Archive for November 2008

 
 

Timing, and Awareness.(1st)Response to Shelly’s Questions

Shelley’s 6 questions are great topical launch points for contemplating and writing about improvisation. Rather than explore each question directly I am going to take an over arching view of her admittedly overwhelming provocations and then hone down to relevant topical components. In order to even begin doing that effectively I’m going to use my practice as the context of my reflections.

The 6 questions bring up two main areas of enquiry for me; time, and presence. In discussing how I deal with these things in my own practice, I’ll begin with a reconfigured question of my own “How does one train time and presence for improvisation?”

Drawing on the practices of Julyen Hamilton, Pedro Ilgenfritz, Min Tanaka and Peter Ralston I have looked for commonalities, principles even, that have pragmatic application for improvising in performance. For me Ralston’s notions of ‘feeling-attention’, and ‘feeling-awareness’ manage to summarily capture and pragmatically elucidate commonalities between these practices.

Feeling-attention and feeling-awareness take into account that all of the body’s sensory data ie: taste, touch, hearing, sight, and smell are either perceived as bodily sensation or converted to sensation. For example if you pay attention to an object such as a ball coming towards you, you ‘feel’ its trajectory and ‘feel’ your response to catch or avoid it. A ball flying through space towards you also has its own time or duration. This duration is  something that can be felt when you put your attention on it.

In my own practice I have committed to an exercise of feeling my entire body at once, whilst paying attention to its relationship to the floor and gravity, as well as to ‘external’ events (people, movements, objects, space, light, sound, and time). I constantly work on this awareness as a whole awareness, rather than build up its fragments.. In my experience it is this cultivated attention that is at the core of presence. Invariably at times focus shifts to different emphases such as having an awareness only of the ball for a split second and losing sense of where my body is. When that happens I lose accuracy in my relative response both to the ball and to myself.

A component of a Julyen Hamilton exercise that I still use and adapt is to practice feeling duration of one minute. This can be done whilst being still, or whilst improvising solo, driving a car, or performing in an ensemble etc. I’ve particularly enjoyed playing with different timings and durations of movement events within that minute. Moving my body at high speeds tends to shift my sense of time radically, the same also applies when I move incredibly slowly. But a minute is a minute is a minute. Only my perception of it and the movements I am doing within that minute alters.

When dancing a duet and playing with this particular exercise there can be incredible differences of perception between the dancers. Particularly between how the two people are perceiving time and execute timing within that same minute. The perceptual variances are not useful for composition in performance if, within the duet I am out of relationship with my own time, and/or the time of my partner. By ‘out of relationship’ I mean not perceiving accurately, and therefore not being present to what’s actually happening. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if I am present to what’s happening I then have to augment, join, or follow my partners timing. I still have other choices eg; exaggerate, conflict with, ignore etc . But my ability to choose in any moment is considerably lessened if I don’t pay attention to the ball!

There is a lot more to be written on this but for now, time to go.

the present

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.

silence

there are so many events in her silence

Bagryana Popov, discussing Gladys Eastwood’s interview from 2000

proximity and time

From: Shelley Marshall <shelley.d.marshall@gmail.com>
Date: 20 November 2008 11:19:13 AM
Subject: ‘time’ . . . . something to muse about over summer

Dear <proximity> community

The March edition of <proximity> will be a special edition on the topic of ‘Time, the Present and History in Contact Improvisation’.  I (Shelley = boring old <proximity> editor) will be joined by Norbert Pape (= exciting wring in) to pull together the edition, with the help of the usual (fabulous) team. Norbert is a dancer and movement facilitator based in Frankfurt who was one of the creators of contactencyclopedia (http://contactencyclopedia.net/develop/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page – check it out if you haven’t already).

We’d love to include your writing, drawing, pictures, poetry, class plans, labbing ideas, MSN chats, interviews, . . . anything . . . on the topic in this special edition.

We have listed some questions we’re interested in as a point of departure – to get the lateral thinking juices flowing – but you can come at the topic from your own angle.

Shoot me an email if you’re interested in contributing and please send this email on to others who you think have an interest in the topic.  Contributions are due by January 20th (but we’d like to know something is on its way before then).

all the best

Shelley

PS My apologies if it isn’t summer where you are. Perhaps this is an interesting topic to muse over whilst in winter hibernation, also?

Time, the Present and History in Contact Improvisation

Some questions:

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’?)

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?)

3.    How do our personal narratives and history find their way into our bodies, our contact, our practice and performance?

4.    What happens when our sense of time, temporality, tense or of timing differs from that of our partner’s? (Can we utilise disruptions as much as we employ ‘effortless partnering’ and ‘flow’?)

5.    How does the collective history of contact improvisation find its way into our bodies, patterns and quality of movement and the contact between us? (How often do things have to be repeated in order not to be forgotten?)

6.    What place does the structured use of time have in improvisation? Do conscious repetitions, variations and time constraints have a place in CI or do they belong to instant composition?

What I’m Doing Now (KL)

In doing my Masters degree at University of Auckland I’m currently harvesting written and digital data in preparation for my research.  Up until now almost all of my work has been studio based ie: actually practicing improvisational dance and choreography with plenty of integrated reflective and reflexive work in the context of working in the profession. The result so far is a fairly extensive body of performance and teaching experience with little in the way of writing output. This is about to change.

Before I go on I want to note that this blog is the result of ongoing conversations between myself and Simon Ellis. In my personal experience its in conversations like these  that accurate and rich reflexivity about improvisational, choreographic and performative practices actually emerges.  I think I’ll qualify that statement as this blog develops.

In the meantime as I said earlier I am data harvesting. This is part of the hoop jumping exercise that is the academic process.  So I’m looking into theoretical and philosophical frameworks in order to qualify what it is that I already know and understand from practice.  It seems that justifying contemporary dance in contexts such as social, academic, artistic, financial etc is so deeply intrinsic in the practice of dance that it should be taught as a technique class at degree level.

Rather than list whose writings I’ve been looking into I will instead pluck out names and titles as the blog unfurls and hopefully this will be of benefit to whoever is tuning into this little nook of the net.  One name  I’ll throw out right now though is Peter Ralston.  A martial artist and teacher of considerable ability, his practice of Cheng Hsin has had a very deep impact on my work in improvisation.  Essentially an ontological enquiry, Cheng Hsin rigorously examines (amongst other things) perception and interaction at an experiential level. This work is ostensibly a practice of consciousness that is dynamic whilst simultaneously being internal and external.  What does that mean? Well that’s a book or two, but what it has resulted in is an ever increasing degree of accuracy of perception and skill and a greater degree of presence in my work. It has also led to practices in improvisation that I can apply to absolutely any activity and context I am engaged with.