Attunement For The Body

First, I should say that I am not as well versed in the literature of improvisation as my colleagues here today. I would like to speak, from my practice as improviser. In my professional experience as movement artist, improvisation exposes me to unpredictable formations, patterns and logic. (Equally, I argue, the viewer of improvisation is exposed and even implicated in this unpredictability). I have found that the challenge and promise of improvisation is that it works against expectation while simultaneously enhancing creative flow. As I move, an embodied experience of modes of uncertainty activates my ability to sense and make sense of layers of information. As a mode of knowing then, I would like to suggest that movement improvisation constitutes a practice of ethical recognition that embraces the uncanny simultaneity of simplicity and complexity in the new meanings that emerge and surprise.

My work is centered on the body. When I refer to the body, I think of the sentience of it: that collection of cells that aggregates into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into systems. In practice, I am conscious of other bodies that may surround me in space and even the "body" of the space itself. I am also aware of the body’s culture and history. The consideration of the synaptic meeting point of all this, permits an interdependence of thought and feeling, and increases my power to act. This is the way I orient myself in space. The body, therefore, is not simply for the performance of action, but for action in itself: that is to say, action in this case is the excavation of knowledge through the BODY. The body that moves, interprets, translates, and absorbs, is the lens through which I am learning to see and communicate. My goal is to make the body an agent in making decisions. Ultimately, I seek a place where every step I make, I stand for.

This approach has led me directly to the investigation of movement that is derived from anatomical knowing. I strive to experience all of those moving, interdependent parts while exploring the body’s synapses. My investigation of anatomical awareness extends to "support mechanics" and their most effective level of functionality and articulation.

My practice therefore derives movement from sensation. It aspires to strengthen the link between body, feeling, and action as manifested through falling, rolling, rubbing, and to resist against the space around me with my back, belly, bottom, neck, jaw, and face.

To organize encounters and search for meaning in this schema, requires me to be attuned. An attuned body is one that registers feedback and that collects the data that the full body system processes. For me, gestures are literally derived from the attunement of your skeletal, emotional, muscular, and enteric nervous system. I organize and make decisions based on this attunement. Integration of internal experiences with the external environment in order to be more in conversation with the present, therefore becomes a sense-making system. The goal – if there is such a thing – is to find a survival mechanism in order to exist within a non- violent, kinesthetically, unobstructed place. I am treating the product of my sense-making system as if it were a collection of data with its own implied logic; I embrace the linear and non-linear narrative as well as the abstract. As Elizabeth Dempster eloquently puts it: “Bodies and Dances are not only legible, but comprehensible. Social and political ideologies are systematically deposited and constructed on an anatomical plane, that is in the neuromuscular structure of the dancer’s body, and a precise reading of this body can only proceed if the reader/spectator’s gaze is not deflected by, but penetrates beneath [. . . ] the body’s surface.”

I am dedicated to a practice whereby the body notices and tracks. This requires commitment to the analysis of gesture in the here and now – even the smallest of gestures. Engaging and paying attention becomes a practice of reduction: I try to strip the myriad gestural options down to the essential. The practice of "what I decide not to do" becomes the focus. Waiting becomes a tool. Selection becomes a way of going forward. In improvisation, thinking in movement involves real-time decision-making that is embodied, visceral, corporeal, but also ambiguous.

In improvisation then, my aim is to touch and to be touched – not to disrupt or provoke reaction. I create a plane for multiple realities to take place and co-exist. Linear constructs are violated in order to create conditions for a direct experience of all kinds of phenomena, for observer and observed alike. I aim to cultivate a context within which we can learn new ways of seeing and call into question our own stereotypical views and ways of thinking. Rather than confirm our views about a performance, life, and relationships, we – more precisely – question them. In this sense, I commit to being available with my body – to approach a state of "potentiality." So, the idea of "waiting to form an opinion" is critical in order to get somewhere new. "Not to expect an answer" creates a unique environment that demands particular ways of listening, seeing, and tracking. But, certainly, there are questions: What is my felt reality in this moment? How do I perceive? How do I keep going? What do I say yes to?

What if . . . ?

The action of being affected by what you see is not only at stake for me, but for the observer, too. In this moment, all of us engage the whole body with all its senses in a practice of meeting. In this space we empty ourselves in order to communicate and to allow ideas to flow. I'd like to think of this as a "transitional space" composed of questions:

 What is your felt reality in this moment?

 Can a transition be a point of arrival?

