BROLGA An Australian journal about dance
December 2015 40 BROLGA An Australian journal about dance Number 40 December 2015
Editor: Olivia Millard Founding editor: Michelle Potter Advisory Board: Sally Clarke, Lee Christofis, Rita Clarke, Cheryl Stock, Kim Vincs Digital production and design: Rachael Jennings
Brolga is committed to providing a space for the publication of current research, critical thinking and creative activities relating to, and impinging on, dance in a cultural context in Australia and elsewhere.
Articles can be refereed if requested by the author. Please see 'Notes for contributors' for further details. Peer reviewed articles are marked on the contents page with an asterisk.
Correspondence and submissions are welcome and should be emailed to Publications Manager Rachael Jennings
Hardcopy back issues are available for purchase from Ausdance National. Brolga articles are available for purchase on the Ausdance National website.
© 2015 Brolga and individual contributors. Copyright photographs/ illustration, respective copyright owners.
ISSN: 1322-76545
Published by Australian Dance Council—Ausdance Inc. The views expressed in Brolga are those of the individual contributors and are not necessarily those of the editor, the advisory board, or the publisher.
2 Contents
Editorial 4 OLIVIA MILLARD
Dance improvisation: Why warm up at all? * 7 JASON MARCHANT
Improcinemaniac * 16 DIANNE REID
Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process * 30 ANNE SCOTT WILSON
What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation.* 45 OLIVIA MILLARD
The ethos of the mover/witness dyad: an experimental frame for participatory performance * 57 SHAUN MCLEOD
Gaps in the body: Attention and improvisation * 73 PETER FRASER
Contributors 85 Notes for contributors 87
* Peer reviewed articles.
3 Editorial
OLIVIA MILLARD
Preface
I begin this preface by acknowledging the sad and sudden passing of Maggi Phillips this year. Many readers of Brolga will have known Maggi as its editor in recent years. I first met Maggi when I began teaching at WAAPA in 2000. Maggi encouraged me to undertake research supported by the Faculty when I knew very little of the protocol and had next to no experience in writing about dance. Each past student of Maggi’s whether they were undergraduate, Honours, MA or PhD, and each colleague will recall the time she gave them, the carefully worded notes in her tiny handwriting in response to their work. She had a seemingly unending willingness to wait and to wait while students figured out how they would complete their work, her faith in them stronger than their faith in themselves. In 2004 I travelled to Taipei with Maggi to attend a World Dance Alliance conference. With us were a group of students and although Maggi was not responsible for those students in any official way, she shared that weight with me with great equanimity and generosity. I was struck by the gusto with which Maggi immersed herself in the conference environment, but even more so by the fondness and respect with which she was greeted by so many members of the World Dance Alliance community. I know Maggi is greatly missed by many.
This issue of Brolga came about after I approached Maggi and suggested that it might be possible to gather several articles, particularly concerning improvisation. Maggi agreed that not only would it be possible to turn over an issue to that purpose, but that I should act as its guest editor. That Maggi would offer me the opportunity to edit this issue, without my having had any editorial experience, seemed typical of Maggi’s willingness to believe in the capability of others. Maggi’s belief in the possibility of my completion of this task has been, in the end, what has allowed it to come into being.
It has been a privilege for me to work on this project. What I have been struck by most and what I believe Maggi was always trying to champion, is the importance and the individuality of the voices of the writers: the dancers, the practitioners themselves. The commonality between these articles is the expression that improvisation and in particular, improvisation in dance is not one thing. It is not a technique to be known and learnt, there is not a set of principles that can guide an individual into a place of understanding that is finite.
Brolga 40 4 This collection of articles began because of several gatherings of improvisation practitioners in Melbourne to dance together, to present ideas and to perform. Although articles were sought more broadly, this collection consists mostly of articles from members of that community. Each of the articles in this issue explores a particular idea or set of ideas that relate to improvisation as it has been experienced in a practical, bodily way. Marchant’s article Dance Improvisation: Why warm up at all? considers what takes place before improvising begins, while warming up. As he describes, there is much that happens both in terms of the gathering of material necessities and working bodily to arrive in a ‘state’ for improvising. Marchant asks when ‘warming up’ begins and whether warming up is necessary or even desirable. He also asks whether warming up in a particular way may predispose one to dance in a particular way and whether that could be contrary to an aim of using an improvisation practice to question dancing ‘norms’. Through these questions Marchant opens up thinking about how one might experience improvisation.
In Improcinemaniac, Reid describes her simultaneous practice of screendance and improvisation. Reid uses language that is deliberately poetic, and deconstructs and reassembles words in order to question or reconfigure meanings, particularly those of conventional dance language. Reid has experimented with how creating dance on screen can bring the viewer into a particular or otherwise inaccessible point of view. She writes that the more she works with screendance, the more she improvises, describing the ‘breath-taking’ accidents that can occur when the rigid requirements of rehearsal and ‘take’ are removed. Improvising with the camera in turn incites in Reid a desire to bring the live, improvising body into performance alongside video images that have been created through improvising. Play with light, breath, zoom and focus inform and are informed by the in-present play with capturing camera and dancing body.
Using improvisational play with light and lens is also described by Wilson who applies a deeply embodied approach, developed over years working as a dancer, to her visual art practice in experimental photography. In her article Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process, Wilson introduces the idea that her photography practice employs dance improvisation which has come about and is perceivable because of her prior experience as a dancer. Wilson charts the development of a technique of creating images by leaving a camera shutter open for a long period of time and moving the camera while holding and moving in response to an embodied perception of light.
Millard’s What’s the score? explores the use of scores or verbal propositions as supports for dance improvisation. Questions about what scores are or could be are explored through describing the use of scores by dance improvisation practitioners, such as Steve Paxton and Yvonne Meier. Nelson Goodman’s theory about how different kinds of notational scores work in relation to the existence and creation of works of art is also discussed and compared to Millard’s own use and perception of scores in her dancing practice, undertaken with a group of dancers over several years.
Olivia Millard Editorial 5 In Gaps in the Body, Fraser writes of having arrived at an understanding of improvisation that, rather than being about moving, is about ‘attention’. Instead of using an (imagined) objective view of a body to generate or create interesting or new movements he employs a kind of noticing from the inside to move with his body, to cooperate with it as it fluctuates and changes. This noticing is full of ‘gaps’ and his attention is drawn to certain physical sites only to be lost as the noticing of a particular area swells, is dispersed or is replaced by a more immediate physical concern.
McLeod’s article, The Ethos of the Mover/Witness Dyad, describes the response of an invited public to a performative Authentic Movement (otherwise known as mover witness dyad) event over three evenings. The events were based on the premise that the audience might be conceived as witness to the improvising movers. The article discusses the varying responses of the members of the witnessing public as a means to reflect on the very current issues of the status and boundaries of performance, ‘audience participation’, and the ensuing ethical relationships.
Brolga 40 6 Dance improvisation: why warm up at all?
JASON MARCHANT
This article looks at a particular moment in the practice of improvisation when the individual is still attending to unique or specific needs. In time, it comes before preparations that involve others, or the doing of something that is organised into an ‘exercise’. A practice rarely begins at the same moment with a group of improvisers arriving together with everyone ready to start. An allowance is made for a transition, and what the improviser chooses to do during this time is left up to them. This is the moment I am calling ‘warming up’ or ‘to warm up’. Taken literally the expression ‘to warm up’ indicates actions a dance improviser can do to prepare their body to improvise; a body-based preparation to attend to particular bodily needs in order to be physically ready to do dance improvisation. Dancers incorporate all manner of somatic practices into training as observed by artist Miguel Gutierrez:
Dancers are doing Pilates, yoga, ballet, [K]lein, [A]lexander, [S}kinner, [G]raham, Cunningham, Taylor, white cloud, Feldengrais, core movement, tai chi, capoeira, aikido, ablab, running, cycling, [L]aban, [B]artenieff, [S]imonson, hip hop, African, [T]risha, improv, release. (Guiterrez 2001)
When these somatic practices are adopted into this moment of warming up, the dancer’s body becomes the primary site of attention. A preparation to improvise might involve a familiar combination of yoga poses, or movement sequences or the adoption of Feldenkrais principles such as applying a form of ‘gravitational scanning’ or a narrowing of attention to a specific perceived area of the body to observe shifts in the pelvis in relation to the floor (Bardet, & Ginot 2012) or warming up might involve a variation on one of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s contrasting fluid explorations (Cohen et al 2008, p. 82–83). While a dancer’s attention might be bodily based during warm-up, the subject matter or themes of dance improvisation reach past the body to questions such as doubt (Rudstrom 2001), trust (Paxton, & Hougee 1995), transition (Martorell 2008), and surrender (Hay, & Brown 1995) in one’s improvising as dancing. The warm up can be a practice of something and as Deborah Hay points out the thinking is one of ‘stretching the practice’ rather than ‘the practice of stretching’ (Hay, & Brown 1995). What is being stretched or warmed up is a preparation that allows for bodily and non-bodily possibilities, to allow questioning and noticing by the improviser so they
Brolga 40 7 can enter territory to practice and perform dance improvisation and this leaves open the question: what is warming up? What is required so that one can do this practice?
If I were to compile a list of the real things that make up my own improvising—that which I need or want in order to do the activity itself, I would begin by jotting down the most common things: studio or performance space (I need a place to improvise), the clothes I choose to wear (as I rarely practice in my everyday things), music or sound. But, are the latter things?1 I may not be able to pick up sound and hold it in my hands but I can view it in this list as a thing, like clothing. If I choose to work with music I am as discerning as to what it will be as to the appropriateness of what I wear. Music, as thing, is as real to me as the floor under my feet and in its absence (which is more common in my improvisational practice) I am not improvising in a cone of silence. I work in the world of sound and noise. These things–the sound of an air conditioning system, the whine of a ceiling fan, the birds singing nearby and the occasional siren from an emergency vehicle—all make up my environment, whether I am listening explicitly for them or not.
Warming up is another thing or some-thing else I would add to this list of my improvising stuff. It falls closer to music, conceptually, than the tactile realness of clothing or the place I choose to improvise, but, it is no less necessary to being able to improvise.
I always take a moment to do something to prepare for improvisational practice regardless of my state of mind/body, or if I happen to be late to a practice and miss the moment set aside to warm up. So far, one characteristic common to every thing on this list is that all these things can take different forms and this is especially true of warming up. One manifestation of warming up is the ‘exercise’. Contact Quarterly —a journal that covers all aspects of contact dance improvisation—makes space in its pages for regular contributions by improvisers to share warm up or preparatory exercises in the section ‘Essentials–Basic CI Principles and Practices’. For example Ray Chung in ‘Listening’ identifies how when doing Contact Improvisation it is important to be present and available to ‘your partner’s—and your own—intentions as they manifest physically’. He offers pragmatic examples for practicing this ‘essential’ skill (Chung 2006, p. 54). Exercises such as these offer a formalised way of preparing for dance improvisation. As concrete examples they provide options for an improviser looking for ways to practice different improvisational skills.
When I am asked to join a practice it is understood that I have the know how not just to prepare myself to improvise but that I can also manage this preparation in order to be ready to do so. To do this and be able to join others who are also doing this, what I grasp immediately is what is happening and what is not and I make appropriate choices depending on the situation. If I enter a space to find others quietly attending to their ‘warm up’, then I take up my warm up by falling into, what Heidegger would identify as the ‘mood’ in the room, and I do something that is in keeping with what is already established. 2 To do something incongruent such as, in this case, jumping up and down or vocalising (like a singer
Jason Marchant Dance improvisation: why warm up at all? 8 might) would be not just unnecessarily disruptive, it would push out of reach my ability to be in relation to the ‘mood’ of the room and then be involved in this thing called warming up as I grasp it.
One characteristic of this period of preparation is its transitional qualities as I move from my life lived in the everyday and begin to do whatever it is I am asked to do in the jam, rehearsal, practice or performance. For this to be a transition I must view it as such, it is not a preparation to do nothing but rather a warming up to do something (even if that something turns out to be nothing), and what I choose to do, or not do, as a warm up will set up the way in which I am able to participate and how I fit with the ‘mood’ in the room. Implicit questions, pertinent to this moment, are what will satisfy the needs of this transitional moment? or what am I warming up to do? In the world of structured dancing where I am asked to take part in a process of ‘choreographic’ development, what I do to prepare can be easier to discern. I know that my body needs to be available to the unique needs of the choreographer and I attend to my body in order to do this–and this is true regardless of what stage in the process we are in. I always include something bodily to prepare for dancing, be it stretching, moving, massaging, relaxing, and/or (and possibly always) breathing. In this instance the warm up becomes primarily a preparation of my body to dance. In contrast, making a transition from everyday being to dance improvisation is not as straightforward, as I discuss below. This is especially true if what I am warming up to do is improvisation that adheres philosophically to principles associated with Authentic Movement.
Mary Starks Whitehouse who first devised and named what was initially a studio based, dance therapy practice, explains what she meant by authentic. ‘Authentic was the only word I could think of that meant truth—truth of a kind unlearned but there to be seen at moments’ (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 81). Whitehouse argues that for the ‘student/ client/patient’ to be seen as moving truthfully, an experience of what she refers to as ‘I am moved’, a ‘moment of unpremeditated surrender’, will occur that ‘cannot be explained, repeated exactly, sought for or tried out’ (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82). Whitehouse viewed the relationship between ‘I am moved’ and ‘I move’ as two ends of the same polarity (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82). They exist together in a state she referred to as ‘both/and’ so that being involved with one did not dissolve the existence of the other. Instead, being in one of these states resulted in the other being momentarily, what she terms ‘invisible’, which incidentally was the word she used to describe the opposite of authentic (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 79,81,82). The therapy of Authentic Movement happened in that moment when the authentic was visible, for Whitehouse, and the ‘I move’ was invisible. The significance of what became visible and what became invisible set up this ‘both/and’ polarity, instead of the view that it is an ‘either/or’ possibility (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82). How does one ‘warm up’ for dance improvisation based on this set of principles? The language or terms might be different but improvisation also investigates honesty and truth in movement that fuel questions about the meaning or significance of performing authenticity. Where or if Authentic Movement influenced contemporary thinking in dance improvisation or which influenced the other is a topic for another article, but the principles
Brolga 40 9 inherent in each, the thinking behind the idea of ‘I am moved’ or ‘I moved’ continues to have relevance.
To prepare to do truthful movement is potentially a fraught exercise for someone practiced in the doing of improvisation and also trained to dance in a particular style, approach or technique, especially if one considers the significance in dance improvisation attributed to the acknowledgement and/or questioning of moving habits and habitual movement. Steve Paxton explained that ‘an important part of improvisation [for him] is finding new solutions’ (Paxton, & Hougee 1995 2). If I attend to my body when warming up with familiar movements such as a series of stretches that I rarely question or have done for years, am I not just initiating predetermined habitual solutions or ‘I move’ moments in my regular warm-up? Am I falling into a somatic engagement that maintains, or keeps visible as Whitehouse describes, a ‘clear knowledge, that I, personally, am moving’ (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82) while pushing further away the possibility of what Paxton calls ‘finding new solutions’, or the way Hay emphasises stretching the practice over a practice of stretching? Are the familiar routines within our warming up detrimental to improvising itself? If I put on what I perceive as appropriate clothes for improvising am I not already covering up what Whitehouse classifies as ‘the truth of a kind unlearned’ by inserting my knowledge of how to warm up in what I choose to wear? These questions begin to eat at the very question of why warm-up at all. Why take the time to do it? Is it counter- productive?
Taking the time to warm up
Preparing to improvise is fundamentally a transition in time conceived as a moving on from what came before to what is about to be done. Merleau-Ponty describes this view of time as one that ‘passes or flows by’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477). Time is slippery. We cannot perceive exactly when one moment actually ends and another begins as it is often overshadowed by an individual’s complete involvement in whatever it is they are doing.3 Warming-up is something one does and it usually happens within an understood amount of time. It is timed to end when the process, the practice you are engaged in, begins—that is when the time to do this activity is set aside for the individual. This can be understood in different ways by members of a group who are preparing to practise improvisation. For example, there can be a defined moment of time when the warming up period will end. This can be communicated by letting the participants know when the next phase will begin such as ‘at 10:15 let’s start’. Or time can be used as a loose parameter: ‘in 15 minutes let’s start’. In both these versions the warm up never ceases—it is interrupted so those present can attend to the reason they are in the room, understood as being ‘there to improvise’ with all the attention-to that this implies. Alternatively, warming-up can come to an end not by a defined or loosely defined set of minutes in time but rather by an understanding, where- by all agree that they are ready to begin, an informal agreement to move on from one moment of preparation to the moment set a side for improvisation.
Jason Marchant Dance improvisation: why warm up at all? 10 When time is conceived as having a past, a present and a future, warming up becomes an activity that one does that deals with change. Within this context, individuals prepare themselves by warming up with the intention to improvise—to transition to that-who-is-ready-to improvise. If I am coming from home to an improvisational practice, all the activity I need to do to get to the practice defines the past moments of my preparation to improvise. I might need to drop off my daughter at childcare, or feel the need for a coffee, and then I will travel to wherever it is the practice is taking place. All these activities might happen as a result of my commitment to be at the practice, and all this pre-preparation becomes my immediate past once I arrive at the practice. Whatever this pre- preparation is, when time is conceived as a series of present moments that endlessly pass along into past moments and move toward an endless future of present moments, my pre-preparation anchors the change or transition that I require from warming up, as my present moments move toward an immediate future that will involve improvising.4 The result of this view of time is that what I do when I am warming up is a ‘consequence of my past’ and what I will do in the near future when I am improvising is a consequence of what (and how) I do when I warm up (Merleau-Ponty 1962 p. 477). This view of time sets up the importance that is given to the earlier questions about what to do and what to wear when warming up to do an improvisational practice that share principles significant to Authentic Movement. Merleau-Ponty points out that this view of time— made up of a past, present and a future—’is in reality extremely confused’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962 p. 477).
Yes, these events happened to me. I am able through reflection to provide a perspective where by what I did can be ordered into a linear series of moments that I consider my past. But this construction dissolves when one considers that it depends on the existence in some form (real or conceptual) of an objective outside observer situated out of time in a ‘finite perspective’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477). I can only reflect on this past if I ‘artificially’ detach myself from it, if I sit back and consider what happened and think about it (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 326). The confusion emerges when I view this moment of detachment as time itself.
Unless I make the conceptual choice to do so there is no time to observe myself in these moments, and even that does not solve the problem that is presented. To be living in a moment where I make the choice to notice what I am doing, this itself requires that the above view of time holds an additional observer, or the ability for myself to observe me noticing my observation of myself doing whatever it is I am doing. I have the capacity to reflect on what I did. I can view it as something that happened to me and think of it as my past. This kind of reflection on time, as something I do afterwards, differs considerably from when I am driving the car to child care, saying goodbye to my child, or ordering that coffee. There is nothing temporally there that is lived in the ‘driving’, ‘saying’ or ‘ordering’. I am not standing outside myself observing or reflecting in those moments. I am ordering a coffee and as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: ‘Time is, therefore, not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 478). If this is right, then warming-up, as a thing, and the things that make it up are
Brolga 40 11 the relation that I need to grasp in order to have an understanding of the question of warming up for dance improvisation. Time then becomes one more thing to consider as crucial to understanding warming up. It can be both real to me as an ‘I move’ through a method of detached reflection, and time can exist like an ‘I am moved’ in the sense of warming up as something that involves me.
If I return to the list of things that make up my improvising, that which I need or need to do in order to involve myself when I am warming up, I find there is nothing unknown about the things on this list. They are all familiar to me as an improviser who has warmed up before. When I enter the place where the practice is held the situation is immediately understood. I take my shoes off at the right place. I place my bags down where they go. I change my clothes and place what I was wearing in a specific spot; all these actions involving these things reveal what is understood as the norms of the situation I am in. It also reveals the limitations of what I do with those things. For instance, it would be inappropriate to put my shoes in the place where I warm up, not as a right and wrong choice but as something I understand is not done. The same can be said of where I put my clothes or my bag and the other items that I might have with me. All these things have a place that is determined by a set of established norms and what I do with them is based on the boundaries of where they go, which is something that is understood. My actions with these things are due to the familiarity of the situation which involve me at every practice over and over again. When I am involved with them, when I am doing these actions and the object-ness of these things moves away, becoming invisible in the same way ‘I move’ becomes invisible by an Authentic ‘I am moved’. The warming up I do becomes a relation to all these things that enter into my preparation. This includes the floor that I warm up on. Sally Gardner proposes that a wood floor:
can ‘survive as the core of experience’: it can be an instrument or equipment for a dancer as well as possessing its own independent qualities that exceed or resist being merely an instrument. (Gardner 2012, p. 146)
In every place I improvise I encounter a floor that allows me to warm- up and my ability to warm up depends on the possibility that this floor can recede into the background as something that is suitable toward warming up. There are many types of floors—carpeted floors, tile floors, concrete floors—but for a floor to be usable for warming up it needs to be suitable. For instance, wood floors have the properties that are suitable for warming up while a concrete floor is less suitable. Secondly, my ability to warm-up and be involved with all these things, such as a floor, is due to their appropriateness for the activity of warming up. I could choose to warm-up on a staircase, or a tiled roof on top of a building (there are more than enough examples of these places being used in the history of dance and improvisation—Trisha Brown’s 1971 ‘Roof Piece’ for example), but these types of surfaces are not floors for warming up. They are staircases, and tiled roofs. The floor I warm up on needs to be understood in an everyday sense as a floor for warming up and improvising—such as the rehearsal floors at Dancehouse in Melbourne, Australia. A floor
Jason Marchant Dance improvisation: why warm up at all? 12 in a supermarket, even if it is made of the same material, would not be suitable and appropriate because in our culture that is not what you do on that floor.
