Independent Dance Forum

January 24, 2012

PAL is delighted to announce the winners of our research and development bursaries as part of The Movement and Meaning Lab. This laboratory is an on-going experimental research process begun in February 2011 by Gill Clarke MBE, the pioneering dancer, movement specialist and teacher who inspired a generation of intelligent contemporary dance artists. Gill started her enquiry, in partnership with PAL, to examine the relationship between Movement and Meaning with a group of dance practitioners, artists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, social anthropologists and others interested in ‘embodied practice’. She continued to work with us to extend our exploration beyond the world of dance until the day before she died on 15 November 2011, at the age of 56, after a long struggle with cancer.

The bursaries of £2,500 each are towards exploratory research (rather than finished works) offering support for four trans-disciplinary creative teams to develop the first stage or pilot for testing new ideas for future development. Each collaborative team includes at least one dance artist.

We were overwhelmed by the quality and integrity of thought in the applications that we received and are thrilled that we are able to offer two more bursaries than originally planned thanks to the generosity of Gill Clarke’s estate.

The four bursaries have been awarded to:

Kate Genevieve and Genevieve Maxwell - Genevieve is a Dance/Movement artist and Choreographer, with a practice rooted in Anthropology and Somatics. Kate is an Audio Visual Artist and researcher whose work focuses on immersive performance experiences. Genevieve and Kate both fell and broke their spines some years ago, an experience which led both of them to an ‘out of body experience’ during the fall, encouraging a line of enquiry into where and how movement can be felt. The rituals experienced in attempting to heal from this experience contrasted greatly, from Kate’s experience of ritual in the Amazon, to Genevieve’s alienating NHS experience and subsequent disability, wielding different results. They will be working in collaboration with the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, including a series of meetings with Neuroscientist Dr Anil Seth (Co-Director) structured around his research into the neurocognitive mechanisms of conscious presence. Their research will focus on the phenomenal possibilities of immersive and body responsive technology, to build firm foundations for further artistic development as well as an opportunity to for a public showing.

Carolyn Deby - is a choreographer who will be working with UCL Urban Laboratory (Director 2005-11) Prof Matthew Gandy, Urban Geographer; Prof Ben Campkin, Director, UCL Urban Laboratory / Lecturer in Architectural History & Theory; Alexandra Baybutt — freelance performer, choreographer, facilitator, analyst, writer and collaborator and Pia Nordin — freelance dancer, teacher, and sirenscrossing performer/collaborator. Carolyn writes…I am interested in the collision between the built environment of cities and the forces of the natural world. It seems to me that the human body is itself the repository and the meeting point for all the conflicts, dreams and fragments that are generated on the border between concrete and green. I am most interested in the places where the city cracks open, or is forgotten: the places where decay and dereliction open up the possibility of seeing the city in an altered light. — C Deby

Adam James - is a visual artist and Royal College of Art graduate who will be working with movement practitioners Andrew Graham and Paola Di Bella, with David Gothard as their Mentor. Their enquiry proposes a collaboration between movement practitioners and visual artist in which body-based movement is used as a tool for questioning the paradoxical relationship between the artist’s role as spectator, and the notional ‘outsider’ lurking within society. In a series of compositions exploring oppositions and equivalents referred to in Jaques Ranciere’s ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Adam will investigate the equivalence of theatre and community, seeing and passivity, externality and separation, mediation and simulacrum; oppositions between collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self possession and alienation.

Frank Bock - is a performance maker, dance artist and psychotherapist who will be collaborating with Astrid Shillings, a clinical psychologist/ whole body focusing teacher from Cologne. They will explore the concept of body laid out in Eugene Gendlin’s ‘ A Process Model’ (1997), a philosophical text which sets out to describe interaction as being first before there is anything else. Gendlin’s conception of the living body is interaction. Implications of this work are being discussed across science and arts and this text is an early precursor to these new paradigms of thinking.
PAL Chair, Roanne Dods, is working closely with PAL’s Founder Artistic Director, Susan Benn, to oversee these pieces of research and to continue the further development of the Movement and Meaning enquiry. All the bursary winners will be presenting their work-in-progress as a part of a 2 day symposium at the Siobhan Davies Studios to be held on May 12th-13th 2012.

More information about this gathering will be published in due course. For further information please call Susan Benn on 07824636933 or email susanbenn@pallabs.org

http://www.pallabs.org/news/pal_announces_four_movement_meaning_lab_bursaries/

The 25^th October; just a bog standard Tuesday evening one would think. Not, however, at Siobhan Davies Studios. The largest gathering of thinkers, creators and movers I ever seen at a Crossing Borders event thronged through the building’s reception, swarming their way up to the roof studio in anticipation. A credit, I think, to Gill Clarke; who’s immense intelligence and deeply somatic and innovative understanding of the body begs a substantial following of artists, scientists and dancers.

