Some writing I did in response to performances at The Little Con on 27 February 2009.

We only ever experience anything once.

Shirley McKechnie (chatting today over tea)

This is the second question from Shelley Marshall’s call for contributions to Proximity:

2. What tense is the present in? How expansive can the present be? (What does the present exclude? Can the present expand and bleed out to encompass the past and the future? Is it possible to experience a present which does not embody the past, and conversely, is it possible to experience the past except through the present? Is it possible to experience a present which is not in some way anticipating the next moment?)

I’ve been trying to address this stuff for Shelley, so thought I’d call on some Henri Bergson to answer it (again, trying very hard to be brief with the responses … to avoid the temptation to ramble on!).

Henri Bergson’s Pure Duration is a form of temporal synthesis, the “horizon of inner life” (Guerlac 2006 p.81) in which quality, feeling and sensation are experienced. It is the “data of consciousness” in which time is  de-spatialised (and as such any notion of time being linear is abandoned).

What does this have to do with the tense of presence?

To be present implies (whether we mean it or not) knowing where one is located. But, at the same time, we tend to refer to the temporal—of being in the now for example—as being a critical aspect of presence.

Bergsonian Duration frees the experience of presence from location or space. It marks the experience as a purely temporal one, but not one that is locked to the current. Rather, Duration exists in flight through the temporal*; it demands (gently) that presence be thought of as consciousness: as flow through memory, temporality, attention and novelty.

Now, here are my really short answers to Shelley’s questions:

The tense of duration.
Very.
Nothing.
Yes.
No & yes (although this answer requires a rethinking of what the ‘present’ is – ie, careful not to conflate ‘current’ with ‘present’).
No (although I think the word “anticipating” is not quite right here).

* It’s so difficult to write without invoking spatial metaphors!: “marks”, “through”. In other words, to write about presence denatures it. Writing is a spatialised act, its primary weapons are metaphors of space. It is nigh impossible not to feel clumsy when writing Duration.

I’ve been thinking about repetition in improvisation. This is because I’ve been working (for some time) with developing improvisations for quite specific ‘dramaturgical’ framings and seeking ways of arriving at presence within these framings.

Recently I have been working in Melbourne with choreographer/director Helen Herbertson, and we began talking about the “repeat” word. Helen said “going back to” – as a means of avoiding saying “Could you repeat that?”!

What is it to repeat an improvisation? To settle on the energetic essences of the physical actions, whilst maintaining an engagement with the new in the improvisations. The trade-off is clear in this kind of work: to try to locate the past but risk never arriving back at what it was that first engaged us/me, or to acknowledge a settled state of being that potentially reduces the quality of attention or engagement with the unknown.

The desire for me is to remain in the “first week” (or the first instance), whilst accessing (forward in time) the accumulation of the weeks of work. This is clearly impossible, but the idea might provide a flexibility in my attention and listening that quietly emboldens the promise of the past. Far from wanting to drop what has gone and simply move on, I am seeking to perform at the nexus of the known (but still unfamiliar and difficult to pin down) past and the surprising now.

(I’ve been writing a bit for Proximity and this writing is part of that engagement).

In her call for contributions to proximity, Shelley Marshall outlines a number of fantastically complex questions. The first of these is below. I plan to work through them, with the goal of speaking clearly and concisely. My answers will be rooted in the experiences of my performance/improvisation practice, and are offered as gentle, uncertain opinions.

1.    What does it mean to ‘stay in the present’ in improvisation? (How does this enhance our practice? What are the philosophical and political consequences of being committed to ‘the present’?)

To ‘stay in the present’ in (dance) improvisation is, I think, an engagement with attention. Attention to details in remembering, in what is seen, heard and felt (corporeally, emotionally). I experience it as a fluttering across these various levels and types of concentration. Sometimes ‘zooming in’ on the minutiae, other times zooming out to give room for more external stimuli.

Paradoxically it is not so much an experience of ‘now’. Rather my experience of time is a shifting between the immediate past (sometimes reaching far into my history) and (the possibilities of the) future, and in allowing this time travel to support my active/current perceptual experiences.

I don’t think ‘staying in the present’ enhances my practice, I see my practice as being about understanding and exploring presence – in various conditions, contexts and activities.

Philosophy and politics will have to wait.

there are so many events in her silence

Bagryana Popov, discussing Gladys Eastwood’s interview from 2000

I am in the studio, working with director/choreographer Bagryana Popov on her project, The Sunflower. She invites—or creates conditions for—lengthy improvisations in which I am exploring psychological and physical states, and also looking to hover in and out of these states (turning them on and off). The work involves playing with a range of (mostly) internal stimuli: imagination, memory, bodily tones.

What is most significant—in terms of our collaboration—is the very strong feeling of trust I feel in the space. This support, characterised by Bagryana’s “warm watching”, means I feel able (and welcome) to express a plethora of physical, conceptual and dynamic ideas (regardless of their ‘value’).