None of the things on my list that I consider essential to warming up (the floor, my clothes, the place, the sounds) can exist alone, one without the other, in order for me to be in this particular moment. All these ‘things’ contribute to and make up the same involvement that I am calling warming up, so even if each of them can be viewed separately (objectively) or if these things can happen in different contexts (for example I also take my shoes off when I am home) it is not the individual interaction with these things as objects by themselves that situate me in warming up but how they work together within the same paradigm situated in the culture of dance improvisation.
Recapitulation
I have asked the following questions about warming up: What am I warming up to do? Why do I warm up at all? Then I have analysed a list of things that make up my involvement in warming up, including time and things. But, this quick summary lists what was done, and as I write this I am covering up the very things that were pointed out. What I did and what I am pointing out are not the same. I can describe these things that make up ‘warming up’ and at the same time be distancing myself from my involvement with them.
The question of when I am reflecting or learning and when I am in the grasp of what I am doing also emerges in these moments of warming up. When I am doing a stretch of my body that I do all the time. A movement that is so close to me that I usually notice that I am doing it after I am already in it. Is this what in everyday common language is pointed out as a habitual movement, a habit, one amongst many that I have accumulated. Is what I am pointing out mindless, a meaningless patterning of my body— something I have absorbed from my past? Is it what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus—a construction that allows but also restricts my possible actions in the world (Bourdieu 1990)? Is this movement something I have learned to do, something I have inadvertently practiced, something that I am now so skilled at doing that I rarely direct myself into it? Or, can what one might point out and call a ‘habit’ or a ‘habitual movement’ only exist in that same conception of detachment that enables me to view time as a series of successive endless present moments? I can point out my movements except in those moments before it dawns on me that I am doing them. At some point I learned to be involved in the stretch and if it is a habit, even a habitus, it is a skilled one, not a mindless or meaningless rote movement. I am in the stretch to be in the stretch, in my warming up. It is in this sense that these movements emerge and continue to modulate, to change, to adapt to the situation due to my constant involvement with them. We need these things. We are situated in them and without them it would be hard, if not impossible to exist, to do anything—let alone warm up before improvising. If every action is either something I am learning to do or a ‘habit’ that makes up the restrictions as well as the possibilities of my habitus then there would be nothing for me to grasp in my world.
Brolga 40 13 My world would be replete with meaninglessness and mindlessness as I continually spend my time re-producing habits from my past. No things would exist, as I would not understand or know what they were if what I learned to do transforms into an empty action. I would not be able to view or grasp things at all. It is hard to be in relation to any thing temporally without already having the know-how to function in the world; a know how that is never static. We are in the world thanks, in part, to being in the grasp of things, forever involved, situated in our body, always moving. This is the back and forth, the both/and of our existence where we are lived and living in the unfamiliarity of the moment. I warm up to improvise both here in space and there in time, in a temporality that is always in some way unfamiliar to me. What is unfamiliar emerges by way of my involvement in the situation both in those moments of ‘artificial’ detachment from the world and by way of my connection in the world. I am in the grasp of warming up when I can fall into whatever it is so that improvising takes over. It is no more mystical or a mystery than the ‘driving’, ‘saying’, or ‘ordering’ that I do on my way to the place where I will practice dance improvisation. My ability to view the thing and be in relation to the thing is always available to me and this is true with a thing such as warming up. I begin practice in this present ambiguity as I move to be situated in ‘warming’, while what I am doing falls further away from view. This ‘warming’ involves me with another thing that I know as ‘dance improvisation’ and my relation to it as ‘improvising’—two more things to add to my list.
Notes
1. In the context of this article I am thinking about the term ‘thing’ in a general sense as a collection of stuff and to be consistent in my language usage I have decided to use the word ’thing’ throughout. My interest here is how warming up is a relation to a lot of stuff–many things real and abstract–and it is from this perspective that I consider the question of warming up to improvise. 2. See Martin Heidegger (1927) Being and Time Section 29 (Heidegger 2008, pp. 172–179). 3. Bardot and Ginot make this same observation ‘It is therefore impossible to know when the ‘present moment’ starts or finishes. It is impossible to define a beginning and an end, a before and an after of sensation…’ (Bardet, & Ginot 2012) 4. See Chapter titled ‘Temporality’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) Phenomenology of Perception for more clarification of how ‘Time presupposes a view of time.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477).
References
Bardet, M & Ginot, I 2012, ‘Habit and change: Discovering the present’, Writings on Dance, no. 25, pp. 10–29. Bourdieu, P 1990, The logic of practice, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. Chung, R 2006, ‘Basic CI Principles & Practices’, Contact Quarterly, vol. 31, no.1, p. 54. Cohen, BB, Nelson, L & Smith, NS 2008, Sensing, feeling, and action: The experiential anatomy of body-mind centering, Contact Editions.
Jason Marchant Dance improvisation: why warm up at all? 14 Gardner, S 2012, ‘Practising Research, Researching Practice’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 18, no.1, pp. 138–52. Guiterrez, M 2001, ‘Subject: Calling you, this now moment?’ Movement Research Journal, no. 23, p. 14. Hay, D & Brown, T 1995, ‘Deborah Hay and Trisha Brown: Paths from the 1960s to the 1990s’, Movement Research Journal, no. 11, pp. 5–17. Heidegger, M 2008, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Harper & Row, New York. Martorell, A 2008, ‘Profile K.J. Holmes’,Movement Research Journal, no. 32, p. 8. Merleau-Ponty, M 1962, Phenomenology of perception, Routledge, London; New York. Paxton, S & Hougee, A 1995, ‘Chaos and Order: Improvisation Taken to the Limit’, Movement Research Journal, no.11, pp. 2–21. Rudstrom, S 2001, ‘This is an Improvisation’, Movement Research Journal, no. 23, p. 9. Whitehouse, MS, Adler, J, Chodorow, J & Pallaro, P 1999, Authentic movement, J. Kingsley Publishers, London, Philadelphia.
Brolga 40 15 Improcinemaniac
DIANNE REID
Abstract
In this paper, Dianne demonstrates the intersections of her research/ practice, mixing live and screen bodies, poetic and academic writing. She is posing an improvisational approach to screendance and an embodied approach to writing as possibilities for seeing, imagining and being in the dancing, researching body. She is interrogating her own embodied knowledge as hybrid site within a live screendance body.
Preface
This essay had its first development as a ‘performed paper,’ presented at The Little Con-ference, an improvisation and performance research exchange in Melbourne, and the Light Moves Symposium, part of a screendance festival in Limerick, Ireland in 2014. In those contexts the paper was read/danced from a long corridor of paper crossing the front section of the performance space. As dancer/reader, this author moved from stage right to left facing and addressing the audience who ‘read’ my performance in tandem with video imagery projected behind me, reading from left to right, as you might read a book, and from foreground to background, as the camera reads cinematic space. The projected video imagery or text faded in and out in a duet with my live performance as I progressed across space and time, showing examples of my improvisational practice captured and re-sited into a screendance context, or animating quotations in text that moved within the frame in ways that alluded to a three-dimensionality, a dance of words. Sometimes fragments of text appeared as they were spoken live as a way of amplifying a point and shifting the depth of field of the event. Sometimes I directed an audience member to read a line of text, which was written in reverse on the paper roll. Finally the screendance Red Rattler, an edited artifact of this hybrid screen/performance practice (which I am naming ‘live screendance’), was screened in concert with the reading of my Love Poem for the Red Rattler.
My challenge in this next development of this practice is to attempt to imbue these pages with three-dimensionality—as I move between the poetic and the descriptive, to bring the tone of my body into the frame of the document, to make sensation make sense. My appeal to you, reader, is to consider the micro-dance of your eyes, the tone of your optic nerve connecting back to the top of your spine, as you shift from left to right of this frame or into another plane to access the video hyperlinks.
Brolga 40 16 Improcinemania
My dance is ‘improcinematic’. As I dance I am simultaneously practising screendance and improvisation. I am bringing perceptive technologies (the camera and its microscopic and telescopic capacities) into my imaginative vocabulary as I notice and occupy each frame, and make connections from frame to frame. I am the camera and the subject; I am the moment and the montage. I have ‘cinesthesia’.1 I am bringing together imagined location and sensation.
You will notice I’m playing with words…I’m looking for reconfigurations of language to undo its form, dismantle its choreography and maroon it in my peculiarities…less sense and more sensation…and I’m playing with performing writing as something not separate from my practice but as a dance practice in itself.
Dance as an act of survival
For me writing is choreography a dance of words images trip, connect, float, fall the rhythm of an idea the balance of a metaphor the right composition has a melody, a pulse, a texture poetry is kinetic it sweats us out and defines each sinew of us saving it saves me
My ‘improcinemania’ is a re-writing of screendance. ‘Screendance’ is a relatively new term used to describe a diverse range of work that combines choreographic and film/video practice. In his 2012 book Screendance: Inscribing the ephemeral image, (Rosenberg 2012) Douglas Rosenberg considers 'screendance as both a visual art form as well as an extension of modern and post–modern dance without drawing artificial boundaries between the two. He calls for a radical new way of thinking of both dance and film that engages with critical issues rather than simple advocacy'2. In this new millennium, screendance has emerged as a new hybrid form, superseding terms such as ‘dance film’, ‘video dance’ or ‘dance for the camera’ which still largely suggested a documentation or translation of dance to the film form. The development of this field has developed with the tools of cinema since the early twentieth century, passing through the hands of visual artists with the advent of video culture in the sixties and seventies, and into the hands of dance practitioners seeking to preserve and promote their ephemeral art. With the domestic accessibility and affordability of the tools of cinema since the nineties (video cameras, mobile devices, personal computers with user-friendly editing software), screendance has become an integral part of all dance practitioners’ work—enabling the documentation of process and live performance, and as a new site for choreography. Now, the technological boom has necessitated a complete re-tooling in relation to dance making and presentation—the dance has been re-shaped and recorporealized again through lens and software and into a new digital
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 17 format for small screens and mobile interfaces. I feel that the present day screen culture has again placed a proscenium arch on our vision; our ocular range fixed to a flat plane, which, although at a closer, often hand- held range to our body, denies any muscular adjustment in our vision or our bodies. This drives me toward a practice, which seeks to re-engage with the body of the audience without denying the choreo-cinematic craft of screen technologies.
Screendance is an enabling practice. It has provided this dance practitioner with intimate access to the dancing body and moved me into locations and relationships unhindered by gravity, location, time or vocabulary. Through the dance of the camera and the choreography of the edit, I am able to ‘dance’ the audience, sharing a kinetic experience of an event. In my current hybrid practice, in this ‘improcinematic’ condition, I wish to ‘flesh the interface’, that is, to involve live bodies (performer and viewer) and enable new, shared experiences of dance and the body—interrogating our physical bodies in the same physical location, unpacking the knowledge residing in the body and revealing the possibilities for understanding through lived experience. As I return, from the safety and seclusion of the edit suite to the risk of the live and un- choreographed, I recall the words of Maya Deren (the trailblazer for ‘cine- dance’3 and advocate for independent artists), that ‘the most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both‘ (Deren 2005, p. 18).
Screendance dismantled my proscenium arch liberated my body in space and time and enabled me to dance (and dance for) audiences existing in other spaces and times The camera has provided me with a means to guide my audience more directly into my body and then to ride my point of view and rhythms as I cut together my dance journey4
In my early exploration of camera and editing I was looking at ways to bring the viewer into the action, to move them by moving the camera, the angle, and the proximity—attending to the duet between camera/viewer and dancer/frame. The camera became my prosthetic for seeing from inside the lived experience. It taught my body how to reconfigure itself to facilitate other angles on and proximities to dancing bodies. My skin became the camera, a sensational seeing; it brought me into the frame and into my body as dancing witness.
cameras…facilitate a kind of seeing that is a manifestation of our desire to draw phenomena closer to us (Rosenberg 2012, p. 29)
The more I worked with screendance, the more I began to improvise. The ‘unknowns’ of improvising can reveal rich stories, surprising moments, breath-taking accidents that are not achievable in choreography, too often flattened and depersonalized through the repetitions of rehearsal and ‘take’. An improvisational approach to screendance—the movement
Brolga 40 18 within frame, the movement of the camera in response to dancer and location—enables other possibilities for seeing, imagining and being in the dancing body. In particular, when working with diverse bodies, whose physical shape and vocabularies differ from those usually attributed to ‘dancer‘, it has been improvisation that has enabled me to capture the diversity and individuality of diverse bodies, and for those bodies to access their unique ‘dance‘.5
The more I improvised the more I wanted to re-enter the live frame, to bring the flesh back into the interface, to rub up against bodies and let the sparks of sensation and proximity illuminate a ‘live screendance’. I have journeyed across the multiple sites of screendance—the body (dancing with or without camera), the physical location where shooting takes place, the camera tape or memory, the edit suite, then the DVD/ file, then the screen it is finally viewed on. This hybrid journey has led me back to the live body. I am interrogating my own embodied knowledge as hybrid site within a live screendance body. I connect with the Merleau- Ponty notion that ‘the body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’ (Merleau-Ponty 2013, p. 235).
My studio practice is informed by my way of seeing and working with camera—it is improvised screendance practice. I consider light falling into the body through the lens of the eye as breath moving into the bloodstream. I play with the zoom and focus of my vision as I simultaneously move and witness. I am editing imaginatively, a montage of images, dynamics, narratives that move through the timeline of my body.
Improviser, video artist and writer Lisa Nelson has been a primary source for my research in working with cameras and improvising. She understands that ‘we are constantly recomposing our body and our attention in response to the environment, to things known and unknown‘ and that ‘this inner dance is a most basic improvisation—reading and responding to the scripts of the environment’. (Nelson 2003, p.2) My experiences of her workshops and improvised performances with Steve Paxton while I was a second-year student in my Bachelor of Arts Dance program (1985) were a pivotal moment in my dance training. Some twelve years later I performed her tuning score with several other Melbourne dancers after a weeklong workshop with her at Dancehouse.6 At this time I became aware of how her experiences of shooting and editing video had shifted both her way of moving and her way of watching.
Video combines two powerful learning tools: a mechanical eye to dissect the moving parts of looking—focusing, panning, tracking, zooming—and instant playback to show the cause and consequences of your actions. It set me up to explore how the body composes itself: first to focus the senses, then to orchestrate its movement around its imagination and desire for meaning. It was a small step to translate my learning experiences with the camera into
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 19 working with my senses in the environment, and I did this along the way, integrating them into my daily life, teaching, and dancing with others. (Nelson 2003, p. 6/7)
Now, a decade and a half, five cameras and hundreds of studio hours later, I see these tools integrated into my creative research. I use the metaphor of the camera as a score for practice, and the actual instrument of the camera as a prosthetic for seeing and a tool for documentation and reflection. With the camera I am writing a visual journal and enacting a way of looking. ‘It’s a seed that puts vision on the line and in the field of play‘ (Nelson 2003 11). By placing the camera in my/our hands, I am drawing attention to the ways we compose space and how spatial configurations shift our perceptions and interactions. The dancing of the camera enables a different permission into the intimate space of the other dancers. In the watching of footage captured by the dancing camera it is possible for the screen viewer to ‘see the kinesthetic dimensions of a visual experience‘ (Albright 2010, p.22) but the permission I speak of is to do with that physical closeness afforded by the wielding of a camera. In this age of over-documentation it is as if the act of ‘recording’ someone’s image (still or moving) reconfigures personal space and its accompanying courtesies. When I am holding the camera I am not afraid of coming too close, my dance is about serving my vision, my moving inside the action is justified by the imagined presence of other future witnesses. ‘Recording for posterity’ … an authentication of existence. The placement of the camera in the dancer’s hands also demands a peripheral attention, a physical control and ease, a seeing with the rest of one’s body to safely facilitate the camera’s journey. The dancing camera is cyborg—a merging of flesh and technologies, soft and hardware. I often refer to hand-held camera as using the ‘fleshy tripod’.
Dancing the camera in the studio at the Australian Choreographic Centre7 with two contact improvisers, David Corbet and Jacob Lehrer, resulted in two video works—one was the screendance Disclosure cut from the footage I took while dancing with/around them (itself an edit of an earlier draft projected in the foyer during their performances at the end of that residency). The other was a document of our trio recorded by a second static camera. There is something about watching the witness that is incredibly interesting. My dance is virtuosic but pragmatic, engaged but aloof, graceful but pedestrian. In servicing my camera’s view of the action I follow, anticipate or counterpoint their duet with an embodied choreographic sensibility.
Early in the residency we spent some time in the beginning investigations of the relationship between dancer and videographer. This is an area we are interested in exploring further and in more depth. The first video is some static camera footage we captured of Dianne filming us. This was a performance for camera and we were allowing the dance of the camera to influence our own choreography. (Corbet 2005)
Brolga 40 20 I am reminded now, looking back at that footage, of what I have more recently seen of Katrina McPherson’s journey inside Force of Nature as she documents from within the quartet of Kirstie Simson with Dai Jian, Kenzo Kusuda and Michael Schumacher (McPherson 2011). I also see the traces that now drive my current performance practice as I watch documentation of Dance Interrogations (in the red train), my 2013 presentation of this emerging research. In this video document I see the audience members moving in and around my dance, to get another angle on the action, to keep themselves out of danger, to negotiate the other moving bodies in the space. I see my desire to dance the audience like cameras fulfilled, their attention both outward to my body and the bodies of other audience members, and inward to their own body’s movement, stillness, posture, sensations.
I noticed different levels of curiosity and boldness in terms of willingness to explore the space of the train carriage and the space between them and the performer. I noticed how one person’s curiosity gave license to others…
As I realised that I was becoming part of the performance I began to feel conscious of the way I looked and moved. (Audience responses, October 2013)
As performer I was also dancing my camera/witness, shifting my angle on the location and its occupants, defying gravity, zooming in on a detail, using the frames of windows, architecture and other bodies to frame my body or my view, blurring my focus, alluding to off screen space (as I leap out a window). I was activating the space between us, a reminder that our ‘vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are‘ (Berger 1972, p. 8).
If the camera is my prosthetic, writing is my ‘prose-thetic.’ It enables my body, its rhythms and sensations, to move onto the page.
A rattling journey… Her body is a vintage carriage—holding moments and might-have beens the mess and magnificence of a life—derelict yet divine The world runs through her…traces and faces, meetings and partings… at once exhilarating and decimating
I practice improvisation several hours each week. I share the studio space with other bodies and pieces of technology—personalities and prosthetics that adhere, ambulate, articulate, accompany. They have labels and expectations attached to them as they enter the studio—dancer, raconteur, disabled, wheelchair, walker, augmented communication device, camera— but inside the studio the practice is an undoing of these.
Improvisation is a long-term practice. Over time the capacity to attend to sensation develops, deepens, and over time the body reconfigures itself and its sensations. It is necessary to practice it rigorously and repeatedly,
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 21 returning to the investigation anew despite the findings of yesterday. The knowledge of the body changes experientially, it is, like the physical body, not inert but alive and changing. A ‘skeleton can renew itself over 20 months‘ (Tufnell 1993, p. 3) so it makes sense that the performance material issuing from an ever-changing physicality is also developing and changing.
Regarding the passage of movement through my body over 52 years as I would the scents and tastes I’ve experienced consider what reverberation meets me now from an earlier action …a breathing out in Varanasi ripples across my cheek today? Sending myself messages tomorrow A particular note reverberates through eardrum to cell nucleus A melodic caress nourishes me and empties me.
As I improvise I am constructing a reality that I am inseparable from in time and space.8 In an instant I make choices that are editing in real time, cinematic device flushed through the chemical sparks of my neurons and the pump of oxygen through my bloodstream. The practice is simultaneously making and undoing a moment, drawing on and acknowledging a range of knowledge and virtuosities without hierarchy. As contemporary dance practitioners the common ethos is one of community and social exchange. We share personal space, touch each other, carry in with us our histories, dreams, emotions and desires inside an organic framework which is remaking itself each moment. Improvising is a socio-political act, ‘an investigation of the moment…a holistic technicity‘ (Bucksbarg and Carter 2012 9).
