Contemplative Dance Practice Saves My Life: a personal point of view.
Contemplative Dance Practice is a holding place for the multiplicity of myself inside many different times and spaces. In the practice I cohere here in vague and precise (Gendlin, 2017) ways. I am witnessed and I witness. Being witnessed holds me still for a moment. I feel amplified. Like a tomato fresh off the vine, full past the skin of me, I feel vital.
Contemplative Dance Practice is the cauldron, the lei water dam (Afrikaans for small dam), the mixing bowl, a carrier bag (Le Guin, 2019) and tidal pool where witnessing holds the rim.
I have been displaced. Not in a violent way and yet in a violent way. My life is not physically threatened yet I feel as dispersed as the night sky of stars. The witnesses of my South African life are no longer (t)here - mother, father, brother, aunts, cousins, friends, teachers, flowers, fields, southern seasons, cat, dog, market, rain, berg wind (afrikaans mountain wind)- all my familiars, sometimes familiar strangers. They are no longer (t)here, holding the rim. Those holders for whom nothing needs to be explained, with whom one shares a tacit texture of being. The polyphony (Riley 2000)1 of perception makes a certain sense there. And now I am here. Here is Denmark. The distance between the two, as the swallow might fly, is 115 days to walk. 60,775km.
Contemplative Dance Practice saves my life. I do not have to answer the perpetual second question. This is the question that I am always asked when I introduce myself in Denmark - when do you go back to where you came from? In the practice I simply move the soft animal of my body (Oliver, 1986) in the shared time-scale-space-scapes we create as we go along together in our ‘doing-undergoing’ (Ingold, 2017) of improvisation.
My experience in Contemplative Dance Practice is one of being ‘outside time and space’ yet fully present. The clock on the wall keeps the exact chronological time. Inside the structure of Contemplative Dance Practice we accordion timescales. Being outside time is ‘so quietly astonishing there is a disservice to saying it can’t be expressed’ (Riley, 2019,p.13). It feels disloyal to give it a category like 'improvisation’ and at the same time unfaithful to say ‘I can’t really describe it’. The effort of speaking from outside time or space is well known. This vivid state arrives in many guises. I admire the Tibbetan Buddhist way of approaching form from formlessness. This is a timeless task (Dilley, pers.comn.). I have come to understand, through the Contemplative Dance Practice structure and Barbara Dilley’s descriptions of the work, that this approach is one of refined invitation - like the silver notes a bird might sing, waking up the world. These invitations are enabling constraints that welcome and discern. They are grace-filled anchor points in an ocean of possibility.
An enabling constraint is a familiar part of dance artist’s grammar of improvisation in the genealogy of my training. Dancers like Deborah Hay, Barbara Dilley, Lisa Nelson, Rosalind Crisp have shared their vocabularies through workshops and books. I have worked with the artists personally and in more distance ways in my practice. I find comfort and encouragement in their formulations. I can anchor my mind in their invitations and my body can fill in the rest.
I walk the rim of the timeless experience each Tuesday, when I host Contemplative Dance Practice here in Aarhus, Denmark. I shall explain the structure, set up and movement research in the right place. I try to admit the strangeness of the experience to the discussable. Its half-tellable ordinariness requests a witness. Focusing and Thinking at the Edge offered by philosopher Eugene Gendlin(2017) as both a concept and an embodied experience for the edge of thinking, they offer a 'radical reflective'(Schoeller &Saller 2017) approach in support of the research articulation. The theory recognises that words are experiences themselves and experience is cultivatable in language. These techniques involve a listening witness who waits with the moment in which vocabulary feels too thin. Waits while I, the focuser, roam around in the bodily felt sense. Waits curiously while I fish and fish, ever more precisely pulling up phrases that draw close to an ‘implicit intricacy of the bodily felt sense’2 to carry it forward into language and into life. When this happens the body finds an ease. (A practice story: FISH)
In Contemplative Dance Practice we sense an easing (A practice story: CLOSER). It is not the ease of a blanket in the winter, it is a relief of new sense arising from he margins of our knowing. An ease that arrives because there has been a play at the lightly terrifying rim of the known and unknown. What I find there is the ‘more'3 of the always more-than-one4. It is the meshwork offered by the only constant, change, inside the knowing5 and being together.
Initially, under the cloud of separatist perception, I thought that the mover, in the centre of the our witness bowl was key to the process. As I start4ed the Practice as Research. I dived into an understanding that we are relation6, not in relation. This understanding was not a swift take over, but glitchy wtih glimpses and lures. I came to realise something is held in the changeable, adaptable, attentions of witnessing and its collusion with the inner gestures of our being and doing.
