Holding Open Space

Nicola Visser

This practice-as-research (PaR) project explores how we use our eyes in seeing and being seen within the context of the mover and witness roles, as practiced in the ‘open space’ segment of Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP). As a dance artist-researcher, I am interested in how a witness holds space for another in ways that go beyond the concept of ‘non-judgement’. My PaR was animated by the question: How do we hold ‘open space’ across distance? Framed in the context of Covid-19 social distancing, it opened up a research inquiry into practices of looking for the witness and leads me to propose that witnessing is not only an embodied technique but an improvisational skill. Witnessing is a co-creative act, how we look changes what we see. My study was invigorated by the theoretical frameworks and writings of key thinkers—including Erin Manning on the Minor Gesture (2016, 2022, 2023), Eugene Gendlin’s practice steps of a Process Model (2017), and Lauren Berlant on transformational infrastructure (2017)—and finds re-orientation with/in the project of decoloniality. My methodology includes studio practice of MoverWitness relation in the open space segment of CDP, parallel methods of close reading, close talking (Schoeller 2022), ‘close drawing’ and ‘close dancing’, and interviews with artists about how they use their eyes in their practices. Ultimately, my PaR project formulates a principle and practice that I term Slow Seeing. The study of looking, attention and perception lead me to detail findings that contribute to ways of seeing as an epistemological concern. The insights are arranged into three broad fields. These include, first the practice as it pertains to contemplative dance training, where I propose a unit of embodied technique called ‘easy eyes’ and an improvisation score for the witness in a MoverWitness relation. Second, a reframing of CDP as a transformational infrastructure and a place of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures. And third, reflections on the socio-political implications of this eye practice and its potential to delink dance praxis as part of the project of decoloniality. A key insight is the notion that the eye technique and practice levers a shift in the sediment of our habitual unquestioned ordering of the world and cultivates courage in doing and knowing other-wise. It is strikingly significant because it wedges up a fulcrum and shifts the way we perceive small and big things —where we sit, how we stand, which tea we buy, movement, relation, migration, borders, identity, capitalism, power paradigms, ideology, the far away-nearby, love, everything-everything. So small. It makes a rupture, a crack, a glitch, and a fertile place for lively possibility

Why these artists and practitioners?

The semi structured interviews were a research step of defamiliarisation (Nelson, 2022) with the following artists and embodied practitioners. Though we spoke in 2023-24 our correspondence has unfolded over years. The starting point was often a remembered painting, photograph, teaching invitation or passing comment that lingered, and reactivated other ways of seeing and experiencing over time.

Sean Wilson

Photographer (South Africa).

There is a well articulated (Barthes,1982; Benjamin,2008; Berger, 1972; Sontag, 1977) interplay of the complexity between the eyes, the camera, the nature and act of seeing. What stands out for me in the exchange and is his ability to hold still through image, a sweet point of experience and not representation. I am not sure how he does it but he keeps on capturing or inviting that. It is seemingly impossible and reminds me of the ‘punctum’ (Barthes, 1982), the aspect of our looking that holds our gaze without condescending to meaning or beauty. In this research I have included a few of his projects and works in progress that I use to help me reference notions like ‘glitch’, ‘ lines of flight’, and jump-recall the remembered knowing of a timeless vertical dimension within a continuum of ongoing. The starting point of our conversations was a photograph of a boy running, holding the line of a kite.

Sven Ouzman

Archaeologist (Kimberley, Australia).

I speak to Sven Ouzman curious about his experiences walking on country in Kimberly with landmen and landwomen within a lived paradigm that is different to the unit model (Gendlin, 2017). I asked what he noticed about noticing, and interacting with the whole sensorium of the body in his practice. The starting point was smell, rather than sight, when looking for rock art.

Lucia Walker

Alexander Technique and Contact Imrpvoisation teacher (Wales, UK).