There is a great delight in the undoing of structures—to engage with that possibility in our bodies, the possibility of opening, releasing, engaging, listening, laughing, and noticing. When I improvise, my dance magnifies ordinary moments and celebrates the present moment. In this way it’s historical and social background is that of the viewer, rather than of the dance itself. It brings together fragments of many people, places and ideas into a dense and diverse summary. Improvisation is a life practice.
what I’m working with when I’m improvising is not separate from how I’m looking at living and how I’m looking at my relationships…it has to do with our place on the planet here and what we’re doing…I think a lot of people are looking for something else now because things are getting so bad… people are going ‘wait a minute! What do we need for life to have more meaning?9 (McPherson 2011)
Improvisational scores are exercises in live, ‘fleshed’ editing. Improvisers are crafting from their embodied or ‘distributed intelligence‘ — understanding that ‘our thinking, our moving through the world, occurs on a full body level‘ (Kozel 2004).
Brolga 40 22 As an improviser (with or without camera) I am engaging in the present moment paying attention— to my breath to the moment when breath becomes sound to what a movement uncovers to sensation to what distracts me Now… I am noticing the juxtaposition … of my body and the buildings I move through I am considering the potential of my breath to permeate their surfaces and for their particles to move through me I am enjoying the idea that structures can be fluid and that the poetic intersects with the academic
(Reid 2012 89)
Recently in a shared practice session I played with reading words/ instructions…a score, a recipe for ‘a conversation of touch and movement with a partner‘ (Tufnell 2004). These were someone else’s words (Miranda Tufnell) but I could play with the live editing of the instructions, attentive to the pace and progress of the two pairs of dancers at work in the room with me…at that moment. I used my voice as I would my hand…to touch, to support, to listen, to watch, to meet them…
rising to the surface of the water (Tufnell 2004) as a fish
Here it was again…my ‘improcinemania’…I began playing with the speed, the order…rewinding, cutting and pasting, repeating frames, combining words into new montages, coloring or blurring, changing the texture and focus through shifts in the quality of my voice. I was ‘play(ing) in the waters of suggestion‘ (Tufnell 2004).
My performance practice is a ‘live screendance’—I have moved myself, and my audience into the frame, into physical sites that are intimate yet non-theatrical, screen locations rather than performance spaces. When performing, my ‘improcinemania’ is a sharing of space, suggestions and sensations between my actual and imagined bodies (i.e. projected video imagery, or a discarded costume, or a spoken word description) and the bodies of the audience. The role of ‘audience’ is challenged through my movement around, proximity to and interaction with specific individuals, who are also having to stand and move with me and each other in order to: see me as I am hidden by a wall or another body; or avoid impact with my dancing body; or in response to my direct suggestion (and because of a limited or complete absence of seating). These viewers are made aware of their own and each other’s bodies, themselves providing physical frames and narrative content. Each performance becomes a creative collaboration imposed by the sharing of this site. There is no scripted or pre-choreographed content; the movement and narratives arise out
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 23 of the moment and the context, albeit with recurring themes about the body/architecture, memory/desire and touch/relationships.
My dancing body is a war memorial a reminder that all our clever complications begin and will end in this fleshy interface.
In 2013, I performed my ‘live screendance’ in a stationary train carriage. This train, a vintage AE railway carriage (now an independent gallery stationary in the environmental park CERES, Brunswick) was built over 100 years ago and travelled around country Victoria for 74 years. Given the name ‘red rattler’ as these vehicles aged and became more decrepit, this site seemed an ironically apt metaphor for my own body as a vintage vessel carrying the emotions, vocabulary, incidents, and ideas that have moved through my architecture.
These vehicles are shared public sites, memories of which we all share in some form or another. We are trapped in it for the duration of the journey, as we are all trapped in this body for the duration of our lives. In that imprisonment we find escape through dreaming…(or used to10) using the repetitive motion of landscape past window, a rolling interface that lulled us into the quiet consideration of our memories and thoughts…we improvised from within an extended state of being in the now.
As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. (Bachelard 1994 184)
Rather than ‘choreograph’ my performance with the background information of the site or by constructing movement scores, I let the performances themselves reveal the site, as we entered into a relationship. The red train and I created a lived history together, formed by the other bodies who entered each performance…bodies who steered and channeled my navigation of that interior, and my own imaginative interior, as we all—bodies, train and all—touched one another. With each performance I discovered another way of traversing the structure, its hard edges that bruised and scraped me, and its de-furnished negative spaces interrupted by flesh and other personal histories. It was a contact improvisation with numerous and shifting hard and soft partners. Through touch I was seeing…it was a writing of a history through the body. My hand-held projector touched and animated my body with images and text, making my skin a portal to another time, and to the sensations and emotions that have held that event in my architecture.
She is crawling towards me, she is taking a journey, it’s not sentimental, it’s an investigation in motion, she’s travelling through time. The landscape changes, the foundations sink, it makes me think about all the times I’ve wondered if it’s time to stop, but the rhythm continues under our feet, the dance
Brolga 40 24 takes us & makes us more than ourselves. She is holding me up, she is sitting me down, she is carrying me across the threshold, she is inviting me to play… I stand in her footsteps. I embody her gaze. I interrogate her perspective. I shift proximity, distance, desire. I play on the edge of the frame. I login. P2P data transfer. seed/feed/seed/ feed/seed… I become disoriented, derailed. I disconnect & follow the commentary. I’m somewhere inside it. I’m looking out into the darkness as she disappears… She is crawling away from me, she is changing before my eyes, a little older, a little bolder than before, she is covering her mouth, she is shedding her skin, she is suspended on the edge (unexpected yet inevitable), she is falling from a moving train, she is never too late, she is eternal return, the woman she once was, the woman she is becoming, she is a hand- drawn heart on the flesh of the earth, she is alien inside, she is other lives. She is still moving, searching, holding the colours of joy in the palm of her hand….
She choreographs her final position, a fortunate death, a dramatic death, an untimely death. but love (a body of) unravels the moment until she is glowing with visceral transcendence. Time flows backwards across her skin, as Saraswati opens within her. She is endless. (Audience Response, October 2013)
I fell in love with that train, not for itself so much as for what it reflected back of me, and the audience as they watched/rode with me. It became a love affair…a memory of an imagined intimacy that built its own soliloquy (written poem) and then fed the next moment, the creation of a new screendance, an artifact of the relationship that holds the traces of the event but transforms as it moves into another site. It rewrote history so that I couldn’t tell if it was real or if I made it up? I decided it didn’t matter. As I invent it becomes mine, as I draw on autobiography I create a fiction.
The screendance Red Rattler is a poetic summary, a writing of the essence of my performance experiences in the red train. I created it just after my confirmation of candidature performance in early 2014 while I had the set-up location again. It was a marking of a moment, a sort of closure on a beginning in both the physical practice and the writing of my research project. I wanted a memento of this period of research, this performance experiment, not sure if I would return to this site as the research continued.
I did have video footage documenting the 2013 performances by two different people (one a dancer with camera skills, one a cinematographer with dance skills). I had also asked another cinematographer colleague to shoot a performance for camera in 2014 (no audience). But I felt all this footage to be somewhat distancing. It reflected a particular performance rather than a state—it needed my point of view and the frame I imagined being viewed. It needed the rhythm of the train and my heartbeat, and to feel these movements there needed to be more places of stillness.
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 25 Again, I suppose this may seem a bit prosaic in its description. What I mean is that I wanted to control the movement of the camera, and clean up the clutter of the frame, and focus on the space between us, viewer and I. In the aforementioned footage the power points and other modern additions seemed to stand out, disrupting the authenticity of the location (which in performance are mostly hidden by other bodies or at least peripheral to the focal point of the action and not necessarily noticeable). The visibility of other audience members in shot made the camera/viewer seem to be a voyeur, external to the action rather than a participant in it. So I spent time alone with the camera in that space—fixing the camera on a tripod framing particular angles in the location, in varying proximities to me, and ‘played’ (performed) within and on the edges of that field of vision. Each ‘set-up’ held its own temporal and textural feel, this moment could be happening at a different time to the last, implying a shared journey over time and alluding to the bodily journey of a lifetime. I magnified an intimacy between us—allowed the camera to see my vulnerabilities—by watch me sleeping, following the trace of my finger on my throat, falling through frame, crawling into corners, struggling out a window, looking directly and ‘unmasked’ at camera. These positions I put myself in, and the charging of the space between the camera/viewer and myself, were surprising unexpected places physically and emotionally (I am balancing on an edge, I am skewered in its framework, I am too close to you). These extremes, behaviour inappropriate for the public space, were strategies, in performance and now on screen, to engage directly with the sensations and emotions of the viewer’s body. I set up shots to drop into the ‘imagined,’ into dream-like abstractions, to amplify corporeality by transcending it (seemingly hovering above the train seat, like a corpse, or sinking into the light of the window as the film fades to an end).
To this mix of locked-off camera shots, I added moving camera shots taken from my point of view, from a gropro camera attached to my head. From here you can see/feel the room spin, read the writing on the wall, float up and see the discarded skin of my/your body. I used reflections of myself off-screen in the glass interior panels to bring the three-dimensionality of the location into the screen frame. The fog of my breath prepares a canvas to draw a heart and this brings my three- dimensionality into the location, its heat, touch, memories, and longings. We all remember this physical act, drawing on the misted window, and the dreaming state of travel that this lives in.
I’m in that dreaming place that travel lulls you into Lolling around in my head while my body is static a quivering rocking contradiction a mobile immobility moving past other lives, all with their own thoughts cramping their actions squeezing their expectations tying their wrists whistling Dixie biding their time getting the job done
Brolga 40 26 I did use one shot in the Red Rattler edit from a previous live performance to show the image of my (past) face onto my (present) face, from my hand-held projector. For other moving images of other locations I incorporated fragments of the footage I had projected in performance onto my body. I had done this in performance to suggest my ‘interior/ imagination’ and to play with the metaphors of skin and screen, past and present. In Red Rattler, these fragments added the same textural layers and spatial/temporal shifts—my torso emerges as a field of flowers as I press my cheek against the window, the heart I draw on the misted window animates into a drawing and words that layer and drown the frame into a scrawled mess.
Just as the Love Poem for the Red Rattler is a written declaration of an intimacy, Red Rattler (the screendance) is a shared intimacy written on the pixels of the screen and riding on the soundscape.11 The writing became a blueprint for the edit, reminding my eyes viewing a screen, my fingers on the keyboard, of the sensations of this dancing life, improvising itself from this moment to the next.
A love Poem for the red rattler
We began as a clumsy collision our bodies bumping and bruising with each dance of the carriage a rattling rhumba… ti ti ka ti, ti ti ka ti, 1 2 & 3, now where are we? We try to make each other fit, etch ourselves upon the other
We spend time in each other’s daydreams, lulled by age and the lure of longings past Slipping into sleep, your edges soften and I can climb in and explore your secrets crawl into your corners balance on your broken edges scramble across your scarred surfaces I find messages of forgotten codes and lost loves a ticket, a talisman, a proof, a truth, a telling I don’t let up ‘Why are you leaving?‘ … ‘Where are you going?‘
I’m shaking you awake and launching into you until I’m impaled, expelled, laid bare, undone… This time together is peeling me like wallpaper groaning off a wall You skin me and the hot red mess of my life spills out staining the floor a murder on the dis-orient express
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 27 You remind me that my body is a vintage carriage and I’m a passenger in it, on this journey My life is running through me like a film a stream of postcards and blurred impressions merging into a melancholic rhythm possibilities flashing past us and within us like air rushing past bodies plummeting to earth and we are dropped into each others’ arms with a gasp, a jolt (where am I?)
An almost death, a pleasurable preview of another place beyond the confines of this carcass outside the adolescent fumblings of flesh But no, we’re not there yet This is not truth but transience We are derailed, marooned, in our fragile shells drawing a promise in the misted window and opening a can of worms
Wanting Distance It’s always further than you thought… And over before you know it.
Notes
1. My neologism ‘cinesthesia’ is a play on cinema and kinesthesia, proposing that I bring cinematic images into the physical body. It also infers the word ‘synesthesia,’ which is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. 2. Description from companion website for the book http://global.oup.com/us/companion. websites/9780199772629/book 3. ‘Cine-dance’ is the term Deren coined for the experimental films she was making in the 1940s and 50s. 4. The beginnings of this research are cited in my article for The International Screendance Journal 4 (2014), p. 118. 5. These ‘diverse’ bodies I have worked with include the company members of Weave Movement Theatre, a mix of people with and without disability (physical and intellectual), and Melinda Smith, a dancer living with cerebral palsy, with whom I have an ongoing-shared improvisation practice.
Brolga 40 28 Goat Media. 10. The current proliferation of mobile phones and rise of social networking has brought about a new ‘escape’ in public …we bow over our tiny screens and armour ourselves against physical interaction like turtles retreating inside their shells. With our attention elsewhere, we render our physical bodies inert, almost lifeless. 11. I drew on sections of the live score, a number of discrete compositions by Stuart Day (Adelaide based composer), which I had woven together with train sound effects to create the tonal and temporal structure for the performance. I kept a sense of the journey of mood that I had had in the performance—the clumsiness of arrival (the rattle of the train), finding your seat and settling in to the location (a lulling, rhythmic guitar melody), the playfulness of getting to know each other (the single repeated piano notes that begin to layer and chase one another), and then to a more intimate place, of dream, longing, loss (the sustained choral voices and otherworldly bell tinkling).
References
Albright, AC 2010, 'Falling…on screen', International Journal of Screendance, vol. 1, pp. 21–26. Bachelard, G 1994, The poetics of space, Beacon Press, Boston. Berger, J 1972, Ways of seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger, British Broadcasting Corporation, Penguin, London, Harmondsworth. Bucksbarg, A & Carter, S 2012, 'Improvising Artists, Embodied Technology and Emergent Techniques', in S Broadhurst & J Machon (eds), Identity, Performance and Technology—Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 7–23. Clark, VA 1984, The legend of Maya Deren: a documentary biography and collected works, Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, New York. Corbet, D 2005, 'Working with camera', Excavate video recording,
Dianne Reid Improcinemaniac 29 Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process
ANNE SCOTT WILSON
Figure 1: Wilson, A. 2014, Coathanger, 75 x 75 cms, digital print on Arches Velin Rag Paper
30 In this article I discuss how I have come to understand embodied processes in my visual art practice using photography. I danced professionally for 25 years and performed in various contexts including classical ballet repertoire, contemporary dance, and commercial dance. I choreographed for various productions working with a group of dancers for seven years before studying visual art. I experienced a particular sense of embodiment as a live performer in which prescribed movements were learnt, performed and repeated as if second nature. Transitioning into a conceptually based visual art practice the creative process was flipped around. Using painting, sculpture, performance (in a different context) and photographic methods I explored ideas from which forms such as video/ audio installations, photography, performance art and painting emerged mostly in a gallery context. Although I still think of forms of movement as content, in a visual art practice the idea or concept invokes form. Figure 1 is an example of an early work coming out of an exploration into the condition of embodiment.
Privileging the idea over medium and form, I encountered a photographic process that shifted an external sense of embodiment (as a performer) to an internal consciousness of embodiment. My rules for shooting the above image facilitated an exploration into what embodiment might look like. I performed ‘the bomb’ into a swimming pool using specific lighting set up to capture and emphasise a moment in which the trace of the body’s movement could become visual. The pool has been blacked out in post production leaving the mark of the body’s impact. I performed the ‘bomb’ or ‘plank’ as part of an ongoing conceptual concern in my practice. In this article I refer to recent works that relate closely to my discussion of the employment of movement improvisation in my visual arts practice. I stumbled upon a way of shooting that provided a method in which I actualise imagery using a bodily sense of light to measure times of exposure in the camera. Images materialise as a map, a drawing of light, caused through interactivity with light in motion. I seek to deconstruct how embodiment occurs in my visual art practice and to observe similarities and differences through improvisation practice and theory.
While shooting with a bespoke camera as distinct from an objectifying experience of conventional photography and by moving in conjunction with bodily knowledge of light I have been able to understand deeply embedded memories that were otherwise hidden. I am exploring how improvisational practice synergises with performative actions. My process is one in which I consider the finished product to be secondary to physical movements necessary to make still images within practice led research in visual art as the art. An artefact such as a photograph relies upon this process to be realised. Upon reflection I argue that bodily actions and spontaneity are the essence of my enquiry and as Goldman writes:
Performance and composition occur simultaneously—on the spot—through a practice that values surprise, innovation, and the vicissitudes of process rather than the fixed glory of a finished product. (Goldman 2010 5)
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 31 Performance and composition are simultaneous when I shoot. Surprise and innovation are framed within a process I describe later and changes of movement evidenced in the prints come out of ‘vicissitudes of process’. When I take photos I engage my body to see rather than looking through the viewfinder of the camera and in this wayprocess is unpredictable— changes of directions, speed, dynamics and bodily form in action is a result of how I read light which also changes unpredictably. This process comes out of a previous exploration into how embodiment, using photography has resulted in cross-disciplinary practice between visual art and somatic dance. In this article I uncover what, why and how processes may be conceived as improvisational (Wilson 2015). By deconstructing actions I made while shooting imagery I hope to tease out the vicissitudes of process more deeply. Hidden memories coming from the act of moving while taking photographs in an improvisational manner, as I explain later, emerge in process, during actions creating new knowledge. In this way:
Improvisation is a form of research, a way of peering into the complex natural system that is a human being. It is, in a sense, another way of ‘thinking,’ but on that produces ideas impossible to conceive in stillness. (de Spain 2003, p. 27)
My project contains all of the descriptors from this text. I shall describe my process subjectively and objectively and by referring to artworks during the improvisational moment. As a starting point to contextualise my process within improvisational theory and practice, I would like to articulate differences and similarities (between visual art and improvisation) I have observed so far:
Similarities Differences
Improvisation reveals hidden knowledge Performance within improvisational that can only be experienced through practice often has an audience moving Improvisational practice comes out of Improvisation often happens through deep and sustained physical awareness contact, in my process contact is made through focussed attention on bodily between my body and light via a camera movement
Improvisational practice is spontaneous Visual art practice, by contrast, may hypothetically include a similar focus Improvisational practice comes from on the body within another overarching habitual bodily knowledge that has enquiry become as if second nature from a tight place (Goldman 2010) Performativity in practice-led research in visual art is conceived of differently in Improvisational practice is often perceived improvisational dance practice which I as having a liberating effect, released shall discuss later. through new experience of movement and embodiment (Goldman 2010)
Brolga 40 32 Figure 2: Wilson, A. 2015, Performative Explanation of my process Landscape # 3, 60 x 100 cms, digital print on Ilford Gloss Paper Performative Landscape #3 was made entirely in the camera. A filter or a graphical drawing has not been applied in post-production to make the pattern and number of white spaces on top of the landscape. The spots are within the actual file and map bodily changes of direction as I shot while moving in a car (a process I will describe in detail). I have learnt to interpret light’s time physically as it reflects off various surfaces when imagery is passing by. As the car in which I travel moves, I move the camera to ‘pick up’ light, drawing a pattern that contains what appears to be a landscape, together with markers of changes in direction determined by my interpretation of light momentarily.
For example, while creating the above picture I was travelling through the Dandenongs towards sunset and a large amount of light came from the sun sitting on the horizon, appearing through trees, or mountains that blocked the view occasionally. My shot takes around 7 seconds and I read light, picking up elements of it over that time, making choices of where, when and for how long to move based upon my bodily knowledge of light in relation to the camera. I have learnt light’s timing, which initiates how I move. I might point the camera towards a darker part of what is flying past then quickly move it towards the actual sun for a very short time using my knowledge of its strength in relation to how my camera works. Thus my movements occur in the moment based upon light speed,
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 33 my speed and light’s strength within several seconds. The white dots are aberrations of light on the file in which there are two time signatures—a darker and a lighter colour sit on top of each other—in the above image I have taken the marks out leaving white spaces to identify a map depicting changes of direction. In conventional photography a still camera with a very short exposure time doesn’t have to deal with these changes of light and so it does not usually show up in an image. Performative Landscape #3 reveals the background as the landscape and the points at which I move as white dots—a kind of map of my relationship with light in motion. I learnt photography by reading light physically that developed a habitual way of moving from a tight place. (Goldman 2010). My tight place comes from habitually formed movements in relation to light’s movement predicated on the laws of photography, specifically the rule of reciprocity which I will describe later.
