Stolen from Eszter Salamon and Bojana Cvejic interview - 6M1L project

on composition techniques-

''Performers had to compose with the memory of precise sensations - composing means writing a score while moving, this was a technique, demanding intensive concentration on the present. The performers were composing with their sensations and imagination and they got lost each of them had a strategy of how to go back to it.''

''Thinking arises from the impossibility of thought. Thought arises from the impossibility of thinking.''

overlapping experience

How could the practice of allowing other/others experience to overlap be develop?
Who can we make thoughts spill?
How can we make memories spill?
Is the sharing of memories lead to new memories/ event/ experience of the past memories?

1- pattern of data (materials, text, movements, sounds...) created by event to create more events
2- map thinking about other things
3 -- Over -layering sensations/ perception ( Deborah Hay method)
4 - the interest of geographic/ cultural / differences
5 - How do we overlap internal time for the performer? (how do we use  body/ brain memory in performance)?

PAF - residency

Day 1 -

Presence - Transformation -Time -Memory

Prelimanary discussion


To Set-up a situation of event for working together in the studio -

•  A series of exercises (each contribute) -
• A list of moment of absence (each contribute)

To record the account of what is going -on - How do we document?

Overarching key notions

Proprioception:
Exposing dance inside the body

Transformation in performance - 2 phases - part of the performers' self exist in the body of the audience
A moment of transformation - a moment of becoming
Self as action

Attention - attunement - relation
Creating invisible threads

Form & formlessness = training

The inhuman performer: What is it that is not you but that is not someone else?
Performer imagination - transformation  / Viewer imagination - transformation


Arriving - becoming present-

Moving out of the head, to a landscape of feeling, memory, impulse and dream ....

''reading Deleuze as a dream book - as a challenge of the notion of grasping'' Susan

Practicing exercises:
4''33 Cage  - focus out
Small dance Paxton - focus in
Blind walk - out
Pairing with percentage - giving / supporting - 80/50/20
Embodied reading - Forti Newspapper

Practical 1
Memory Gestures improvisation: Directed gestures/actions using images - not through imagination but through being (feeling versus thinking)  Here connection with being and the deleuzian notion of actualisation - virtual technology.

Practical 2
Butho Fu Improvisation:
1 place
1 figure
1 oject
1 environment
1 landsacape
1 verbe
1 sensory information

Butho fu *1

Endless dark corridor,
Sunlight coming through each lonely rooms
Steps echoing from an old time, don't leave any traces in the creaking planks
Turn left, right, get lost in the corner,
In the fire brace, she is waiting for our eyes to find her nails padding the featherless peacock
Through the hole in the wall the helicopter dance with the eagles

Instructions/tacks

1. follow invisible threads
2. jump back into a picture
3. dance 3 min like your father
4. carry forward and let go
5. think about something boring and make it interesting

Sensation composition from improvisation - A score-

Remembering traces of gestures

As soon as you find variation, you change the sensation

Alter the intensity of the sensation

Come back to neutral

Remember the sensation, feel it but don't do

Apply the sensation to of the gesture to another gesture ( the next one)

Go back to the other gesture

Transform and merge the other 2 gestures

Use the other gestures to break form the pattern of repetition

Reflection and comments
We can't quantify sensation, they are only quality


Day 2

Suggestions:

• Going back to 5 gestures
• going back to butho fu
• doing a durational improvisation - something we witness evolving for 30 min
• partnering sensation - impulse (eye contact -duo)

Reflection and comment

Active viewing= action

Observing what are the threshold when the observer start to interrupt/interfere with the action going on

Embodied Research

This Post is a reflection on the notion of embodied research.
It is in dialogue with follow  PhD student Rebecca Woodfords-Smith.

07/04/11:Practice session 1: Embodied memory

Discussion on different kind of memories ( Thought memory/ felt memory)
Practice session based on collaborative practice of improvisation.

