitchell’s model, Perceptual images refer to ‘sense data’ or sensory perception. Here Mitchell (1984) is referring to Aristotle’s ‘sensible forms’, which according to Aristotle would ‘emanate from objects and imprint themselves on the waxlike receptacles of our senses like a signet ring’ (p.505). If by ‘sensory’ we only refer to the visual sense, then a Perceptual image is what we see, as opposed to a Graphic image (i.e. a pictorial representation), which is (arguably) always an image regardless of whether or not it is currently being looked at. But not all images are visual, according to Mitchell. He says that Perceptual imagery encompasses both ‘physical and psychological accounts of imagery’ (p.505). For Mitchell, as well as for Aristotle, sense data is perceived in each of the senses, including hearing, touch, taste and scent, and although not necessarily visual, these percepts may still be considered images (Mitchell 1984).
Similarly, Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has suggested that imagery is not solely visual. In Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (2003), Damasio has defined two types of ‘perceptual imagery’; one being ‘images from special
32
sensory probes’, which come from the retina and cochlea, and receive information from outside the body; and ‘images from the flesh’ which come from the viscera and nervous system (p.195-197). My understanding of Perceptual imagery is also informed by Damasio’s definitions, and therefore informs my interpretation of Mitchell’s ‘family of images’.
Many different Perceptual images are available to us at any one time, although we may not always be attending to them.24 But when we do give attention to the experience of a Perceptual image, this experience can also be affected by imagined or remembered physical experiences. For example, if I imagine myself floating in water, or sitting in a hot car, I can create more than just a photographic, visual image; I can also recall an associated physical sensation, without experiencing it directly.
Somatic Imagery The interplay of Mental, Verbal and Perceptual imagery as I have described it here, in Mitchell’s terms, illustrates my own interpretation of Todd’s original principle of psychophysical embodiment. In my understanding, the ‘somatic imagery’ of Ideokinesis, Body Mind Centering (BMC™), and the Franklin Method have all been informed by Todd’s principles.25 Each of these methods draw upon Graphic, Verbal and Mental imagery of human anatomy and bio-mechanics, in order to bring attention to the Perceptual images that may arise from the body in movement. In turn, giving attention and awareness to Perceptual images and bodily states can also feed back into how we perceive Graphic, Mental and Verbal images.
24 See for example Drew Leder’s post-phenomenological analysis of ‘bodily absence’; Leder, D. (1990). The absent body
/ Drew Leder, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1990.
“While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is
also essentially characterized by absence. That is, one’s own body is rarely the thematic object
of experience.” (1990 P. 1)
25 In Sensing, Feeling and Action, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (2008) cites Andre Bernard and Barbara Clark’s teaching ‘in the tradition of Mabel Ellsworth Todd’ (p.190), as being one of the many influences on her approach to Body Mind
Centring™. This can be seen in the following quotes from both Todd and Bainbridge Cohen: “For every thought supported by feeling there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man, man’s whole body records his emotional thinking.” -Mabel Todd (1937/2011) And; “Our body moves as our mind moves. The quality of any movement is a manifestation of how mind is expressing through the body at that moment” – Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
(2008, p.1) Eric Franklin also cites both Mabel Todd and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as having influenced his own method of somatic imagery for dance (Franklin, 2013).
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Visuality As Mitchell and Damasio have indicated, not all images are visual. Nonetheless, the visual sense does offer something very definitive. Lisa Nelson says ‘the eyes are the first to know’.26 For Nelson, the eyes being the ‘first to know’ is not to undermine the other senses, but simply acknowledges that seeing happens to be the quickest way for us to perceive forms. I can feel an object with my eyes closed, and get an idea of its shape, but it will take a lot longer to generate. Also, if it happens to be something I have never seen before, my perception of it will always lack a visual perspective. On the other hand, there is a lot that I can anticipate about the weight, shape, texture or temperature of an object, simply by looking at it.
American philosopher of phenomenology and neuroscience, Shaun Gallagher, points to some neurobiological evidence to support the claim that vision is an embodied process. Gallagher refers to a discovery in neuroscience of ‘canonical neurons,’27 which are said to be ‘responsible for the motoric encoding of actions such as reaching and grasping’ (Gallagher 2005). As Gallagher explains, simply looking at certain objects (if they are already familiar or relevant to the perceiver) ‘automatically evokes the most suitable motor program required to interact’ with that object, even if there is no intention to pick the object up. Therefore, he says, ‘the activation of motor preparation areas in the brain form part of what it means to perceive such objects’ (Gallagher 2005).
26Paraphrased from online interview with Lisa Nelson on Dance-Tech.net EMBODIED TECHNE SERIES. Conducted in New York by Marlon Barrios Solano (February 15/2008). http://www.dancetech.net/video/1462368:Video:15448. Accessed 20/10/13.
“The eyes are the first to know - it’s the way humans use them, probably. For a dog the nose is
the first to know, or to notice […] we tend to see in a snapshot.” 21:40 min/secs.
27 Canonical neurons were discovered in the ventral premotor cortex (area V5) of macaque monkeys. These neurons are closely related to mirror neurons that were also discovered in the same research. Mirror neurons are said to be responsible for empathetic behaviour and for mimicking the actions of others, while canonical neurons are involved in motor preparations for reaching and grasping objects. These neurons are presumed to also exist in humans. See, Rizzolatti, G., L.
Fogassi, et al. (1997). "Parietal cortex: from sight to action." Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7(4): 562-567. Gallagher, S.
(2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford; New York, Clarendon Press, Gallagher, S. (2012). "Neurons, neonates and narrative: From empathic resonance to empathic understanding." Moving Ourselves, Moving Others [electronic resource] : Motion and emotion in intersubjectivity, consciousness and language: 167- 196.
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Sweigard’s (1974) theory of the Ideokinetic influence of imagery on ‘subcortical planning of muscle action’ (p.170), seems to anticipate this more recent discovery in neuroscience of canonical neurons.28 If canonical neurons indicate that objects within one’s environment evoke motor preparations in the body as a response to what we see, what motor preparations may be evoked if I just imagine an object? And what if that object happens to be my own skeleton? How might this affect the way that I move? These questions were addressed in my practice through my use of the Substance Score. The precise details of this score will be given in part two of this chapter.
Soma Thomas Hanna coined the term ‘Somatics’ in the 1970’s to encompass the range of mostly western, body-mind practices including Ideokinesis, Body Mind Centering™, Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method, among others. The term ‘somatic’ literally means ‘of the body’, and therefore might refer to almost any type of physical exercise or treatment. However, Hanna’s emphasis is on the ‘soma’, which is derived from ancient Greek, and refers to an internal perspective of one’s own body as a living body ‘perceived from within by first- person perception’ (Hanna 1986).
In western medicine, ‘somatic’ is a term that is used to differentiate illnesses of the body-proper from mental illness. Medicine takes a third-person view of the body, and categorizes the body as being separate from mind. Although Hanna concedes that a third person perspective of the body is equally real, he emphasizes the first-person perspective of the Soma to be the primary concern of Somatics.
“Body and soma are coequal in reality and value, but they are categorically distinct as observed phenomena. Somatics, then is a field of study dealing with somatic phenomena: i.e., the human being as experienced by himself from the inside.” (Hanna 1986)
28 This point is also addressed further in chapter three. 35
Although Somatics are primarily concerned with a subjective, kinaesthetic experience of the body, they also draw heavily upon a third-person anatomical perspective. Body Mind Centering™, for example, involves sensing the body’s tissues, bones, organs and cells, in order to internally embody anatomical information from a first-person perspective. I understand this approach to movement in relation to Mitchell’s ‘family of images’ as being one that draws upon Graphic, Verbal and Mental imagery (of tissues, bones, organs, and cells), in order to bring Perceptual awareness to the body moving.
Anatomical Imagery From the seventeenth century onward, anatomy has been popularized through greater dissemination of visual representation. Visual technologies, ranging from drawing, etching, photography, motion-capture, x-ray machines and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, have all been instrumental to western anatomical study. The pervasive role of Graphic and Optical imagery in anatomical study indicates the importance of visual representation for understanding the human body. But this understanding has in many ways objectified the body. As post-phenomenologist, Drew Leder, observed in The Absent Body (1990):
“Since the seventeenth century the body has been primarily identified with its scientific description, i.e., regarded as a material object whose anatomical and functional properties can be characterized according to general scientific law. As such, the human body, while perhaps unusual in its complexity, is taken as essentially no different from any other physical object.” (Leder 1990, p.5)
Given that anatomical study has essentially atomized the body into dissected parts, it may be considered paradoxical to the holistic nature of somatic practices. However, as Leder explains, it is also possible for the objectifying view of the anatomist’s gaze to be integrated into first-person perception.
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“To be a lived body is always also to be a physical body with bones and tendons, nerves and sinews, all of which can be scientifically characterized. These are not two different bodies. Körper is itself an aspect of Leib.” (Leder 1990, p.6)
Following Merleau-Ponty’s use of the terms, Leder (1990) employs the German Leib, which translates as ‘living body’, and Körper, meaning ‘physical body’, to advocate a perspective of embodiment that may be ‘witnessed from the third- person and first-person alike.’ That is, ‘articulated by science as well as the life- world gaze’ (p.7). While somatic practitioners had already developed practical methodologies for integrating Körper and Leib, well before Leder’s post- phenomenological account (which Leder appears to be unaware of),29 his insights are mostly complementary to somatic perspectives. This is not merely coincidental, but is indicative of the affinity between Somatics and phenomenology (Eddy 2009, p.6).