Photographs come from light forming an image over time onto a photosensitive surface. I am supported by quantum physics’ postulation that light changes when being observed, in suggesting that my relationship with light is interactive. I use the camera while moving without looking through its viewfinder. It is at the end of my arm moving in response to light’s movement as perceived through my body (learnt through practice inside the human size camera) manifesting in a still image of movement. Contact with light in my process is spontaneously occurring in the moment. My rules of engagement are formed out of reciprocal, inter-dependent relationships: between light’s undulating strength, surfaces and shapes viewed in movement, my own movements and that of a vehicle (or not). Rhythms and speeds are marked on the film or sensor surface through an interdependence of light with movement/s, camera’s setting, surface quality and my knowledge. The speed at which I move and change directions is determined ‘in the moment’ only. Decisions of how long to leave my arm and body in one place, how quickly to move it to another and how long the total movement can be depends on a physical understanding of light, movement and exposure times within a camera and is achieved through repetitive practice. The improvisational moment begins in stillness and moves into action during the shoot.
Stillness consists of hours of observing light inside a human size camera obscura and learning to respond to momentary changes and interpret that response into photographic language specifically for developing skills to facilitate photography’s rule of reciprocity which I describe later. For example, in the image below I was speeding past a cluster of trees closely observing within light which initiated a movement of vertical motions with my arm pointing the camera at the sky where light is strongest, resting momentarily there, then moving my arm and body down towards shadows at the base of the trees at a speed determined by its strength and affect on the film/sensor surface.
I took the two outside panels in the image while outside of the car—the central image was taken while moving in the car as the sun was setting in front of me. I intentionally set up situations that challenge me and play with light, by choosing the time of day, form of landscape or urban site,
Brolga 40 34 Figure 3: Wilson, A. 2013. Portrait speed of the car or body, choice of objects and shapes. For example in Landscape, 118 x 84 cms, digital Portrait Landscape above I chose to travel through the Dandenongs in pinhole print on Museo Portfolio Rag winter at a time and angle that captured the deceleration of light. The imagery is not improvisational—it is a memorial of the improvisational process, a trace of my body’s movement while I was in that moment. I move at a certain speed, slowing down and speeding up depending on how I am interpreting the rule of reciprocity in the moment of light’s speed. My rules of engagement have a synergy with an idea of composition which I understand in a general way, drawing on how it can sometimes be used in improvisational practice and the rules I apply to it form a framework and context to improvise within which I think of as a tight place (Goldman 2010) from which movement arises based in knowledge of photography.
Even though there is no audience I consider the process to be a performative act. The word performance in the context of my process relates to visual art’s claims of performativity in practice led research. Following Bolt’s postulation that performativity occurs within the ‘creation of an artifact through repetitive actions—and re iterations of a singular idea’ (Bolt 2009), I perceive my process as performative. My project sits with an overarching enquiry in which I reflect on conditions of embodiment—particularly through movement. My process is a re iteration of a research question. Specifically my performativity engages habitual memory through learning to read and use light in a playful and challenging way. Initiated by inquiry into the research question my process aligns with the idea that ‘art practice is performative in that it enacts or produces ‘art’ as an effect’. (Bolt 2009)
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 35 A subjective description of my process: improvisational practice and habitual bodily memories within visual art practice using a bespoke camera
I feel that learning dance and learning to read light have something in common in the way they create habitual memories (experienced as second nature). When writing a chapter titled ‘The Immersive Experience’ (Wilson 2009) for my PhD I attempted to describe the way I conceive moving within the studio to have meaning and how this connects to video works in a gallery context. Trying to grapple with existing knowledge of movement experienced as embedded memories I aimed to explore how embodiment translates from a dance/performance context into a visual art performative context.
Writing about the immersive experience helped to connect the impact of embedded memory in different contexts. At that time, in the process of making art works, combinations of movements I had learnt came to me as Figure 4: Wilson, A. 2009, Terminator, I moved about the studio or researched ideas, particularly those exploring 120 x 100 cm, digital print on metallic concepts such as movement and memory. Figure 4 is an example of a paper work that explores the body in motion, a static moment depicted in ‘play’ with dynamics of movement.
I am aware of how abstract meanings are attached to memories of dance compositions in my body—it is personal, yet at one time dance compositions performed constituted communication with an audience. I can always recall compositions performed to a live audience. These memories have connections to my physiology as, when learning to co ordinate my body aiming for technical proficiency, I embodied sequences that still exist within me. Even though years have passed corporeal memories, whether I am still performing or not, have been a communicative tool and as such I know those movements as language albeit personal and abstract.
As I develop new work in the visual art I continue to think in movement. For me how I navigate the world mentally and physically continuously influences my work. (Bolt, B. 2009). I often look at video art to reflect on how rhythms convey meaning and how dynamics of movement and juxtapositions of speeds are used by various artists. When writing the chapter I thought on how procedural and declarative memory affects how I read movement. I read the work of Bill Viola for example, who used super slow motion to expose subtexts, dialogues between actors not usually seen at normal speeds. By reflecting on speed in video works and how that affected the viewer in a gallery context I understood the potential of using movement to either trigger habitually formed memories of movement perhaps embodied unconsciously. Slowness for example revealed unconscious or procedural memories of moving in habitual ways, by making what is not usually visible to be revisited. Viewing Viola’s work helped me understand how my body’s movements must have, at sometime been learnt, like knowing how to walk. Movement in slowness exposed how time and speed contributes to how memories are formed while learning to move.
Brolga 40 36 I understood when writing the chapter the tight place Goldman speaks of as habitually formed movements that were once learnt (Goldman 2010). I spent 15 years training in ballet and performing in the corps de ballet and another 20 years training and performing in musicals, commercial events and contemporary dance projects. As I began my work as a visual artist memories from my dancing years embedded at a cellular level surfaced. For example while thinking about how to create a work to explore embodiment, an image will come to me of a learnt choreographed sequence of movements. I can remember developing a video work that I storyboarded mentally into 3 different movements—the first involved a figure running up a hill and through a wall into water. I saw the figure’s movement as a kind of choreography with a pace and rhythm I related to through live performance. Eventually I dropped the figure running up the hill and made one scene of people speaking underwater, a decision that favoured a language of movement over a literal narrative, distilling the idea into a single set of physical conditions applied to bodies in motion.
Because of this pervasive condition of memory situated within my body and mind as I transferred my practice from performance to visual art I have considered that all movements learnt at some time in my life seem to be framed by rules defined by their function whether a performance, pedestrian movements or moving in my studio towards and away from a painting.
Similarly a rule of reciprocity is intrinsic to photographic practice. From my experience, correct exposure is achieved by balancing a few interdependent conditions of light. Before I could use photography confidently I needed to understand the camera physically, so I built a human size primitive camera and ‘played’ inside observing light to know how each element affected the other. I began to appreciate how a two dimensional image inside a camera is created similarly in sight through our eyes, by a light safe container with a small hole, that is, the pupil of the eye letting light into the eyeball. I learnt in a tight place (Goldman 2013) from which improvisational actions emerged as limitations contained within mechanics of the camera and sight.
An example of how the rule of reciprocity works in photography
Correct exposure occurs with full expression of tones–details in the shadows and details in the highlights, in a full colour gamut (depending on the limits of printers, screens or paper upon which it sits). This in turn is affected by light’s speed and strength travelling through the aperture or hole; it’s size and shutter speed:
The rule of reciprocity engages three parts of a camera: the aperture or hole, the photosensitive surface either film or digital sensor and the shutter speed or the amount of time the hole is left open. Each relies upon the other to create an image that looks like that we see. The digital sensor is different than when using film in that its sensitivity can be increased or magnified allowing for faster shutter speeds than ordinarily available with film.
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 37 Figure 5: Wilson, A. 2010, Installation If I use a small aperture light comes in more slowly and there is finer detail view, Conversation, Monash University in the image with a long depth of field. This means everything within the Gallery, video projection onto painted image is as sharp as everything else. A large hole lets light in more quickly canvas 200 x 200cm and depending on time it will create a shallow depth of field meaning a part of the image will be sharp with other parts blurry. Added to this the sensor or surface, upon which light fixes the image, can be set to respond more quickly or slowly to light. Learning to read light for the camera is about understanding these variables. I can use the camera’s light meter to tell me what size hole is needed and for how long to achieve correct exposure. It is also possible to use an external light meter, however, I chose to learn the rules physically and to witness the rule in action. By observation of light inside a human-size camera, ie a large light safe container I could walk into, with a hole on one side and a white surface opposite, I practised how correct exposure could be achieved. On the inside of the construction was a piece of gaffa tape, a flap covering a hole and if I uncovered the hole the back wall would light up to reveal a two dimensional image of the world outside upside down. When inside I would expose black and white photo-sensitive paper to light for a certain amount of time then develop it in the darkroom.
Brolga 40 38 Through repeating this process at different times of day in different light situations I learned to judge times of exposure. I also made different size holes that could slow down or speed up light’s journey onto the surface. After several months practise I developed a sensory ‘intuition’ of the strength and speed of light in relation to the camera. Intuition based on habitual movements in response to light’s momentary changes. Movements such as changing the position of the paper, moving the paper closer to the hole, altering the time I let light in by closing the aperture and pulling down the piece of gaffa building up a movement memory.
After practising and teaching inside the primitive camera I used a pinhole camera outside and exposed film and polaroids for long times at sunset, overnight and at sunrise to further develop my skills. I practised by observing how light’s intensity affected exposure times and qualities of images left on the sensor or paper outside the darkness of the camera obscura. Photographs taken at the change of light as distinct from high contrast images shot during the middle of the day when the sun was strongest exhibit a glow fixing light’s changing character as it becomes stronger or weaker over time. Called ‘The Magic Hour’ photographers and film-makers use this quality to create a romantic effect. In these situations I used a tripod and exposed the pinhole camera for up to 12 hours. I practised so much that reading light in relation to a camera and ‘capturing’ an image became embedded mentally and physically. This meant that the actions of using the camera were not unlike improvised seeing as I respond to variables. My habitual memory triggered what had become ‘automatic’ learnt during periods of reflection, trials and failures in stillness and movement.
After taking photos with the pinhole camera, I had a lens cap engineered by a jeweller with F160 aperture, a tiny hole to slow light’s speed attached to my Canon 5D Mark 2 digital camera. As an experiment I wanted to see what would happen as I could change the receptivity of the sensor in more extreme ways than with film. This allowed another element to enter into the rule of reciprocity—the speed of fixing the image. Keen to experience a direct contact with light, a camera without a lens creates a direct hit on the sensor. Lens can bend light, speed it up and slow it down and magnify the image. I surmised that without a lens that I would be able to put into action what I witnessed inside the camera obscura.
An improvisational moment discovered
Once, while in the hills of Bruny Island in Tasmania as my friend was driving the car slowly as the sun was setting in a hilly terrain, I picked up my camera fixed with the F160 lens cap and absent-mindedly began to move it at the end my arm, picking up light’s reflective traces here and there—pointing towards trees travelling on my right, then swinging the camera over the other side picking up light off rocks. Each surface required a different movement to achieve an exposure. The camera set to ‘bulb’ a setting in which the aperture is permanently opened until I choose to close it, meant I could control the amount of time needed to achieve exposure. I found these sustained movements with the camera in
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 39 relation to the car’s speed and the landscape came from habitual bodily knowledge of light.
This was fun (which came as a surprise) playing with light constrained by rules of reciprocity. I was in a kind of reverie while physically engaged. When I began shooting like this, I perceived the improvisational moment had begun in stillness during observation of light’s movement while inside the camera obscura transforming into action during the shoot. I began to understand deep feelings, memories that were otherwise hidden could not have been revealed except through movement, in response to and in collaboration with light speed.
Unifying nature of light
Figure 6: Wilson, A. 2015, 9 Robert Lanza’a Theory of Everything claims ‘that life creates the universe Incarnations, 75 x 75 cms, lightbox instead of the other way around. In this new paradigm, life is not just an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics’ (Lanza 2012). Light is interactive and changes when observed so as I focus throughout improvisational moments I don’t think I am alone–I know I am responding to light as I move and I move in a playful way to test light’s effect on my camera. During the shoot I forget the camera and think of the way light is in motion—I make changes based on how light is moving not unlike dancing with a partner. It is spontaneous. I create… the universe in that moment through a direct interaction with light. Lanza’s theory that we co-create the universe fits neatly with my experience however subjective. I conceive the universe through how I perceive it and in the context of my shoot it is experienced in a specific way that is reciprocal and alive a reciprocity created between light and me only available while moving. A still shoot would create a different experience. Moving engages a sense of creativity of co creation and embodiment.
After making several shoots and during the time I learnt and responded to light inside the camera a somatic experience began to materialise –in the prints which I see as movement in stillness (Wilson 2015), a kind of map showing interactions between my perception and play with light and the camera’s ability to handle changes in direction over time.
In the work above I travelled in a car on dirt roads towards sunset. I moved the camera vertically in response to differing light situations. Each exposure was about eight seconds depending on how fast the car was moving and the reflectivity of surfaces I pointed the camera together with deceleration of the sun’s light. I see the prints as a record of that moment, like a map of time and space as experienced through my body in an improvised play with light. However a more profound exchange occurred during the shoot than by looking at prints. The actions produced what seemed to be early memories, perhaps for example as a baby in the sun, of embodiment.
Brolga 40 40 A re assessment of my process through the use of an improvisational score by Rachel Kaplan to sift through empirical findings translated into improvisational language
I would like to use a score by Kaplan to see if and how my process could be conceived of as improvisational: I can’t verify my proposition of improvisation scientifically or through qualitative or quantitative research methods, however, I felt it strongly synergise with descriptions of improvisational practice.
Kaplan’s improvisational text :
Make and break contact with other dancers in the space. Use the whole space within and without. Track your internal landscape. What feelings or images or memories or associations are triggered when you separate and unite with other people? (Kaplan 2003).
Make and break contact with other dancers in the space.
Through connection with light reflected off different surfaces through my eyes and through my camera in motion I would ‘make and break’ contact. Other dancers being the ‘body’ of light itself as it moved and I moved in response to its timing and strength.
Use the whole space within and without.
The whole space ‘within’ and ‘without’ forms from awareness of light in action, literally inside my eyeballs and inside my camera. Using the whole space involves responding to and embodying light’s omniscience, that is it is all around me inclusive of all I could physically perceive or was conscious of in that moment. As a directive the verb ‘use’ lifts the act of shooting an image as independent and disconnected from me into action–collaboration. I understand this to mean I search out and make assessments of what and how light can facilitate a composition or make form while moving.
Figure 7: Wilson, A. 2015. Performative Landscape #1, digital print 70 x 100 cms, Ilford Gloss Paper
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 41 Track your internal landscape.
Am I tracking my internal landscape as I move the camera, my body and direct the car’s speed (if used)? I wonder if as I make choices of speed, movements and directions based on my inner knowledge and practice working with light, whether I am ‘tracking’ the internal landscape. I feel I see the landscape as a part of my own body’s landscape. I understand this as poetic and authentic yet struggle to articulate it. My interior landscape is continuously tracking and being tracked by looking outwards at the light and looking inwards at the knowledge of light’s time.
Wilson, A, (2015) Performative Landscape #2, digital print 70 x 100 cms, Ilford Gloss Paper
What feelings or images or memories or associations are triggered when you separate and unite with other people?
I feel sensations and memories in the moment that inspire an extraordinary sense of time. Day turning to night, figures and surfaces are visually loaded with sensations and memories. The familiar becomes undone as I view what I see everyday with more attention. Surfaces evoke elaborate structures in my imagination that I know yet feel as if I am seeing them for the first time. I feel a bit like a baby. Movement seems to allow for memories that go further back in time emerge than if I was static. As I separate with light momentarily I am playing hide and seek, I play with light. In unity light’s source ie the sun (portrait landscape—the middle panel) becomes a tactile object that I stroke with the camera–a quick small movement—I know if I stay too long it will burn out the sensor but I dare myself. Its late, the sun is setting, seemingly it’s last flicker is pregnant—its final moments are a promise for more.
Brolga 40 42 Make and break contact with other dancers in the space.
If I think of light as a body, separating and uniting with it over time, associations form. It becomes a life force that breathes. It’s only through actions that light’s body in various relative shapes and dynamics inscribe this. In those moments when decisions are made, new experience emerges. I conceive other dancers as surfaces reflecting light and I Wilson, A. 2013, Homage to Turner, move to make and break contact. I think these actions and moments 130 x 97 cms, digital pinhole print, as the essence of the art-work—associations triggered through and in Museo Portfolio Rag collaboration with ‘other bodies’ of light.
Conclusion
Improvisational language and theory is helpful in thinking about out how my visual art practice can be understood. I have gained new knowledge by reading about and considering improvisation in relation to my own practice and become aware of otherwise difficult-to-articulate real effects of my process. There are some similarities between my process and some improvisational practices, however, contexts and methods differ greatly. I think about the process of reflection I use while working with files resulting from spontaneous movement while shooting as a continuation of movement based practice even though movements are small. It is a bit like moving inside the camera obscura while observing light. New forms of embodiment seem to come out of visual art practice
Anne Scott Wilson Improvisation in visual art practice using a photographic process 43 and I think of the prints as drawings made with my body in a performative improvisational moment. By employing Kaplan’s improvisational score to make connections to my process and embodied experiences I have understood cross discipline within visual art and improvisational practice. I discovered a way to articulate a new sense of embodiment experienced in my process through using Kaplan’s score in retrospect. Finding ways to talk about process from an embodied perspective has been helpful in evolving my practice further providing a way to go deeper into philosophical enquiry around the human condition.
References
Goldman, D 2010, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance As a Practice of Freedom, University of Michigan Press, Ane Arbor. de Spain, K 2003, ‘The cutting edge of awareness: reports from the inside of improvisation’ in Cooper Albright, A & Gere, D (eds), Taken by surprise: a dance improvisation reader, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut. Bolt, B 2009, ‘A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts’, Working Papers in Art and Design, viewed 7 November 2015,
Brolga 40 44 What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation.
OLIVIA MILLARD
This paper explores the use of scores or verbal propositions in improvising dance. Examining my use of scores in my own improvisation practice it discusses what scores might be and might do and how they relate to the real time composition of dance in the present of its making. To help explore these ideas I refer to the theory of Nelson Goodman and discuss the use of scores by other dance practitioners including Steve Paxton, Yvonne Meier and Anna Halprin.
In 2012, I completed a three-year research project, as part of a PhD programme at Deakin University. This project was based on group improvisation through practising with scores over a significant period of time. The question that I asked in conducting my research was: What is the work the ‘score’ in the creation of an improvised group dance? where scores are verbal propositions, usually relating to physical, bodily or movement notions, rather than being narrative or psychological, such as tangling and untangling or the noticing of being subject to gravity. This research took the form of a studio exploration with a group of six dancers, including myself. We practised with the scores twice a week for three years.
In the years since that project, I have been working a core group of dancers once a week. Some have left the project, others have joined, but the core of the group has been consistent. We practise in a similar way each week although at the start of each session, I introduce a new set of scores.
Over my years of my practising dance improvisation in this way, I have not questioned whether to use ‘scores’. I have always taken for granted that they are useful and perhaps even essential in the generation of movement material in the present. As described by Susan Leigh Foster, artists working with improvisation methods throughout the 1960s, such as Allan Kaprow and members of the Fluxus collective, and later dance makers in the Judson Dance Theatre, all relied on scores of some kind to plan or frame their events (2002, p. 44). Throughout my research, I have been interested in how scores work within the way we practice as a group. Initially, I had assumed that scores had an easily perceivable
Brolga 40 45 effect on dancing, for those dancing and those observing. I soon realised that this was not the case. This has led me to explore the taken- for-grantedness of the utility of the score. In this paper I am asking: What is a score? What does it do? Here I conclude that there is not a straightforward, causal relationship between a score, the way we use a score and the dancing we do when we practise with a score. In order to think through the role that scores play in my/our dancing, I will begin by discussing what a score might be, how scores have been used or rejected by artists I have worked with, then move on to explore the theory of Nelson Goodman’s regarding scores and recuperate its use in the context of group dance improvisation.
Background to using scores
My introduction to the use of scores in dance improvisation was in the studio, in the workshops and the choreographic processes of improvisation practitioners. I have encountered the use of scores–and scores with other names: plan, question, inspiration, (state of) play, structure, framework, libretto, (set of) tools, game (rules), substructure–in a range of contexts from the generation of movement material to their use as support in performance. I have experienced dance makers using their scores generate movement to suggest or define an approach to the act of performing.
I began work as a dancer in companies performing ‘set’ or choreographed movement and these choreographers used improvisation as a tool for creating that movement. I gradually became more exposed to improvisation for performance with my first opportunity to perform in an improvised work offered by Ros Warby in 2001 while working with Dance Works (2000). Working with Warby gave me a new perception of improvisation. It was much more than a tool for creating ‘interesting’, virtuosic or non-habitual movement; it could be a way of noticing and exploring the many experiences of a dancing body both in private and in performance. This approach allowed me to eventually leave behind the over-valuing of certain types of movement such as the shapes and virtuosic steps of ballet or modern dance traditions and to begin to find an interest in a wider range of possibilities.
