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.