Hanna’s use of the term Soma is very similar to the way that phenomenologists, like Leder, use the term Leib. Soma and Leib are similar concepts in that they both refer to the perspective of being a body, as opposed to a distanced view of the body as an observable object. Furthermore, both Leder and Hanna identify the Leib/Körper, Soma/Body distinction as one of perspective only, rather than two separate bodies. Each perspective is considered to be integral to the whole. However, what I find interesting about Leder is that he explicitly advocates for the value of a scientific perspective. Although he acknowledges that third-person perspectives have historically undermined the significance of lived experience, he also embraces the scientific gaze as something that has the potential to inform and augment first person perception (1990 p.5).
29 Although I do think that Leder is aware of somatic perspectives, he does not emphasise them in his book because his thesis is focussed on ‘ordinary’ experiences of embodiment. See also, for an actor’s perspective on specialised modes of embodiment, in relation to Leder’s notion of absence. Zarilli, P. (2004). "Toward a Phenomenological Model of the
Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience." Theatre Journal 56(4): 653 - 666. 37
“The scientist tends to perceive objects through highly developed technologies and conceptual strategies uncommon to the ordinary life-world […] Such experiences reveal aspects of corporeality unavailable to ordinary vision.” (Leder 1990, p.7)
As imaging techniques have continued to develop within medical anatomy, somatic movement practices have also benefitted. Body Mind Centering™, for example, has embraced more and more microscopic levels of embodiment, and assumes that we can actually access these interoceptive processes perceptually, and not just visually. As is revealed in Susan Aposhyan’s foreword to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Sensing, Feeling and Action (2008).
“For me the most precious aspect of BMC™ is the uncompromising belief that consciousness pervades all of the body. This leads one to a very intimate, almost microscopic, experience of the body. From this level, all tissues and fluids, each and every cell, are clearly intelligent, can perceive and take action. Not only can we be aware of each part of our physical self, we can be aware with each part of our physical self. The realization of this belief stems largely from Bonnie’s ability to contact herself on a microscopic level and communicate both from that place within herself and to that place within others.” (Aposhyan in Cohen, Nelson et al. 2008, p.vii)
Body Mind Centering™ is specialised in its approach to first-person perspectives of embodiment, and requires a different kind of attention and awareness to the body than in daily life. In contrast to this, Leder (1990) says that in normal situations our perceptual organs tend to project outward, as we act upon things in the world. His term, the ‘ecstatic body’ refers to the way that our body becomes absent or transparent in our experience, as we frequently engage with what is outside of ourselves. By contrast, in dance and somatic practices the body is thematised in ongoing activity, often for hours at a time. This perspective is perhaps equally as ‘uncommon to the ordinary life-world’ as the scientific, third- person perspective. But while Leder says it would be a mistake to ‘expunge from
38
our view the specialised experiences of the scientist’ (p.7) in this research, the specialised view of the dancer or somatic practitioner is equally important. For a dancer, the ability to perceive what lies beneath the surface of her skin is beneficial to her presence and engagement with her own body in movement.
Somatic practices have taught me to notice subtle impressions, sensations, tensions, and gravitational forces in my body, and I have experienced changes in these particular impressions in response to being attended to. It took some years to learn how to listen to the resonance of internal sensations and perceptions, and to understand this as a dialogue both within myself, and with the external world. Now it is something I can drop into quite easily. At any moment it is possible to drop in, to sense what is beneath the surface, and then return to the ‘ecstatic body’ which projects outward.
A Camera’s Eye View When seen through a microscope, a body might appear to be merely a gathering of cells in a complex system of molecular response to the immediate environment. But these images from microbiology also enable us to imagine our own insides. Similar to Leder, English literary historian Marina Warner also tells how specialised instruments are able to reveal previously unrecognised aspects of experience, and also make clear the natural limits of our embodiment.
“New instruments have taken human vision to places the eyes themselves could never reach, and the images they bring have become part of our intellectual furniture as well as means of bodily survival. At the same time they have revealed to us the sensory boundaries which we inhabit.” (Warner 2006, p. 17)
In 2009 I had an MRI scan (magnetic resonance image) of my brain and spine, and I remember being struck by the fact that I was able to see such a clear image of my own interior. The scan was able to splice through my 3D image on any plane (represented in 2D). This cross sectional perspective of anatomical imagery is familiar to anyone who has looked at an anatomical diagram, but the particular way that an MRI scan is able to scroll through different planes of the body is extremely dynamic. Rather than zooming between macro and micro 39
magnifications, the MRI slices through fine layers of the same magnification. I remember when my doctor scrolled from the top of my head to about mid-way through my eyeballs, in order to point out a benign cyst in my brain (which are apparently very common), I felt oddly confronted by the fact that whatever angle the doctor showed me, I recognized myself in the outline of the image.
“The predicament of Narcissus, who did not know that he was beholding his own image in the pool, has been turned upside down: we now know ourselves in our mind's eye mostly by projecting internally a camera's eye view.” (Warner 2006, p. 336)
My perception of myself when I am dancing is more like an MRI scan than a mirror reflecting the surface. I think anatomically, and try to visualize my body as it actually is. I can picture my bones, tissues and organs, but this is still only a Mental image. It is one thing to develop an idea of one’s own anatomy, but it is only through practicing somatic awareness that one is able to embody this information as a Perceptual image.
PART TWO: Pre-choreographic Scores As mentioned in the Introduction, this practice-led research project has revolved around two scores, which facilitated the creation, memorisation and performance of the choreography in Creature of Habit. In the pre-choreographic phase of Creature of Habit, I discovered the substance score and matching, and developed a practice around them. As stated earlier, I consider these scores to be loose instructions that determine how movement is produced. Both scores are described in detail here.
The Substance Score
Imagine your skeleton is made of either Styrofoam, lead, wax or wood, and notice if the weight, density, or transformability of each substance is reflected in your movement.
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In Mitchell’s terms the substance score used Mental and Verbal imagery of particular substances, in the place of my bones, that led to a Perceptual image of lightness, heaviness, softness or hardness in my experience of moving. This score did not prescribe what movements I did, but instead provided a schema of movement qualities that I was free to move through and interpret differently each time I practiced the score.
By imagining my skeleton to be made of changeable substances, I experienced physical sensations that translated the image of a substance into a particular movement quality. The affect this had on my movement was not entirely predictable, but I found it more effective to use the image of my bones being made of Styrofoam if I wanted to experience a quality of lightness, for example, than if I tried to achieve a quality of lightness in a more direct way. This was not about acting as though my bones were made of Styrofoam but instead it was moving with what felt like a neuro-physiological response to visualising my skeleton being made of Styrofoam – or lead, or wood, or wax. The difference sounds very subtle on paper, but in practice it is the difference between acting and being in a certain physical state as a result of intentionally imagining something.30
Matching Matching is a movement score that I have based on a somatic principle, articulated by phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke (1995). Behnke describes matching as being a principle of somatic practice, which she has named after a somatic technique developed by somatic practitioner, Judith Aston. In making this distinction between somatic principles and techniques, Behnke quotes Don Johnson.31
30 Working with the image of Styrofoam had an effect of lightness, which circumvented any sense I might have had of trying to achieve lightness as if it were my primary goal. Because the quality of lightness has such a strong association to ballet, it is often seen as a problematic ‘symptom’ of childhood ballet training in contemporary dancers. This has been my experience, having started ballet at a young age, and then taking up contemporary dance in my late teens. But I feel that it is unnecessarily limiting to avoid an entire quality of movement based on its association to a traditional technique. As a choreographer I have chosen not to cover up my ballet training, but at the same time I try to be aware of its influence on my habitual responses in movement, and I have been interested to see if lightness may be uncoupled from balletic technique.
31 Johnson, D. H. (1986-87). "Principles versus Technique: Towards the Unity of the Somatics Field." Somatics
6:1(Autumn/Winter): 4. 41
“Don Johnson has distinguished between principles and techniques in the field of Somatics: Principles are fundamental “sources of discovery” that “enable the inspired person continually to invent creative strategies for working with others,” whereas techniques are specific methods arising from such principles.” (Behnke 1995, p.317)
As a somatic technique, Judith Aston uses the term ‘matching’ to describe her approach to treating asymmetrical alignment in her students, not by attempting to correct their alignment through prescribed exercise, but by asking them to ‘consciously match’ their asymmetry. Behnke (1995) takes Aston’s example of her matching technique to describe more broadly the principle that supports it, which she says has three main aspects:
“(1) Awareness of something in one’s own body; (2) an inner act of matching or aligning oneself with this; and (3) allowing something to change.” (Behnke 1995)
According to Behnke (1995), the principle of matching is to inhabit one’s body ‘as if it is something that I am myself doing’, including those aspects which may be considered automatic or involuntary (p.324). Although in normal functioning we do not need to be consciously aware of how we move, it is possible to bring our awareness to the edges of what we can know.32
32 See also, Feldenkrais, M. (1981). The Elusive Obvious (Introduction). Bone, breath, & gesture: Practices of embodiment. D. H. Johnson. Berkeley, North Atlantic Books Berkeley, CA.
“In general we do much without knowing consciously how we do it. We speak and do not
know how we do it. We swallow and ignore how we do it. Try to explain to a Martian how we
swallow and you will realize what I mean by knowing. Some very common everyday acts, like
sitting or getting up from a chair, seem easier to know. But, are you really sure of what we do
when getting up from the sitting position? Which part of our body initiates the movement? Is it
the pelvis, the legs, or the head? Do we contract our abdominal muscles first or the extensors
of the back? We can do the movement just by intending to perform it and not knowing how
we do it. Do you think that we really do not need to know?[…] Suppose you are in need of the
explanation, for how can we be sure that without knowing how we do something it is being
done as well as our potential capacity will allow?” (Feldenkrais 1981) 42
“If something is at all present to me kinaesthetically, somaesthetically, or proprioceptively, I can find a way to match it and see what happens […]. Matching blurs the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary; I can use the as if to align myself even with processes and functions I would have thought were out of “my” control.” (Behnke 1995, p.324)
This perspective resonates with other somatic approaches, such as the perspective of BMC™ in which, according to Aposhyan, ‘consciousness pervades all of the body’ (Aposhyan in Cohen, Nelson et al. 2008, p.vii). Behnke also describes a similar type of awareness, after Husserl, which she calls a ‘dilated kinaesthetic consciousness’ (Behnke 1997).