Warby had, in the preceding year, been working with American artist Deborah Hay, a relationship which she still maintains. She had been participating in Hay’s Solo Commissioning Projects. In these projects, a group of dancers participate in an intensive workshop in which they learn a solo, created by Hay. The participants are able to go on and perform that solo in the contexts of their own choice but they must first have practised for three months. As Warby explains:
Deborah’s choreography is articulated by a series of instructions and spatial pathways. Often these instructions are nonsensical and apparently impossible to execute, such as ‘take six steps into the light without taking a step’ (in Dempster 2007/08, p. 77).
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 46 The moment of negotiating the impossibility of the task is witnessed by the audience. We are able to see the ‘working- through’ of a performance problem in real time even though we don’t know what that problem is. This approach puts the performer in a situation where they are attentive, they are focussed on the unfolding of their performance in the present.
Soon after working with Warby, I travelled to New York and Europe. I attended workshops with several improvisation practitioners including KJ Holmes who is a dancer, poet and singer based in New York. Holmes has an interest in a broad range of somatic practices including Ideokinesis, Alexander Technique and Body-Mind Centering. She had many years experience as an improviser, working with Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton (Benoit 1997, p. 89). At Holmes’ workshops, I became aware of the way a long history in improvisation in New York which allowed her dancing to be assured and supported. I had not experienced this deep feeling of implicit knowledge around and about improvisation in Australia. In Holmes’ workshop, I was first introduced to Steve Paxton’s small dance (c 1972). The idea of the small dance resonated with me. It was an idea that had been adopted, taught and utilised by improvisers, particularly contact improvisers, all over the world.
My most recent and long-standing relationship with an improvisation practitioner was with Rosalind Crisp. Crisp is an Australian who is based in Europe for part of the year and divides her time between performing, developing new work and teaching. Her influence on my practice has been significant. Over a period of a few years, I was involved in a project with Crisp, which she named the ‘d a n s e’ project. Through practising, a group of choreographic principles were developed by Crisp, which guide the way an improvising dancer generates movement. ‘Movements may come from any part of the body, at any speed or level, with any force or direction, for any duration, […] at any time. It is about dancing‘ (Crisp 2011). These choreographic principles are assimilated into the body through practising with them. For Crisp, her choreographic practice ‘focuses on the making of movement, rendering visible the constant decision-making of the dancer‘ (2011). When I was practising with Crisp, she did not did not name the choreographic principles, or any verbal propositions with which we were dancing, scores. These principles arose from dancing and were used both to describe what might have been taking place while dancing, and to suggest possibilities relating to how one might be attentive while dancing. Crisp avoided labelling these verbal tools as ‘scores’ as she also avoids naming the dances that she makes as ‘improvisation’ even though the ‘choreography’ is taking place in the present during performance. Avoiding the labels of ‘score’ and ‘improvisation’ allows Crisp to discover and re-discover what her practice is and what it is becoming without herself, or anyone else settling on how the use of particular terms might determine what a dance is or could be.
In contrast to Crisp’s approach, I have deliberately decided to use the term ‘score’ for the verbal propositions we use while practising. I use the term score for the words and sets of words conveyed verbally that we use
Brolga 40 47 to both offer possibilities while dancing and to share our experiences of dancing with other members of the group. By labelling them as scores, I aim to have a consistency in the way that I perceive what they might be and in doing so begin to understand how they might be significant to the way we practise. Here it is useful to work with Nelson Goodman’s ideas about autographic and allographic art and the ‘scores’ that these different types of art use and produce.
Nelson Goodman and scores
In his book, Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman discusses the concept of scores as linked to the idea of a stable, repeatable work, and in terms of his distinction between autographic and allographic works of art. He describes a painting as being autographic (1976, p. 113): it has been produced by one artist and cannot be reproduced, unless it is forged of course. But a print made from a plate by an etcher is also autographic even though there can be varying numbers of prints made. This kind of work of art can always be attributed to an originating artist. By comparison, a piece of music is not autographic, however. According to Goodman it is allographic. It may be written by one a composer, but it can be interpreted in performance by a different artist: the performer. Gérard Genette, referring to Goodman notes that the categorisation of a work as autographic or allographic is affected by both how it is produced and whether it can be reproduced:
In certain arts, [autographic] the notion of authenticity is meaningful, and is defined by a work’shistory of production, while it is meaningless in others, [allographic] in which all correct copies of a work constitute so many valid instances of it (1997, p. 16).
With dance, particularly the kind that has been created by a choreographer there is a similar relationship to authorship when compared to a composed piece of music—the moves, like the notes may be interpreted by different artists, in this case by a dancer. In improvised dance, the question of whether a dance is autographic or allographic and of the author is even more complicated. Gèrard Genette, referring to the work of Goodman can assist here. Genette describes how an autographic work is often produced in one stage, such as a painting and an allographic work is produced in two stages, such as a musical composition. In the case of allographic work, the score, produced in the first stage stands for the work produced in the second and ‘the act of writing, printing or performing a text or score is for its part an autographic art, whose usually multiple products are physical objects‘ (1997, p. 17). A solo improvisation a work could be considered to be autographic in that the score and the work would be devised and created by one person. However the score would not guarantee that the same dance would result from a subsequent dancing with that score.
In the case of group improvisation the score is not necessarily created by one author and nor does it guarantee what the work that it stands for will be. The site at which the ‘creation’ is taking place, rather than in the
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 48 instance of the single author conceiving the score, occurs as the dancers dance with the score. This allographic work is may be produced in two stages but seeing as it is created in its second stage, rather than being interpreted, the authors of it are not one but many.
A score, according to Goodman, is the means by which a work can be authoritatively identified from one performance of it to the next. In other words, a score that is devised by the author stands for a work and allows that work to be repeatable. Goodman also suggests that score might also have a more ‘exciting’ function such as aiding composition but he argues that its primary role is to identify a work (1976, p. 127). In discussing the importance and significance of a score for a work of art, Goodman suggests that a score could easily be dismissed as not being of any use once a performance is complete. ‘But to take notation as nothing, therefore but a practical aid to production is to miss its fundamental and theoretical role’ of the score that has the ‘logically prior office of identifying a work‘ (127). A performance, according to Goodman, must be compliant with its score in order for it to be a true instance of that work, and a score must unambiguously stand for the work.
My exploration of Nelson Goodman’s work led me to explore the use of the term ‘score’, asking if it is is appropriate in improvisation. Scores, in Goodman’s terms, can’t stand for an improvised dance. Danielle Goldman, claims that ‘systems of notation can never adequately capture the complexity of an improvised performance‘ (2010, p. 10). The verbal scores that I use in my practice do not represent a ‘work’ which was or will be created. Neither can they, in isolation, shed light on the practising that takes place in the studio during or after the fact of that practising. My use of the word ‘score’, though, is not a term that I decided upon; rather it is a ‘traditional’ word which I have learnt to use from working in practical dance situations, particularly in dance improvisation.
I do not think that Goodman is referring to ‘scores’ as I have experienced them in the past in the practice of others. Nor did I use my reading of Goodman’s theory to decide what my scores should be. I do, however, use my emerging understanding of how verbal scores might work for others in various practices to ask again and again what scores are in my practising. How do we use them? How do they support the communication in relation to our dancing?
Scores in the dance field
Kent de Spain has observed that ‘if you want to understand how something as subjective as improvisation really works, you need to ask improvisers; they are the ‘authorities’ in the field‘ (Cooper Albright 2003). As you can imagine there are as many ways of using scores as there are choreographic processes. Rather than guaranteeing or stabilising a work as Goodman suggests, each user of scores in dance improvisation finds her own use and meaning for them. Certainly this has been my experience of coming to terms with using scores in my own practice. I would also suggest that even within my own practice, I can only be an authority of my own experience of scores. The other dancers in my
Brolga 40 49 projects each have their own understanding. I do not explicitly discuss with them what they should do with our scores in terms of movement or movement quality. There is always the option to not use a score or set of scores.
In performing improvised dance, there is a difference between, on the one hand, not knowing while dancing, (not knowing what movement or impulse or relationship will come next), and on the other hand, searching for that movement. If I am able to allow myself to be comfortable with not knowing what comes next, I am able to be open to possibilities which arise. If I am pre-planning or anticipating or searching for the next movement, the possibilities of what, where, how are circumscribed. Scores support me. They allow me to not know what comes next. They are a prop, a ruse, a pretense which, while giving me the illusion of ‘knowing’ in my dancing, allow me to not know. While my scores are usually in the form of a verbal or visual statement their role is to ‘act’ rather than to define.
The use of a score to support the possibility of not knowing seems to be shared by other dance improvisers. Yvonne Meier describes the use of scores in her work in this way,
I was watching myself all the time. So you take a score and your mind gets relief. You’re only busy with that score. Of course then you’re using the score, the score enters your body, so you have the score work your dance, make your dance (Satin 2009, p. 43).
It is as though a score is allowed to have authority within the process in its own right interacting with the physical history in the body which also has its authority.
For Mark Tompkins scores allow us ‘to do anything because at the same time, we’re supported‘ (Benoit 1997, p. 225). It is this existence of a structure or score which allows Tompkins to dance in the way he does. In describing what that score could be, he says:
It’s a line in space, a change in the light, the body falling[…] It’s a lot of off balance, being off center, the sensation inside an articulation, the speed at which I come near somebody, or at which I go away. These are very physical situations, I can see them and I can touch them (Benoit, p. 117).
A score could be almost anything. Using scores is a combination of what it manifestly proposes and how it allows or is employed to influence, affect, notice or feed the dancing which comes while using it.
Steve Paxton’s small dance, which, as mentioned above, I first encountered in a workshop taught by KJ Holmes, is an example of a verbally conveyed score that has been shared and communicated between and by a large number of people reaching far beyond Paxton’s initial devising and use of it. Described by Sally Banes in
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 50 Terpsichore in Sneakers as ‘a warm up done while standing […]sensing gravity and becoming aware of one’s breathing, peripheral vision and balance…‘(1987, p. 66). The small dance as a verbal score is at once a physical instruction and an invitation to be attentive to the (dancing) body. In a transcription of the verbal sharing of information in a series of classes taught by Paxton in 1977, he describes the small dance, also named the stand, as ‘continuing to perceive mass and gravity as you move‘ (Paxton 1986, p. 66). To perceive one’s own mass in relation to gravity is both personal and changeable. I could be attentive to my mass and gravity while dancing on numerous occasions and perceive it differently, slightly or significantly, every time. As Paxton suggested to the participants in his class, that perception is ‘always new but so ancient‘ (1986, p. 49). The invitation implied in the small dance shared between many dancers over many years is a suggestion for possibility as well as an instruction but not a means to achieve something particular.
In an interview in 1994, nearly twenty years after the transcribed workshops, Paxton described the small dance.
Tuned to gravity, reflexes arrange our skeletons, aligning weights and proportions to maintain our stand. Noticing the Small Dance gives the mind a way to tune to the speed of reflex’ (in Curtis 1994, p. 68).
This more recent description of the small dance by Paxton is refined, as though he has shared it often in the intervening years. It is not, however, significantly different from the proposition he conveyed in that earlier workshop. The small dance is a way of perceiving and being attentive to the body: ‘feel the play of rush and pause of the small dance […] its always there‘ (Paxton 1986, p. 50). Its openness allows it to be a tool which can continually be re-visited by a dancing body that is becoming in its present.
Score versus open improvisation
Some practitioners refer to ‘open’ or ‘closed’ scores. An open improvisation might be one without any score at all. There may be a group of dancers who have worked/performed/improvised together many times and so they deliberately leave the work open to let their familiarity with each other be the score. Or perhaps they have had no experience with each other but are interested to see what would happen if they leave the possibilities very open. Anna Halprin felt liberated by working out that she could vary her work in terms of how ‘open’ or ‘closed’ she made the scores she worked with. Halprin even gave some of her scores a number from one to ten with the most open being one. One of the purposes that served was to let the dancers know what to expect. In a very open score, giving it a number closer to one could signify: ‘Please don’t expect to be told what to do’ for Halprin (Kaplan 1995, p. 201). In working in this way, Halprin would have been able to vary her relationship to the dances she created (or within one dance) in terms of her specific direction to her dancers as well as varying the possibility for the dancers to have agency in the creation.
Brolga 40 51 Solo improviser Suzanne Cotto describes starting from ‘zero’ where she has no plan; she has not prepared anything. Yet as soon as she begins to perform, in fact even before she begins, memory and impressions arise for her and these influence her performance. These impressions seem to be physical as well as imagined memories (Benoit 1997, p. 105). The physical history in Cotto’s body has come about through her dancing history and through her practice. By practising with a particular thought or intention even if that intention is just to dance, the body is becoming tuned with that intention. In improvising, parts of that history will arise whether it is searched for or hoped for, whether they are noticed when they arise. In performance, even if there is no planned score, such as in Cotto’s ‘zero’, the score is that there is no score, and the dancing from practising, even if that too comes from the score no score, will be the dancing which is performed.
Scores in my practising
In order to discuss how the dancers with whom I have been dancing and I are using scores, I will first describe how we conduct our practice sessions.
We warm up by dancing by ourselves, usually starting on the floor and coming to standing over time with the option to go back to the floor. We call this warm-up period the solo warm-up. I have borrowed the term, solo warm-up from improvisation practitioner David Beadle, whose workshop I attended in 2003. Our solo warm-up lasts for a pre-determined period of time. Sometimes I time it with an external device, and sometimes we do a ‘fake’ period of time and I call out periodically suggesting how long (there might be) to go.
Following on from the solo warm-up, we work together with a partner or in groups of three using touch as a way of sharing physical information. Gradually, the touching person(s) steps away to allow the moving person to dance unencumbered. We then follow on by dancing and watching each other in varying ways, sometimes dancing for short periods and then swapping over and at other times dancing for up to 20 minutes.
At the beginning of each session, I introduce a score or set of scores, words or verbal propositions. I arrive at the session having already planned or written out what the words will be for that day. Over the last five or six years, I have used many scores in many ways. What they all have in common is that they are related to physical, kinesthetic or movement ideas.
Recently, I have been using lists of words that I have gathered because I see them as being part of a certain category. Following are examples of sets of scores from two separate sessions.
Session One
Action words: flop, bounce, wiggle, flick, swing, fall, dip, slide, surge, tap, fling, crawl, tip.
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 52 Framing words: sustain, interrupt, appear, reduce, contradict, compose, wander, drive, erase, rebound, undermine, crystallise, open, antagonise
Session Two
List A: What? The space, the body, the movement, the intention (what are you intending?), the noticing
List B: How or Where? Over, along, behind, above, within, through, between, alongside
I share the scores with the group at the beginning of a session, before our solo warm-up. During the solo warm-up we dance with the scores and begin to see how we might understand the possibilities that they offer for that day. After the solo warm-up we have a discussion about what happened for us as individuals, particularly in relation to the scores. There is no obligation to speak. From there we move on to the next part of the session. We discuss, before going on, how the scores might be of use in the next part of the session. As the session progresses, we use the score to discuss our dancing experiences. There is never any obligation to use the scores in a particular way, or even to use them. Sometimes one or more members of the group discard them early in the session. Sometimes they are used by all of us very closely for the whole session.
Is the dance written by the scores?
The scores are not designed to have a particular effect or to make particular changes in anyone’s dancing. When I began my PhD project, I thought that I would shape the dance, not through explicitly directing the dancing which was to take place but through the use of scores which were designed to result in a certain way of dancing. The more we practised the clearer it became to me that not only were the scores not directly shaping the dancing, but that I did not want them to do so. This insight existed because I was a participant in the project. Through my own dancing, I came to understand that the relationship between the scores and my own dancing was not causal. A score did not induce me to dance in a certain way, nor did it remind me of the way I had danced if I have used the same score previously. A score is not a map for what to do, nor can it authoritatively define a dance or a work from one instance of it to the next, in the way Goodman describes.
The scores are not causal, nor does our dancing represent the scores. Representation could be described as something which stands for something else. A painting is often described as representing its subject, regardless of how much it actually resembles it. According to Goodman, a picture needs to do more than resemble something in order to represent that something. It needs to be a symbol of it, ‘to stand for it to refer to it to denote it’ (Goodman 1976, p. 5). To represent something is not a matter of copying it but ‘conveying’ it. But we do not think about or aim
Brolga 40 53 for our dancing to convey the scores. I have no interest in our dancing standing for or referring to the scores in a way that would be able to be apprehended by a witness. Not only are we not aiming to convey the scores, we are not aiming to convey anything specific that could be made into a verbal statement.
One way to name the way we sometimes use scores is exemplification. Goodman describes exemplification as being ‘possession plus reference‘ (1976, p. 52). A work of art will relate to that which it is exemplifying by both having properties of that thing and referring to it as well. A painting that exemplifies ‘red’ is both red and refers to the colour red. A dance that exemplifies ‘fast’ is both fast and refers to the nature of being fast. It may be that there are only one or many properties of a complex idea or object that are being exemplified. The ‘fast’ may be the chosen aspect of something more complicated such as acceleration, which is being exemplified in the dance. Perhaps in improvising dance, choosing what aspect of an idea or a score to exemplify is not as clear as thinking and deciding and then acting. The choice may be blurred, not consciously decided, or may be a bodily response to the perceived meaning of a score. The exemplification may also be of ideas that are non-verbal, that is, not conceptual. Symbols from other systems: gestural, sound, pictorial, diagrammatic and movement, may all be exemplified. Goodman writes that ‘points of contact with language are enough to set the direction‘ (1976, p. 58). Exemplification of the scores is, in some instances a good way to describe what takes place, even if that is not necessarily our intention in dancing with scores. If I use the example of falling, holding, reaching, riding, it is likely that falling, holding, reaching and riding will have taken place at least at some point in our dancing with that score. By both having properties of those actions and referring to them, and exploring the physical implications of those actions in different movements and body parts, the dance may be exemplifying them.
Our dancing with scores does not effect a simple causal relationship yet there is no doubt that, at times, there is an aspect of a score, let’s say falling, which becomes physically manifest in our dancing with that score. We quite often talk about what a score might ‘mean’ in our bodies or in/with our dancing at a particular time. ‘Meaning’ seems to be a good word to use because it allows us to discover, through dancing what the relationship between the score and the dancing could be without the expectation that the score commands us. Falling could be discovered to ‘mean’ the whole body falling; the dropping of one body part; standing still and feeling the affect of gravity while using the structure of the body to resist it; the momentum sent somewhere else in the body after an initial fall. These examples are all of conscious perceptions or deliberate actions which may take place while dancing with a score. There are many more non-conscious actions which may take place as a result of patterning or bodily habits, still in relation to the score. As Goodman suggests, exemplification is potentially much more complex than its starting point as a word or a perceived meaning of a word. In our practising, the starting point of a score, the whisper of something which we think we might know or have an association with, allows us to enter in to dancing, into an unstable situation and find, in our bodies, what that dance could be.
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 54 The possibility to dance while ‘not knowing’ exists in our way of dancing with scores. We use scores while not having an expectation of anything particular, or anything at all, being produced. Yvonne Meier’s suggestion of letting the score work the dance describes the constant possibility for the score to be part of our dancing without the obligation for it to inform it, or for the dancing to represent it. Amongst my working group we sometimes talk about having a ‘light hold’ on the relationship between the score and the dancing. That hold could be tightened in times of need, that is, it could be consciously referred to, to initiate, adjust or affect the dancing in some way. At times the hold is so loose that there is probably a perception that there is little or no relationship between the score and the dancing.
In our practising, we have talked about scores being generative of movement and also ways of noticing. They can often be both of those things but on some days or at some times they may be more one than another. For example, One day we had a set of ‘action’ words and a set of ‘framing’ words. I really began with a set of action words because I hoped that they might be supportive of our dancing. The support that I hoped for, however, was not the direction or inducement to do anything in particular (or anything at all) but the momentum or opening to begin dancing. Perhaps it is really from dancing that dancing comes.
What is the score?
One dancer asked me whether, since I always decide upon the scores and how I group them together before the practice session, I had certain expectations as to how the dancers would understand and use those scores and also whether I was open to more information arising as I participated in the practice, both from within my own dancing and also as it was suggested by members of the group. In the answer to that question, I suspect, lies the answer to the question of what a score is and what it does. Every week I write a new list of scores. They often come from what I have encountered during the week, particularly in dancing. When I write them down, however, I am usually sitting down and not in the middle of dancing. Although I write a series of words that (I perceive) belong together in some way, I do not really imagine dancing as I write. As I offer a new set of scores to the group I do also try to convey why I grouped certain words together, such as the ‘framing’ words. Once I start dancing, however, I invariably allow that thinking to either fall away or into the background and instead see how dancing with that score might bring up its ‘meaning’ on that day. Sometimes I have a tight hold on a score for a whole session. It might feel particularly fruitful. One day I was stumbling in my body in many different ways without pause even after I thought I had stumbled enough. On other days, I abandon some or all of the scores almost immediately. I would like to believe that there is both tacitly understood and expressed permission for all of the dancers in our group to find their own use for the scores on each day. We use scores while we are dancing and we use them as a way to communicate about our dancing. There is much passing on of information that is non-verbal, such as dancing, watching and touching. The scores, conveyed verbally,
Brolga 40 55 enable the sharing of a dancing practice in which ‘meaning’ can be found in the present and is ever-changing.