1. Warm-up: emptying mind - attention exercises : Cages ' 4'33 

Negotiation- making observing
Automatic memory : Chance, Newspaper

2. Kinesthetic observation  ( In paris)
responding to partner's movement (at 80%, 50%, 20%) then adding space
3. Kinesthetic Feedback - Physical
4.Drawings

18th of May Session 2

Self and other bodies in the space : connections / breaks / extension between each other / boundaries
Perception: having a sense of each others' timing.

Difference between the terms Time and Timing in dance
Timing: quantifiable, phrasing, compositional components
Time: quality, duration (Bergson), presence - control

The presence of the performer negotiate the ownership of the time with the audience members.
Through memory connecting with the continuity of our duration (the real time for Bergson)
Time is memory is duration is quality.
Kinesthetic time is the pure experience of time (heidegger) - authenticity.
Fascination with time to know our own duration. it is only possible through the use of memory.
Duration is a process of imagination.

 15th of June Session 3
How is embodied memory conveyed to audience members : process/product?
The relationship between memory felt and memory thought?
The unknown potential of the body.
Practical work on sensation:
Improvisational movement (mover/observer)
Difficulty to name a sensation - tendency to go to the emotion. May be need to record images instead?
difficulty to stay with the physicality of the movement.example of sensations:lightness/opening/breath/lift/suspension/hot

29th of June Session 4

Defining Sensations:
How to word sensation? It seems too difficult to put a word on sensation. I felt that sensation were more a process than a product that I could name.
How can we account for that sensation?
Are there different levels of sensation: A primal - basic survival - and one that build-up from that primal?

26th of July
Influenced by one of my reading
Referring to sensations as 'a kind of felt thought.
Yet any ‘language’ of ‘co-speaking’, of giving voice, to emerge from the propositions of the
Vocabulaoratories must also encounter sensation: non-representational, a-syntactic, nonlinear
movements of thought. This kind of felt thought, charged by the chaotic force(s) of the
unthought, can be called a diagrammatic process.

15th of August
Working form the movement we think we are do -
Working as a feedback loop of the movement we imagine the other do -
Ex from MIranda Tufnell book: ''Widening the Field''
1- Imagine yourself dancing for one minute - eyes closed
The image kept changing/ the context kept changing - on the beach, in the studio with my daughter
2 - Same thing but with the hands clasp
Shift of point of observation/ much more connected with the image of myself, with the sensation -
something about touching my hands.

The more we want to connect, the more we need to expand ...

Memories from a stone -

Remembering / Thinking
This big storm in India,
While I was walking up the mountain with myself
It broke
A lot of water falling down in a very short time
And then this little hut with the old man
Having found shelter
Smoking a perfumed cigarette
And then sharing a hot tea
Smiling a lot
Looking out at the valley in front
Looking at the dogs playing in poodles
Wanting to record that moment
A moment of beauty, peace encounter
The warm tea, the burning cigarette and the flood of the rain

Witnessing

Resting
Waiting for the next breath
The next impulse to guide us
To find a new ALWAYS new orientation
Listening to an orientation
Digging in
Witnessing
Other movements from closed eyes
Witnessing a witness witnessing
Intensity and moment of rest
Fingers/hands
Three dimensional sound
Cutting out
What comes out more?
What highlight?
What to choose?
A tree, a bee, a church bell ringing in the scattered air
Spring

Remembering / Feeling
Swaying to find the tunning
To the image
To the moment
Looking actively within
out for that moment
Stop
Feel
Breath in
With the out comes the move
Impulse of the arm
The weight going down
Ah the image of the old man appears
somewhere inside of my body
My bones feel heavier
Resting down
Taking in again
Waiting for the cusp of the breath
That moment just before
The breath exhale
Again travel out
That moment is the moment
The in-betweens
What shape has my body when that moment comes?
Sensation are harder to imagine
To render physically
To bring movement to sensation

( From Miranda Tufnell's Workshop)

Miranda Tufnell - Workshop on Origins

A day with Miranda Tufnell - Shiobhan Davies Studio.