Gill begins to talk, prompted by Sue Davies, on her own journey as a dancer into a more somatic and experiential considering of the physical form. After technical vocational training, and a stint dancing for Sue Davies, Gill described how her perceptions changed radically when she started working with contact improviser and Body-Mind Centering practitioner Jeremy Nelson. Over 10 days of ‘very little movement but a lot of visualisation’, Gill proposed that her movement changed over this short expanse of time. Made more aware of bodily structure and its relationship to the ground, there is an increase in sensory information and energy flow, and movement seems to become directed by sensation rather than by specific intention. The body is more aware of itself moving, giving way to a deeply connected and grounded dancing experience and a more informed performativity.

We then move on to that ever expansive question… what is Dance? Gill remarks intriguingly that people can only recognise what dance is when confronted with something that definitely isn’t. We are constantly in negotiation, in conversation with a persistently changing environment which shifts and develops alongside evolutionary intelligence. Through our understanding of this, an acceptance of the inability to actually really pin down what dance is seems to become important. Perhaps the nature of dance itself is that you can’t capture it in one description or definition. It has the potential to take on more and more forms and meanings as our perceptions develop and deepen. Gill describes this in her approach as releasing ‘the muscular thought and bodily containment to alter our perception and find something deeper’. Movement then becomes the resource of dance. Dance is unto itself.

Gill then goes on to describe dance as a kind of currency. Like an aural tradition, it is passed through bodies and it changes and develops depending on the unique attributes of the human form that it inhabits. This can be seen through the choreographer’s and teacher’s roles. When these become more about dance facilitation; where a situation is set up so that learning is possible rather than a mere transference of information. A great knowledge seeker herself, Gill has read more books than one could possibly count, and describes this importance of learning through finding something out yourself as fundamental, an aspect of life that that helps us to evolve. Gill’s approach is naturally all about exploration; it’s less deliberate, less predictable. It’s not about appropriation; it’s about tuning in, pairing away, embracing the process and being in the moment. This ‘pairing away’ Gill describes is a little like the scientific process, such a practice also engages in the simplicity of stripping down the amount of variables involved. Everything in this process is considered and influences the final findings, and in dance terms final performance, even though they may not be immediately present. The only difference of course is the lack of a definitive answer. The results of this pairing process may well be sets of questions themselves, feeding back into the process and propelling it on, an evolutionary momentum with an indefinite amount of possibilities.

Gill then moves on to consider the influence of meaning-making during moving, especially through performance. It is important to let the movement speak, and to give imagination its role to play, however the unsayable is also valid, for example, the pulse speaks, our bodies use movement as communication without sometimes even being aware of it. Why then can’t we use this movement as our own theatrical language? Dance is struggling to validate itself as a discipline because we speak in movement, and this cannot always be recognised within traditional forms of academic communication. How do we harness language from our own practice without alienating others?

Gill stipulates that through this disciplinary openness and ambiguity there must be some element of rigor and purpose. This often comes in the form of theorising the concept that the movement provokes, rather than the movement itself. There is some form of distributed cognition that makes the dancer tune into their movement, and in turn allows the audience to see the embodiment. This, according to Gill, is the difference between dancing and not dancing. There is a sincerity and powerfulness in the ability to be able to keep the gift of experience in the moment without having to talk about it and assign it to a theoretical concept. It can be unto itself.

And so in true Gill Clarke style the talk ends in a seemingly organic circle back to the initial question of what dance is. An expertly crafted and articulated aural essay that seems to just glide effortlessly out of Gill’s stream of consciousness, deeply intelligent ponderings that settle like feathery layers of understanding to create a completely clear sense of comprehension within the listeners, who through their intent attention rapidly nod their heads in agreement.

Gill Clarke died on November 15^th 2011, exactly 3 weeks after giving this talk. Her strength and determination shone through even more vividly during her final few weeks of life. She never faltered in her generosity and immense passion for dance and knowledge; a legacy that will continue within the hearts and lives of everyone she touched. It is hard to put into words how much she meant to the dance world, and perhaps true to the final statements in her last talk, our sentiments will play out through a deeper understanding of our own bodies, through her teaching.

Crossing Borders – 11^th October with Guy Claxton

It might seem unusual that Crossing Border’s next guest, cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist Guy Claxton, seems so at home amongst dancers and artists alike. He appears as part of the first in a series of talks resulting from PAL’s Movement and Meaning Labs which’s aim, in line with that of the previous Crossing Borders talks, is to ponder the questions and artistic potential that surrounds cross-collaboration. However the gap between the ‘logical’ science discipline and the ‘creative’ dance world for me can sometimes seem more like a gigantic chasm rather than a hair-line border with osmotic potential. Claxton believes otherwise, and carries on to completely fuse the two in a mere hour and a half, leaving everyone in the room wide-eyed.

The cavernous space of the Siobhan Davies roof studio suddenly feels more intimate as Claxton begins to speak, his voice confident and inviting. The room bristles with excitement as Gill Clarke warmly introduces this acclaimed writer and author of the innovative success Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. Claxton’s work to date has centred on his enthusiasm for teaching, which has been heavily influenced by his own Buddhist practice.  He speaks about his interest in the link between mind and body, and the intriguing concept of unconscious autonomous intelligence.