Matching brings an intentional shift in perspective, so that whatever is occurring habitually is imagined to be something deliberate. However, there is still no direct action for change. The change comes as a physical response, rather than a purely intellectual decision. This principle has similarities to Ideokinesis, which does not attempt to correct alignment through conscious direction, but instead uses imagery to influence subcortical planning (Sweigard 1974, p.170).
After reading Behnke’s article, I decided to incorporate the principle of matching into my choreographic practice, and use it as a movement score. As a score, matching was not for the purpose of correcting my alignment, but instead for directing my attention while dancing.33 When I am matching, I scan and match my postural shape and listen for opportunities to release muscular tension and balance the skeleton. In the meantime another movement, or a fresh awareness of the same position/shape/trajectory already begins to emerge. This has a double fascination for me, in that it enables me to notice what I am doing, and also to notice what I am about to do, and then it offers me a choice to do something else, or to do the thing but observe it as it unfolds. Matching places me
33 I write matching in italics to indicate that I am referring to my choreographic score, to differentiate it from Behnke’s somatic principle, which the score is based on but is not equivalent to it. 43
on the hinge of the present moment, to not only recognize what is already happening, but also to have a choice in what might happen next.34
Although it is perhaps easier to practice matching while staying relatively still, it is not a static practice. As a method of training myself to observe movements as they pass in improvisation, matching helps me to frame and compose movement in real time. Matching can also be practiced at the same time as the substance score, because it is possible to match anything, including whatever spontaneous responses I might have to the imagery of the substance score. Instead of being led by my imagination, which is often too fast for the body to keep up with, the matching score helped to detain my imagination, as well as my opinions and judgements, so that whatever was actually happening in an improvisation could come more clearly into view. This could then become available as an idea/shape/rule that could be returned to later in the choreographic and post- choreographic phase of the creative process. This will be addressed in chapters two and three.
Conclusion In this chapter I have described how the interplay of Mental, Verbal and Perceptual imagery, as defined in Mitchell’s ‘family of images’, relates to my own understanding of Ideokinetic approaches to movement. Mitchell has shown that not all images are visual, and I have taken this point to illustrate how imagery can engage our perception of things beneath the surface. In my understanding, thinking through the body and its anatomical structure gives rise to Mental and Perceptual imagery of the form and substance of the body, and this imagery can then be used to direct the quality and choice of movements performed in improvisation.
In part two of this chapter I described two improvisational scores that I have named the substance score and matching. These scores were informed by the somatic principles of Ideokinesis and Matching (Sweigard 1974; Behnke 1995), and were developed and practiced in the pre-choreographic phase of Creature of
34 My use of the term ‘hinge’ in this context is borrowed from Varela, F. J. (1992). The reenchantment of the concrete.
Incorporations J. C. S. Kwinter. New York, Zone. P. 321 44
Habit. Both scores engage the intentional imagination to affect the quality of movement in improvisation.
Through a sustained practice of matching in the pre-choreographic phase, I learnt to ground my attention in what was already present in my movement. While the substance score allowed me to move through a palette of different qualities without preferencing one quality over another. I consider the substance score to be a mediated use of the Ideokinetic principle, because it uses imagery to influence the ‘subcortical planning’35 of my movement responses, rather than approaching directly a preconceived idea of how a quality such as ‘lightness’ should look or feel.
My use of the substance score and matching together enabled me to develop a personal methodology of using the imagination to direct qualities of movement and presence in dance improvisation. In chapters two and three I will describe how both scores also helped me to memorise the choreography in the choreographic phase, and to re-enact the choreography in the post-choreographic phase of Creature of Habit.
35 Sweigard, L. E. (1974). Human movement potential : its ideokinetic facilitation / Lulu E. Sweigard, New York : Dodd,
Mead, 1974. P. 170 45
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“The crucial faculty of the image is its magical capacity to mediate between physical and mental, perceptual and imaginary, factual and affectual. Poetic images, especially, are embodied and lived as part of our existential world and sense of self.” (Pallasmaa 2011, p.40)
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CHAPTER TWO: A FILMIC ANALOGY
Introduction What follows in this chapter is a ‘narrative of practice’ (Murphy 2012), which illustrates how a filmic analogy has evolved within my work since 2001. Within the period of this research I have come to think of my practice in terms of this filmic analogy, and have traced its evolution through earlier periods of my practice. I use the filmic analogy as a heuristic device to articulate and reflect on the ways that I devise choreographic sequences, and also how I imagine returning to a choreographic sequence in performance.
Filmmaking and choreography are both time-based art forms that make use of the signifying potential of the body. During the 20th century, filmmakers developed a conceptual model for constructing and manipulating the semiotic meaning of moving images, through film editing and the (perceived) manipulation of time. These techniques have been used to support the continuity of narratives, but film editing is also a process of abstraction, as much as it is a set of tools for fabricating a narrative. Cutting, reversing, slow motion and fast motion may also be re- imagined as choreographic strategies.
Precis to the Filmic Analogy I first started using a video camera in my rehearsals in 2001, to document choreographed movement, and as an aid to memory. Between rehearsals I would review the video at home and edit out the material that I did not want to keep. Because I was working solo, on my own body, the video gave me a chance to step outside my role as the ‘dancer’ to be more fully in the headspace of ‘choreographer’. This gave me at least some perspective on the external, visual aspect of the work. The fact of being able to return to video footage, to look again at movement that occurred spontaneously in improvisation, altered my perception of my dancing and fostered my interest for finely detailed movement.
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After reading Roger Copeland’s Merce Cunningham (2004), I became interested in how chance operations could be used within my own practice. This influenced the way that I used video and editing in my choreographic process. I already worked with a method of recording and editing footage of myself improvising, and then re-learning movements from the edited footage. After reading Copeland’s book, my editing process changed and I began to isolate individual movements and randomly re-sequence them, rather than take longer sections of footage to be learnt in one go. This approach was informed by Copeland’s filmic and computer metaphors for Cage and Cunningham’s chance procedures.
“John Cage had long conceived of the computer as little more than a high(er)-tech version of the I-Ching, which he and Cunningham had employed since the 1950s as a principle tool for chance dictated decision making.” (Copeland 2004, p.185)
Copeland also describes Cunningham’s 1953 work Untitled Solo as using chance procedures in a way that mirrored the process of video editing.
“Cunningham’s movement choices for the arms, legs, head and torso were all developed separately and ultimately linked together by chance operations. This collage-like conception of the body (the body as an inorganic “assemblage” of parts) anticipates the way a film or videotape editor arranges and rearranges individual shots and splices.” (Copeland 2004, p.184)
However, Cunningham’s choreography was more than just abstract sequences, predetermined by chance. Cunningham also acknowledged that it was his dancers’ ability to learn the sequences, to physically make the transitions, and to find the continuity in their own bodies that made his work exciting (Noland 2010). As Noland says of Cunningham; ‘what he learns by endangering that more conventional form of continuity is that another form of continuity can emerge’ (Noland 2010, p.53).
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When I edited footage of myself improvising, it spliced my movements into discrete entities, each with a beginning, middle and end, but no longer connected or able to flow evenly through time. Parcelled out in this way, the movements had clear edges. I could name them, reverse them, and splice them into smaller pieces, to open up new gaps. But I still had to physically relearn the movements and find the transitions between them. By re-sequencing my improvisations on video, I was interested in reassembling my habitual ways of phrasing movement. This led me to question, what constitutes ‘a’ movement within my choreography.
‘A’ Movement In the context of my choreographic practice, a movement may be defined as an initiation followed by an end point. An initiation occurs by directing a particular part of my anatomy in a certain direction, and an end-point is reached when that movement has either expelled all of its momentum, or it is interrupted by another initiation.36 The initiation of a movement, in this context, is a conscious action that is directed and/or followed by a focused attention to a particular part of the body, and the direction in space that it is travelling. A movement may begin from stillness, or interrupt another movement during its trajectory, but it is always consciously activated.37
The concept of a movement is brought even more into relief by my editing process, which creates gaps between movements. In order to make live sequences from the edited footage, it is necessary for me to physically traverse the cuts in the footage. Within this filmic analogy for my choreographic practice, I have developed two main strategies for making a transition across the cut, I have named these transitions ‘jump cuts’ and ‘cross fades’.
36 Later in this chapter I will draw attention to the influence of Australian choreographer, Rosalind Crisp, on this aspect of my practice. 37 This is not to say that I never initiate a movement without being consciously aware of it, or that unintentional movements do not also form a legitimate part of my process and performance. Instead it acknowledges that in the choreographic phase of my process, when I am deliberately constructing sequences of movement, this attention and awareness is what differentiates, for me, the movements that I consider to be part of the choreography from those that are not.
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Jump Cuts A jump cut in film or video breaks the continuity of a scene, and leaves it to the viewer to make his or her own connection between the separate images of each frame. When I perform a choreographic ‘jump cut’, I take the most direct route from the end of movement A to the beginning of movement B. Although making the transition from A to B is essentially just another movement in itself, in order for it to feel like a ‘jump cut’, it should not technically be a movement, but quite literally a jump from one position to another. I can only pretend this is possible. As a transition, ‘jump cuts’ are an imagined blackout, or void, which appear as a sharp break in attention, direction, or physical/muscular tone.
By under-doing the transition, I imagine myself to be bringing more attention to the movements either side of the transition, assigning them with more visibility than the transition. ‘Jump cuts’ may be quite visible to a viewer, or very subtle, depending on what the movements are either side of it. It is worth mentioning however, that in this dissertation, I am primarily interested in describing the things that are in my imagination as I make my work. I do not claim to know what an audience actually sees.