References
Banes, S 1987, Terpsichore in Sneakers, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut. Beadle, D 2003, Winter Melt, Movement Research, New York. Benoit, A (ed) 1997, On the Edge, Contredanse, Belgium. Crisp, R, The D-a-N-S-E Project, viewed 9 August 2011,
Olivia Millard What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation. 56 The ethos of the mover/ witness dyad: an experimental frame for participatory performance
SHAUN MCLEOD
This article reflects on a dance improvisation project in which the foundational relationship of the Mover Witness Dyad (MWD), the private exchange between mover and witness (and more commonly known as Authentic Movement) became an ethical and physical paradigm for an improvised performance. The untitled performance (danced by Olivia Millard, Peter Fraser, Jason Marchant, Sophia Cowen and myself) took place over three nights in Melbourne in November 2014. It was specifically informed by the experiences, observations and questions drawn from an extensive studio practice of the MWD by myself and the other dancers. The practice of the MWD is a therapeutic relationship between contemplative mover and attentive witness. Falling within the wider field of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), the MWD has uses as a therapeutic aid, in personal development and also as a context for exploring dance improvisation.1 An important feature of the MWD is that attention, in whatever manifestation, is directed inwardly and is engaged bodily (Olsen 2007). The form parallels dance improvisation in its emphasis on open, exploratory movement, which is grounded in the particular sensibility each individual brings to embodiment. Never intended as a performance practice, the MWD has nonetheless been used by dancers as a method for investigating dancing and towards informing or generating performance content (Olsen 2007, p. 324). US dance artist Jennifer Monson, for example, has utilised the dyad ‘as a means not just of deepening appreciation of the natural world, but of generating new ecological knowledge and of exploring environmental values‘ (Stewart 2010, p. 32).2 My project had no specific environmental considerations, but it still threw up considerations of values; in this case values associated with audience participation and the ethics of ‘witnessing’ improvised dance.
The practice of the MWD involves an exchange between mover and witness in which the mover freely associates through movement, with their eyes closed, according to personal inclination. The mover encounters ‘felt’ states of embodiment, and particularly what Daniel Stern would call ‘vitality affects’. Dance movement produces and displays variable,
Brolga 40 57 abstract qualities often not tethered to the communication of a specific affective category such as distress or shame. But Stern’s ideas provide a clear insight into the relationship between ‘abstract’ movement and affect as it operates in improvised dancing. His notion of vitality affects articulates the qualities our bodies feel when we perceive dynamic and temporal patterns and changes (Stern 1985, p. 53–61). Hubert Godard also makes the point that affect first registers in our bodies in the postural muscles, that is, one’s affective disposition is embodied in our musculature even before one moves and ‘every affective charge will bring with it a modification, however imperceptible, in our posture‘ (Godard 2004, p. 57). The MWD’s focus on bodily states of being thus make it a useful practice for understanding the affective origins of movement. Through the practice’s emphasis on free association in movement, this usefulness is also applicable to dance improvisation. The witness in the MWD is present to provide a safe context for the mover (whose eyes are closed), and to ‘reflect back’ the experiences of the mover through active, non-judgmental witnessing (Stromsted & Haze 2007, p. 57). The witness is not required to decipher or analyse the movement but to capture and hold what has taken place and, once moving has ceased, to name associations generated within themselves in a communicative interaction with the mover. The attentive presence of a witness significantly impacts on the quality of engagement for the mover and enables a level of deep attention that is less accessible without their presence (Adler 1999, p. 153–154). This aspect of the MWD reflects its need for a ‘safe space’ for learning (what D. W. Winnicott called the ‘holding environment’); the psychological containment that a mother (witness) provides for the infant (mover) is metaphorically recreated in the MWD (Meekums 2012, p. 53). According to Stern it is in the mother/infant relationship that the recognition of the energetic states, and consequent correspondence between them takes place. He calls this exchange affect attunement. In other words the mother becomes attuned to the intensity, modulations and changes over time of the infant’s energetic (affective) variability, and reflects these back to the child through her own embodied states and vocalisations (Stern 1985, p. 157).
It is this relationship of exchange between mover and witness fundamental to the MWD that has been influential in the formation of this performance. As ‘choreographer’ for this performance3 my inquiry was whether it was possible to establish the ethos of the private, therapeutically oriented, mover-witness relationship in a public performance. What emerged from this experiment was a particular approach to performance propelled by, if not entirely capturing, this ethos, and inviting a specific quality and emphasis on audience participation. The active role of the witness in the MWD transformed the role of the audience in this event; a greater emphasis on the experience and activity of the witness/audience was paired with a diminished emphasis on the dancer as the central focus. The performance featured layers of uncertainty which initially disordered and then animated audience engagement. Firstly, there were the changes rendered by the public viewing of a private practice—and how to be both ‘witness’ and ‘audience’—to the extent that the very possibility of the MWD as public performance came into question. The performance also used the
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 58 configuration of the MWD by providing time for a concluding, reflective discussion between dancers and those watching. But in contrast to the MWD, the witness/audience were also provided with a series of Watching Scores—written prompts that suggested ways for those watching to think about the activity or physically position themselves in relation to it. The Watching Scores were intended to give insight into the thinking that had gone into the work’s conception. But as such they revealed a pedagogical dimension that complicated the experience for the witness/audience and elicited an ethical consideration of how to watch.
Another layer of inherent paradox emerged from the post-dancing conversations and the use of Watching Scores. Instead of giving primary importance to the experience of the mover (as the MWD does) this event paradoxically gave greater ‘voice’ to the witness/audience. My assertion was that conversation and language formed a central part of the performance itself; that an aspect of the performance was to an extent formed and realised through reflexivity, discussion and debate. Thus it was through non-dancing processes that a dimension of the work was brought into being, and so bringing the dancers and the witness/audience into the same circle of creation. This contention had the potential to diminish, if not marginalise, the dancing itself. Notably, semantics became implicated in an otherwise improvised dance performance, a form which often seeks to resist the categorical impacts of language. But the performance was not an attempt to ‘language’ dancing, nor did I wish to diminish the physical poetics of the dancers by reductively naming what we did. I saw the conversational and written components as ways to bring into focus aspects of what transpired between dancers and witness/audience: how the dancers’ movement and presence invoked thoughts or responses from the witness/audience and vice versa (whether privately or through physical and spatial relationships), and so lacing the witness/audience into the fabric of the work. It was a strategy specifically derived from the MWD (which ends with a discussion between mover and witness) and was, therefore, specific to this performance. It is not possible for me to do justice to both sides of the dancer/audience equation within the limits of this article and so the dancers’ experiences are missing. Of particular interest instead are some of the ways in which the witness/audience articulated their participation in the creation and definition of the event.4
The MWD’s grounding in psychosomatically motivated movement partners well with a developmental exploration of dance improvisation: as way to investigate and understand the specific conditions of an individual’s improvisation practice (the reason I began utilising the form). The MWD is not intended as a dance improvisation practice even if it is premised on the emergence and free association of embodied content (movement, gestures, sounds). Yet the practice does generate awareness about psychosomatic patterns of physical engagement (proprioceptive, muscular, rhythmic, affective and so on) that each dancer negotiates when improvising. However, it is not the dancer’s intricate experience of the MWD on which this article is focused, but the impact of the witness in the conception, and then outcome, of a performance. To reframe the practice of the MWD as the subject of a performance in its own right is
Brolga 40 59 necessarily experimental. Practicing the MWD, and questioning it from the position of dance improvisation, led me to think about how the dynamic of its relationship might be maintained in performance. Initially this situation seemed contradictory, perhaps impossible. In the creative practice that developed as an extension of the MWD, the four dancers and I established a structure for improvising together. Experimenting by improvising singularly and as a group, with various combinations of eyes closed and open, our aim was always to maintain the interiority or somatic free association of our improvisation as established by the MWD. But our improvisations were always most richly articulated in the enabling presence of ‘witnesses’: watchers whose attention was attuned to the non-judgmental, care-directed disposition underpinning the MWD. It was this realization—that a witness watches with a different eye to that of an audience member—which led to the experimental strategy for performance in which the audience was cast as analogous to a group of attendant ‘witnesses’. To suspend judgment or leave expectations aside, requires a different approach to watching performance than might be expected of a conventional dance audience member, premised on a different set of values and principles. This newly differentiated role Photo: Katie Banakh involves an active monitoring of one’s own responses and a physical responsiveness to the activities. Put another way, the witness ‘participates’ in the outcomes and is consequentially implicated in the ‘composition’ of the experience. The ethical conception of ‘witness’, derivative of this therapeutic context, was critical to the performance’s ethos, structure, outcomes and eventual definition.
In a therapeutic application of the MWD, the mover explores movement in response to whatever states or associations that arise. Ideally this should be without reference to any demands for how movement might be understood (that is, as a ‘composition’ with specific attributes). The mover’s motivations need not be predetermined. He/she gives him/ herself over to the act of ‘listening’ (to their body) and attempts to act upon whatever emerges without assessment or judgment. Because the mover’s eyes are usually closed, these stimuli are not externally directed, but call on internal somatic, affective, psychological and imaginative impulses. There is no obligation to move except when the mover feels motivated to do so. Each mover has their own set of motivations creating individual qualities of movement and presence. The mover may be quiet and still, or animated and wildly energetic. But they need not pursue this with a choreographic sensibility. One does not need to interpret or organise the various manifestations according to a choreographic or performance imperative, only to listen to and follow them.
Paired with the mover role is the role of witness. In the MWD as therapy, the witness makes specific care-directed contributions to the operations of the practice—they provide a therapeutically safe context for the exploration of emergent affective content. Perhaps counter-intuitively the witness’s presence makes it possible for the mover’s experience to unfold without reserve as if, after Winnicott, metaphorically ‘embraced’ by the witnesses presence. The witness attempts to observe the mover’s unfolding experience with a non-judgmental disposition: to receive without personal projection or expectation but also to provide physical
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 60 and psychological ‘safety’. Movers must be safe from walking into walls when their eyes are closed, as much as they are free from evaluations that might, however subtly, ‘direct’ a mover’s experience (away from the negative and towards positive evaluation). Instead, the witness provides a facilitating presence, a psychological ‘imaginary’, onto which the mover can project variable aspects of their own immanent and imaginative experiences. This is an ethical stance, based on trust, which requires the witness to assess their own responses to what they see without a judgmental division between ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The witness is attentive to the mover’s experience even if this confronts the witness’s own attitudes, experiences, expectations and so on. To an extent the witness actively constitutes what is possible in the emergent dynamic between mover and witness. By facilitating unconstrained emergence of psychosomatic material for the mover, the witness participates in its activation.
As I pursued and developed my interest in maintaining the ethos of the MWD beyond the privacy of the dyad itself, a hybrid performance situation emerged, with a distinctive form (derivative of the MWD) that entwined the therapeutic and the artistic, and offered an extension of what performance might entail and reveal. The hybrid performance became the most significant consequence of this project, offering new possibilities for the performer-audience compact by reconfiguring this into a triangulation between performers, and those in attendance who alternately consciously respond as participating ‘witnesses’ but who also participate as an active, mobile audience, caught up in the composition of the event. The conception of this performance as participatory has aligned this project with current practices in dance and theatre, but also in the visual arts, for which participation is seen as an urgent and essential component.
As Jacques Rancière has convincingly argued about theatre, there is a false binary at work in assuming a division between an active performer and a passive audience. An audience, even if seated quietly, will always actively reconstitute what is being presented from their own experience and their own imagination. It is not necessary to directly include them in the production of theatrical activity for them to be active (Rancière 2011). One of contemporary dance’s general preoccupations has also been ‘to maintain on stage the value of an experience/experiment in process—an experience which of course concerns the spectator as much as the performer—without which the dance is lost‘ (Louppe 2010, p. 260). And yet, the quality of attention that the witness gives to the mover in the MWD seems different to the attention an audience gives to a performance. In examining the performance art of Allan Kaprow, author Laura Cull makes the point that while Rancière’s critique of the active /passive divide is indeed accurate, Kaprow’s work also questions the necessity of spectatorial action (Cull 2011). Kaprow’s work creates the possibility that audience attention can be invoked or strengthened through the participatory requirements of attending to something. Requiring a specific quality of engagement from the audience, Cull calls this ‘ontological participation‘ (Cull 2011, p. 80). It was invoking this quality of participation, of attending to an ethos and thus giving rise to ontological considerations, which was the heart of this performance.
Brolga 40 61 Because of the procedural demands and my ethical aspirations for the performances that culminated my work with the MWD, questions and uncertainties about the different identifications of involved witness and detached audience certainly emerged. It is impossible to dictate how people might respond—only to invite the possibility of experimentation. Those in attendance remained, at some level, a segregated audience—a group of people making private assessments and personal decisions about what they are seeing. The resultant tension that emerged between these different roles (of witness and audience), and the ways in which it energized the performance, became the most powerful outcome of the project. Whether or not they chose (or were able) to take up this invitation, the audience was still confronted with a fundamental premise of the MWD: ‘how is it possible for me to be in an active, attentive engagement with the dancers while maintaining an enabling, non-judgmental disposition?‘
The performance event
The invitation for the untitled event billed it as an experimental performance, premised on the practice of the MWD and which posited a participatory role for the ‘witness/audience’. The event took place over the evenings of Tuesday 11, Thursday 13 and Saturday 15 November 2014. The venue was The Sacred Heart Oratory, an erstwhile chapel, now converted into gallery space, and situated amongst the many reconfigured buildings in the Abbotsford Convent facility in Melbourne. The three evenings together constituted a single event and attendance at all three was a requirement for attending any at all. This requirement meant many interested people were not able or willing to attend, but it also meant those in attendance were genuinely motivated to attend and to participate. Twenty-three invitees agreed to participate, although five of these attended less than three times. All were given ‘Notes for Witnessing Audience’, which set out the score for the event and the expectations of the witness/audience, part of which read as follows:
The witness/audience’s role will be to ‘contain’ the dancers (to keep them safe as they may have their eyes closed), and to discern what is happening. But the witness/audience will also be asked to ‘compose’ the event from their position of perceiving the whole. Each witness will be provided with ‘watching scores’; 52 cards, each one with a different statement or suggestion to focus perception, or to frame the improvised dancing. Witnesses are free to choose one when you want to, read it, and return it to the pack. The scores aim to reframe the role of audience into an active witness. How does being a witness reframe the role of the audience?
The Watching Scores were intended to give the witness/audience some insight into the thinking that had gone into this project; to indicate to an audience what possibilities and values were contained in the MWD and what kind of investment of attention was necessary.5They also provided suggestions for how an audience member could activate or experiment with their watching by attending to their own embodiment or spatial
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 62 positioning, given that the MWD allows the mover to ‘meander’ without regard for maintaining the viewer’s interest. The four ‘suites’ of cards were divided into four specific categories reflecting the areas of engagement of the project to give specific insight into my thinking towards this practice; the artistic influences and the insights gleaned from the studio practice. The audience members were invited to follow the suggestions, or to consider how the dancing might be thought about in light of a statement, or as a reminder to implicate their own body in the experience of watching. It was a frame of reference that might merge with that individual’s personal history, perceptions and inclinations thus creating a unique perspective for each audience member. The Watching Scores and iterative cycle were together intended to indicate how important the committed involvement of the witness/audience was to the entire event.
The Watching Scores were offered as optional and attempted to be non-coercive. But they also partially obscured the role of ‘witness’ as defined in the MWD. They were partially intended to describe and invoke a situation where the improvised dancing could be watched on the terms of the MWD. They also offered suggestions and ideological positions that might ‘frame’ the experience for the witness/audience in relation to the practice of improvisation. These dual intentions became contradictory: any pedagogical intervention contradicted the intention of the MWD where what emerges is through free association and not with deliberate reference to anything else. So the use of the Watching Scores revealed the tension between trying to facilitate private experience and presenting performance and complicated the experience for the witness/audience.
Each evening was structured according to specific blocks of time (signalled by a bell) marking the emergence from eyes closed to eyes open (for the dancers). Each of the iterations, conducted in silence, lasted for 40 minutes and was followed by a seated, group discussion. The ‘Notes for Witnessing Audience’ set out the score for the witness/ audience members, briefly detailing the changes over the 40 minutes as well as encouraging witness/audience members ‘to roam, sit, watch, or read some watching scores‘. These notes also prompted witness/ audience members to participate in a post-performance discussion where they (and the dancers) could ‘articulate something about what they did, felt or noticed‘. The importance of these discussions to the functioning and evaluation of the event was also noted.
Is this a performance?—The witnessing audience.
Each evening of the event was inflected with multiple affective and kinaesthetic qualities arranged by the shifting relations of dancers and witness/audience. For each of the dancers, moving still offered the possibility (if not the demand) of poetic articulation, of dancing, and therefore with aesthetic attribution, despite their weak obligation towards formal choreographic determination. These articulations were certainly available to be ‘composed‘ (for either mover or witness) but more as relations within the attending self, than as a formal choreographic entity. Both types of participants were invited, through the various, rhythmic and qualitative modulations of affectivity and activity, ‘to become more
Brolga 40 63 Photo: Katie Banakh attentive to the individuations of which they are composed‘ (McCormack 2013, p. 112). This involved all participants in a relational field of discernment and transmission; of noticing and influencing the perceptual differences between movement qualities, interests, presence, or spatial and corporeal relationships.
For the witness/audience, as for the dancers, perceptions of the shifts in this disceriable field were innumerable and diverse and it would be impossible to adequately catalogue this diversity. However, it is possible to say that certain patterns of engagement were evident from the both the dancers and the witness/audience, and that these patterns changed over the three nights. Each evening finished with a conversation, in which all participants sat in the communal address of a circle. These matched and enacted the therapeutic component of the MWD in which first the mover and then the witness begin reflexively to bring into thought and language, aspects of their experience.6 These conversations became a central feature of the event, a sibling to the scored component, enabling individual questions or understandings about the event to be circulated. There were many impressions, points of view, issues, questions, concerns and uncertainties expressed in these conversations but I will address only a few aspects.
In general terms these conversations helped steer a path through the uncertainty that was an initial component of the event for all participants. Indeed the conversations were perhaps the most significant structural addition to the performance situation. It became a socially reflexive extension of the performance that both defined and qualified resonant features for and between all participants. Clarified positions were carved
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 64 out of these discussions that were not immediately available–only after reflection. In one sense the performance was ‘made’ or substantiated during these discussions. This is contentious given that language became prominent to the potential detriment of the dancing. Yet the dancing itself was discussed very little; little attempt was made to describe what we did. Of much more concern was the experience of watching, and the features of being a witness/audience. What was most urgent, notable or convincingly articulated was picked up on by others, giving some shared understanding to what had happened previously. The initial challenge that faced the witness/audience was to determine how to watch given that it wasn’t immediately clear whether the event was a performance.7 This question was partially directed at the threshold that emerged between the perceived polar inclinations (and resultant unease) spanning active intervention and supportive distancing. To violate this threshold might invalidate the event when approached as a ‘practice’ (with its therapeutic, and therefore ethical, aspirations), or alternately, invalidate it as a performance (with its spectatorial benefits). For example, one witness/ audience member forcefully expressed it like this after the first evening:
…all the rhetoric that we were fed coming in… was to do with the engagement, the participation, the exchange. But in this room there was this incredible force to assume this spectatorial distance and position, that at times I felt like I was really fighting …the desire to just go and stand in the distance position [and say] ‘entertain me‘.
Another member had a different perspective on the same evening:
There were people standing on the periphery but there was constant movement and there was constant change, prompted by the cards and prompted by people moving around. There were moments when I was going ‘Who am I watching again?’ because it was fascinating to watch the movement of people through the room, not just the people dancing…As a witness, as an observer, who was I watching, who was I observing? And at one point I found myself in the middle of the piece and…the five of you [dancers] were circling around me. That felt like it was a tension…am I now part of the performance, am I part of the practice, can I move with you?
A third person’s response to this issue:
I felt like it was quite hard not to feel like I was interfering by taking a place which was involved. So…standing on the back or on the wall wasn’t so much about being a spectator… How can I be that witness who is just allowing when I’m so close and interfering with any sort of breath or sound or any sort of energetic minds that might be being made by the person… because we were allowed to move around. All of those things were incredibly delicate and that we’d come in and
Brolga 40 65 made it not so delicate. I didn’t know… I started going, I can’t remember if I’m meant to be audience or respectful witness.