Claxton starts to explain the interesting ways your mind seems to work things out for itself while you are completely unaware. Giving meditation as an example, an issue that I’m sure a lot of people come across, he explained that good ideas; those which may not arrive fully if you try and will them to, seemed to come along by themselves whilst he was trying to concentrate on his breathing during meditation.

This is something I certainly came across whilst writing my undergraduate dissertation. I surprised myself by how little time it took for me to grind to a writing halt. For about an hour and half I would write continuously, with little attention paid to editing my work, however after this time it felt as if my brain had taken on a greyish hue, my eyes turned into rectangles and my face felt slanty. At this point I had to leave my seat; sometimes mid sentence – my words would just flap away like trapped birds willing to escape, and I would not return for at least two hours. I’d go for a walk, wash up, do laundry – anything physical. And the interesting thing was that during these times I had my most inspired ideas, where they came from I can’t say, but my mind seemed to store them all up ready for another 1 ½ hour full-pelt laptop marathon. Slow progress one might think, but my productivity during my writing times was increased tenfold.

It is interesting then, as Claxton brings up, how the education system in this county has developed. Children are encouraged to sit at a desk and work for hours at a time, and are taught that comprehension comes before competence. When, in fact learning through doing, through physicality, encourages wider brain usage and capacity. Claxton remarkably explains that the physical and verbal attributes of the brain actually derive from the same root. With this in mind, he asks the audience of mainly dance artists whether speech during movement seems integrated. Clarke notes that they do feel separate, and part of two different mindsets. I can partly agree with this, I find speaking and moving incredibly difficult and somehow incongruous. However using language through writing comes naturally, and as writing can be considered a physical act, I find words come so much easier through this method than if I was to speak and move. I think of myself as fairly articulate with language, but when it comes to verbally expressing myself, I struggle and often sound as if my IQ has dropped by about 50%. So it’s the physical act of writing, the movement, which encourages and develops my cognition. It’s is also the fact that writing allows you to think before you write, and also move around before you commit to paper. It could be said then that language is a tool of expression, and the verbalisation of such requires a different process all together. Claxton also mentions that movement in children is often a lot more mature than their words, and therefore if deprived of movement, children find it harder to understand. Why then is the education system forcing children to understand the concepts of things before they are given a chance to try it out? This also true in my experience as a musician, if playing something by memory, it’s a complete waste of time to try and remember the notes or picture the stave, or even hear the music. It’s the muscle memory I fall back on, the way my body moves around the instrument; which only comes if you try and disregard everything else.

Claxton mentions that the common perception is that we think in consciousness, not so, according to Claxton, in fact we think into consciousness. By slowing down we notice the act of conscious thoughts arising; in the form of ‘glimmerings’ and ‘inklings’. From a phenomenological point of view, we often disregard the act of perception as automatic and immediate, when in fact perception is active and can be directed. It becomes a form of ‘doing’. It is a building up of imagined images that derive from pre-judgements due to a lack of mental capacity and an inability to process countless possibilities and outcomes. This is what some phenomenologists call a frontality of perception. We understand something through our previous engagement with it; it is integrated into our perception which therefore feeds our knowledge.

So, if perception is a form of doing, and movement equals giving your brain some space and time to think on its own, and if this movement equals better, more informed ideas, then why do we force children to focus 100% of the time? I for one am glad to have figured this out early on, before I stick myself behind a desk for the rest of my life.

Right – I need a washing up break.

Crossing Borders – 4th October - Ben Duke

Ben Duke sits at ease on a sofa below the majestic ribboned ceiling of the Siobhan Davies studios. His appearance here comes as part of Independent Dance’s annual series of talks called Crossing Borders. The series aims to challenge and question the ideas behind inter-disciplinary work, and explores the ways in which different art forms can be enriched and informed through cross-collaboration. In collaboration itself with The Place’s postgraduate course Edge, and this time also with PAL (performing arts labs), Crossing Borders brings to its platform Lost Dog co-founder and choreographer, Ben Duke. From a company renowned for its inter-disciplinary use of movement, theatre, text and live music, Duke’s seems like a perfect brain to pick to kick-start this series of talks.

Sat in front of an impressively sized audience for the first in a series, Duke begins to contemplate how the concept of crossing the disciplinary border is addressed in his own choreographic work. He talks about beginning with a story and characters, the way one would assume a theatre director would begin. However he goes on to describe how his approach to ‘story’ is not necessarily in the linear narrative sense. He speaks of expanding a single moment, and exploring the millions of possible moments that could take place within a mere couple of seconds. Almost a theatrical approach to chaos theory, Duke explains how within his work these minute moments are stretched, sometimes through the use of dance or other abstract forms, to create a sense of parallel realities. As an agent of illusion, the physicality of movement seems to emerge, dream-like and embedded through an immersive narrative as a way of generating believable frames for the dance.