Miranda Tuffnell took us through the very poetically evocative journey of the embryonic life (embryology), the development of the beginning of life. She is drawing on scientific ideas about the cosmos and relates cosmic forces shaping life. The same forces that have shaped the cosmos, shaped the human being (apparent forces)
Looking at a picture of planet earth you can observe how much water is present in the overall construction of the earth and that is what permit life: Movement and water - constitute planets ;
Could decay be measure by decrease of movement and water elements in someone/thing life.
The necessity to connect to those original forces to orient ourself, to reflect on what is coming in the body and how the internal body impact on the outside.- a constant inter change - va et vient
Triggering questions about the coming into being.

• How do we organise ourself
• Inquiry into movement across land and territory
• Inquiry about the way intention unfold:  Decision making - 'that something inside that knows' intuition?
•  The way that we are already latent in the genes of our grand mother?
• There is a lot of dying phases in the process of maturation of the egg - negotiation and stillness -
• The phase of implantation: when the egg land and feed itself from the floor of the womb - the landing process is the forming process of us.
• Mesoderm (the middle of the three germ layers, or masses of cells (lying between the ectoderm and endoderm), which appears early in the development of an animal embryo. In vertebrates it subsequently gives rise to muscle, connective tissue, cartilage, bone, notochord, blood, bone marrow, lymphoid tissue, and to the epithelia (surface, or lining, tissues) of blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, body cavities, kidneys, ureters, gonads (sex organs), genital ducts, adrenal cortex, and certain other tissues. See also ectoderm; endoderm.)   she referred to it as the primitive street which essentially is responsible for the formation of the spine.
• The start of the heart beat: It is a rush of the blood flowing into what will become the head, a movement that will produce at 21 days the first heart beat. (see Buddhist view of the wind of both parents creating the first heartbeat)
• We form out of movement in our fluid. MOVEMENT COME FROM FLUID - Tidal influence of the moon. The forces of the fluid: imagination, feeling, emotion...they are all at play in our decisions
• The first tidal movement of the body is the breath - inhalation - exhalation (90 seconds)
• She referred a lot to the notion of CALLING - INNER CALLING - INTUITION  through which we orient.  The knowing of the embryonic cell - even interrupted it will know where to take it from. 
•   The use of accumulation to let go (here at the end of the session Anna asked about accumulation of experience and having done a succession of exercises that will shape our perception.)
• The inner and outer body: the inner body is the body of the mother and the outer body is the body as it will be.

• Int term of methodology Miranda used the expression 'rocking out of it from the periphery back into the centre' - WIDENING THE FIELD- beginning to narrowing from the widening (like finding a spot and then narrowing right into it.

Exercises fro the practice


Preliminary preparation:
The choice of the stone:
in pairs talking about the choice of that particular stone and trying to relate it to a memory. talking about its qualities.
Then choosing a spot in the room to place the stone.
Movements practices:
warming up: walking in the space and noticing the breath then exaggerating the stomping of the feet using the rhythm of the breath. shaking, the back walking backward, using the surprise factor to wake up the body. 'surprise yourself' disturb yourself. 
Imagining your body being liquid, liquidizing the entire body. Using stillness of the body and waiting for the movement to come.
Recording practices
with clay. (each got given a ball of clay the instruction was to let our hand move through the ball with our eyes closed)
Writing about the previous experience
Then sharing with the same partner we have shared the stone history with.

Movement practices 2:
The yawning warm-up: Taking a big inhalation with mouth wide open, opening all the way down until a yawn comes. Letting movements come from it - awakening the body through the opening instead of feeling tiredness, stretching and breathing though a sense of vitality of movement coming through the rhythm of the yawn. feeling the tidal movement...

1. Closing your eyes, then opening and choosing a spot in the room, walking to it, feeling it in your body letting the imagination take over and impulsing movements. Then reiterate 3 times:
2. The last spot should be where you stone is.
3. Finding another partner and sharing the process and talking trough what that spot can be ( a landscape, a person, a memory, an emotion....)
4. Then choosing one of the three and writing about it, once again letting the imagination go.
5. Reading it to the partner 
6. The partner do a movement response for 5 minutes 
7. without transition the person who read her text start to take over the movement for 10 minutes.
8. Then talk about it and swap text

Rounding of the session:
On the floor each participant gives 1 or 2 words related to the stone and the experience.