Paris: Contact Improvisation as Research Forum
Three people went on a walk together. After they tried to draw the path they took. The pictures show each person's remembered path. After showing each other the differences in the remembered path, the 3 people then each put a pen on the paper at the same time and drew together, again trying to recreate the walk from memory but drawing together influenced the path.
Experience to Lines
Tilburg, Netherlands: Students at Fontys BA dance department were asked to practice different terms found in neuroscience describing the brain and certain cognitive functions.
The terms were : Modulation, Attunement, Negotiation, Synchronicity, Resonance, Negotiation and Exchange.
They were asked to 'do that' work for 10-15 minutes and then write about their experience afterward, charting what tactics they used, how time and space felt, what felt like succeeding and what did not. After all 7 were experienced, they were asked to draw a chart, table, depictiion and find a way to visualize the different terms based on thier experience and notes.
15 Duet Drawings.
Dancers execute a short movement phrase while another dancer watches. After the phrase the dancer and the watcher each draw a line translating the movement they saw. The two dancers change roles.
The drawer is marked D and the watcher is marked W.
When each participant described the logic behind their drawing, it was noted that the two bottom participants had similiar shapes for the terms: Each draw a long object for resonance (picture 1 arrow, picture 2 the snake tale). They each used the V shape for negotiation. They each draw modulation as round dots colored in. the overall shape of the whole pictures also had similarities. The drawing helped describe how abstract concepts were understood physically and found similarities between some participants visualizations.
Amsterdam: 2015. Drawing Prosody. Four people participating in a sense-making exercise of group drawing.
Drawers are translating the singer's volume, consonants, vowels, timbre, pitch and intention into lines.
Watcher Dancer practice with THIRD cohort.
One person does a short move, 7 drawers watch. The dancer's drawing is at the top.
NOTE: Drawing 7.
The dancer did a relevé in ballet- standing in place and rasing up onto the balls of the feet. The dancer drew a straight line for their experience, but all drawers moved the line slightly to the right. It appears that TIME was conflated into the line drawing as we perceive time in the wester world moving from left to right.
Amsterdam 2015
3 examples from dancers translating the felt sense of each word in the sentence "How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture." The translation of the conceptual logic of a word (noun, verb, preposition etc) is made evident by the shape, movement and body logic that seems to reference image schema understanding and other metaphoric frameworks.
Notice similarities in:
use of both hands for "such".
length of movement for "to".
placement of "manage".
hand-eye relationship for 'complicated'.
Among other iconic considerations, are past tense for 'did' moving backwads, or placing body behind and up or open for 'how' as in unknown to reference a question.
Lines are used to deomonstrate that 'seeing is like feeling' for the dancer and watcher and that different people in some ways can see the motion in similar ways. It also exposes differences.
Watches oscilate between tracking linear designs and linear patterns. Dancers do as well. Similiarities in drawings would suggest people switch between designs and patterns at similar points.
Blind Triangle Experiment
1. Top row. Dancer does an action and draws their experience.
2. Second row: 5 drawers draw what they saw. Two people who were blind and did not see the dancer, look at the drawings to get an idea what the movement might have been.
3. 2 dancers dance what they think the movement would have been and drew their experience.
The 2 blind dancers have to create a 'blended space' where all 5 line drawings merge to create an idea that would match what the possible movement was. The dancers did not see the first dancer's drawing. The two blind dancers do not see each other's dance either, so similiarities in their drawing/dance are due to them reading the watcher's drawing similiarly.
3 trials documented in slide show.
Talk w Martin Nachbar
- text and dance as parallel lines..two different things
- text explaining what im doing (words come before
- Text after, coming from what im doing
Notes on describing origami and drawing/dancing.
Student noted that when drawing, they waited for complete sentences to be said before they made a drawn line, but when dancing, they used their body immediately to respond to anything that made sense, even if it was a fragment sentence.