The invitation for the witness in the practice is to ‘hold non-judgemental attention, practice unconditional regard7’. This is all very well. But how do I know I am doing it right? The effort of trying for a value based state is depleting. I have long wanted a physical anchor point for the practice of the witness. An anchor point shined up like a silver key. An anchor point that is an enabling constraint in this practice toward 'a new social confidence to joy'8 , flourishing 9and kinaesthetic delight10. I did not know it at the time but the physical constraints of social distancing soon offered just such a proposition. How could we practice Contemplative Dance Practice together across the perceived distance of t/here? How do we hold space open for the silver singing of our be-ing with the world?
Contemplative Dance Practice and its relationship to my Practice as Research
As described in earlier segments, Contemplative Dance Practice is the form of dance I have been hosting for the past 10 years. I do so from a position as a Community Dance Artist, eager to welcome anyone to the dance studio and practice, regardless of prior experience or ability. Everyone is welcome.
In this research I peel down through the stages of the Contemplative Dance Practice to the third stage called Open Space. It is t/here in the exchange of roles of Mover and Witness that I situate the research. My particular intervention is focused on the act of witnessing. The witness is an onlooker of the unfolding composition, aware that they ‘join with the other’ (Hess 2018; Adler 1987), but add nothing (Gendlin 2017).
There are four important points of departure in the Contemplative Dance Practice:
Firstly, it is a shared practice and not a performance.
Secondly, it attunes the body to the intricacies of sensation, affect and movement.
Thirdly, it attunes the mind and ‘never-mind’ to the play between knowing, not knowing, and ‘getting out of the way’.
Lastly, it is a dance exploration. It does not have a therapeutic goal, though this may be a side effect. This is significant as it has implications for the democracy of the situation - no one holds more power or knowledge than anyone else in the practice. We learn equally how to hold space for one another through the doing of it. As Dilley has often said, the fundamental responsibily is to keep showing up, the rest will take care of itself (Dilley 2020).
The first two moves of my research methodolgy are an exploration of the Witness role in the MoverWitness relation. The external witness is understood through the 'well-wisher and on-looker' lens of CDP and not as the therapeutic undertaking as it is in Authentic Movement.
Below please find the history and structure of the practice and various conceptualisations of its implications.
Contemplative Dance Practice as Transformational Infrastructure
Here I propose that there are ways of thinking about and there are ways of thinking through the body. Dance therapist Janet Adler said that her life's work, The Discipline of Authentic Movement, was really about healing the great separation (2023). Separations are everywhere - dichotomies and dualities form the foundation of our cultural bias and the ladder of our language.
Philosopher, Eugene Gendlin expands on this separation, particularly articulating that the skin is not the boundary: 'what inside and in mean is no simple question' (Gendlin 2017,p.7). With a few distinct strokes in his A Process Model (2017), Gendlin opens up a place from which we can speak without putting us tacitly outside. He evades our Western Modern 'god's eye view' and dismantles subject / object distinctions with straight forward, acessible concepts. At the same time he reminds us that these concepts are always already embodied and provides a method for thinking with this resource that we have.
It is his third concept of 'En#311' or 'Body Environment 3' that I see as connecting to Contemplative Dance Practice as we undergo improvisation and witnessing. I include a full quote from A Process Model, as it traces the idea that we are always and already making our structures for our ongoing, and I have come to understand through this PaR, that movement improvisation as witnessed in Contemplative Dance Practice, is somehow making a web, making for a strong and flexible weave. Or as Line said at the end of yesterday's practice: 'I feel untangled, gathered in at the centre' (Munthe, 2024, pers. comn.).
The blood stream is often called the environment of the cells it feeds. The many processes in the body have various parts of it for their environment. Also here the skin line is not the big divide. En#3 is the environment that has already been regenerated by body-processes. The body is an environment in which body process goes on further. The body was made from an embryo engaged in process. The body structure is not only made but also maintained by ongoing processes - if they stop the body disintegrates. See the lines on a seashell, a small first part is alread a seashell, and was the smaller animal's shell; more and more rings are added on by growth.The shell has the nature of an action track, it is process concretised. The body is also like that, a record, an action track. (Gendlin [1997]2017, p. 6).