Cross Fades A cross fade is different to a jump cut in that it allows traces from the previous frame to linger into the next. In a choreographic ‘cross fade’ I overlap the initiation of movement B with the end of movement A. In doing this, I attempt to morph into movement B from the ‘wrong’ starting position. In my experience, ‘cross fades’ feel less like a transition than a subtle shift in the direction of a movement. This is more like a continuation of the previous movement, wherein two movements become one. To initiate a movement from the wrong starting position is essentially asking my physical responses to cope with the wrong conditions. By not thinking too hard, or over analysing the transition, I have found it easier to make this kind of shift.
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Jump cuts and cross fades have given me an understanding of the range of freedoms that are available to me as a dancer, even when I am performing highly detailed and ‘set’ choreography. This understanding eventually began to influence the way that I structured sequences. Rather than using video technology to capture, reorder and sequence choreography, I began to work with a choreographic score that I called ‘reverse and repeat’.
Reverse and Repeat Reverse and repeat is a score that sits on the border between choreography and improvisation. In this, I try to sequence choreography in real time, but inevitably forget and lose parts of the sequence as the material accumulates. Through reversing and repeating I try to recall and collect movements as they spontaneously emerge. Reverse and repeat is a method of going back and forth in movement that allows me to keep moving while waiting for new movement impulses to emerge. Instead of initiating movements from stillness, the repetitions within reverse and repeat become a kind of unstable ground, which makes it easier for me to recall the new movement emerging, as well as the movement it emerged from. This score may be performed as an improvisation, or used in a choreographic process to generate and collect new material.
Reverse and repeat acts like a holding pattern, which helps me to be less intentional about what comes next. I do not plan ahead, but instead respond to the immediate conditions of my physical relationship to space and gravity while moving. I find the next movement by initiating from whatever part of me that is available to move, change direction, or speed. Which depends on where my weight is distributed and what direction it is travelling in.
Imaginary Editing My description of what constitutes a movement in choreographic terms is very far removed from how I think about movement in daily life. My notion of what makes a movement is constructed and artificial, as is the idea of splicing and editing live movement. In reality there is never a gap in my movement, regardless of whether I am initiating a movement, or a transition, or walking through the door to the studio, my movement is always ongoing. Even so, it is possible to imagine that individual movements may be edited and spliced, and therefore have ‘gaps’
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between them. Through my intentional imagination I am able to perceive movement in this way, as a choreographic strategy.
Embodying Discontinuity Learning to give attention to the isolation and initiation of movements came from my experience in somatic practices,38 and also through the influence of two of my earliest mentors, Joanna Pollitt and Rosalind Crisp.39 My experience with each of them began in 2000, soon after I graduated from tertiary dance training at the WA Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). I worked with Joanna Pollitt throughout her MA research at WAAPA on ‘Accumulated response in live improvised dance performance’, and in the same year I attended Winter Moves at Crisp’s studio, Omeo, in Sydney. Since 2001 I have regularly attended workshop intensives with Crisp, including the 2004 National Dance Laboratory at Critical Path, the 2007 National Dance Laboratory at Dancehouse (co-facilitated by Feldenkrais practitioner and French dance theorist, Isabelle Ginot), and I performed in Sur les Traces du Wombat, choreographed by Crisp for the ‘June Events’ festival at the Atelier de Paris, in 2011.
Pollitt introduced me to the idea of performing one move at a time, and Crisp taught me to notice the initiation of movements. How this attention is facilitated in practice is detailed below.
Rosalind Crisp: Initiating MovementOne of the most important features of Rosalind Crisp’s approach to choreographic practice is her continual effort to break and re-wire the habitual movement pathways of her dancers, her students, and herself. Crisp’s commitment to instability continues to fuel her practice in fascinating ways. She achieves this re-wiring of habit by giving attention to where her movements are initiated, and continually searches for unfamiliar places to initiate movement from. In her teaching workshops, Crisp often facilitates dance practice through an exercise that she jokingly calls ‘tool number one’, of apparently sixty-four closely related tools that she has accumulated over many years.
38 My emphasis on noticing how movements are initiated has been informed by the Feldenkrais Method, and having regularly attended Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons with local Feldenkrais practitioner, Naomi Richards.
39 Their practices are not the same, but they have worked together, and Crisp has mentored Pollitt. 53
In tool number one, participants partner each other in an exercise of moving in response to touch. The ‘toucher’ suggests places to initiate movement from, and the mover responds by moving toward the touch.40 I understand this exercise as having three stages; (1) A period of input via tactile aid from a partner; (2) a period of moving without the tactile aid of a partner, but using the imagination to continue the same task of locating and initiating movements from specific places on the body; and (3) letting the exercise go completely, while continuing to move and notice what else is of interest in the dancing.
The second stage of this practice, which occurs without the tactile aid of a partner, has often led me to initiate movements from internal, anatomical locations, as well as the surface. The third phase of letting go of the exercise is also very important, as it gives space for the dancer to notice and reflect on what is actually happening, while moving in an unfamiliar way. This allows the dancer to integrate the experience of moving in her own terms. To my mind, this emphasis resonates with Mary Fulkerson’s approach to release technique in dance, where forgetting means that the image or the score may ‘become part of mind and body intelligence’ (Fulkerson 1975, p.11):
“See it Think it Forget it Then it happens.”
Tool number one has often led me to discover new scores, such as the substance score, described in chapter one. By noticing, naming, forgetting and then remembering the ideas and images which condition the experience of tool number one, the dancer is given an opportunity to develop a new pre- choreographic score, which she can return to at another time.
40 Other versions of this same exercise involve moving away from the touch, or responding to the quality and impression of the sensation of being touched. I am speaking from my own experience of attending many of Crisp’s workshops, but
Crisp also describes this same exercise in an interview produced by Marlon Barrios Solano for dance-tech.tv and dance- tech.net. Accessed 20/10/13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFjZOzeBh1c 54
Tool number one is an exercise that disrupts habitual movement patterns by locating and suggesting areas of the body that are not commonly used to initiate movement. As the touch stimulates sensation on the surface of the body, the sensation helps the dancer to imagine and then organise the new co-ordination required to initiate unfamiliar movement. Moving toward the touch also leads the action away from the central axis, which works against a more normal reflex of contracting away from external stimuli. Crisp describes this as a process of ‘myelination’ in the dancer’s awareness that forges new connections in the nervous system.
“Increasingly, my interest is how this practice effects the perception of the dancer. Gradually, as the dancer's body awareness becomes myelinated with ways of finding movement in any part of the body at any time, her perception of herself dancing starts to slip around, generating a fluid interactivity between the body and the imaginary.” (Crisp 2011)
In my filmic approach to choreography, movements are spliced in the editing process. In doing this, I often deliberately cut out the preparation or initiation of movements, in order to force myself to ‘jump cut’ or ‘cross fade’. This means that, when I am learning a sequence from the edited footage, it is necessary for me to find new ways of coordinating movement. In achieving this, the ‘myelinating’ effect of Crisp’s practice has been helpful.
Joanna Pollitt: One move at a time ‘One move at a time’ describes a training exercise that Pollitt used in her practice- led M.A. research, Accumulated Response in Live Improvised Dance Performance (Pollitt 2001). In Pollitt’s thesis, ‘accumulated response’ refers to an idea that we carry our past experiences in our bodies, and that these accumulated experiences can surface in live performance (2001, p.2). From 2000-2001 I was one of five dancers participating in this research.
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To even attempt one move at a time begs the question that is akin to asking after the length of a piece of string, and reveals the notion of ‘one’ movement to be purely rhetorical. While the end of a movement may come with a natural loss of momentum, more often than not our movements are interrupted by a new impulse, before the previous one is fully exhausted.
By thinking of only one move at a time, the duration between each movement impulse comes into focus, and brings attention to habitual rhythms and thought patterns. Recognising this presents an array of choices regarding how these durations may be varied. This has a secondary affect of altering habitual motor chains. Over time, I have developed my own notion of what constitutes a movement, and to make things clearer for myself I have come to consider the length or duration of a movement to be as long as my attention to it, until another idea takes its place.
My experience of working with both Pollitt and Crisp, and their associated interest in observing how movements emerge in improvisation has shaped my choreographic methodology. After many years of having practiced ‘one move at a time’, while also being very attentive to the initiation of movements, it has become possible for me to physically and conceptually articulate movements as being clear and separate entities. The process of recognizing individual movements, and taking them out of an automatic flow, also leads to the possibility of naming and repeating movements. This means that when I am copying movements from video, it is possible for me to re-capture them because of the attention given to how they were performed in the first instance.
Recordings in the Body The filmic analogy describes my choreographic process, based on the period of my practice from around 2001 – 2011. The reason I have described this period of my work, which pre-dates this M.A. research, is to prepare the ground to speak of the strategies in Creature of Habit as being filmic strategies. Although this process did not rely on editing movements to the same extent as described above, I feel that a filmic analogy extends into this research because I have come to understand my choreographic practice in itself as being a recording in the body.
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By recording, I do not mean that it is my intention to fix or limit my habitual repertoire. I aim to continuously challenge my neural plasticity, but to do this I must also allow time for some motor patterns to establish themselves, before they can evolve. In the terminology of my filmic analogy, I might compare my nervous system to analogue videotape, which can be recorded onto, but this does not imply that it is then stable.41 Whatever is recorded onto a tape may later be recorded over, or become double-exposed. As a metaphor for my nervous system, I think of this as being similar to a cross fade, but more enduring.
In Performance Studies, video recording is often considered to be a diminished representation of live performance.42 But I am less interested in how mediated representations differ from live-ness, than I am in the potential to recall movements that would have gone unnoticed if they had not been captured on video. All dancers know that the feeling of a movement changes from one day to the next, and yet the assumption that choreography can be fixed and stable is still often taken for granted. The concept of ‘set’ movement is based on a controversial assumption that live movement can be repeated.43 I am interested in the reasons for this, and I believe, it is because movement can in certain circumstances appear to be accurately repeatable. The following anecdote by Lisa Nelson gives an example of how the imagination’s role in perception can lead to this impression.