In one round, two dancers had one knees and one hand on the ground. They both had their right leg off the floor extended in space. The person describing the lines said 'but more stable', and both dancers put their 2nd hand on the ground. The bodily knowledge to know, that putting another on the ground to support what then looked like a three0legged table, came from experience obviously knowing that they are less likely to fall if they have more limbs on the ground.
Gravity, and their own understanding of their body guided them to make the same choice. One of them could have just sat down or stood up, choosing an entirely different position. But in the juxtaposition of how their body was in a position from previous instructions and given the possibilities of future instructions, perhaps the simple addition of one limb was the easiest choice, as well as could have come from recognizing they embodied a table logic already with an arm and knee on the floor.
I use this as a dynamic system exercise, to see how the same description manifests in the drawer and two dancers differently.
When an instruction is said like "A large line arches back", dancers have to first make meaning with their body. They can view their spine as the largest line in their body, and simply arch back minimally. In this expression, the arch is not so big, nor the action, but the dancer is satisfying the instruction by thinking of their spine as large and working from inside. They can also use the tip of their hand or foot and with one limb make a large swooping action. In this expression the line is fast and big, but is temporal and only exists as a trace. Dancers oscillate between using their body as a design like architecture or fulfilling the descriptions through traces.
They can make an angle with their elbow or make an angular action with their foot. They also look for variations allowing hips or neck or focus to
I can also then describe the drawing that came from the origami description.
And then the air holds them bewteen us- THIRD Forum. Das Graduate School. 2019.
Two musicians experiment with the idea of translating the lines of my body into lines of sound and music.
The Shape of Past, Present and Future
These drawings were given to dancers to translate into movement. The imagined line of Past-Present-Future was drawn into a perceived line and translated into movement by seomeone else.
Linear Design comments from THIRD cohort during practice session:
Difference between aiming for a form/design and being busy with energy shifts and observign the remembered form/design.
Observing my own capacity to recognize points of design. Capacity of quick changes.
Moving slowly allows for focus on the in-between places in the body, between joints.
Lines and twists.
Looking at the relationship between the movement and what is necessary for that movement to happen.
How do muscles figure in this?
Where does Laban, Delsarte and Forsythe relate?
Not horrible, but very shape-y. In the beginning it seems bound in the presenting of perceptible image (of lines) and quite bound to western cannon of dance line making- because of the avoidance of 'pattern' the kinesphere remains small and contained. 'Design' is about putting a thing some place carefully. Then my body finds a solution-instantly occuring mini-lines that articualte swiftly and then unpreditable movement can happen that I am able to preceice as 'design'.
Perpendicularity large and small joints in contraction.
Linear Design: do you make it? or is it something that rather just is? Or it is already and you can then move to shift them?
Interesting if not challenging to think of surface (skin/outer shell of body) as line. Web of lines.
I have to think of the Dutch prhase 'lekkerin je vel zitten' to feel comfortable or uncomfortable in your skin.
Origami Dancer practice.
Someone describes the lines in an origami and someone else translates the spoken description into another form: drawing or dance.
Comments about doing Linear Design and Linear Pattern at the same time:
The most interesting is both, as its closest to my natural experience.
They are both there at the same time. One is more internally- other is in environment around you.
Can I see a difference between the attention that a mover has when paying attention to a design or pattern (practice)? I don't know.
Patters can be internal and external- can design be internal?
Speed of linear pattern slows with linear design.
I can split the body as well- upper and lower because imagination is what is hodling it together anyway.
Setting up different patterns and trying to pay attention to all of them. FEeling how each pattern or trace might want to develop or change in terms of space, intensity, speed. to try to give attention equally to all and failing.
Drawing of Linear Design of Mike's arm by Siegmar while watching. (The drawing and movement through space turns it into a linear pattern).
Linear Pattern comments from THIRD cohort during practice session:
So yes of course the kinisphere is more flexible-bigger smaller, the gaze is a limb. Momentum is possible.
When is it about the lines that are already deisnged within the body - we do not have to explore all kinds of movements necessarilty. It is in stnading, walking, biking, laying down, typing, combing your hair, doing the dishes, lets make a meal together and attend to the designed lines = much more awareness to how these lines are perceived/imagined in everything we do.