To create engaging pieces of work that successfully combine dance, text, music and narrative without ending up with a spangly tits and teeth musical theatre piece requires some serious thought. It begs the age-old question, mulled over by audiences and choreographers alike, how do you make it so that the characters within a piece believably choose to dance? Duke asks ‘how do you bridge the gap between reality and an abstract reality?’.  He provides us with an undesirable example of musical theatre and its harsh changes between spoken text and show-tunes (group-shudder).

The answer to this seems to hover around a certain element of subtlety. He describes a delicate balance between providing the framing devices of narrative and character for the dance in order to tie the piece together concisely and not leave the audience utterly perplexed, yet also leaving enough space for ambiguity and imagination. The level at which an audience’s emotions are directed can be controlled through the subtle marriage of text and movement. A choreographer must take control of an audience’s emotional journey through the piece if they have any hope of communicating some tangibly emotive meaning or leaving behind a form of reactive residue. Duke describes his use of layering as a way of inducing subtlety and combating the clunkyness that could arise if movement and text are put together haphazardly. By allowing an expansion of the audience’s imagination through carefully constructing this blurred connection between theatre and dance, the audience member then has the agency to interpret what they see differently. They can relate it to their own lives to make it more emotionally relevant, rather than some distant story about some removed characters that may or may not bare any social or cultural relationship to the viewer. Duke also adds here that in the building and layering of character; when developed in conjunction with text and theatre and most importantly improvisation, a feeling of immediacy can be conjured. Through the use of improvisation, characterisation and physicality can be kept alive, leading the audience to believe (but at the same time not really believe) that this series of events unfolding on stage is happening for the first time. A sensitive balance between letting the audience know that this is a performance (yes, very Brechtian) and tempting them to become emotionally involved within the story creates this two-way pull that seems to fuse the use of dance and theatre. Almost like saying – yes, audience, I know this is completely unbelievable because two people wouldn’t ever go from a very verbal confrontation to a twisty-turny-lovely-dancey phrase in normal life but, oh, don’t we wish we could… wouldn’t it make so much more sense…

Sitting in a circle at the end of a class, someone shared that they experience Continuum as the opportunity for our mind to fall in love with our body. I liked this and I think it captures the essence of what Continuum makes available; an awaken to the pleasure of living within a body that has the ability to dance with the mind in an unlimited variation of responses, not trapped by predictability. 

This predictability is essentially what happens when we are caught in the process of learning from our past experiences. It is our instinctual body reacting to invisible messages from the past, leaving us to re-experience our hurts, our wounds, and ensuring that we not make the same mistake again. We are left living an endless repetition, attempting to maybe, this time, understand and move beyond.

I have come to love our humanness. Living with an instinctual brain that only wants to survive, yet dances next to a creative neo-cortex that wishes to discover and describe, and with a body trying to keep up with all of the brain’s instructions. I am being a little tongue in cheek, but life can be like this.

Continuum creates a shift of balance, where the wisdom of the body is given as much credence as the mind. When I am speaking of ‘body’ Emilie Conrad, (the founder of Continuum) makes a powerful distinction.

“Commonly, when we speak of the ‘body’, we refer to a defined boundary that features a head, two arms and legs, and encompasses a very specific locale. This description is necessary to know that I am feeding my mouth and not yours, which is basic to survival.

In Continuum, we recognize that the body is mutable, multi-functional and containing a process that is not defined by boundaries. What Continuum calls a ‘body’ is movement — a dance of cells, molecules and interpenetrating wave motions. All of these movements stabilize in order to function in the environment of planet earth. Beyond conventional functioning exist domains of an unfathomable fluid mystery. We could say that all has been forgotten of this legacy except for our primordial pulsating, undulating environment of blood, organs, membranes and connective tissue.”

Already a new world is opening up, and one of the central teachings of Continuum is that all fluids of the body - the circulating blood, the tides of cerebrospinal fluid, the surge of the lymph system, the net of membranes, or the swirl of viscera and brain - function as fundamentally one stream of intelligence.

This echoes the precepts of cranial sacral therapy where maintaining changes in our own fluid mobility is essential for optimal health and self-renewal. All fluids, whether in the cell, the body, or the planet, function as a resonant intelligent whole and can never be separated.

In Continuum, we refer to this in its entirety as the fluid system and recognize its ancestral and essential role in healing, movement, and fundamental wisdom.

Where our body is resonating with the planet, we are connected and in harmony, and our thoughts begin to reflect this. We have the capacity to release from the tissues in our body the tensions that maintain our history.

Central to Continuum is breath, and perceiving how our breath moves within us.

All movement originates with breath. Fixations, compensatory patterns, family history, trauma and emotional stress are all maintained in the freedom or inhibition of breath. By engaging with variations in breathing, we are able to stimulate a wide spectrum of internal sensations, responses, and movements. Healing, growth, and all mobility, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, are enhanced by the dexterity of breath.