The starting point was an invitation she posed to an improvisation class in 2006 when she invited our class in Cape Town to observe the periphery move, while we moved.

Barbara McCrea

Feldenkrais Practitioner (London, UK and Cape Town, South Africa)

The starting point was an exercise she facilitates of ‘uncoupling the eyes’ from habitual movement patterns, in which the head naturally follows the eyes. Another starting point was her regular weekend activity of finding rare botanical flowers in the wide veld.

Amanda Dinan

Environmental consultant and a landscape painter (Cape Town, South Africa).

The starting point for our conversation was her vivid landscapes of Namibia and the Overberg, South Africa where I used to live.

Barbara Dilley

Dancer and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner (Boulder, Colorado, USA).

Barbara Dilley is the originator of Contemplative Dance Practice and author of This Very Moment (2015). Our correspondence began passively with me reading her book The starting point for our conversation was an email I sent from Namibia, while watching rain fall but never hit the ground. We wrote and spoke about eye practices.

Second Research Inquiry

Semi Structured Interviews

*Follow blue line and click on picture icon for interview transcript

I conducted semi-structured interviews with artists, somatic body work practitioners and embodied researchers about how they use eyes in their practice, and what they find interesting for themselves about eyes and ways of seeing.

1. Barbara Dilley - Originater of Contemplative Dance Practice, January 2024

2. Barbara McCrea - Feldenkrais Technique Practitioner, November 2023

3. Lucia Walker -Alexander Technique and Contact Improvisation Teacher, November 2023

4. Sean Wilson -Photographer, November 2023

5. Amanda Dinan - Landscape Painter, November2023

Key to preview images for each interview:

Friends and family, 'holding the rim'

1. Artist Karen Stead Baigrie of South African farm dam.

2. Artist Karen Stead Baigrie of South African farm dam

3. Artist Rosa Shepherd, from her Grade 12 School final project documenting her ceramic bowls.

4. Artist Sean Wilson, found glass slide with water damage, of my father (c. 1960s).

5. Photograph from recent family trip to the Skeleton Coast, Namibia (2024). Rocks found in this shape near the road edge.

Amanda Dinan, Visual Artist

‘It changes the way you see the world’

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‘The world keeps offering itself exponentially’

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‘A discipline in receiving’

Barbara Dilley, Originator of Contemplative Dance Practice

“Naming it after you find yourself there.”

“It cuts something...It stops the grab so that the grab is not so strong and it lets the seeing happen in a big field of awareness.”

"not being OUT OUT not being IN IN but IN"

"quality of mingling direct looking and peripheral vision is a way of.. of letting awareness expand in the environment. And still being awake".

LUCIA WALKER Alexander Technique and Contact Improvisation Teacher

“..of ready”

"The eyes function best when they are relaxed and interested. And that is so interesting for me - that is like all of us - like children and like us dancing."

"The freedom of movement was like, a bit shocking. It wasn’t bits moving - it was complete fluidity."

"It is not rest-rest. It is rest-wakeful and playing is play relaxly not frenzied -

and both these practices help feed each other to that state which you really need - in improvisation - of ready.

NV: of ready LW: of ready"

Sean Wilson, Photographer

"..one of the things I am attracted to about photography, is that it can kind of short circuit the naming of things".

" But there is something more than that - something immediate - something ontologically you can record - you can - some essence of experience or something that happened can be slowed down in order for the viewer to experience it at their leisure".

Barbara McCrea, Feldenkrais Practitioner

"Everything is Interesting"

"They are seeing whole"

"You move where your eyes are taking you - this is neurological wiring - when you are uncoupling you are doing a major shift into the nervous system and it feels odd and uncomfortable and not very pleasant to do."

"When riding a horse I just have to look in a direction where I want to go and the horse will go there as he senses my body organisation. He will feel a tiny shift in my head and shoulders and a tiny shift in my pelvis and that's enough for him to know what I am asking. To get over the jump you look over the jump and then you will get over it."

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