When the different roles of ‘witness’ and ‘audience’ were conceptually merged, those watching were prompted to think carefully about how to engage or how to watch. The debate in the discussion, exemplified above, enunciated the reflexive activation of noticing, of discernment (however vigilantly), in the face of the uncertain, and affectively delineated parameters of the event. What might the respective roles (of mover or witness/audience) entail: the capacities of the role, the responsibilities, the delicacies, the affections towards which one might gravitate, or the situations one moved away from? Confronted by ambiguity, the witness/ audience were consequentially placed in a position of vulnerability which seemed to catalyse an ethical evaluation: how does one position oneself, physically, spatially and philosophically, in relation to the activity. Thus a distinctively new role of witness/audience emerged from the situation of co-presence and corporeal observation.
Photo: Katie Banakh In discussing Felix Guattari’s thinking on therapeutic practices, Derek McCormack draws out a relationship between the ethical questions therapeutic practices produce, and the aesthetic. McCormack begins by pinpointing the ethics of therapeutic embodiment:
Therapeutic practices are ethical in the sense that they are concerned with the Spinozist question of what bodies can
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 66 do, and what they might be able to do if the generative conditions are opportune. They produce opportunities for expanding the range of ways in which bodies can be affected by other bodies, and, in the process, open up new possible forms of life whose value is not specified in advance (McCormack 2013, p. 114).
Value in an embodied therapeutic practice can never be predetermined because movements are individually differentiated according to complex affective and emotional entanglements. Accordingly, the event attributed no relative value to any of the improvised gestures, movements, rhythms, positions or qualities of being the dancers brought into being. They were equally valuable. Equally, the witness/audience were free to position themselves according to their own attractions and interests but, as they acknowledged, they did so in an atmosphere in which the ethics of the situation needed consideration. An ethic of watching is summoned based on the observation of another’s embodiment.
Returning to the progression of the performance event, by the second evening a different quality of engagement emerged that seemed energised by greater clarity about the possibilities of engagement. I speculate that this difference was in large measure a result of having a temporal gap between iterations. This provided time to digest or unravel the previous evenings uncertain impacts and allow one’s body to release from the affective grasp of this uncertainty, before re-engaging into the next iteration. The iterative aspect, the repetition over three evenings, became like a meta-refrain within an event that was replete with individually differentiated micro-refrains. For one witness/audience member the second iteration prompted a more secure response, indicating a clearer investment, or interest in experimenting with his/her agency within it:
But you’ve also given us a liberty as an audience because we’re not in a configuration of sitting and watching a performance. We’re actually moving through a performance, therefore I had an experience of realising, well I’ve actually been given an opportunity to view dance in a way that I never normally do. Like I can go up really close and watch it very closely, or I can lie down on the floor, or I can watch it peripherally. So as an audience member, because I’m here for the second time I want to make use of those choices.
Interest, as an affect, may facilitate openings for dancers, but it reciprocally fosters witness/audience engagement.8 Did allowing the witness/audience to choose or even create the terms of their engagement as a participatory premise, generate a more ‘interested’ level of watching and noticing? Again, this is impossible to adequately answer. But in the quote above, the member describes an interest in creatively assessing and embodying witness/audience engagement by implicating him/herself in the active zone of performance. But participation by the witness/audience might also involve a less spatially active engagement.
Brolga 40 67 Activation was achieved in multiple ways, by multiple strategies, partly because this is always what an audience will invest in, partly because it was impossible to avoid in the open-plan room, but also partly because this was being specifically invited by the Watching Scores. At the close of the third night, one participant reflected on how she noticed her involvement:
Tonight…what I noticed was the permission to move or be roving, like allowing myself to attend to my physicality, not just be sitting there going…[if] I end up sitting very, very still for a very, very long time I can disassociate from my body very well…so it was it was really nice tonight to go ‘I need to move‘. And in keeping alive to my own physical state, it made me notice a lot more where I was adding my attending, where I was adding my noticing, when had I left my own body. When my body asked that it needed something… because of…what I was watching…To just be more alive to so much more of myself as a viewer because I had permission to go beyond sitting in a chair.
The sense of witness/audience activation was possible, at least for some Photo: Katie Banakh members. But multiple, other issues were also alive. Prompted by one of the watching scores, one member asked whether watching with a non- judgmental disposition was ever entirely possible, saying:
Tonight I picked a card right at the start that says ‘you are invited to witness without judgment‘ and that…gave me something for the entire duration. The first night I came and I was going through a few cards and my attention was really on you guys, not so much the other people in the room. And I was using the cards to kind of feed what I was watching…the movers. And then last time I got a card that said ‘everyone in the room is in this fucking dance‘ 9 and that made me watch everybody else in the room and I kind of wasn’t as interested in you guys. I was kind of watching people in the audience. And then tonight I found myself not really paying…I was paying a lot of attention just not really paying attention at all because I was trying to think about how I would watch something without judgment. Like it’s kind of impossible… so I found that tonight was not actually about you guys, and not about the audience but about myself. And I found myself just trying to figure out whether maybe I could not have a judgment, whether that’s possible to do…and just trying to be with my own thoughts.
Different witness/audience members raised the question of whether this event actually constituted a performance (or choreography). Performance itself was in question, or perhaps more acutely the question of a performance of a question, but in which by the third night the respective roles had become more clearly defined. The event took on a more clearly delineated character by this point, despite still sitting between identifiable
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 68 performance and mode of therapeutic questioning. One witness/ audience member articulates this experience of liminality:
And I was thinking that any work that has… detachment… it’s seeking a non-performance or a non-attractiveness. It’s not seeking to attract me. Nobody seems to be seeking to attract each other. Or get attached to anything or anybody, therefore detachment…has as much need in it as works of, you know, attachment and attractiveness. And perhaps they need as much hard work, craft, in the run up before and as much during the performances because between the first day and today there’s a world of difference. And one of the differences [is] that everybody seems to [know] their joy… And therefore what was my craft, as a witness? What did I, even in these two days, move to? …The difference between the first and the 3rd day was enormous for me. In terms of craft and in terms of being and in terms of freedom…the amount of freedom you could all breathe in and experience. And that brought me to one of the cards which said ‘what’s going on here?‘10…[it] is a question we aren’t able to ask of survival in our families. And that’s such a critical question, because I said, ‘oh, I can ask that here,…now‘. Not only can I ask this here, now, also I can just get up and change my position and find a way to get closer to it. And then I thought, you know, the performance itself feels like a question. The performance, the work itself, is the framing of a question. And therefore maybe the answer is maybe another performance. That itself was exciting to come to.
By the third iteration then, more clarity about the ‘job’ of all participants, with associated ‘work’, was in evidence. Witness/audience members seemed more willing to utilise the malleability and reflexivity of the event in personally determined ways and satisfy their own interests or pursue their own experiments. They also seemed cognisant that their interests in this situation, the activeness or disposition with which they attended to these or towards the dancing, became direct contributions and relations to the whole. In a sense, through exercising these choices as watchers, they also shared in authoring the event. Accordingly this was a more communally creative experience, within a specific set of rules, but which invited a shared creation of meaning. Any such meanings were aired and debated in the discussion component, which emerged as a critical to bringing into critical or emotional perspective, how the various participants responded, related to or understood the experience. Participation became an accumulating force directed towards both the immanent unfolding of the event and its future re-engagement; to find out how the next iteration would be different, and consequently towards a reformulation as prompted by this difference.
Uncertainly balanced on a line between performance and private practice, this event’s primary allegiance was to the experimentalism at heart of the MWD. The content and character of each of the iterations was systematically generated only through the considered mutuality
Brolga 40 69 Photo: Katie Banakh between performers and witness/audience. Definition of what this system produced—its identity—was reflexively and contestably brought into being through the organised negotiations of the group. Thus the group discerned, identified or emphasised particular aspects of the event, shaping these into a joint envisaging of its defining features: its behaviour, energetics, meanings, values and difficulties. Certainly the private, therapeutically oriented context of the MWD was inevitably reconfigured by this experiment. Yet in attempting to maintain the ethos of the MWD as much as possible, a particular kind of artistic discipline emerged which emphasised the ontological engagement of the witness/audience and the dancers and leading to an adjusted dynamic between them. Rather than merely being self-gratifying for the dancers, it was enriching and enabling for all concerned in a real, palpable sense. It enabled all participants, dancers and witness/audience, to discover things for themselves, and to an extent on their own terms, yet within the experimental sensibilities of the group. Experimentation informed by certain principles is a potential discipline, a practice. If we are to continue to expose ourselves to life’s capacities then perhaps we must practice this. For us to realise more of life’s diversity and invite fresh experiences of it—for life to open to us—we experiment with practices for liveliness, appropriate to all of life’s everyday permutations.
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 70 Notes
1. Dance Movement Therapy can be defined as the psychotherapeutic use of movement and dance founded on the principle of motion and emotion being inextricably entwined. This relationship is the channel through which a person can embody a deeper consciousness of the self (Payne 2006, xv). 2. See also Emma Meehan’s writing on Irish dance artist Joan Davis who used Authentic Movement in her site-specific, audience participatory performance project entitled Maya Lila (Meehan 2010). 3. As this article will refer to, without fully examining, this performance did not emphasise the choreographic embodiment of my particular kinaesthetic sensibility. My role as initiator, conceiver and improvising dancer defined this as ‘my project’, while giving over much of the task of composition to the collective body of dancers and participating witness/ audience. 4. All of the post-dancing discussions between dancers and witness/ audience members were recorded and transcribed. Quotes from these discussions appear later in this article. The names of the witness/audience members have been omitted. 5. A few examples of the watching scores: Which is best: standing, sitting or lying down? Watch while lying down for a while. The witness-mover relationship in the Mover/Witness Dyad is likened to the mother-infant relationship. The relationship creates a connection of trust and intimacy, a safe place for the infant to experiment and develop. An appreciation of the feeling of getting lost…of proceeding into the unknown… to reject the familiar, so rooted in our nervous system and minds, requires discipline. (Steve Paxton) 6. This dialogue is an attempt to bring into understanding something of the pre-reflective lack of clarity through which one can wade in the MWD. 7. Participants asked on several occasions whether the event constituted a performance both during the post-score conversations and to me personally. I refrained from answering this question definitively, instead invoking the experimental and question-oriented nature of the event. 8. The psychologist Silvan Tomkins was the first to conceive of interest as an affect. For a summarized reading of his work see Shame and its Sisters. A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Tomkins, Sedgwick & Frank 1995). 9. This is a quote from Miguel Gutierrez’s program notes which I used as one of the watching scores. 10. The watching score being referred to read as follows: This practice seems to hark back to the cut and thrust of growing up and of family life. Andre Green makes the point that kids grow up in situations where in the swirl of parental relationships, activities, expectations and desires most issues never get articulated or clarified. How often do kids get to ask, ‘What’s going on?‘ ‘What does this mean to me?‘ or ‘How do I feel about this?‘ And they are constantly being watched as well. When they are older, kids have to figure out what or how much was left unsaid by their parents. Perhaps authenticity, if there is such a thing, involves being in the grip of something about which you don’t have full understanding, and honestly noticing your responses. Perhaps it means being honest to the situation, like the family situation, in which you find yourself? (Mover/Witness Dyad Journal)
Brolga 40 71 References
Adler, J 1999, ‘Who is the Witness? A Description of Authentic Movement’, in P Pallaro (ed), Authentic Movement. Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow, Philadelphia, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp. 141–59. Cull, L 2011, ‘Attention Training. Immanence and ontological participation in Kaprow, Deleuze and Bergson’, Performance Research, vol. 16 no. 4, pp. 80–91. Godard, H 2004, ‘Gesture and its Perception’, Writings on Dance, no. 22, pp. 57–61. Louppe, L 2010, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books. McCormack, DP 2013, Refrains for Moving Bodies. Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, Duke University Press, Durham and London. Meehan, E 2010, ‘Visuality, discipline and somatic practices: The ‘Maya Lila’ performance project of Joan Davis’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 219–32. Meekums, B 2012, ‘Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Therapy’, in D Reynolds & M Reason (eds), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, Bristol, UK: Intellect. Olsen, AJ 2007, ‘Being Seen, being Moved. Authentic Movement and Performance’, in P Pallaro (ed.), Authentic Movement. Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved. A Collection of Essays, vol Two, pp. 321–5, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Payne, H (ed.) 2006, Dance Movement Therapy. Theory, Research and Practice, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Rancière, J 2011, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London, New York. Stern, D 1985, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, Basic Books, New York. Stewart, N 2010, ‘Dancing the Face of Place. Environmental Dance and Eco-phenomenology’, Performance Research, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 32–9. Stromsted, T & Haze, N 2007, ‘The Road In. Elements of the Study and Practice of Authentic Movement’, in P Pallaro (ed), Authentic Movement. Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved, vol. 2, pp. 56–68, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London and Philadelphia. Tomkins, SS, Sedgwick, EK & Frank, A 1995, Shame and its Sisters. A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Duke University Press, Durham.
Shaun McLeod An experimental frame for participatory performance 72 Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation
PETER FRASER
Despite lengthy, repeated attempts, I could not get mind and body to work together. One or the other would dominate, and make a complete mess of things, or each would wait for the other to make the first move and nothing would happen. And then … like a good negotiator… I decided to stop intervening and suggesting, and, instead, to simply pay attention and listen.
That was more or less how I discovered improvisation as a practice of attention (focussed noticing) rather than of moving. Instead of hoping the body will absorb me in its flow, or that I will be able to ‘think up’ innovative things for it to do, I now improvise by noticing and dancing with the body. What I activate is my attention. I place it, like a bait, somewhere on or in the body, and there and then, some quality of the body, or its movement or weight, something that has been hidden and active there all along, comes forward. Then I go along with it, cooperate in its spreading or diminishing, or I move on to some new site of attention. (So although I am barely intervening, there are choices involved). The improvisation is sustained by constantly renewing these acts of attention to the body’s states and processes.
This attentive process is episodic of necessity—continuous attention gets tired and falls asleep, just as our eyes glaze over if we stare too long. The episodic attention also reflects the fragmentary nature of our embodied life. The experiential body that seems continuous, unified and contained, has ‘missing’ parts and is intermixed with the environment (Leder 1990). What we experience as a continuous flow of consciousness is interrupted with breaks and surges of attention so that our ‘now’ is typically composed of a series of three to four second ‘moments’ (Stern 2004, p. 41). Our self, too, is a composite: Neisser distinguishes five types of self (ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual) based on different forms of experience and information, that we experience as aspects of a single coherent Self. (Neisser 1988). So our sense of being a single self, with a full and complete body, negotiating an environment external to us, relies on a sort of inattention.
By directing our attention towards the living body we can notice its movements, its processes, its qualities as participant-observers. We can witness not just the visible placement of our limbs in space, or the
Brolga 40 73 mechanics of movement, but the feeling of our living, moving fleshy body. We can feel, what our willed actions often obscure, the body’s ongoing, forthcoming process, moving in multiple simultaneous times, at multiple simultaneous weights and densities (from the sub-cellular to the muscular). We can glimpse (feel, in and through the body) what I take to be ‘being’, or what I call ‘being-becoming’, as it moves and in-forms our bodily life.
Attention, improvisation, being
In what follows, I further outline a view of improvisation as making ‘gaps’ in whatever is running smoothly (habits, a particular movement, a nice plan) in order to move with what is already moving. I support this with accounts of my own struggle with a form of, so-called, ‘Authentic Movement’; phenomenological accounts of the body and proprioception; and perspectives on the practice of some key dancer/ choreographers. I also try to further explain what I mean by saying that improvisation can provide an encounter with ‘being-becoming’.
But, first, I would like to show attention, improvisation, being, performance and bodily noticing at play in everyday life.
Selfies in Kyoto
The cherry blossom is at its peak. The girls feel it too. They arrange themselves in front of the trees, spread out but linked together. Their arms diverge at inventive angles, and each ends in two diverging fingers. The girls are marking the place with their being: a momentary coincidence of group, weather, rocks and trees.
They check the selfie and try two more. One could say they are trying for more accuracy. They are trying to compose the feeling of ‘me’ or ‘us’ at this place and time. As in a dance, they are composing with bodies and gestures. As in dance they are creating not merely visual pictures, but energetic patterns providing evidence of a unique ‘now’. A selfie that is just a layered arrangement of bodies and gestures can only be so good. They check the selfie to see if it shows ‘blossoming’ bodies filled with feeling–a sense of life ‘captured’ in the process of its going on.
They know how to notice, feel and modulate their body in relation to the environment and to its parts, and they are choosing to magnify and modulate their body’s state of being.
We all self-notice our bodies—notice our bodies, not visually, but with the senses by which our bodies know themselves: we know how to swing our hips and flounce our arms in dancing; we absent-mindedly enjoy the weight and lean of the drink dangling in our fingers while we talk; the surfer loves reading and adjusting to the wave.
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 74 Each of these self-noticing bodies is noticed from inside, as a constantly reforming mesh of sensations of body and world. Dancer Steve Paxton (2015) describes his experience of the ‘small dance’ of the body (its already and always occurring movements) as ‘a body-field event, centreless’. No-one needs a mirror to see how their body is arranged or to assess the quality of its movement. Each is performative to a degree and each improvises various degrees of noticing, following, re-directing, amplifying or adjusting.
Noticing the body by means of its own modes of awareness is a common experience and capacity. 1 As is improvisation and performance. Nevertheless, the relationship of body and awareness is complex and the examples above are only partly conscious for the participants. Below I attempt to analyse personally, and generally, how body and awareness are related, and outline the unique role of proprioception as a way of knowing the body in one of the ways it knows itself.
The incomplete body
I have always experienced my body as lumpy, opaque and riddled with empty areas. At least, this was the case whenever I actually gave it some thought (for instance, remembering to use my legs properly when swimming) or when my body foregrounded itself, say, as a scattered constellation of discomforts that prevented me from sleeping. I used to feel frustrated and ashamed about this messiness. But I have come to regard it more positively, as an opportunity to explore and discover in dance and somatic practice, a resource for performance, and a means of noticing being through the body.
To further illustrate phenomenological absences, or blind spots, occurring in the body, I might examine what is happening, now, as I write: I can feel my buttocks on the chair, the underside of one crossed leg, the upper side of the lower one, the pressure on my foot, the stiff arch of my lower back, the tension of part of my left jaw, my central chest area is missing, most of my face is absent, except for the cheekbones, I have no awareness of the sides of my legs, and so forth. If I pay close attention to the particular feel of my side ribs, just about everything I mentioned disappears.
There is a fundamental difference between the body, (Korper), as the substance filling up the dancer, and Leib, the dancer’s lived body. Our flesh and its physical boundaries do not line up with our somatic experience. Our lived body stretches across space and time. From a seated position I can sensorially enter my chest, or jump across space to touch things way beyond reach– a treetop for instance. I hear a car, outside; or see the curtain inside; or a cloud, way above. The car sound is not experienced as something in our ear. We don’t sense the curtain as being in our eyes, or the cloud in our brain. We feel these things (even, I think, when we drift a little kinaesthetically, in sympathy with the cloud) as Merleau-Ponty suggests, out there, where those things occur.
Brolga 40 75 Drew Leder, in The Absent Body (1990), goes much further, describing irrevocable absences in the felt body–the gall bladder unless it is diseased, the blind spot in the eye—the teeming presence within the body of other bodies such as invasive or synergistic microbes and bacteria—and the visits and exchanges of air. He also describes, more romantically, how the materials of our body were forged in stars like those we reach with our gaze. He argues, in fact, that the spread out gappy nature of the body opens us onto and into the universe. He says that the body’s ‘usual state is to be lost in the world—caught up in a web of organic and intentional involvements through which we form one body with other things’. ‘As recessive being, these worldly relations are organic and pre-conscious. As ecstatic being, we are in conscious and purposive intercourse with the environment ’ (160).
So our body has absences, jumps from space to space, inside and out, and is not entirely our own. As Husserl says, the body is ‘a remarkably incompletely constituted thing’ (Ideas II, 1989, p. 159: cited Carman 1999, p. 207). And yet this body supports our experience of having a completely constituted body, environment, temporality and self. I think that interrupting or making ‘gaps’ in some of these continuities can give the dancer access to generative processes and experiences of being. It is an approach that starts with receiving somatic experience rather than making things with the body.
Authentic movement—placing attention on the body
Below is an account of my own experience of struggling to ‘find’ and in some way follow the body. It comes from the initial stage of an improvisation based on a version of ‘authentic movement’–standing still, then moving, with eyes closed. Looking at it now, it appears that I had forbidden myself the use of images as well as deliberate actions to initiate movement:
It’s dark. I can feel a sort of black cave around my head and shoulders—roughly shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet. This darker, more solid area, like a cave, with a brow or overhang, surrounds an inner cave somewhat less dark, like the air or water in a sea cave. It is very confined: it goes vague only a little way back. It is a sort of ‘thinking area.’ Annoying. I can feel a soft pressure, or slightly squint-like, tension around my eyes and temples and over the top of my skull, associated with thinking and looking. A connection between seeing and thinking that seems hard to escape.