The other elements we bring into the practice of Continuum are sound and movement. Sound is audible breath, penetrating the density of locked tissue. It eases mobility while releasing areas of stagnation and stress. Specific sound frequencies engage various systems of the body. By coupling sound with movement, we increase the agility of both. Sounding further connects us with each other and to the resonant whole, providing another source for communication.

Continuum’s movements are designed specifically to enhance the undulating spirals and circularity of the fluid system. A full range of non-patterned movement, from dynamic full-bodied expression to subtle micro-movements, stimulates neurological growth and vibrancy. Undulating wave motion permeates tissue, softens boundaries and amplifies sensation. Wave motion is the primary access to our bio-intelligence that is not bound by time, space or condition.

We use sensation as a guide for awakening the body’s mysteries and as the activating principle of the life force that feeds and nurtures the entire system, a Continuum that engenders Self-Renewal.

It is a practice that is taught in groups, where the group creating sound together creates a larger field of resonance.

www.continuummovement.com

www.lovesbody.co.uk

Jane Okondo.

jane@lovesbody.co.uk

Hosted by PAL on Sunday 19th June 2011

at
Siobhan Davies Studios
85 St George’s Road
London SE1 6ER

‘We are in continuous movement, acting upon and responding to our environment. It is the means through which we learn, make sense of, and create new meanings within the world of which we are a part. Our sense of ourselves is realised in being present, moment by moment…and yet our embodied knowledge and nature remain largely absent from our personal and cultural awareness, dominated as we tend to be in the west by visual perception and the verbal conceptualising of experience.’

Dancers’ attention is focused on being present in the moving body as the raw material of choreographic creation and performance. Could the skills and knowledge that are the fruits of their inquiry and labour have a wider currency and relevance beyond Dance?

What are the questions current within dance inquiry and what kinds of knowledge embedded in its practices might fuel fruitful connections with experts in other fields?

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Background

In February 2011 PAL hosted a Lab, directed by dance artist Gill Clarke of ID, with the aim of putting movement experience and embodied knowledge at the heart of an trans-disciplinary discussion. Participants explored ways that the concerns of dance practice could act as a catalyst to promote future conversations and collaborations beyond the dance world.

This public event aimed in part to bring forward ideas generated within the Lab and to stimulate further trans-disciplinary conversations, inter -actions, fed by dancers’ knowledge and acknowledging our embodied nature.

Participants brought with them their own questions, wonderings, interests around the topic. these were accumulated onto a wall of questions:and will be posted very shortly…

Please do add your comments, post event reflections, ideas, suggested readings/viewings….

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Movement and Meaning - Wall of Questions

Participants were asked to ‘bring with you a question that drives you in relation to the topic, an area you would like to explore, an experiment you would like to make happen. (You may have more than one!).