This is a recent multimedia work of mine called echo/archive. The piece is based on improvisation in both performance and in post-production. In this excerpt I wish to give you a taste of how “trying to meet” becomes the product and the invention in itself. In essence, I wish to show how “trying to meet” becomes an "arrival point."

Dance artist, Eva Korzag, is my collaborator here. Our bodies are from and contain different backgrounds:- two females that bookend a generation in age and dance history; we talk and move with different rhythms. What is shared between us here, is space and time, and the willingness to co-exist.

As we bring our history, backgrounds, and viewpoints into a shared space, the first step is to perform for each other. The vulnerability of this exposure leads to a discomfort of touch, impacts, collisions, and labor. Simply "being witness" creates a particular attention, under which our movement is activated. The physiological charge from being watched creates a particular awareness in us as movers, in our choice-making.

 In the beginning of the process, we rotated fifteen minute-long solos or “propositions.” As one of us dances, the other watches and notices. At first, the rotated solos seem to have very little to do with one another. As I observe, the attention to rhythm that she proposes, registers in me. As she moves, my mirror neurons fire, activating the same movement pathways in me: I make those same movements on the level of my nervous system. Within the feedback loop that is created, I respond. On a tissue level, I move with her. More than that, our interaction gives me a taste of her physical thinking and problem solving through movement. The synchronicity or disparateness of our rhythms – whether visceral or respirational – will, somehow, determine the outcome. Throughout our process, we observe and record with our whole selves. The conversation that evolves is full of following each other: catching, recognizing, giving up, refusing, and even immediate dismissal. If the flow stops, it simply starts again. Occupying the same space, but at different times, we attempt to break one another’s expectations: misleading; surprising; faking. The real-time construction of our relationship hovers between doing and waiting; listening but not responding; and modulates between simply sharing space, being careful, and finding a groove.

At this point, forming is already happening. We build a dynamic, shared history through our choices. The more we expose our diverse pasts to one another, the attempt to meet becomes more important than the meeting point itself.

"Are we even interested in one anothers points of view?" "Is it really that movement that I am after?"

 Emphasizing dialog over confrontation is how we compose.

 No words are exchanged, however. No systems or methods are determined or pre- determined. Through our listening, what emerges is a physical sense of generational

difference, the body’s archived history, its priorities and values. The result (here) is an assemblage of personal, intimate portraits, and fractured narratives that aggregate through the organization of the film. The intervention of the camera, film editing, and the graphic control of the image, is an invisible third party in this process. The camera is a fully present observer, witness, and magnifier of the echoes and repetitions between the dancers. Through its intervention, patterns may be revealed and new images can be created that may not have been visible in the live space.

The outcome of this arrangement – dancers and camera – is an interdependent score of image, action, and sound. The changing divisions and perspectives on the screen provides another compositional layer: from split screen to triptych, moves are tossed between the various "actants" as a method of communication. What is revealed in this "improbable" attempt to exist together is a dedication to observation and the search for solutions. The improbability of the task seduces us, as bodily sounds and guttural, non-vocalizations arise out of disparate bodies and their "desperate" failure to meet.

What became apparent to me in creating this work is that, as artists and improvisers, we don’t have to agree in order to organize. The action of “trying to meet” is the organizing principle of the work and, in this case, also the frame of the work. “Trying to meet” (or “attempting to meet”) is an action rather than a static formula and has the power of creating dynamic interdependence. It is an approach that can change, transform, reveal, still become (in other words, continue to evolve). “Trying to meet” then, is a solution, an end, in itself. It becomes both the form and the system. There are two points of view, but neither is separate from the other, nor does one become the other: what is constituted in the work is multiplicity.

I'd like to conclude with a quote from Australian choreographer, Russell Dumas: “Dance is in the world; it refers to that world, but it also creates its own reality. It is not simply reflective of a current social reality, but can be a gesture towards some other; it is able to project other possibilities, alluding to a future, a past, and to another present.”

 For me, as an artist, to advance or advocate improvisation as an ethical agent in political or social change is not part of my creative imperative. But, in being invited to think about ethics for this panel, I have offered my experience as it relates to improvisation in how we negotiate the "messiness" of being human – a kind of fluid, normative ethics, if you like. In my brief description of my process today, hopefully you've had a glimpse of how I, and other artists like me, might approach the creative process, while understanding that, for us, the fundamentals and etiquette of improvisation – flexibility, openness, a willingness to be uncertain, and presentness – are unspoken, and only ever tacitly understood.

Thank you.