41 For an interesting example of how analogue technology, which is already obsolete, can no longer be considered a stable archive, see Marsh, A. (2008). "Performance art and its documentation; a video/photo essay." About performance
[electronic resource] 8: 15 - 29. In this, Marsh tells of a documented performance which ‘comes alive’ after the tape is damaged.
“The damaged tape […] is fascinating and intriguing. If it had survived in its original form, as a dumb witness tape, it would not be compelling. But as a wrecked video that has come back after years of neglect via chemical assault, it represents aspects of the live performance[…] It breaks up, it fumbles, it repeats[…] I like to think of it as the ruin of technology, the stained record, the hysteria of video noise.” p.26
42 See for example, Phelan, P. (1993). The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction. Unmarked : the politics of performance / Peggy Phelan, London ; New York : Routledge, 1993.: 146-166.
43Controversial, that is, in relation to Performance Studies tropes of ‘performance as disappearance’, ‘vanishment’, or ephemerality. See: Ibid. Siegel, M. B. (1972). At the vanishing point : a critic looks at dance / [by] Marcia B. Siegel, New
York : Saturday Review Press, [1972]. For an alternative commentary, Rebecca Schneider speaks of ‘performance remains’, and ‘performance as memory’. Schneider, R. (2010). In the meantime: performance remains. Performing remains : art and war in times of theatrical reenactment: 87-110. 57
In an online interview with Marlon Barros Solano for dance-tech tv, Nelson remarked that her use of reverse in her work was informed by her experience as a videographer (Solano 2008, 36mins). Nelson works with open and improvised structures that she names Tuning Scores. To direct and punctuate her movement on stage, Nelson uses directions such as stillness, pause, or reverse. This operative terminology that she describes as ‘choreographic language’, is also borrowed from the lexicon of video editing.44
“Reverse came from my appetite of working with video, where I could reverse images and look at causality in a different way. But when a human being is reversing, of course it doesn’t have that kind of accuracy.” (Nelson in Solano 2008, 36 mins)
Nelson says that her Tuning Scores ‘do not measure for accuracy, it is always “shit happens”, and accidents, and what the viewer sees’ (Solano 2008, 36 mins). In spite of this, Nelson tells of an audience member who once remarked after one her shows; ‘I could never do what you did, because I can’t remember anything’. Nelson relays that this audience member believed that the reversals she had performed on stage were accurate (Solano 2008).
“She thought that we actually memorized as we were moving, but if you looked at a video of us, you would see that there was no accuracy, it was just that the observer’s, as well as the dancer’s, sense of what just happened is completely constructed.” (Nelson in Solano, 36 mins)
44 It may be noted that the terms of my filmic analogy are very similar to Nelson’s. Although she did not directly influence me early on, she is influential, and so her ideas were circulating all along, and so in retrospect she may be considered an influence. It is important to clarify however, that despite the similar themes and terms, my approach to choreography is very different to Nelson’s, primarily because I set movement in choreography, whereas Nelson works with open and improvised structures that she names Tuning Scores. As I developed my filmic analogy in this research,
Nelson has become a key influence on my thinking. Nelson, L. (2004). "Before your eyes: Seeds of a Dance Practice."
Contact Quarterly 29(No1, Winter/Spring): 20-26. 58
What stands out for me in Nelson’s statement is that movement can be repeated, inaccurately, but sufficiently enough to be recognized, and performed again, or even reversed. Given the necessity to re-iterate choreographed dance, also embodies the opportunity to develop a multifaceted relationship to movement through repetition, for both performer and audience. Movements can be recognized, across time and across bodies. Movement is citable.45
In my creative process, I use video as if it were a ‘map of the territory’. As a record, the video may be considered an abstraction, an image, a mere representation, or an archive, but it is also a tool that I use to guide myself through the real territory of a half-made choreography. The comparison between ‘how I did it yesterday’ with ‘how I am doing it today’ is only made apparent by the frame of reference that is provided by the video recording. So long as a video is seen as an archive of ‘original’ movement, which can never be properly repeated, this difference may be considered problematic. Instead I choose to view the video of my rehearsals as sketches, which may need to be re-drafted many times, and possibly taped-over with more recent renderings of what I consider to be the same movement. This implies a perspective wherein the ‘origin’ of a choreographed movement is not lost to the past, but instead is yet to emerge in the future.
This idea of moving toward a ‘set’ movement that is gradually distilled, rather than trying to fully retrieve a spontaneous moment from an improvisation, is how I approach my work. In an ethnographic study, cognitive scientist David Kirsh (2009) reveals a similar perspective. In Kirsh’s study, he used eight video cameras and a team of observers to research the distributed cognition involved in the creative process of an established dance company. In this study, Kirsh observed that the choreographer would frequently direct his dancers to perform movements that he was unable to demonstrate himself, but that he anticipated
45 This claim is now supported by more recent evidence in neuroscience, by the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’. This point will be addressed further in chapter three. Gallagher, S. (2012). "Neurons, neonates and narrative: From empathic resonance to empathic understanding." Moving Ourselves, Moving Others [electronic resource] : Motion and emotion in intersubjectivity, consciousness and language: 167- 196.
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his dancers would be able to do, given time to practice. Kirsh identified this anticipated movement as a ‘Platonic ideal’ of the movement.
“At each moment, there is an intended movement – the Platonic ideal of that movement. But because of body idiosyncrasies, or because the ideal movement requires considerable practice, the Platonic movement each member of the troupe is aiming for may not yet have been displayed. The troupe may know what they are aiming for but no one has executed it yet.” (Kirsh, Muntanyola et al. 2009)
This notion of a Platonic ideal of movement is interesting because it implies that choreography may be seen to exist as an abstraction outside of the body. If this could ever be strictly true, it would only be possible within a company that has a very highly codified vocabulary, and perhaps a company of robots. Nonetheless, as Kirsh reveals, it is a common trait for choreographers to establish a vocabulary of movements, and then ask their dancers to somehow meet the idea of that movement.46 For example, in Cunningham’s practice we see a process where pre- determined movements become stable referents, or ‘Platonic ideals’, which his dancers then work in relation to. The contribution of the dancer in this process is, as Cunningham has also acknowledged, one wherein the dancer’s individual agency is co-constructive to the choreography.
“Cunningham has stated that his most fulfilling aesthetic experiences have been produced by the spectacle of a dancer learning to embody his nearly impossible choreography, that is, by the spectacle of a human body in the process of rearticulating its very motility in order to perform inorganically derived choreographic [sequences].” (Noland 2009b, p.1)
46 An exception to this rule would be Deborah Hay’s approach to choreography, which does not involve a movement vocabulary at all, but instead asks the dancer to respond to a verbal or written libretto. See Hay, D. (2000). My body, the
Buddhist [electronic resource] / Deborah Hay ; with a foreword by Susan Foster, Hanover, N.H. : University Press of New England : Wesleyan University Press, c2000. 60
As Noland (2009b) observes, what is interesting in Cunningham’s work is not his dancer’s mastery of, but their negotiation with his choreography. In Creature of Habit I became interested in finding ways to make my negotiation with the choreography a central focus. In the choreographic and post-choreographic phase of the creative process, I altered the matching score very slightly to become a rule of matching myself to the movement, whereas previously the score was focussed solely on my postural position and kinaesthetic sensations. In doing this, I began to feel that I was aligning myself with the choreography ‘as if’ it were something stable.
“Matching is a way of reinterpreting what is happening to me, or inside of me – not only by feeling my way into it, but also by experiencing whatever is going on as if it is something I am myself doing.” [original emphasis] (Behnke 1995, p.324)
The way that I have physically responded to Behnke’s directive of moving ‘as if’, has also been informed by my participation in workshops with Deborah Hay.47 Hay often prefixes her choreographic scores with the question; ‘What if?’ Although Hay’s choreographic approach is very different to mine, her sophisticated use of language in her practice makes it possible to re-interpret her scores in other ways. The key difference in my take on Hay’s question; ‘What if…?’, is that, unlike Hay, I am interested in applying this enquiry to pre-determined movement.
In My Body the Buddhist (2000), Hay says that ‘questions like, “What if alignment is everywhere?” set up the imaginary conditions that are necessary for me even to begin dancing’ (p.xxiv). Both ‘as if’ and ‘what if?’ set up rhetorical spaces that allow for an open and embodied interpretation of the situation at hand. To my mind, even if in the ‘present moment’ I am trying to repeat a movement that I set yesterday, approaching it today in the spirit of ‘as if’ (…it were possible to repeat), allows me to attempt it, and to move on.
47 In 2012 I performed in a work choreographed by Hay during a workshop at the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson. My participation in this workshop was made possible by a Dr Phillip Law Travel Scholarship from the VCA. Also, in 2014 I attended another workshop with Hay in Melbourne, at Dancehouse in Carlton. My participation in this workshop was also supported by the VCA. 61
I experience choreography not just as setting and performing a fixed sequence of movements, but as a process of negotiating myself in relation to a highly detailed set of physical instructions. The sections of my performances are part of a conceptual framework, which can be run from any point, stopped, reversed or re- ordered which, again, implies the influence of a filmic analogy.
Conclusion By spelling out in detail how visual technologies operate within, and inform my practice, I am illuminating some of the idiosyncrasies of my choreographic imagination. As filmic concepts became absorbed into my approach, they were reflected in my language for describing my choreographic process as involving ‘cross fades’ and ‘jump cuts’. Over time, the language itself began to inform my process in new ways. I imagined choreography to be a process of ‘capturing’ or ‘recording’ movement, while ‘editing’ became something that I could do in real- time, through compositional scores such as reverse and repeat.