• How does one write about dance in ways that convey enough of its texture to allow readers to imagine it?
• Relationship and influence between contemporary history world and movement,  choreography, aesthetics 
• The connection between the moving body and the moving camera
• I am interested in how I can approach movement with people who have limited possibilities of movement because of a particular condition, regardless of what condition
• Meaningful movement for me is when a person can truly be her or him self. When the social codes and ways of behaving are secondary
• It occurs to me that our vocabulary/ies need to be unpicked eg ‘discipline’, ‘practice’, ‘flow’ ‘structure’…
• What ‘s the relation between ‘aesthetics’ and ‘efficiency’ in movement performance?
• What in (or of) dance cannot be translated to other fields?
• If dance isn’t a universal form, what is it that we are we talking about? A history? A genealogy? A sort of ‘tradition’?
• Being in the present always presupposes having lived in the past; this past is a continuously carried and transformed experience. How can a performer be stimulated and absorbed by present moment and not get lost in past? (especially when s/he performs a rehearsed material)?
• I see the meaningful mover/performer as our modern days shaman
• How can some of the methodologies used by artists throughout the creative process be used to develop better systems within the education system, healthcare, local transport, social services etc…within the community at large?
• The importance of body practices in the aid to reduce tumours
• I have two roughly equal homes. Since I have been in that situation I often get cofused when trying to cook, as if without realising it I had recipes printed on my body. Could ‘movement people’ help understand better that kind of process?
• How does( or can) dance training complement fitness training ( those who work in sport) or military training, police, security forces…?
• How is it possible to make experiential work less ‘wooley’ without losing its innate qualities?
• How do we write dance? Can we only ever write about dance? And if so what does that about describe ?
• Dance and Medical Profession – How can the methods/practices used by dancers to increase consciousness of our bodies, and thus influence our relationship with our bodies, be utilised by the individual patient to build a sense of empowerment throughout their treatment, management of chronic pain, recovery etc. …..?
• Architects and urban designers frame people’s movement, interactions, and meanings in space. Could working with dancers/choreographers help them attend better to that dimension of their work?
• How might we escape existing codes in movement? In interpretation?
• How do we get articles on the somatic viewpoint into mainstream media?!
• Movement and spirituality.
• Can we use dance as a way of stilling all the pressures and distractions which teenagers experience, to reach a point where they can access concepts and ideas – thereby allowing them to become absorbed in their learning?
• We heard that ‘perception and imagination = meaning’. Is there a correlation between the balance of these two stimuli in the performer and in the spectator? How does this work (if so)?
• Something to do with understanding ‘presence’ in relation to the overwhelming presence of screens. And how ‘consciousness’ and ‘movement/action’ fit into this puzzle.
• How does creativity and freedom in movement relate to structure and form? How does it relate to the embodiment of techniques?
• How do we account for change in a process that is in continuous movement? Starts, stops, instantaneous points.
• What would Research of exploratory work look like if we transcended mind-body division?
• How would social analysis itself change if the work of dance or research theatre (my area of work) are recognised as thinking tools?
• What happens to long, slow, processes of Reflection, if we work towards Thinking that is Responsive to the here and now?
• If cognition is understood as situated – that the practices/activities done in tandem shape thinking – then how is dance and theatre work different to Reading, Writing, Reflecting?
• What do we come to know about ourself through movement?
• Does moving away from the city mean sacrificing connections?
• How can we use creative practices/choreographic structures to foster Emotional Literacy in children and adults.
• How can we understand (and perhaps choreograph) embodied movements or language within a wider environment of energetic, spatial patterns of movement in our environment? i.e. particular social settings or urban or natural environments? Are we separate of implicit?
• How can embodied meaning created by bodies be choreographically in conversation with non-bodies? (systems, movements, trends, energetic fields…in the environment).
• I am interested in motion as e-motion. My question is: How can the moving body, as the locus of emotional experience, transmit emotion into motion?
• Can movement language ever be free from meaning?
• Where is the movement?
• Where is the meaning?
• What do we mean by ‘meaning’ in a dance context?
• How is the concept of ambiguity of meaning reconciled in movement context?
• How and where do practitioners with diverse experiences and backgrounds, fit and find an outlet in the movement context or beyond?
• As believers in the meaning of movement, is it important that we agree on all using a system to give meaning to movement e.g Laban, Jung, Kestenberg, Bartenieff? If we do not agree how else can we get our theories accepted by mainstream science/health?
• How do we find a body-speaking that can allow the knowing of movement (movement knowing) to be heard on the same level as the knowing of language (writing knowing)?
• My question, which is not really a question but as somebody new to professional dance is something I would like to know: The purpose of contemporary dance. I am familiar with therapy but I’d like to know about contemporary dance professionally.
• Arts/Science = in government/?  Enquiry and verification of ideas, process, means etc. It seems to have to ‘fit’ a pre-described mould. How can we change / open up the language, modes of enquiry?
• How can we get the message out about the benefits of somatic practice?
• A genuine and in-depth engagement with the unsayable
• What might embodied knowledge reveal about what we don’t know that we don’t know as well as what we know that we don’t know
• Choreography as a political act
• How can a dancer’s corporeal intelligence help us understand dance/corporeal history?
• In what ways does the social/cultural/political context shape movement? And how does movement shape culture?
• Movement as ”intended”: for inter-cultural and inter-specied (professional) communication. How to learn? How to teach this? (re. healing, health and social care practice, research, conservation.
• What are the various modes of recording/documenting people (dancers/choreographers/others, e.g. science researchers) choose and/or prefer to adopt in the creative process? Are there differences between what is personal and what will be shared? 

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With thanks to the Jerwood Foundation, Esmee Fairburn and ACE.

Interviews with Deborah Hay, who leads the ID produced Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP) each year in Findhorn, Scotland.

Deborah Hay Interview 1

Deborah Hay Interview 2

Deborah Hay: What if…? Excerpts from  A Lecture on the Performance of “Beauty” at Cooper Union, NYC

Enjoy!

Notes from a discussion led by Frey Faust (creator of The Axis Syllabus) in June 2010 as part of the Independent Dance programme.

The historical importance of human movement training science in the maintenance and evolution of our body’s design

Human Locomotion in the Gravitational Field
anthropological argument
aquatic phase
persistence hunting
dance and the evolution of human bipedalism

Many of the well-intended exercise regimes and physio-therapeutic approaches I have observed seem not take into account that the daily task of locomotion uses asymmetrical, sequentially deployed support systems that require coordination for negotiating a shifting perspective and a wide variety of speeds. With near uniformity, they all insist on a simultaneous activation of both arms and legs or the folding of both hips or the folding of the body trunk in a single direction as a starting point. According to recent neuro-science, our brains grow or shrink depending on the challenges we set it. If this is true, then it would be logical to assume that the over-simplification of our perception of the three dimensional field we inhabit to bisecting right angles and 40 degree diagonals could limit the ability of the nervous system to respond to situations where the appreciation and use of a more subtle geometry would save time and injury. It is interesting to note, that in most training approaches the world over, multi-axial motions are limited to essentially bi-axial circumduction. Also, in many dancers preparations, there is an attempt to approach dynamic states while maintaining postures more appropriate to static ones.

