ENQUIRY 4 | INDETERMINACY

This enquiry began in April 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic through to February 2021. Informed by previous enquiries, I took the opportunity during the extensive lockdowns in Melbourne to collect a series of perceptual tools to begin an improvisation and to activate the process of jo-ha-kyū.

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In this enquiry, I focused on two aspects of indeterminacy — the vagueness of my perceptual experience while practising riken no ken, and the sense of potentiality it entailed. The body as thickness when observing myself as if from the outside heightened my awareness of how a jo-ha-kyū arc emerged. There was always more than one option for a passage of movement and more than one way of construing its ending. In particular, I examined the instance when body-in-stillness became body-in-motion at the beginning of an improvisation. To do this, I brought in the idea of virtual and actual movement.

The term ‘virtual’ denotes qualities or ‘senses relating to essential, as opposed to actual existence’.[1] Actual movement is defined as movement that is observable as kinetic motion with a sense of direction and magnitude of force.

When an actual movement is performed, both mover and watcher perceive a quality. The quality of actual movement is also its virtual side (Manning 2009: 19).

However, when I stand still, I can sense/feel microscopic movements deep in my body. My body-in-stillness is tending towards moving or towards making relationship with the world. There is a speculative quality emerging from thought, or felt perception, as if it causes my body to become kinaesthetically organized towards movement. This type of movement is what I call ‘virtual movement’. I would argue that virtual movement is the foundation of actual movement.

In my research, I make a notional distinction between virtual and actual movement, so that I can pay more attention to the subtlety of virtual processes to enrich their actualization. I can also use virtual movement as improvisational material on its own.

In Noh, there are many examples of performance material that are enriched by virtual processes. For example, in vocalization, Zeami posited that the jo-ha-kyū of vocalization begins with the performer’s attunement to the pitch and tone of the flute, the sense of occasion, along with the relational milieu in the performance and so on. This attunement is the jo of the vocalization, which occurs well before the performer produces an utterance. Just as the performer begins chanting, the performer packs the breath in the lower abdomen as ha to produce voice in kyū (Quinn 2005: 214).

In addition, to include a sense of spatiality of the relational milieu during improvisation, I used the term ‘field’, defined as the domain and extent of that which is perceived and experienced. To gauge the interactions between my body, the surroundings, and Janette, the term ‘fielding’ is also used for the act of initiating the relationality between my body and the surroundings.

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Between genuine indeterminacy and the actualization of kinetic motion, there lies the activation of jo-ha-kyū. To activate jo-ha-kyū means to put in place a somatic–perceptual organization to facilitate a formation of jo-ha-kyū from virtual to actual movement. For generating movement, if we take into account the virtual processes, or the tending towards movement, the activation of jo-ha-kyū does not occur at one point, but as an accumulation of processes.

The following nine perceptual tools do not prescribe movement. Instead, they facilitate the processes of activating jo-ha-kyū and ma in improvisation. In this exposition, the perceptual tools for beginning an improvisation will be presented chronologically. However, in practice, they can be explored in a different order or examined one by one.

The use of these perceptual tools is demonstrated in the video above.

(1) Begin with riken no ken.

In general, I begin an improvisation with the practice of riken no ken, by observing myself perceiving my environment as if I were watching myself a metre away from my body.

(2) Begin improvising by fielding attention — inside and outside my body.

I then begin fielding my attention by noticing my body in relation to the surroundings.

(3) Begin improvising by attuning to the field(s) of relationality.

Next, I use the tool of attuning to the fields of relationality by locating where and what I pay attention to, and how specific parts of my body might potentially be associated with various elements in the surroundings.

(4) Begin improvising with virtual and/or microscopic movement.

While practising riken no ken, I begin to improvise by generating virtual movement in thought when standing relatively still. At the beginning of an improvisation, it might take a while for my perceptual experience to become alive to various embodied processes, and I often feel an urge to move and be seen to be producing movement. With this urge, inevitably I fall into a default mode of moving, that is, habitual movement.

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(5) Begin with ‘attentive waiting’.

For this reason, I examine what might occur should I not follow the urge to always be in motion by waiting attentively for the interweaving of perceptual uptakes to occur. ‘Attentive waiting’ is a mode of attention in contrast to ‘an ego-driven desire to seize prematurely on a particular understanding of reality’ (Maier 2013: 230).

(6) Begin with the superposition of relational fields.

By being attentive to embodied/virtual processes, I become more receptive to the sense of potentiality — there are a few options vaguely presented to me. To mediate this vagueness, the notion of ‘superposition’ can be useful to give me a tangible mental image of how the fields of relationality and potentiality can be schematized.

SUPERPOSITION:

Time described in loop theory has the attribute of quantum indeterminacy, which is expressed through the term ‘superposition’ (Rovelli 2018: 87). Superposition is a speculative term denoting quantum states of granular bodies such as quanta that have more than one possible position or observable value. For quantum superposition, the positions or qualities are ‘present together’ (Rovelli 2021: 44) or ‘coexisting’ (Lu 2017: 27).

Hover the cursor here for the image of the superposition of my fields of attention.

(7) Begin improvising by approximating a jo-ha-kyū grain of virtual movement.

I then speculate the first virtual jo-ha-kyū as movement of thought by attuning to one of the fields. After the first virtual jo-ha-kyū, the second jo-ha-kyū grain can be formed by repeating the process of the first but with a different outcome.

(8) Begin with repetition with differences.

That is, the second jo-ha-kyū can differ from the first one in intensity, temporality, and other qualities. I call the process of repeating the embodied interactions with the relational fields, each time with a different quality, ‘repetition with differences’.

(9) Begin with a nexus.

As I repeat the embodied processes with different outcomes, the kinaesthetic experience is gradually archived in my body as a nexus, defined as a series of points linking kinaesthetically condensed body parts to my surroundings.

A nexus does not consist of precisely connected points, and my body archives the nexus in a blurry fashion. So, the nexus becomes a superposition of nexūs.

Hover the cursor here for the image of the nexus.

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Movement as events

Taken together, the use of the perceptual tools to activate jo-ha-kyū concerns not merely the sensory–motor process of kinetic motion but also other embodied processes, including attunement to the watcher’s attention, perception when practising riken no ken, and speculation of potentiality. These processes underpin the activation of jo-ha-kyū as a progression of somatic–perceptual organization, enabling virtual movement to become actualized through the process of repetition with differences. Thus, kinetic motion, or movement, can be understood as a series of accumulative processes subjected to ongoing transformation, or events.[2] 

Embodied temporality

Through practising these tools, the perceptual and sensorial remnants of jo-ha-kyū grains begin to accumulate in my body. These remnants are nested in my felt perception and generate potential jo-ha-kyū grains. While moving, I perceive not only the embodied process(es) of each jo-ha-kyū, but also their temporality. Informed by Rovelli’s notion that time pertains to process, I would argue that my experience of embodied processes gives rise to temporality, which I term ‘embodied temporality’.

Through the repetition with differences, the nexūs are formed as a kinaesthetic archive. I can then return to explore other potentials along these nexūs. This allows me to wait or delay while realizing that the archive is there. And the repetition with differences functions in tandem with the archive of nexūs to become a resource for sequencing the improvisation. 

This leads us to Enquiry 5.

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