We have been using this blog as a forum for sharing notes and resources between ourselves, having conversations and organising our research in a more linear way than perhaps it feels in the studio. This blog is also a space for us to extend our process, a place that encourages us to analyse and reflect upon our creative practice together. It enables us to present our written work as an indissociable element to our physical work.
As dance/movement artists, sharing our work at What Now! give us the opportunity to open our process and present our research. This is essential for us at this early stage as it allows us to legitimize our practice among a community of dance artists.
Thank you for your interest in our work. Feel free to take your time and read as much or as little as you wish. You can read notes in publishing order, or using labels on the side to select topics that interest you. We'll also be very happy to talk to you and answer any question you have.
We have extensively written about "what then" and "what now". But What next ?
In the near future, we are hoping to focus once more in our practical research, spending time in the studio working with our bodies. We plan to refine the method of interrogation of objects as well as further our questioning on object-embodiment-relationship. New strands of our project are also waiting to be explored such as object-function-body. We hope to finally be able attend to our idea of lineage and taxonomy of movement. Our aim is to create a score from the various elements we identified, with the intention to create a performance within the next year or so.
We also wish to explore our process through different media, working with installation, video, sound or text in order to develop and consolidate or processing machine as a skill.
Finally, we continuously seek opportunities to share our process in educational contexts, proposing many approaches to encourage questioning around areas of our research, such as embodiment, perception or exploring one's personal world.
We are looking for support both in the UK and in France to help us challenge and develop a practice that seems relevant to us in the present artistic context.
Elodie speaks about sensation in the post titled “Thoughts on sensation”. She talks about her experience of sensation as the interface between herself and the object as she stands back, allowing the object to present itself to her. As I understand Elodie’s description and the premise of phenomenology I can propose that through her exploration of the object, she is practising the phenomenological reduction. That is, she is setting aside what is known of the object.
The phenomenological perspective opens up the possibilities for information to come from things in themselves, and as we apply it- from the object. We want to source our physical work from ideas quietly possessed by the object, bringing these to our attention through a method which we are devising in quite a trial and error fashion.
‘My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”...’ M.Merleau-Ponty in Baggini & Stangroom, 2004 p.159.
Through our method, as through the phenomenological method, we seek to build eventually toward meaning, via some necessary reductions. In January we were working to build a method which could be replicated, we were trying to break down what happens sensually, perceptually, cognitively, physically and imaginatively when we approach an object as stimulus item. Here I think it is important to note that we are not going be stringent with terminology until that terminology has proved sufficient and necessary for naming parts of our endeavour. For example referring as I just have to the sensual, perceptual and cognate etc facets of experience seems clumsy as the parameters of each term are perhaps not mutually exclusive but since we are concerned with the experience of meeting the object, it is useful to both acknowledge as different, and ultimately reconcile the different qualities of information offered by our faculties....
So, hopefully having made it clear that we understand the impossibility of isolating entirely a faculty of investigation, I hope now to elucidate the rationale behind our endeavour to do so.
We have been thinking about “sourcing” in our process- how in all the approaches we might have to taking information from objects, we want to source this information from the experience we have of sensation, and find the methodology required to access a sensual experience of the object. This is experiential, with some differences noted between what is happening neurologically (for exploration at another time perhaps).
We understand sensation as the privileging of information from the object, a relationship which stimulates corporeal memories, a certain felt “something” (but what is the something that that is?). In some ways it is a trick to ask ourselves to attend to the experience of the flesh and nerves as awakened by the object because they are the medium through which the whole message is conveyed.
We were interested in Berkeley’s notion of objects as “collections of sensations” and Locke’s principle that the foundations of our knowledge are ideas perceived by sensation (e.g. in Baggini & Stangroom, 2004). In January we were quite systematic in approaching the objects through each of the senses. The process happened something like this:
-interrogating the object through the sense
-information travels in the body and generates more sensation
- we keep following the sensation to clarify it
-as the exploration takes hold the second layer of knowledge, imagination, association and memory are permitted/ encouraged to have influence on the dancing, carrying with them instances of meaning and ideas...
-as the physical info gets clearer still, we start to identify an embodied essence of the object and the movement tends to become more of a recognisable vocabulary.
We filmed episodes of explorations; interested in noting any consistency across the sense categories or object categories- this needs further development.
a glass jar with red lid
a blue hippo sponge toy
a yellow plastic egg spoon
a metallic pyramid ornament/ box
a red decorative ribbon
red and pink collapsible paper lampshades
a wooden peg
a heavy lead pipe
We were beginning to work with object-embodiment-relationship. We spent time looking at each object and noticing qualities that we felt that object proposed. We especially noted contradictory ideas proposed the object, and ideas which seemed to go against "natural affinities" such as large things having heaviness. There are problems with the word "natural" of course... For each object we discussed tensions in qualities such as the quality of being infinitely amenable without standing up to gravity but with lightness enough to hold some form unsupported (red ribbon.
As we were interrogating the objects we were drawing attention to the obvious physical/ structural properties which are perhaps overlooked through an understanding of what is necessary for the object to sustain it's designed function. For example, the peg possessed two materials and two halves. The peg also possessed energetic potential ( in the spring), a certain life-span subject to wear and tear, strength, bilaterality, one point of flexibility, flat surfaces, tension/ resistance.... All these observations could and did then provide information for our own movement explorations, proposing some strange ideas for us to inhabit.
Once we felt that we had begun to explore the objects verbally, identifying proposed properties and ideas, we systematically explored these physically, then taking time to discuss what was happening for each of us.