It should be obvious to all of us by now that muscle strength and motor control are not equivalents. Conditioning can provide support, but will not protect us from coordination-related injury, nor will conditioning improve our ability to execute movements with more integration and alignment. Many training systems regularly work with static, rectilinear postures, or repetitive, mono-axial, single-plane movements that do not reflect the sophistication of everyday motion, such as normal walking. Such methods, instead of reinforcing or improving on good habits, can cause the student to remove natural patterns of appropriate weight distribution that are vital to efficient motion, setting them up for rapid decline and injury. Rectilinear stretches that push the joints to the maximum and beyond do nothing to insure alignment and security in dynamic situations either. The deciding factor in efficiency is in the deployment of kinetic energy and inertial principles for stress-reduction. This issue remains absent in many or most standard approaches. I would like to ask the entire industry to re-examine their training systems in the light of human locomotive needs, and call on my colleagues assist me in devising logical ways to prepare the people who place themselves in our care for real life.

Each living organism gathers itself into pouches and tubes, within pouches and tubes (Stanley Kelleman), and defines an external membrane, barrier or limitation to monitor exchange with the environment, and in so doing sets parameters for activity. Within these parameters, the variations are limitless and unpredictable when allowed; the fractal, an infinite line in a finite space. Dimension and movement, density and mass; all are inextricably linked to physics.
Over millions of years, anyone who has instructed their children in the appropriation of inherited gestures and postures, or anyone who has simply procreated has passed on a genetic legacy of instinctive scientific inquest into kinetic energy generation, conservation and loss inside of the earth’s gravitational field.

Perhaps it is also pertinent to note that the current humanoid species has been around, more or less in its present form for at least the last 4 million years. This could mean that the solution to moving that our ancestors found 4 million years ago is still valid today, and if this is so, it would also be logical to assume that they knew a thing or two about how to use the body, even way back then. This prospect dwarfs every modern training system… and I include our oldest recorded ones… because what does 3 or 6000 years have on 4 million?
In an emergent universe such as ours, there are no fixed equations, everything changes… but it is not stated what kind of changes we will undergo… it depends a lot on what we do.

The other amazing fact about human beings is that through training, an individual is able to take the same nervous system, the same basic muscular apparatus, and harness and generate superior amounts of energy. In each culture, a different dance, a different way of holding the body creates a new base pattern. People from one culture generally have difficulty adapting to the particularities of another. We seem to be gifted with the potential for imprinting. We come to this world with a huge amount of yet-to-be appropriated brain, nerve and muscle material, meaning that even though we share common genetic design, our bodies offer a great deal of room for variation through education. These considerations have given me a will to patiently study the structures of the body… attempting to read the passage of time in the bones and muscles, to feel… to verify, the intimate relationship of the body’s structure with mass and inertia. For me, the study of anatomy only makes sense in the context of its origin… movement. Specifically functional, fall-driven, efficient deployment of support elements, adaptability, subtlety in the transitions, appropriate breath mechanics… and necessarily, tri-axial movement, the context where the legacy of the chaos principle has left clear clues for strength, health, freedom and restraint.

Understanding limitations nature has set as guidelines is a humbling but ultimately free-ing task. For example, bi-axial, or two-axis motion, usually visible in a standard circumduction, is only relative, none of the motion centers in the body are entirely devoid of the tri-axial potential, but some are structurally inhibited. For example, the atlanto-occipital interface offers clear tri-axial potential, while the base of the neck is essentially bi-axial. The base of the thoracic spine is again clearly tri-axial, while the lumbar basically bi-axial. The hips and shoulders are wildly tri-axial, while the knees and elbows reduce the possibilities for safe motion enormously, the elbow because of its ingeniously stable locking hinge pin, and the knee more by default than design. The knees, although remarkable in many ways, require patient schooling and muscular reinforcement because of their questionable ability to rotate externally when flexed.

If the body was designed to get around, and in so doing to obtain and process air and other kinds of food, it follows that our movement training systems, in order to be functional, would reinforce the co-ordinations that would assist us in doing these things. Would, or could even make it easier for us to do these things, to do them better, with less stress and wasted energy. The skeleton, as the non-contiguous element in the tensegritous simbiosis of our body’s play with gravity, communicates the notions of existing playing fields through the sections it establishes to the muscles, and offers first-level check-points and limitations for the body’s well-being. The skeleton argues our motion potentials on the basis of 19 sections: head, neck, upper arms, lower arms, hands, upper torso, abdomen, pelvis, upper legs, lower legs, and feet; five central and twelve peripheral pieces. Even though individual parameters vary somewhat, the range of motion (ROM) of the intersections joining these sections is clearly defined. The central skeleton is called “Axial”, and it includes all the bones of the Skull, all the Vertebrae, the Ribs, the Sacrum and the Pelvis. The arms are considered “Upper limb”, the legs “Lower limb”.