Through the filmic analogy I have embodied characteristics of a recording and editing device. I see this as an inversion to the notion of a mechanical gaze unable to truly capture the ‘essence’ of live performance. Instead, I consider myself to be capturing some, though not all, of the essence from reproductive visual technology, and using it for my own, choreographic purposes. The performance may only happen once for the audience, but as the choreographer and performer I need to feel that the work can be performed again. Despite the notorious ephemerality of dance, it is the attempt to ‘capture’ and ‘recapture’ movement that fuels my choreographic imagination.
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“Through slow motion technologies or somatic techniques that make us more aware of the continuum from which gestures have been cut, it is possible to increase one’s sensitivity to the gap, to lie in wait for the emergence of that short but pregnant interval, that the next step on the chain both renders possible and leaves behind.” (Noland 2009a, p.92)
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“It could be argued that there is no artist who precedes the repetitive practice of art (and it is repetitive). Through practice, the artist comes into being. Art practice is performative in that it enacts or produces ‘art’ as an effect. ‘Artists’ engage with, re- iterate and question the ‘norms’ of ‘art’ existing in the socio- cultural context at a particular historical juncture. Similarly, art practice conceals the conventions of which it is a repetition. The re-iteration that operates in an artist’s practice produces a ‘naturalized’ effect, which we come to label as the artist’s style.” (Bolt 2008)
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CHAPTER THREE: CREATURE OF HABIT
This chapter focuses on how I imagine the ‘post-choreographic’ stage of my process, and also considers issues of agency and inscription. As stated earlier, in this dissertation, ‘post-choreography’ refers to the stage in my process where the choreography has been previously set and learnt by heart. In this phase of my process, I have already acquired the embodied knowledge that enables me to re- activate the dance, in both rehearsal and performance.
Meaning and Movement While making Creature of Habit I became interested in how movements become gestures. What does movement have to say? How does meaning attach itself to a gesture? When we interpret another person’s state of mind, or intuit their intentions, we read it in their bodies and their faces. This is so automatic and ongoing, that it is easy to forget that we have an inherent ability for reading bodily movement, although the meaning of a movement is never entirely fixed.
The gesturing body is integral to the craft of both actors and dancers, but in very different ways. In acting the emphasis is not on movement itself, but on the expressions that may be interpreted in the body’s movement. For an actor, the body in motion is a vehicle for expression, of psychological or emotional affect. The gestural regimes that actors perform rely on an established cultural significance, relevant to a particular context, time and place. Whereas in dance, movements of the body may be taken for what they are, in and of themselves, without making reference to anything else. While this is not always the case for dance, it is an approach to movement of which dance is uniquely capable.48
48 See for example; Noland, C. (2010). "The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression." Dance Research Journal 42(1): 46-60. “The dance can move its audience without relying on pathos embedded in plot, or energy
framed as categorical emotion. There is no external referent that the body’s movement refers
to; it is not expressing more than it is (or, rather, more than it is doing). On this reading, expression is borne by a materiality – the moving body- it can only transcend by losing itself.” (Noland 2010) p.50.
Micheal Kirby also made the same point in 1975, but he was speaking specifically about abstraction in postmodern dance, rather than a broader notion of abstract movement in dance, which could also include modern-classical choreographers such as Balanchine. Kirby, M. (1975). Post-Modern Dance Issue: An Introduction, New York University:
3. (p.2) 66
One’s Own Movement
“For the first time in history modern dance allowed the individual to find her/his own movement. ‘A profoundly original movement’, according to Hubert Godard. This has led not only to existing vocabularies being discarded but has meant that it is obligatory to do so. In this regard, dance belongs to a whole modern project involving each creator in reinventing an entirely personal language.” (Louppe and Gardner 2010, p.74)
Early in the 20th century, Modern dance introduced the solo dancer, without a corps de ballet or narrative to support her. Completely alone on stage, and often performing her ‘own’ choreography, the Modern dancer no longer had to stay in line or in time with other dancers, or fit any pre-given cultural ideals.49 The hardest part of defending ‘one’s own movement’, however, is in finding how to identify ‘one’s own’ in the first place. Given that the shape, age, health and regular occupation of a person has implications for how that person will move, at what point does a dancer/choreographer become personally responsible for inventing something ‘new’? Is it even possible to own and invent movements of the body? As Louppe (2010) also acknowledged; ‘today, this horizon of a personal language can seem more like an illusion dependant upon a modernist utopia’ (p.74).
49 This point was made by Ramsay Burt, during a visiting lecture and seminar, which I attended, at SODA, Uferstudios,
Berlin 27-28 April 2011. ‘Alone to the World’. This lecture discussed issues of authoship, or the ‘author function’ as defined by Foucault, and how it applies to dance.
‘It was initially in modern dance rather than ballet that the dancer performed alone on the
stage, often, but not always, dancing her own choreography for which she had developed her
own, unique movement vocabulary. This solo dancer is alone in ways that other artists are not.
Whereas a violist plays from a musical score and an actor interprets a play text, the solo
dancer performs with her own body as her instrument and has nothing to interpret other than
herself. The solo dancer is therefore more solitary while nevertheless revealing herself in a
more direct and unmediated way than artists in other disciplines.’ –Ramsay Burt 2011 67
In Agency and Embodiment (2009a), Carrie Noland has argued that the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription, dominant since Foucault, has been over emphasized.50 Although she acknowledges that individual habits and gestures are inscribed through a social, cultural and historical milieu, individual subjects experience this ‘dressage’ differently, and may alter it slightly, which then feeds back into the milieu.
“Normative behaviour may be coercively imposed (as in Foucault’s account) or actively sought, imitated during infancy or gained incrementally throughout one’s entire life. Further, “normative” should be understood as normative within a particular context: a hip swaying gait might be normative for a classed or gendered subject at a certain place and time, but balletic turnout is normative for a self-selected group of skilled bodies that have acquired flexibility in the hip joints under voluntary duress.” (Noland 2009a, p.3)
As stated in the chapter summary (p.16), Noland (2009a) is interested in bridging an ideological gap between phenomenology and constructivist theories of embodiment. In doing this, she draws from French sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss’ famous essay, Techniques of the Body (1934/1973). Noland explains that this essay was not only an important source for Merleau Ponty, it also lay the ground for what she describes as a ‘radical phenomenology’ that ‘sets the agenda for a truly phenomenological constructivism’ (p.21-22).
50 See also Franko, M. (2011). "Editor's Note: What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology?" Dance
Research Journal(2): 1.
‘Since the late 1960s, Michel Foucault’s concept of post-humanism has worked against the phenomenological model for dance scholars influenced by his analysis of power, history, and the vicissitudes of subjectivity. Foucault, although himself no dance theorist, is often considered a pivotal figure in the transition from traditional dance history to dance studies that transpired in the 1980s’. (pg2)
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Techniques of the Body During a period of hospitalization in New York (sometime before 1934) Mauss noticed that he recognized the particular way that his nurses walked, but could not place right away why he recognized it. Upon returning to France, he saw that the gait was as common to French women as it was to the American nurses. He decided that the influence was coming from American movies, which were popular in France at the time. This theory gives support to my filmic analogy for choreographic practice, given in chapter two, as it gives anecdotal evidence of the influence that visual technologies can have on modes of embodiment. More importantly, Mauss observed that styles of walking could become fashionable and also be mimicked.
“The positions of the arms and hands while walking form a social idiosyncrasy – they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychic, arrangements and mechanisms.” (Mauss 1973, p.72)
According to Noland (2009a), Mauss was one of the first people to draw attention to the moving body as the primary site for cultural inscription, as opposed to myth, language and representation. Up until then, the psyche was considered to be more influential in structuring individual identities within a given culture. In Mauss, Noland identifies a key argument, that ‘gesturing is absolutely central to cultural construction of the body’, and that cultural conditioning goes beyond the psyche to ‘lodge itself in the very tissues of the body’. This means that subjects may also have a ‘sensual apprehension’ of the experience of being inscribed (p.21-22). This first-person kinaesthetic awareness, as Noland observes, can provide an opportunity for inscribed and habitual modes of embodiment to be altered, and therefore may enable a dancer to develop her ‘own movement’, albeit if only gradually and through reiterative and disciplined practice.
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“It is ultimately kinesthetic [sic] experience, the somatic attention accorded to the lived sensation of movement, that allows the subject to become an agent in the making of herself.” (Noland 2009a, p.171)
Within dance and somatic movement practices, habitual movement patterns of the body are deliberately addressed and altered. Performers need to be aware of their physical gestural habits and learn to alter them when necessary. Somatic practices have been important to dancers, not only for those wanting to improve their posture, but also for bringing awareness to the felt sensation of particular ways of being and moving, which thereby provides an opportunity to change.
Writing at around the same time as Mauss, Mabel Elsworth Todd also investigated human movement and gestural habit. Like Mauss, Todd understood that movement is as at once a biological, social and psychological phenomenon. But whereas Mauss explored the cultural significance of gestures, techniques and actions of the body, and how these activities constructed the individual, Todd investigated more specifically the mechanical and physical properties of movement.
Informed by concepts of mechanics, engineering, architecture and anatomy, Todd’s terminology included words such as ‘structure’ and ‘efficiency’ to describe the minimum amount of physical energy required to maintain ideal postural alignment. Her choice of the term ‘efficiency’ seems to reflect the language and preoccupations of industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century, when the efficiency of repetitive movements by factory workers became important to mass production. Despite this impression, Todd’s method actually took the objectified, anatomical body, and re-incorporated it back into mindfully embodied experience through her principles of body education. As was discussed in chapter one, somatic education teaches students to integrate third person perspectives into first person experience. Like other somatic pioneers of her time, including
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Laban, Alexander and Feldenkrais, Todd developed a practical methodology for developing somatic awareness. My experiences in somatic practices have often given me the feeling of returning to a ‘natural’ way of moving. To find ease in movement, and to let go of any unnecessary effort is certainly a delightful experience, but of course it is not really a natural way of moving. Somatics are also taught, and are therefore also a kind of dressage, like any other education. My question is not whether or not something is being inscribed, because it undoubtedly is, instead my interest is in how useful this education is, to me, as a choreographer, as it gives me agency to find other ways of being inscribed?