Does pattern have to do with repetition?
It makes me feel/think with my body as some kind of geometric object, measurment sort of thing.
Difference between patterns that are willfully produced and patterns constructively produced by way of anatomy and physical disposition.
Shifting attention between different patterns big and small, internal and external.
There is a difference in relation with the outside space-time.
When concentrating on linear trace, that sometimes becomes linear patter, I feel caught in a web with the exterior time and space. I know I ultimately havet he choice to move, this exterior space-time won't stop me, but actually this dialogue is very much a dialogue- feels that the exterior has a say too.
The web that was my skin is now a matrix.
And then the air holds them bewteen us- THIRD Forum. Das Graduate School. 2019.
- How much our experience starts something? On how much our experience has t fit to previous assumption.
In preperation for a talk at a the Research and Applied Metaphor conference, I was going to replace the powerpoint with a performance where I move and talk at the same time. In doing this practice, I began to feel the practices accumulate in my body and realized I could understand the theories dialoguing with each other as the commonality was lines. This led to the dialogical dance practice used in the films and taught to others. The text to the right shows the lines of silence while I think or move in the video above.
Dance students at HZT in Berlin listened to a guided audio walk starting from their choice. After the walk they were asked to draw the shape of their remembered path. Then they were asked to find some way to draw the actual path that was taken (using google maps for example).
I went on a walk with a friend. Afterwards we both drew the remembered pathway. Included is also the use of googlemaps to get the actual shape, which is then drawn.
Samuel Feldhandler translates his perception of the music coming from the pianists right hand and I translate the left hand. The drawings above are created by us tracing out movements afterwards, 7 years after this was danced together.
The question raised is does Wagner's understanding of love, translated into a melody, then translated into movement and then translated into a line, allow the line to time travel different extended-mind thoughts of Wagner, seen in the above drawing?
Talking to myself in my head and translating the imagined sound symbolic shapes and imagined prosody into movements. Same as the prosody exercise but sound is imagined.
Traces of Silence: section from the Between these lines pracgice of the video to the left. This shortened part is the video that corresponds to the images and discussion in the Between these Lines: Gesturing for the dialogical chapter.
Face drawings from a workshop at DAS Graduate School online.
Four different people traced their face while 5-7 people drew.
Faces 1 and 2 drawings are shown in slideshow.
Faces 3 and 4 are shown in composite format. In this lay out you can clearly see the way the person touched their face influenced how everyone in the group drew as similar attributes are caught in the lines.
Prosody Dance
Dancers translate the: volume, pitch, vowels, consonants, timbre and intention of the voice into movement.
Dancer Watcher Experiment HZT
Note: movement #4 is testing what was discovered in this experiment in Amsterdam in 2019 (drawing #7). The movement is only a relevé up, but all of the drawers move the vertical line also on the horizontal plane, hypothesizing again that time is conflated into the drawing from a Western perspecive of time going from left to right.
Doodle to Dance
Dancers turn the drawing into a dance.
The corresponding video shows the process and attempts.
I practiced the dialogical dance in Amsterdam and asked my colleague Gustavo Ciriaco to speak about lines while recording. The practice of letting the cameraman follow the lines was then used in future films. This took emphsis off of it being a 'dance film' only and allowed lines in nature to be of equal attention, as well as the lines of thought and attention of the camera operator.
In this practice, after the dancer is done, they both look at the drawing and then the drawer joins the dancer for a second improvised dance. There are no more instructions. Simply looknig at the line together reminding them that the watcher was present and letting the drawing function as a remembering as the starting place for dancing together. Below are two different drawings made by watchers of the second dance. In this experiment, the dancer looked at the four drawings and chose who would join them based on which drawing they felt more attracted to.
1 Person dances and someone outside traces with pen and paper their movements over time. In this version, there were 4 watchers. The 4 drawings are from the 4 watchers watching the same solo. The dancer danced for a few minutes.
Practice session with Igor Koruga. We did a self practice of face drawing and then I asked him to draw me through my own traces. These practices were inpsired from Kimbal Bumstead's work on duet touch drawings
5 doodles to one dance.