What is “getting around” for us, I mean besides sitting in a machine that is doing the work for us? Human locomotion can be summed up by the term “walking”. Walking can be described as: a continuous controlled falling and rising that requires the sequential deployment of support elements. The centralized mass of our head, torso, abdomen and pelvis gets adequate support from the efficient placement of these support elements along the trail our mass is blazing. The same central masses compensate, roll and pitch, undulate tri-axially in order to take advantage of the support. I cite the different sections Head, Torso and Abdomen, because they have motoric value in driving the body forward in space.
The head and neck are often working together even though they are distinct pieces, the thoracic spine is a very obvious unit, and then it is the weight of the entire abdomen that must count as a motoric factor as well. I call these masses motors, and specifically, proximal motors, because of their symbiotic marriage to the axial skeleton. The typical motion is a contra-lateral counter-rotation that uses the mid-spine as a universal hinge. Healthy walking requires good posture, i.e.: bringing skeletal joint surfaces together in moments of impact, compression, decompression, or torsion. In other words; all spinal curves hips, shoulders, knees, ankles, wrists, feet and hands held within neutral values during locomotion.

Healthy walking requires irregular breath patterns that are adapted to immediate oxygen and CO2 requirements.
If we accept this definition of healthy walking or locomotion, then we can also agree that any training system that disturbs or removes these co-ordinations represents a potential challenge to the health of the practicing individual.

That would be; any training system that:
- insists on flat uses of space, rectilinear flexions and extensions
- pulls the skeleton out of line or apart
- de-trains the counter rotation
- inhibits undulation
- uses two or more supports for the same function (reception/propulsion) at the same time
- inhibits natural, irregular breathing, or does not promote efficient breathing

Now, lets examine the idea of sequential deployment. This concept implies a division of roles, in other words each support element will be doing something else than another. Movement patterns become blocky and inefficient when two or more supports are used at the same time for the same thing. For example, the turned out back-step. A typical move from many training systems that places the back leg in the role of the front one. Inwards shear on the knees, flattening foot arches are common side-effects.

What about over-stretching? Dynamic adaptation becomes very difficult when the ligaments are no longer offering passive support for the skeleton. Youthful muscular mass can create the illusion of freedom from this constraint. Atrophying muscular mass will show up the instability caused by over stretching.

What about isolated muscle building or still poses? These positions and simplistic movements tend not to use the tri-axial potential in the joints, and are most often done out of context of walking or locomotion. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that they do not reinforce good walking habits or co-ordination.

The Axis Syllabus (AS) is a movement analysis and training method that comprises a fund of clinical as well as empirical knowledge and a symbol system for describing the body in motion in terms of orientation, anatomical structures and physics. The information contained in the AS is expressed through an ethical approach to teaching people how to move efficiently; namely the aspiration to convey physio-emotional principles of stress-reduction, energy generation and conservation and encourage a process of scientific inquest and creative endeavor without recourse to either physical or mental abuse.

http://www.axissyllabus.com/

Due to requests below are the web links from Sarah’s talk as part of Crossing Borders on Tuesday 17 November 2009. This information is also on the Independent Dance Crossing Borders page:

Siobhan Davies Replay

Synchronous Objects

Inside Movement Knowledge

Siobhan Davies > The Kitchen > Birdsong

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Online Toolbox

Due to requests for the information given out in the Crossing Borders talk this Tuesday 29 November - please find below the links. This information is also on the Crossing Borders page at: http://www.independentdance.co.uk/what/exchanges/crossing-borders-talks.htm

Websites and clip-links from lecture Nik Haffner (29.09.2009)

Websites:
http://www.desorg.org
OVNI archive in Barcelona, also biannual festival: video art, independent documentary, and mass media archeology

http://www.praticable.info
PRATICABLE (Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad, Odile Seitz)

http://www.sweetandtender.org
Sweet And Tender Collaborations

http://www.artistwin.de
Katrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke -developed a workshop format that uses shared notebooks in a rotating system. Tumay Kilencel (dance student from Berlin) gave a short report from her experience of a workshop with Deufert/ Plischke earlier this year.

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu
2009 online project- developed by Forsythe together with artists and scientists from different disciplines and departments of the Ohio State University

During the lecture we looked at: Counterpoint Tool:
http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/counterpointTool

Filmmaker Artavaz Pelishian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artavazd_Peleshyan

During the lecture we watched parts of his films:
Earth of People: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C95XRkGGpBE
and
Inhabitants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnEY9Rv809Q

Other film-clips watched during the lecture:

Peeping Tom by Michael Powell (UK 1960), scene with Moira Shearer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILoI6cgYRU8

Cien Muchachas by Jaime Salvador (Mexico 1957), scene with two women watching two men dancing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv5wEWlNfuU

Simple Men by Hal Hartley (US 1992) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXBJYQGsaFQ

Bande a parte by Jean-Luc Godard (France 1964):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6pOXjQLh7Y&feature=related

Cría Cuervos /Raising Ravens by Carlos Saura (Spain 1975), scene with three children dancing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzrGFvI2hS0&feature=related