skellis

p.87 “…people might vary in the number of external cues they need to accomplish the same mental task. Individuals who require a great deal of outside information to form representations of reality in consciousness may become more dependent on the external environment for using their minds. They would have less control over their thoughts, which in turn would make it more difficult for them to enjoy experience. By contrast, people who need only a few external cues to represent events in consciousness are more autonomous from the environment. They have a more flexible attention that allows them to restructure experience more easily, and therefore to achieve optimal experiences more frequently.”

Is this relevant to improvising? i am less interested in variations between people … but just in noticing how ‘external cues’ might shift the presence and focus of an improvisation … to be switching between external and internal cues. to notice how they work together (or impact on each other), to ‘flick’ between them. to bring their differences into the idiosyncrasy of the performing/listening.

p.74: “In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.”

Quote from Dana Caspersen, long time collaborator/performer with Forsythe.

“There is the kind of collaboration where people work on different aspects of one project to create the whole, there is the kind where someone organizes the seminal parameters of an event and enables others [to] move into this field to find their own version of it, and then there is the kind of collaboration which is the coming together of two or more minds with the intent to carry out the difficult and lovely work of letting something take root and form in the expanded and complex space of minds thinking together about one task.”

Steven Spier (2000). A difficult and lovely work. Choreography and Dance, Vol 5, Part 3, pp. 103–114. This quote on p.112.

“This is not a concept of improvisation as an illusory freedom, nor of an anarchic free-for-all, but of a highly trained state in which dancers are able to rely on their own ability to access appropriate movements for themselves and their contexts.” (cited in Sulcas, 1999, my emphasis).

Steven Spier (2000). A difficult and lovely work. Choreography and Dance, Vol 5, Part 3, pp. 103–114. This quote on p.111.

Interesting to note that Forsythe changed the word “access” from the word “create” (in correspondence with the author).

An “illustration of a duality that Forsythe juggles with through much of his work: the desire for and capacity to attain beauty, and the resistance to settling for beauty.”

Roslyn Sulcas (2000). Watching from Paris: 1988-1998. Choreography and Dance, Vol 5, Part 3, pp. 86-101

“How does she look at the daily? and how does she maintain focus on physicality? As part of her training, Hay projects the existence of an observer who is watching her exploration of bodily cellular consciousness. Hay further projects a second observer who watches the first. Hay’s moving body is thus watching itself moving and watching itself watching itself. Many theories of consciousness do not permit body to be consciously aware of its own activities while in motion. Many forms of prayer and meditation, even Buddhist meditation, encourage practitioners to sit and be still. In defiance of this opposition between action and reflection, Hay asserts the possibility of a consciously aware and critically reflective corporeality.”

From Susan Foster’s foreward to “my body, the buddhist” by Deborah Hay

These videos have no audio - a microphone mistake on the very last day. Gulp.

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An article written by Gill Clarke:

http://www.independentdance.co.uk/forum/2007/08/02/mind-as-in-motion/ 

A few thoughts about points where Gill’s thinking (and the thinking of others) doesn’t quite sit with these experiences in Sofia - not so much to disagree, but as a means of further clarifying what is at the heart of this work (and my experience of it).

Gill quotes Merleau-Ponty and the “wordless dance”. This work we have been doing feels anything but wordless. In the engagement, in the listening, my experience feels laden with words. They seem to be an integral part of the activity, the way in which I choose, remember, decide, stop, commence …  However, the words are not the raison d’être of the work. They seem to contribute to the confluence of pathways, experiences, and sensations …

She also mentions Csikszentmihalyi’s work on ‘flow’:

“they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing”.

Once again, this  doesn’t sit quite right for me. There is something in this work with Bagryana in which there is an interplay between my being aware of this ’separateness’ (my self in relation to the physical actions), and then playing with it in terms of the improvisational choices I am making. In this sense, the ’separateness’ becomes part of the ‘flow’ - perhaps an aesthetic choice?

I hope I am not misunderstanding Csikszentmihalyi’s thinking. Or maybe his thinking doesn’t cover the breadth of the improvising experience? (particularly when we are directly playing with the quality of attention and awareness).

Finally, Gill quotes psychologist Guy Claxton’s consideration of intuition, which “works through a relaxed yet precise, non-verbal attention to the details of a situation, to the actual effect of one’s interventions, without any explicit commentary of justification or judgement, and without deliberately hunting for a conscious, articulate mental grasp”.

It’s probably out of context to discuss intuition, but this work we are doing is highly intuitive. However, it definitely involves judgments  on my part. They might not be explicit (to a viewer), but I feel that they are explicit to me. In other words, if asked, I could talk to how I was judging the improvisations.

Does this mean I am  not present? Is the quality of the work reduced because I am involved in deeply judgmental activities? (or is the type of judgments that are going on?) In other words, within the improvising I am consistently engaged in decision making processes based on judgments of things like tone, space, time (and rhythms), dynamic, gaze, relationship to external stimuli (music, voice, words etc) … it is almost as if the complexity of the judging affords the possibility of improvised flow (or ‘performative listening’).

Need to do more work on this. In the studio. And at my desk.

• states of vulnerability
• states of extremity
• side by side with ordinary actions
• ordinary actions can be many things
• level of imaginative freedom
• mid-flow
• imaginative flow
• being in the room
• prosaic moments help bring it back into the room
• Faustian search - “it’s about the search”
• movement/dynamic/emotional presence - “… it does have a meaning” (just one Bagryana?)
• witnessing very open states of response
• unpredictability of repsonses when in that ’stage’ = real actions
• different from ‘flow’ - not sequential