5 doodles were drawn by 5 dancers. Each dancer secretly chose an order for the drawings and then created a movement for each drawing. With the five movements, they performed them sequentially in a dance. The outside watchers tried to guess the order of the chosen drawings for that dancer based on understanding the relationship between the movement and the drawing (and of course their own experience with turning the same drawing into a movement, which may have helped or challenged the reading).
Blind Triangle Experiment. (HZT)
1. Top row. Dancer does an action and draws their experience.
2. Second row: 5 drawers draw what they saw. Two people who were blind and did not see the dancer, look at the drawings to get an idea what the movement might have been.
3. 2 dancers dance what they think the movement would have been.
It is called Blind Triangle because there are 3 parts and the last part involves dancers were did not see the original dance.
Notes from Face dances
Dancers are asked to translate the traced lines of the face into the body as a duet.
Lines were perceived when the person touches their face. They were translated into a different mode on paper leaving a permanent trace. They are then asked to remember these lines, moving them to the imagined line mode. When performing the duet, instead of moving them into lines traced by the body, these two dancers fell into an eye-tracking dance, where the imagined lines cast from their vision re-created the previous memory but this time without the pen and paper. Their bodies shift weight slightly and move in accordance to the imagined lines traced by the movement of the eyes.
Dancers have the option of translating the memory of the final image as an imagined line, or the memory of the physical trace they made with their hand, or the touch of their own finger on their face. In effect this is the same line, the line left on the paper is the line made by someone’s hand which is the tracing of the other person touching their face. The question arises, depending on who did which task, which mode of the line the person is resourcing in order to translate.
Face dance 1
Dancers face each other, move minimally. Making eye contact there are slight weaving of actions between mirrored and contrasting attuning.
Face dance 2
Both dancers face forward and do not look at each other. They both move in their own way. One dancer moves more quickly and the other stays at a slow tempo. In this version, I as the dancer, imagined a large face in front of me and I was recreating the same task on a larger scale, using my arm and whole body as the pen. This felt limiting to do in the practice but when watching outside, the method is not recognizable.
Face dance 3
Two dancers stand back to back. Without seeing each other, they make even movements, using all parts of their body. For the most part, staying stationary, but using levels and turning around. Though without seeing each other, the dancers’ actions seem harmonious and in relation to each other. They sense and seem to speak a common language.
Lines generate complicated conversations.
Dialogical Dance practice:
First times all practices were taught to dancers and they were asked to incorporate them all into their body as a combined practice.
Drawings 1, 2 and 3 on left correspond to the video.
Dancers who were not in the room, look at the drawings from the watchers and try to recreate the original dance from using the lines as memory storage, vitality information, and for their linear traces and linear designs.
What is a hard line? Are the rocks a hard line like the straight hard lines of the grid in the building? The rocks actually have curved and jagged lines, but the material is hard. Do we project the material of the rock onto the line? A square architectural line could not be any more different from the curved organic lines of the broken cliff. A jagged line could be hard, but also they are organic. How are both lines so different and both hard? Perhaps they are not. Is a soft line, not a line at all but an undemarcated blur?
At the end of the lecture demonstration 'Traces of Silence', (film below), I traced my face while I asked members of the audience to draw on the back of a card i gave them the line I drew with my finger. I was signing the card I gave them. Though they were each following the same line, this exercise deomonstrates how 'withness' can be seen in that different perceptions, materials and people follow the same line differently, resulting in different drawings
In this lecture performance, the 6 emotions drawn on cards from the chapter Felt Lines that are proposed as a musical score, were instead used here for dancers to turn into movement. The dancers and/or audience were then asked to guess the emotion based on what they saw, or in the case of the dancer, how it felt,
Two dancers were taught the entire dialogical dance practice in 3 hours as the basis to create a score for a performance later that evening. The piece was titled Between these lines and was performed as part of Speedance at Dock11 in Berlin.
Text was added as an additional component per instruction for the evening concept.