I can feel some other areas of the body, a tension in muscles of the leg, a tense neck, lower ribs like a pair of hands pressing the sides of my torso, but this awareness is not initiated by those areas of the body, it’s initiated from around my eyes.
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 76 If I just wait, will areas of the body bring themselves to attention?... I wait. …Mmmm maaaybe, a bit, perhaps. I try sending my awareness proprioceptively around the body. I sort of squeeze or have the local muscles activate so that I can feel the flesh of various body parts.
Next, I do that yoga thing of ‘sending the breath’ through the body. I feel the outer layers of my body take form like a soft shell. But it’s full of air rather than organs, and it has an arbitrary, uniform density or tone. So I start coloring myself in, activating a solid tone in various spots then fine tuning it—but I’m not exactly sure which organs go where.
Light from a window shines through my closed eyelids: this dissolves my boundaries and makes me feel I’ve spilled into space … and so on.
Noticing the ways in which the body ‘appeared’ in my consciousness sharpened my sense of my body and the activity of my attention together. A proprioceptive dialogue was established. It then became like a dance with the body, with dancer, then body, leading or following.
When, after this ‘body interview’, I began moving and improvising in space, my body was present to me as something always already moving or expanding or contracting or enduring.
I chose which qualities or movements to notice, or keep noticing; which to follow, which to provoke or extend. I made attentional and choreographic (positional, spatial, energetic) decisions, but they were based on attunement to what was already occurring. I also made decisions to detach from what I was noticing in order to notice afresh—especially if I found my attention wandering or, on the contrary, vaguing into a continuity of not-really-noticing.
For example: I tied my attention to a sinking movement that led the whole body to the floor; I repeated movements and noticed how they fluctuated and morphed with shifts of inaccuracy and fatigue; I followed the consequences of letting an aligned spine and arm stretch further and further outwards, to the limit; I chose random points in space for random points of the body to touch—to find out what demands and effects it created in the rest of the body; I deconstructed movements: What if crawling legs and arms slid backwards each time they took at step forward; What if I did this for a few minutes on end?
These were not aesthetic choices. They were stimuli or experiments to focus attention, creating a gap in the background continuities of body and mind (a gap, so to speak, in not-noticing) in which the body’s occurrences may appear. Paxton (2015) describes a similar process in which he sets up a series of attentional strategies: actions, changes of balance, use of anatomical knowledge plus imagination to gain awareness to parts of the body that provide very little sensation (the bones for instance)—all of which are designed to awaken awareness of
Brolga 40 77 ‘sensations or events of the body’ that ‘can be consciously observed and manipulated…’
These are receptive experiments for the body, rather than a sequence of actions that the ‘known’ body is being asked to accomplish.
Underlying these experiments are two key actions: the placing of attention on aspects of the body and its states, and the use of proprioception as a means of dialogue with the body. I discuss both these activities below.
The body as a ‘site of enquiry’—the role of attention
Practices of attention, conscious perception and bodily enquiry played a transformative role in dance, and ideas of what dance is, from around the mid-twentieth century. Deborah Hay, for instance, pioneered (and continues to refine) a process of subverting the known, choreographed, socialised, habitual body by treating the dancer as ‘a site for inquiry i.e. a bodily presence trained in the performance of parallel experiences of perception’ (2015a). Hay submits herself to playing out unanswerable but consequential questions such as: ‘What if how I see while I am dancing is a means by which movement arises without looking for it?‘ (2015b). Other major figures include Steve Paxton and Min Tanaka who says: ‘the body does not exist unless one is astonished with its ingenuous state’ (1986, p. 153). More recently, Australian dancer/choreographer Rosalind Crisp demonstrates a rigorous, exploratory and constantly refreshed application of attention to the shifting relationships and conditions of her body.
I had tried to apply attention to whatever arose in my body in the improvisational research described above and discovered it to be a volitional act rather than a passive experience. In daily practice and performance, I found that unless I continually and actively ran an investigative attention around my body my performance became forced or habitual. This was different from thinking about the body—which tended to turn Leib into Korper. Attention is less intrusive and without force. Placing the attention—a volitional act–is more like choosing where to invite the life of the body to come into being in any of our many modes of awareness—touch, smell, taste, proprioception, sense of temperature, vision, hearing, thought and imagination, to name a few. (I am using the term ‘modes of awareness’ to embrace the bodily senses and the mind. Berthoz (2000, p. 263) makes an interesting case for revising the meaning of ‘senses’ according to their perceptual function: ‘So to the sense of taste and smell, touch, vision, and hearing, add, as the vernacular already does, the sense of movement, space, balance, effort, self, decision, responsibility, initiative, and so on. This idea of the senses shows the way, determined by the subject, toward a goal.’
The unique status of proprioception
Even in this very extended view of the senses, proprioception is unique in its internal focus and in offering us reflexivity—offering us a degree
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 78 of awareness of its activity and a degree of agency, and thus, a form of bodily dialogue. This reflexivity is not usually apparent to a person engaged in moving: ‘In most instances, movement and maintenance of posture are accomplished automatically by the body, and for this reason the normal adult neither needs nor has a constant body awareness. Indeed, in most activities that are oriented toward an intentional goal the body tends to efface itself with respect to conscious awareness’ (Gallagher 1998, pp. 132–133). Moreover, proprioceptive activity tends to be noticed less as we develop bodily skills that, as they are accomplished, recede from awareness. Shusterman (2008, pp. 160–165) discusses the contribution of William James (1890: republished 1983) in identifying several ways to increase introspective awareness of body-movement—an awareness now articulated in a whole range of somatic practices such as Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering and Alexander Method.
The availability to awareness of proprioception contrasts with our body’s outwardly focused senses which show themselves not as themselves, but as aspects or qualities of the environment. When we use our hearing, for instance, we notice sounds, not some part of our ears, but if we actively engage our proprioceptive sense we can feel the body conveying and adjusting its movement, extension and weight. Just standing upright offers us, if we attend to it, a flurry of proprioceptive activity–a ‘small dance’ always already underway in the body.2
In the case of my ‘authentic movement’ exploration, it was hard to know whether the proprioceptive scanning I was ‘doing’ was something sent towards or coming from the body. When we become aware of movements, qualities or densities of the body by proprioception (which requires attention) it is almost like holding hands with them. Our proprioceptive looking, unlike visual looking, or thinking, does not reduce the body to a perceived object. It is more like a bodily conversation: You can feel it feeling. It feels and adjusts the living body and is the feeling of feeling and adjusting the body. I claim that it gives us a glimpse of being, or being-becoming–because that is what it ‘feels’ like, in the body: a sensory awareness of the body as something that, in its fleshy movement, gives us a timely feeling of substance or a substantial feeling of time.
Images—the body meets the imagination
We can also form a proprioceptive dialogue between the body and imagination. Working with images is not a matter of controlling the body or making shapes. It is, to adopt another metaphor, perhaps more like the meeting of a coat (or a tailor) and a body—the body feeling its way into the sleeve, slipping the shoulders around the inside of the coat, and the coat shifting its weight and form to accommodate the body.
Image work is fundamental to Butoh and, also, to Bodyweather, an ecological approach to the body initially developed by Butoh dancer Min Tanaka. Tanaka’s Bodyweather deconstructs and decentres body and self. It sees the body as permeable with the environment and it seems to see the ‘self’ as fiction of society and history. While the body has its patterns (perhaps a sort of climate) it is experienced as something,
Brolga 40 79 constantly changing and shifting. Tanaka argues that the dancer’s self is not necessarily at the centre of this. The centre is everywhere and drifts around (Marshall 2006, p. 61; Kim 2006 n.pag.).
As a result, Bodyweather training focuses on perception, not control, of the body—although the body and mind (Tanaka uses that binary sometimes) are highly trained to meet each other. The body-relation is a constant open experiment. This body is never singular. It moves from any point, not just the limbs and torso, and Tanaka speaks of its multiple speeds: ‘The speed of thought, of nerves, of blood circulation, of muscular tissues, of the spirit; the chaotic coexistence of various speeds’ (Tanaka 1986, p. 154). It also has multiple densities, scales, temperatures, sense of weight and so on.
So this isn’t the sort of body that could be defined or outlined once and for all. But it is a body ready to meet the imagination. Somatic images as they are used in butoh and Bodyweather, are imagined states that are rendered as sensate states in the performer’s body.
It is in no way a simulation of the posture or appearance of the imagined being. It is an attempt to allow the image to affect the felt qualities of the body. In my experience, the image is embodied by an iterative and proprioceptive process of layering—feeling a change in the tone and structure of the body, testing it against an imagined state and adjusting it.
The image arrives cumulatively by somatic research: imagining and adjusting the body to match. Feeling out, say, in the case of a bird image, its posture, the structure of the feet and their soft wrinkled leathery skin, the curl of the grip on a branch, the breath and pulse, the shifting weight, the placement and layering of the feathers, its gaze and desire.
To establish a relation between imagination and body that is transformative, not pictorial, requires an extensive training of both the body and the imagination. Tanaka developed just such a training—an investigative training with a focus on noticing the body and its relations to time and space. His ‘mb’ practice (mind/body:muscle/bone) is a highly demanding physical, aerobic training but equally demanding of attention and perception. The result is a body that is flexible and able to initiate and isolate from points all around it. It is also a body sensitive to time and space. Tanaka also created a range of partnered exercises that involve the body being manipulated sensitively from outside—a training in responsiveness, observation and imaginative re-creation for both parties. Bodyweather also uses Bisoku, very slow movement (say 1mm per second), to develop a bodily sense of speed, and perceptual investigations such as imagining the body as various elements.
In Tanaka’s practice the body and the dancer have been trained to meet and respond to each other. The process is another attentive-receptive way of meeting with the body. The dancer has had no ‘designs’ on the body—it is a dialogue that transforms the body into an undetermined form.
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 80 Rosalind Crisp–moving and noticing
Rosalind Crisp exemplifies another approach to attentional practice. She exhibits an endless play of attention to what is already there (or arises from her choreographic or attentional interventions) in the body or imagination. Unforeseen actions seem to drop into her body. The focus shifts continually, from way out beyond the arm to something nibbling the foot; an emerging thing unravels; she laughs with pleasure and surprise; directions realign and tempos shift. She is continuously shaking free to surprise herself with a new focus of attention so that her attention does not fade, and the dance, as she puts it, ‘hardens into display’ (personal communication 2014).
In a workshop I attended, Crisp shared strategies that engage active attention explicitly, directly and simply. For example, she invited the dancers to ‘notice beginnings’. This led me to discover that my starting had leapfrogged and pre-empted thousands of tiny events and possibilities, wrenching the body (and mind) into action rather than noticing microprocesses. I had overlooked the beginning point in the body, the duration of the beginning, the miniature steps in time, the relationship of breath and initiation, the tiny muscle fibres at work, the larger sequences of joints, the moment at which intent joined action, and so forth.
Sometimes Crisp works in what might be seen as a reverse direction, altering the body first, to render it available to attention. For example, by ‘unholding’, making parts of the body ‘feeble’ ‘so that the body can feel where attention is in it now.’ Citing Steve Paxton, Crisp says, ‘the less we hold, the more we feel’ (personal communication 2014).
Crisp emphasises that we don’t need to search for inspiration and ideas when the body is already there as a source: ‘movements can be found by a practice of paying attention to what is already there, emergent, not yet named or colonised…these buds and shoots appear everywhere’ (2009, p. 104). She provokes movement and attention with a range of improvisational and choreographic tools.
One such tool–‘move two body surfaces away from (or towards) each other’—could almost be an archetype of creating a gap for noticing. The tool is silent about which body parts to move, where to, for how long, at which speed, or how it should look. It isn’t directed towards some point of completion. On the contrary, in my experience, it guides the body and attention away from shapes and trajectories towards discovery and an open-ended process.
As two body surfaces move away from each other the ‘gap’ is filled with the unfolding life of the body. The attended-to body feels itself moving and being. A gap in continuity becomes an opportunity for noticing being-becoming.
Brolga 40 81 Conclusion—bringing being and movement together
Why associate proprioceptive experience with ‘being-becoming’ (or ‘being-in-the-process-of-becoming’) rather than simply call it a pleasurable, or in the case of improvised dance, a creative, experience? Using the term ‘being-becoming’ is an attempt to describe one aspect of the felt dialogue between bodily movement and attention. Moving is more than relocation, bodily movement has a self-reflexive capacity that constitutes a mode of knowing, perhaps our foundational mode. (Sheets-Johnstone (1998, p. 253) describes felt bodily movement as ‘an epistemological gateway’ and as ‘the ground on which intentionalities initially develop’).
Sheehan (1981, pp. 536–542) argues that movement is central to Heidegger’s understanding of being which focussed not on some quality over and above things (entities) or man but on the disclosive processes of each. The intelligible structure of these disclosive processes is intrinsically kinetic. ‘We understand a plant as a plant, for example, by knowing that its presence is fraught with absentiality: a not yet and a no longer, a coming into and a going from presence’. It is ‘the presence of the absentiality [italics in original] that makes it kinetic’. This absentiality, ‘that dimension of the entity’s disclosure that is not fully present or knowable or controllable’ nevertheless functions in the entity’s auto-disclosure. Heidegger was not imagining a day when being or Being would ‘finally show up’ but showing the way to ‘becoming explicitly aware of what one already experiences: the relative absentiality [as well as, and in, the presentiality] of oneself and of things’.
To improvise by paying attention to the processes and states of the body— in a proprioceptive dialogue—is to play with the self-disclosure of the body: to feel its unfolding presence hedged by absences–the ‘previous’ body falling away, the instant of initiation submerged by the movement it initiated, and the emerging body surging towards becoming present.
By making a gap in what we take for granted in the movement and state of our body, and paying attention, we may feel our way into a momentary dance with being.
Notes
1. In this article I treat thought as one of the body’s modes of awareness along with (at least) taste, vision, smell, touch, proprioceptive awareness of gravity, muscular action, bodily orientation and movement, and sense of temperature. Buddhism, similarly, includes mind among the sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind) and thought among what are commonly regarded as senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and thought). Rudolf Steiner includes thought among 12 distinct human senses related to thinking, feeling and will (Soesman 1999). 2. I am using the term ‘proprioception’ broadly, as an ‘attentively immediate intuitional awareness uniquely of [our own limbs and body] (O’Shaughnessy, 1995, p. 201) or ‘an internally-mediated corporeal
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 82 consciousness of movement that is not dependent on external tactility, but that is internally mediated’ (Sheets-Johnstone, p. 76). Within ‘proprioception’ I include all those sensations by which we may have conscious awareness of bodily movement, position, effort and tone. Strictly speaking our awareness of movement draws on vestibular (balance) sensors, is modified by vision and skin sensations, and operates against an unconscious whole-body background ‘universal setting’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 326) or ‘body schema’. However, our reflexive sense of movement, of having agency and awareness, seems primarily related to the muscular apparatus of proprioception, even if our acts of agency—of consciously initiating or responding to a movement—are obscured by the movement that so quickly follows (Kinsbourne 1995, p. 207).
References
Berthoz, A 2000, The brain’s sense of movement, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Carman, T 1999, ‘The body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’, Philosophical Topics, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 205–226. Gallagher, S 1995, ‘Body Schema and intentionality’, in JL Bermudez, A Marcel & N Eilan (eds), The body and the self, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. pp. 225–244. Gallagher, S & Cole, J 1998, ‘Body image and body schema in a deafferented subject’, in Donn Welton (ed), Body and flesh: a philosophical reader, Blackwell, Maldon, MA. pp.131–147. Hay, D 2015a, viewed December 2015
Brolga 40 83 Neisser, U 1988, ‘Five kinds of self-knowledge’, Philosophical Psychology, vol. 1, no. 1. pp. 35–59. Paxton, S 2015, ‘The small dance: the stand’ [Adapted from (1986), ‘The Small Dance, The Stand: Transcription of 1977 classes’, Contact Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 48–50.], viewed 20 October 2015
Peter Fraser Gaps in the body: attention and improvisation 84 Contributors
Peter Fraser
Peter Fraser performs in improvisation, site-specific performance and dance. He has performed with De Quincey Co body weather performance ensemble for over 20 years—in desert inhabitants, durational performance, outdoor and theatre-based works. He has worked with a wide range of groups and in self-devised solo and duo works. He has studied with dancers mentioned in this article (Ros Crisp, Min Tanaka and Deborah Hay whose solo, I think not, he has performed). Peter is a co-director of, and performs with, the Environmental Performance Authority ecological performance group. Recent projects include Sounds like movement, with instrument builder and musician Dale Gorfinkel, investigating the relationship of movement and materials, such as paper (‘Festival of Live Art’, Melbourne 2014); authentic movement/ improvisation as part of a research group led by Shaun McLeod; the body/city project About Now for ‘Performing Mobilities’ (PSI Conference, Melbourne, 2015); eXchange—six short solos by six performers, presented at Taipei Art Festival; performing in Xavier Le Roy’s Temporary Title ‘exhibition’ (Carriageworks, 2015) and, currently, a Kathakali/Western performance investigation led by Arjun Raina. Peter recently completed a performance MA, Now and again: strategies for truthful performance, Monash, 2014. Accessible at
Shaun McLeod
Shaun McLeod is a dancer, choreographer and academic who lectures at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is interested in the affective situation of dance improvisation and performance, as well as exploring alternative audience/performer relationships. As a dancer he danced with Australian Dance Theatre, Danceworks and One Extra Co. His work The weight of the thing left its mark was presented as part of Dance Massive 2011 (Melbourne). He recently completed a practice-led PhD on the engagement of Authentic Movement for performance. The performance component of this PhD, entitled Witness, will be presented by Dancehouse (Melbourne) in August 2016.
Jason Marchant
Jason Marchant is a PhD student in performance studies at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Dr Amanda Card. Before he moved to Australia Jason lived in New York City where he performed as a dancer and improviser and toured dance work with long time collaborator Lindsey Dietz Marchant. Over the past two years he has taught in dance on a sessional basis at Deakin University. His current artistic work is in collaboration with visual artist Alison Kennedy and philosopher, poet and playwright Mammad Aidani, and he continues to stretch the practice with artist Shaun McLeod. Contact Jason at
Brolga 40 85 Olivia Millard
For the past 20 years, Olivia has worked as a performer, maker and lecturer of dance. After graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1992, Olivia performed with companies and independent choreographers/directors in Australia and overseas including Rosalind Crisp, Sue Peacock, and Peter Sellars (Salzburg Festival). She has created over 20 dance works, both funded and commissioned, including for the Asian Young Choreographers Project in Kaohsuing, Taiwan, and was the recipient of a Creative Development Fellowship from Arts WA in 2003. Olivia taught at WAAPA, Perth from 1999–2006. She has taught dance at Deakin University since 2007, first sessionally, and commenced her current position as a Lecturer in Dance at Deakin in 2014. Olivia’s PhD, from Deakin University was conferred in April 2013.
Dianne Reid
Dianne is a performer, choreographer, camera operator, video editor and educator. She works in both live and screen contexts. She was a founding member of Outlet Dance in Adelaide (1987–89) and a member of Danceworks from 1990–95. Dianne completed a Master of Arts in Dance on Screen in 2001 and her dance video works have screened internationally. From 2004–2006 she was Artistic Director of Dancehouse and has worked as a lecturer in contemporary dance and dance video at Deakin University since 1996. She is currently a PhD candidate in screendance and performance improvisation.
Anne Scott Wilson
Working in video and photography, and with a strong performance background, Anne Scott Wilson's oeuvre is an exploration into memory, motion and imagination. Drawing on anachronistic ballet training, she uses her own body as an experimental site. Her practice considers the relationship between death and embodiment, light and motion and the yearning for something more. She has received several grants from the Australia Council and Arts Victoria for international residencies at Banff in Canada and Liverpool, UK and has been awarded a residency at Can Serrat, Barcelona, Spain and from Australian National University to be included in an international residency as part of The Ethnographic Film Festival, Nuoro, Italy. Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia and overseas. She is represented by Arc One Gallery in Melbourne and Conny Dietzchold Gallery in Sydney, Hong Kong and Cologne. Her moving image artworks have been exhibited at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Athens Film Festival and Melbourne Urban Screens Festival. She has recently been a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize and the Substation Contemporary Art Prize. Her work has been curated by Asialink and Experimenta internationally, as part of the Asia Pacific Media Arts Biennial in Singapore and ‘Contemporary Australian Drawing #5’, Florence Italy. She has been selected as a guest curator at Centre for Contemporary Photography and continues to curate exhibitions including Finitude at University of Tasmania in 2015.
Brolga 40 86 Notes for contributors
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