As such, Contemplative Dance Practice is a place where the gathering Line speaks of, can pattern moment by moment, unrestricted and undocumented, unnamed. It can change and change and keep changing. Its patterning can refigure over and over and what we thnk of as our mind movement can lag as after thoughts. Movement in improvisation receives its own feedback in the moment of making, and it is making with acute attention to the inseparable living processes that we are in, in other words: En#2. It welcomes the En#1 and makes room for it, while changing persectives at the same time. It is both/and. It is intra-actional (Barad, 2007). It is quite dizzying and the beauty of it is that the Mover Witness relation in the structure of Contemplative Dance Practice catches us and supports us to keep on going in the deep play at the edge of our thinking. I understand, to paraphrase Gendlin's well known phrase (1971), that we already know so much more than we can ever say and there is more still.
Finally, this is where 'transformational infrastructure' is such a useful concept offered by Lauren Berlant (2016) because the implications of such onto-epistemological play are thrilling. They address our troubling times. Berlant articulates the concept of structure for transitional times so beautifully that it must be offered in full:
All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself: but my interest is in how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too. But a few definitional problems arise from this observation. One is about what repair, or the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe; the other is defining what kind of form of life an infrastructure is. These definitional questions are especially central to contemporary counternormative political struggle. (Berlant 2016, p. 393)
I propose that Contemplative Dance Practice is a transformational infrastructure in which we can play into the glitch and in which the beyond of the glitch will make itself known.
Contemplative Dance Practice: Inside Open Space and the 'thick space' of the MoverWitness relation.
‘The space is thicker’. This is how I described the experience at the end of Contemplative Dance Practice for many years. It was really a very slippery thing to grasp in words (See Practice story Closer, Fish and Floor).
Barbara Dilley referred to this phenomena in this way: ‘I am different because you are here’ (Dilley 2020)
Eugene Gendlin writes in A Process Model (2017): ‘How you are when you affect me, is already affected by me, and not by me as I usually am, but by me as I occur with you’.
There are many artists, philosophers and psychologists who bring us closer to understanding what is happening when we attend to each other in a particular way. It is a way of attending that the witness does in our practice. I have heard it described as ‘beholding’ (Walker, pers. comn.), wishing well (Dilley 2020), compassionate curiosity (Mate), unconditional regard (Adler 2002, 2023) and non-judgemental witnessing (Sager 2018, Hess 2018, Goldhahn 2024).
In the practice there are two roles, the Mover and the Witness. They exchange at any time.
Well-wishers, on-lookers, witnesses - sit on the outer edge of the studio in the Open Space section of Contemplative Dance Practice. Each participant can choose when they wish to take each role. They can change roles as often as they want in the session. It is possible to be a Mover and a Witness, and at the same time there is another witness present: this is the inner witness of the mover. Dance Therapist Janet Adler helped us to see that these roles are inseparable (MW). The state of the witness is in stark contrast to the audience spectator of dance performance. The power exchange has been eradicated as each person directly experiences an immersion in both roles.
Janet Adler, in her lifelong study of The Discipline of Authentic Movement, followed the ways in which the inner witness develops. She codified a process of tracking ones own inner witnessing while witnessing another person moving. Over time, the external witness (first the therapist and later others) cultivates a state of non-judgement for the mover, that transfers to their own internal witness of themselves while moving.
Another way of saying it is that we accompany the mover with our attention. The more freedom we host in our witnessing, the more freedoms we ultimately gift ourselves when we move. I have heard one participant of the research group say each week: ‘I just want to give myself permissions’ (Participant R, 2022, pers. comn.). What we come to understand through our MW doing-undergoing, and the theory of Janet Adler, is how we witness another, will in turn develop into how we witness ourselves. I like to think that the reverse is also true. The more freedoms we can explore in our movement improvisation, the more latitude we permit in our witnessing of others. The word permission is full of gateways and locks. This may be a hangover from our cultural bias and living in the western modern world.
It is so obvious, but it is worth mentioning. This study is a little bit counterintuitive. Why? Because it is about being seen and in the discipline of dance studies an audience is already presumed. At the same time, we can recognise that we don’t always want to be seen. At the same time being seen is part of healthy early childhood development (Winnicott, 1991; Ogden, 2024). At the same time our dance training in the studio carries over in our bodies into the supermarket queue- a turn out, an elongated neck. Our training is our habitus. At the same time, being seen is capitalised by social media. We participate hungrily in feeding off images of others and ourselves with particular backgrounds. At the same time, we never see the same thing twice (Berger, 1973) and you and I will never share the same view. At the same time, we are surveilled by invisible eyes - cameras or religious gods. At the same time - what does it mean when people say’ I feel seen?’
Pause to ask - What does this mean for you? When did you last feel seen? And by whom? A person, an animal, a situation/environment?