Transcriptions As Mauss recognized in the familiar gait of American and French women of the 1930’s, people are prone to mimicry. Our ability to mimic movements is linked to a discovery in neuroscience in recent decades of ‘resonance systems’. Resonance systems refer to neurons in the visual cortex, known as ‘mirror neurons’ and ‘canonical neurons’. Mirror neurons are said to be responsible for empathetic behaviour and for mimicking the actions of others, while canonical neurons are involved in motor planning for reaching and grasping objects. These neurons are fired when we visually perceive certain objects, or actions performed by other people (Rizzolatti, Fogassi et al. 1997; Gallagher 2005; Gallagher 2012).
“It has been shown that there are overlapping neural areas (shared representations) in the brain that are activated when the subject intentionally acts in specific ways, observes the same kind of actions, or imagines such actions.” [original emphasis] (Gallagher 2012, p.168)
According to Sweigard (1974), Ideokinetic imagery influences ‘subcortical planning of muscle action’ (p.170). If resonance systems enable movements and gestures to transfer across bodies through mimicry, perhaps it is possible that the very same systems are involved in Ideokinetic methods of altering undesirable inscription, through the use of somatic imagery.
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Ideokinesis brings awareness and attention to the body’s movements and posture so that unconscious habits that may be ‘inefficient’ can become available for change. Paradoxically though, an important aspect of the Ideokinetic theory is that conscious directions are avoided, because this draws from the same habitual patterns of moving that were previously inscribed. As Sweigard (1974) explains, when our movements are ‘consciously directed’ we use already ‘established neuromuscular habit patterns’, which can interfere with the ‘possible influence of subcortical planning’ (p.170).
Students of Ideokinesis are encouraged to resist the temptation to consciously ‘straighten up’. Rather than following a conscious command, the body is given the space to employ its own particular mode of intelligence in response to a mental image that is designed to facilitate ease of movement and efficient alignment of the skeleton (Sweigard 1974; Bernard, Steinmüller et al. 2006).
In my choreographic practice I develop precise and deliberate sequences of movement, which I want to be able to repeat, but also do not want to perform habitually or automatically. How then, does the Ideokinetic principle apply to this process? Is it possible to perform ‘set’ choreography without consciously intending to do it? What aspects of the movement should I be intending, or not intending, to do?
My answer to the above questions is that I have found it possible to differentiate between a ‘conscious direction’ to do an arabesque for example, which may be laden with pre-determined expectations,51 and doing the same movement but being guided by imagery. Although it is impossible for me to eliminate entirely my pre-conceptions of how I would like a certain movement to look or feel, it is
51 I am only using a balletic term because it is more universally recognizable, but I am actually referring to any movements that I have choreographed, and practised many times over. Although Postmodern and contemporary dance has largely done away with codified movement vocabularies, as choreographers today are more likely to communicate with their dancers via principles of movement, or movement scores, rather than a previously established vocabulary; many choreographers still develop temporary vocabularies and signature moves that are recognizable and nameable when transferred onto other dancers. Even so, movement vocabularies are not generally codified to the same extent, or passed on in the same way, as they were in ballet, Graham, or Cunningham technique. 72
possible to broaden my understanding and awareness of what informs my Mental and Perceptual image of it. With the substance score, one of my approaches to this research was to imagine my skeleton being made of different substances, i.e. Styrofoam, lead, wax or wood, and allowing the quality of each substance to affect my movement. As explained previously, this score was based on my own understanding of Ideokinesis, and Joan Skinner’s approach of using imagery for dance.
When I used the substance score in the pre-choreographic stage of my creative process, there were not yet any known movements that I wanted to rehearse. Instead, the imagery in the score helped me to understand and embody unfamiliar movements. In the post-choreographic phase, however, I used the substance score to assist in my return to movement, which by then was ‘set’ and pre-determined. As Jonathan Burrows has said, ‘going back to the score’ means being able to ‘re-tap into the conditions of the movement production’, not simply the movement pathway or the image of the movement.52 Burrows’ comment values the performer’s lived experience and presence as an agent for the choreography, over and above the shape or pathway of abstractly predetermined movement. This also resonates with Cunningham’s emphasis on his dancer’s negotiation with his choreography - rather than expecting that they master the choreographic sequencing straight away, which would foreclose the opportunity for the dancer to co-evolve with the choreography.53 In my practice, the substance score and matching helped to facilitate my negotiation with the choreography of Creature of Habit, in the post-choreographic stage.
Natural Movement
“The re-iteration that operates in an artist’s practice produces a ‘naturalized’ effect, which we come to label as the artist’s style” (Bolt 2008)
52 See Oralsite (accessed March 2014); http://sarma.be/oralsite/pages/Jonathan_Burrows_on_Scores/
53 See chapter two of this thesis, and Noland, C. (2009b). Coping and Choreography, eScholarship, University of
California, 2009-12-12. (p.1) 73
If Isadora Duncan was driven by a desire to return to an ‘original’ or ‘natural’ body, the ‘supposedly natural gestures’ (Noland 2010) that she performed can now appear equally stylized and constructed as the traditional movement techniques that she was resisting. As Mauss demonstrated in Techniques of the Body (1934/1973), there is no ‘“natural way” for the adult’ to move (p.460). Nonetheless, if Duncan’s movements were not as ‘natural’ as she felt they were, she did at least break with tradition, and manage to resist the dominant cultural rules for women in her time.
Through attention to the kinaesthetic sense, it is possible to become sentient to what is culturally inscribed in our movement. If cultural inscription may be seen to embed itself in the body, as Noland (2009a) has shown through Mauss, then somatic awareness may be used to directly confront cultural inscriptions. As has been demonstrated throughout this dissertation, many choreographers, including Isadora Duncan, Merce Cunningham, Rosalind Crisp, Sandra Parker, and Deborah Hay have all, in various ways, developed choreographic approaches that resist automaticity in movement. The continuing tendency in dance to resist cultural inscription perhaps stems from the fact that it also has the potential to actually do so, in a real way, because of the close affinity between contemporary dance and somatic practices, which promote kinaesthetic awareness.
Movements may be judged to be either efficient or inefficient, or functional or dysfunctional, but it is no longer possible to deem certain movements as being either natural or unnatural, even if some movements feel more natural than others within an individual. In How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), Shaun Gallagher has given clarity to the terms ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. These concepts are part of a complicated discourse in various disciplines, including somatics, phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, which go well beyond the scope of this thesis. Even so, Gallagher’s concise explanation of each term has contributed to my understanding of why some movements of the body feel ‘natural’ while others feel ‘new’.
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Body Schema and Body Image Gallagher (2005) says that the terms ‘body schema’ and ‘body image’ have often been used interchangeably. For him, this ‘terminological problem,’ indicates a ‘deep seated conceptual confusion’ in how the body schema and body image function (p.17-18). According to Gallagher, this confusion ‘turns on the question concerning the extent to which, and the manner in which, one’s body is experienced as an intentional object of consciousness, as part of the perceptual field’ (p.18). Gallagher clarifies this distinction by showing that the body image is available to consciousness, and is representative of how our body appears to ourselves as part of our perceptual field; while the body schema is a subconscious process that indicates how our body shapes our perceptual field.
“A body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body. In contrast, a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring.” (Gallagher 2005, p.24)
When I say that a movement feels ‘new’ to me, I mean that it is not habitual. When I am dancing, if I attempt to move in a non-habitual way, my movements require more perceptual monitoring, because they are not yet stored in the repertoire of my nervous system, as a body schema. But if I intend to repeat a non-habitual movement many, many times, as part of a choreography, it will over time begin to alter my existing schemas. Although it is not possible for me to consciously direct a body schema, it is possible for me to recognise when it is actively involved in what I am doing.
“To the extent that one does become aware of one’s own body, by monitoring or directing perceptual attention to limb position, movement, or posture, then such awareness helps to constitute the perceptual aspect of a body image. Such awareness then may interact with a body schema in complex ways, but it is not equivalent to a schema itself.” (Gallagher 2005, p.24)
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To my mind, Gallagher’s description of the interaction between body schema and body image helps explain how Behnke’s principle of matching works. By giving attention to what can be known or conscious within our movements, it is also possible to observe changes to the body schema.
“Matching presupposes that there is something there to match, some feature of my own bodily experience – such as a shape, feeling, or a movement – of which I am aware… I will assume that I can indeed feel at least some of my own body from within, simply by turning my awareness toward the shape of my limbs in space […] I enter the shape or the tightness, feeling it from within as clearly as I am able, and I begin to appropriate it as something I am myself doing – tightening myself precisely here, or holding myself in exactly this shape.” (Behnke 1995, p. 319 – 320)
Image: Phoebe Robinson, Creature of Habit. Photography: Rachel Roberts
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Proprioception Gallagher’s model of the body image and body schema is also closely tied to his definition of proprioception. Although proprioception is not the equivalent of a body image or a body schema, proprioceptive awareness can inform and alter a body image, and then indirectly have affect on a body schema. When I use the term ‘proprioception’, I am referring to the sensory awareness whereby I feel that I know the relative position of my limbs in space. However, Gallagher identifies a disciplinary debate as to whether or not proprioception is even available to consciousness. . “Neuroscientists may treat somatic proprioception as an entirely subpersonal, non conscious function – the unconscious registration in the central nervous system of the body’s own limb position […] On the other hand, psychologists and philosophers sometimes treat somatic proprioception as a form of consciousness.” (Gallagher 2005, p.6-7) If Gallagher’s neuroscientists are correct, and proprioception is not available to consciousness, what should I call the thing that I experience when I pay attention to the relative position of my limbs in space? Such as, when I make a choreographic decision to extend my leg at a 90° angle behind me, or hold my arms up at shoulder height to evoke one continuous line.54 What is the thing in me that produces the feeling of being in the ‘right’ position?55
Gallagher’s (2005) answer to this comes from separating proprioception into two categories; proprioceptive information, which he says is a ‘subpersonal, non- conscious’ aspect of embodiment; and proprioceptive awareness, which he says is available to consciousness (p.7). In my understanding, it is my proprioceptive awareness that tells me that my leg is in the air at 90° degrees behind me (whether or not I am actually accurate in doing this); meanwhile it is the proprioceptive information that is stored in my nervous system which enables me to put my leg in the air at all.