METHODS OF INTERROGATING OBJECT-EMBODIMENT-RELATIONSHIP
In January at Laban we worked for 10 days, repeating similar tasks with different objects and slightly different focusses, to make clearer the method of interrogating (taking information from the) object and understand the sorts of physical responses we might be able to generate from certain objects.
This research phase built directly upon the groundwork done in Canterbury. During the studio time at Laban we agonised over how we were attending to the objects, and got really serious about our methodology. We had previously felt the necessity for clarity in our use of language, often finding that we were working with different references, however during this phase the need for concurrence on terms was paramount as found ourselves getting more and more detailed. We noted how in the first instant of attending to the objects we were using the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell with a probable preference for sight and touch. We decided then to break down this process, trying to focus on each of the senses at a time. We were interested in investigating if different qualities of information arose from interrogating the object with different senses.
We worked with all combinations of the 5 senses and 2 objects: the piano and the metal object in the photo below. We filmed the danced responses/ processing and timed 7 minutes for each. We have watched the film footage back, interested to see if there is evident consistency either across the sense categories or with each object through all the sense categories. There are some clear correspondences, but not yet enough material gained to state a consistent trend. We will follow up with further research...
A few objects that we approached in our January research phase.
Some questions/ thoughts that arose:
Notre projet est avant tout un projet de recherche chorégraphique.
Nous souhaitons développer une méthode créative qui nous soit propre et par là même explorer notre identité artistique.
Notre recherche a pour point de départ notre intérêt commun pour la relation entre le corps et l'objet et ce qu'elle reflète de notre relation au monde qui nous entoure.
Notre démarche est dans une certaine mesure le prolongement de nos travaux individuels précédents, notamment nos mémoires de BA. En effet, nous faisons appel aux théories de phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty et à la sensation telle que l'a décrite Deleuze. De plus nous attachons une grande importance à la perception physique et viscérale et à la mémoire musculaire comme empreinte de l'expérience. Nous tentons donc d'une part de nous fier à l'intelligence du corps plutôt qu'à l'intellect dans notre travail pratique, tout en attachant, d'autre part, une grande importance à l'analyse et la formalisation de notre processus.
Notre recherche s'articule autour de deux axes qui sont la taxinomie et l'histoire personnelle (que nous réservons temporairement pour plus tard) appliquées aux mouvements et aux objets.
Dans notre processus, nous détournons le protocole taxinomique, c'est-à-dire la classification, la dénomination et le regroupement systématique d'éléments (généralement des espèces vivantes), que nous transposons aux objets et aux mouvements. Nous appliquons des critères subjectifs à ce système rationnel et observons par conséquent ce que ces choix révèlent de nos affinités et tendances personnelles. Que se passerait-il, par exemple, si l'on organisait les objets d'une maison non plus par leurs fonctions (les ustensiles de cuisine dans la cuisine, les vêtements ensemble, etc) mais suivant ce que l'on en perçoit instinctivement ? Quelle serait la nature de ce nouvel univers, reflet de notre monde intime ?
Afin de mettre en relation le corps et l'objet, nous explorons l'incarnation physique (embodiement en anglais) des propriétés essentielles subjectives d'objets en essayant de répondre à la question "what is the something that that is ?".
Lors de notre dernière période de travail (Laban Centre, Janvier 09), nous avons décortiqué puis analysé le processus qui conduit de l'interrogation de l'objet à son incarnation. Les différentes étapes que nous avons identifiées et isolées constituent l'ébauche d'un protocole d'improvisation que nous appelons "the processing machine". Celui-ci nous permet de distiller par le mouvement dansé, ainsi qu'à travers d'autres média (verbalisation, vocalisation, dessin, etc) l'information physique, presque tangible, glanée au contact de l'objet. L'improvisation nous permet de clarifier cette information pour en capter l'essence. En effet, notre première réponse physique sert de point de départ au mouvement. L'approfondissement de l'exploration corporelle de cette information primaire stimule la mémoire musculaire ainsi que l'imagination et la connaissance qui contribuent à leur tour à distiller l'information originale. Ces multiples strates sont autant d'éléments qui alimentent à leur tour la distillation.
L'improvisation est donc à la fois le processus et une partie de son produit.
Bien qu'ayant pris le parti de nous détacher des préoccupations de production pour un temps, il nous tient à cœur que ce projet aboutisse à la création d'une pièce chorégraphique. Nous considérons les différents éléments de notre méthode comme autant d'outils de composition qui pourront être utilisés pour la création d'une partition d'improvisation.
Enfin, nous avons conscience d'être à un stade précoce de notre travail sur la taxinomie du mouvement. De nombreuses questions restées en suspens n'attendent qu'à être explorées. Quelle est la nature de la relation entre l'objet et son incarnation ? Comment cette relation est-elle affectée par le contexte, par d'autres objets et la présence de l'autre danseuse ? Notre processus de distillation peut-il s'appliquer à d'autre média (photographie, installation, vidéo) ?
C'est une des raisons pour lesquelles notre collaboration prend une seconde forme en dehors de nos périodes en studio: nous utilisons un blog (http://janineandelodie.blogspot.com) comme plateforme pour publier les compte-rendus de notre recherche, échanger nos pensées sur certains aspects théoriques du travail, clarifier une partie du processus ou la terminologie que nous utilisons. Ce blog nous permet de maintenir un dialogue permanent entre nous. Notre travail peut ainsi exister en dehors de nos rencontres et devient une entité autonome en constante évolution.