54 See Figure 1 on previous page. 55 Which is not to say that I think any one position of the body is more ‘right’ than any other. By ‘right’ position, I mean the position that I think I am in. 77
Proprioceptive Blur In 2009 I had a Schwannoma tumor removed from my spinal cord. After the surgery, I experienced many sensations that felt to me as if my proprioception was blurred and out of focus. Parts of my head seemed to be floating out in space, or sitting on a shelf behind me. My experience of sensation was affected by the tumor because of its size and location on the sheath of my spinal cord at T1. My spinal cord was being compressed against the bones of my spinal column.
In the first weeks after surgery, I experienced a range of symptoms while waiting to overcome the shock and loss of myelination where the tumor had been removed. At this time I became extremely sensitive to movement. Even the tiniest vibrations of the hospital building were registered and magnified by my nervous system. It was difficult to tell if I was sensing movement around me, or if my nervous system was fabricating it. What this experience highlighted for me was that reliable sensation is not simply given whenever any-body makes contact with any-thing. Sensation requires a living body with a fully functioning nervous system. As obvious as that sounds, I found it hard to equate the tangible and concrete presence of my nervous system with the range of emotions and ‘ghostly’ sensations I was experiencing as a result of its malfunction.
This personal experience of neurological dysfunction, surgery, and recovery, has led me to appreciate the nature of my own motility more deeply. After the experience of neurosurgery, I now have a tangible sense of proprioception being one’s own-perception, which locates and focuses the body in a particular way. Through malfunction and recovery, I developed a new respect for the biological processes that form a background of ‘normal’ sensation, which was revealed to be a very particular impression forged by a cellular, fluid, fat, chemical and electrical nervous system. This experience led me to become more interested in affirming the functionality of my existing schemas, and has also informed my interest in matching. Throughout this research, matching became a way of affirming where I am, and what my proprioception is telling me. Matching has allowed me to fully acknowledge what is already stored in my body schema, and has occasionally offered a fleeting glimpse of something new.
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Post-choreography In the post-choreographic phase of Creature of Habit, my focus turned to understanding how movements unfold, rather than on inventing new movements. In this, I sought to re-experience even the most basic movement impulses in choreographic form. This interest was informed by my earlier experiences in the Feldenkrais Method, but it was only after reading Behnke’s (1995) article on ‘Matching’, that l discovered a way to apply this principle directly in choreographic practice. Matching fuels my inquisitiveness for movement, giving me a reason to move and to think of this movement not just in passing, but also as something that can be moved again and shown to others.
Connecting movements into sequence brings about a gradual unfolding of revelations, which only comes through repetition. As each gesture falls into a direct relationship with other movements in a phrase, new images emerge in the transitions. Through repetition, the pathways, rhythm, direction, effort and dramaturgical intention all go through subtle changes. Sometimes two movements become one, acted simultaneously. Subtle shifts in emphasis move from one area of the body to another. And, in this process, the physical information that is reinforced kinaesthetically each time the choreography is repeated forms new patterns in my body schema.
Given that I do not wish to simply repeat each work I make with the same vocabulary of movements, it is necessary for me to find ways of moving in unfamiliar territory, and Ideokinetic principles help to facilitate this. However, I have also come to realize that I am not solely interested in new movement. When I return to a movement, to try again its pathway, quality, or kinaesthetic sensation, it opens a path to discovery, which fuels my choreographic imagination.
Conclusion In this dissertation I have focussed mainly on my overall solo choreographic practice, rather than on Creature of Habit specifically. However, I would like to briefly mention Jennifer Hector’s design of the staging, lighting, and video projection of the bird’s eye view of the performance (see video documentation).
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In Creature of Habit, anatomical imagery, somatic imagery, and the technological reproduction of images all swarmed together to illustrate and inform my thinking about the body in movement. Somatic images were used to generate, recall and perform the choreographic material, while video and projection amplified my movements, both in the choreographic process and in the performance. The gestures I performed in this work made no promise of meaning, but still they attached themselves associatively to unfixed meanings, and to a dramatic sound score.
These elements had a major influence on the choreography, and the way that I performed on stage. Although I had developed a lot of material before entering the final stage of development, much of this material was discarded as I began to work in relation to the set and the video projection. In this, the matching score helped me to pare back and simplify the choreography in order to complement the geometric staging, and also to maintain a more central position under the overhead projection.
I was pleased that all the elements of the staging conspired to bring attention to the detail of the movement, which is something I have aspired to do for many years. Mostly thanks to Jennifer Hector’s talent, this was achieved in Creature of Habit. However, although I was very happy with the design overall, my experience inside the work as a performer felt very much like being an insect stuck under a microscope. This has led me to a turning point in my interest as a choreographer. In my future work I would like to be less precise about how I set choreography, and to allow myself more breathing space as a performer.
In future I would like to keep working with the substance score, matching, cross fades, jump cuts and reverse and repeat, but I would like to retain more of the sense of freedom and possibility that I experienced in the pre-choreographic phase of the creative process, by using a more improvised approach to structuring performance. It is, after all, possible to maintain an interest in the re-enactment of movements, without those movements necessarily being arranged in a particular sequence. If, as I proposed in chapter two, a choreographed movement only has its origin in the future, then I hope to always be in the pre-choreographic phase, even in performance.
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CONCLUSION
Separating my process into aspects of pre-, mid- and post-choreographic phases has been helpful to me in structuring this dissertation. Although I also have an appreciation for a much broader notion of the choreographic, which may apply to the movement of traffic, or of pedestrian movement through a building or streetscape, it has been of value to me to articulate the precise way that I think about, and actually make, my work.
In the pre-choreographic phase of my process, matching and the substance score were used to direct myself in improvisation, and to generate a choreographic focus. In chapter one I articulated these scores as being an interplay of Mental, Verbal and Perceptual images. These images may be thought of as embodied images, which have the capacity to respond directly to Graphic and Optical images. These terms were based on WJT Mitchell’s conceptualisation of the ‘family of images’ (Mitchell 1984).
In chapter two, a filmic analogy described the mid-choreographic stage of my practice, and also re-named and redefined ideas and approaches that I have directly inherited from other choreographers and dancers, such as; Merce Cunningham via Roger Copeland; Lisa Nelson via her own writing; and Sandra Parker, Rosalind Crisp, Joanna Pollitt and Deborah Hay, via a direct engagement in workshops and creative processes with these choreographers.56
The filmic analogy emerged in my practice as a method for manipulating movement in a way that took me further away from my established habits. Early on in my practice I was not interested in the impulses that were already stored in my body. I wanted to dissect movement, in order to undo and reassemble my habits. Through my interest in matching, however, I have become less concerned with undoing habit, than in attending to what is already there.
Although the anatomical body has been exhaustively mapped, named and dissected over many centuries, my lived experience of my own body continues to
56 I would also like to acknowledge the influence and support of Helen Herbertson and Judith Walton, who did not feature in this dissertation, but who have inspired and informed me. 81
be filtered in a way that can never be fully apprehended. It is this condition that keeps me continuously alive as a choreographer, and interested in returning to movements over and again.
If it were truly possible to invent new movement, how should it be read? The expectation for artists to be innovative and constantly future-bound in their practice sometimes works in opposition to another expectation, from audiences, the media and funding bodies that choreographic work should be understandable and accessible. For work to engage and inspire discourse within a community it needs to reach into the unknown, but also be identifiable within an historical and geographical context. When dance is seen as ‘an isolated event, a fleeting spectacle amongst others’, it becomes a cultural commodity of ‘newness’, which exacerbates the tendency for dance to self-erase (Louppe and Gardner 2010, p.xxi).
Around the time after my surgery, I had a recurring image that appeared regularly. This image was of different coloured lenses that when drawn together, into focus, the colours would turn clear. It is hard to explain how or why this image attached itself to the sensation I had of being ‘proprioceptively out of focus’, but as a poetic image it continues to inform me and attach itself to other ideas.
The challenge of this research has been to acknowledge the vast web of Somatics and dance practitioners who have informed my approach, while simultaneously defining the particularities of my own choreographic practice. I perceive the world around me and shape those impressions into my work for others to perceive. The idea that any single perspective is in fact always peering through multiple layers of difference is communicated to me through the image of coloured lenses drawing into focus.
Whenever I try to shape my words or work into sense or logic, I do not see myself defining a fixed view, but instead to be in a process of finding a position where my perspective on the things I am looking at can fall into a temporary alignment. This positioning takes a stand, and puts trust in my proprioception.
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APPENDIX
DVD Documentation of Live Performance Enclosed
Documentation of Creature of Habit. A solo dance performance, presented as the creative outcome of this research at the VCA, Studio 45, 45 Sturt St, South Melbourne. July 24-26, 2013. Collaborative artists involved in this presentation were, Jennifer Hector (lighting design), Kym Dillon (sound composition) and Alesh Macak (animation).
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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s: ROBINSON, PHOEBE
Title: Choreographic imagination
Date: 2014
Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/55425
File Description: Masters Thesis