SURFING 

Some things are coming together in surfing.   All the materials. The motions of moving along with.…  : The surge of the wave on that particular day, in that particular time and weather, the sand and rock in that shape pushing up that wave, the board meeting water, you with quickening muscular decisions, the brazen sky, the long travelling force toward shore and everything going along. Sometimes you surf this way and that by choosing your path and there are other times when you surge with another thing, a fleeting surrender, the board seems to take you and you hold on with those bare feet, keeping up, keeping balance, staying with. 

After, you are left pooling in its eddy - a whirl kick ecstasy whoop leaping from your lungs - the only way to tell of this wild encounter, this left field flow.  The body in dance could be a surfboard. If so, who, what, is holding on?

THE GAP

I think you know this when you improvise: it’s something of a paradox. And maybe that is it’s cruel catch in the back of the throat cut-off-weep beauty and mystery. But I get ahead of myself. First to say there is a phrase that repeats in my mind said by dancer Rosalind Crisp in her workshop on improvisation. It repeats and repeats, a wave to a shore. It has always stayed with me, perhaps because I didn’t quite get it so it worked away like an artisanal technique, like a koan, like a shining thing under the water, always underneath, quiet and glinting. 

The workshop was in France, in 2012. Six days inside a sultry summer where leaves overhung stone walls and fruit was heavy, bowing low. The workshop was in an old silk spinning factory on the top floor. To get there we walked up old step ladders in rough wood, held handrails with splinters. We passed the bones of gothic machines, black iron skeleton spindles, fingertip to fingertip wide wheels struck through by thin black spokes. All of them silent, threaded with spider web and dust. Each day we crossed this haunted threshold to reach the upper chamber studio

of bare floor,

arched windows

and flooding light. 

She said: “when we improvise we either move from the motor or the window”.

And this is what I have understood long afterwards: you can go from the Motor by dancing the form from the engine in your fleshy centre -doing the moves, letting the movement feed itself, pulling out the tools, shifting from one to the other and riding that wave that is generated in the muscular consciousness. 

And then,

there is the Window. 

And this is when you are moved.

It is ‘the gap’ Nancy1  speaks of.

THE FLOOR

Rosebank, Cape Town, South Africa

My interest in this research is motivated from my experience as a performer, choreographer and director of the first professional and inclusive dance company in South Africa. What I am thinking of now is the 7 years of audience development. I am remembering what it took to educate the audience and to invite them along with us, as we performed and played into what can and can’t constitute dance and a dancing body.

In the studio, an old church hall with newly refurbished wooden floor, we experienced what philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva memorably named ‘difference without separability ’2. Our vastly different physical abilities, backgrounds, languages, communication skills, historical privilege, economic class, energy labour for transport to the studio, gender, age and prior dance training meant talking would most often fall apart into disparity and frustration and positions of fixity. On the floor however, we found new ways to be together in and through moving, making, imagining, playing, sensing. Here on the floor, released from the grip of certainty, we approached something else through radical creative capacity and daring, through embodied imagination and empathy.  Da Silva talks about a reassembly of ‘the fundamental components of everything to refigure the World as a complex whole without order’3. On the floor, in movement, this was possible. We could make a playground with the staples of Western Modern racial grammar ‘fear’ and ‘uncertainty’ and the violence of Western Modern thought. We could move-think the world otherwise. In taking movement improvisation seriously it is precisely the skills of the improviser that I interrogate and wish to teach: their ability to meet uncertainty with curiosity and their stamina to dwell in the unclear and confused, the vague, while widening attention for the precision of  the ‘wiggle room’4 .

FISH

Aarhus, Denmark.

It is after practice. We are sitting in a circle. We have time to share our experince if we wish. I see L ’s hands as she tells us ‘something about…..about…..like…..its something…..’. Her hands are palm up above her lap, leading a downward pulse from her knuckles. In her palms of air she is weighing something in a determined way. I feel the something there, not yet expressed and on its way. She is holding a net for it to land. Like a fish it will surface from her flesh, this word or phrase that fits just right, that matches her bodily felt sense of her experience. ‘Its….like…like yesterday…..my dog….at…….it’s like being off the leash…yes, off the leash’.

‘Do..don’t…run..sleep..dig..eat…do…run again…don’t..’  

We laugh so hard. Its exactly that. 

It matches just right. We feel an easing. 

I fatten out full and satisfied, eager for the next thing. Anything can happen next and I feel a solid and flexible capacity to meet it. L has made explicit what was implied in her felt experience. Intoxicating as it was to move that morning, to say it - freed it, and then more was available. More is always available. It is there for the unfolding, fertility lively in the creases5, infinitely intricate and generous. It is not a linear logic.

We have had to learn that special kind of waiting. It is an expecting nothing and expecting everything at the same time. I have heard it described as the centreing down kind of quietness that we do when we want to invite a wild animal a little closer.

We sense it, its already there. The words are tasty when they land. We smelled them cooking. They are familiar words with old meanings making new fresh sense6.

GOLD 

 Aarhus, Denmark.

I think of Jytte in the session last week, answering the question, "What is here for you? Why do we keep doing this? Why do you keep coming back each week?" She says, “Gold…the gold…precious gold". It's not just the Danish-English language crossing that is trying to be forged in this moment, where she can only say, "the gold".  It's also the travel from the fleshy body, the feeling that needs to be encapsulated with sound and semiotics and syntax. She's fishing for the one word that is a portal to the body's knowing of its understructure, its underbelly, that fat shelter of stuff. The word that is the bottle-stopper, the exact word, that, as it is said, releases a rush of shared understanding. Yes, we say, we nod, we smile, gold.

In my mind I see a heroic quest, the kind with dark forests, no shoes, slippery wells and laughter like broken sticks. I see the dwindling of a figure, feeling her way. She disappears down the path, is eaten by the trees. And then she is back, walking clear. In her pocket is something weighty. Her hand is in her pocket and she pulls it out. From the shape of her hand it is round. Between her fingers a warm light dances. It glows and as she opens her hands it is disappearing. It's seeping and gone, absorbed into her bloodstream, below her skin. It's underground again, liquid, underskin, a ‘jubilation of emptiness’ (Barad 2012: 13). And there it is, a living thing. Now, pulsing about, untrapped by shape, form or word.

And so it is, we come close and we touch things we ultimately can't explain. We come back to do it again as Barbara Dilley urges - 'you just have to show up' (Dilley 2016 :24) and ‘follow kinaesthetic delight’  (Dilley 2020: 59). 

NIGHT KITCHEN 

I remember seeing improvisation as an effortless pairing with the world, a moving and being moved, a not-seeking but surfing, for the first time in 2004 in Harvard Square at Green Street Studios. It was an evening performance. Debra Bluth was performing and what I remember with piercing clarity is a suspended moment. She was on the floor, facing the audience, she had scooched there from the front of the stage, moving backwards, reverse evolution, something belly-led and now at the far back and centre of the stage she looked out at the audience. Quietly she looked - like a drop of water forming on the mouth of a faucet.  She was low, crouched, soft, alert, watching us back, scanning the space gently and specifically, listening with her eyes. I think it was the first time I saw egoless performance - performance on fire, under pressure, sand becoming glass, and yet unconcerned with its own impression. She was a place of passage. She had surrendered or softened the form of one thing to allow another through. She listened with everything. I don’t remember anything else on the stage or in the room, yes, the warmth of other bodies beside me in the audience. Mostly the whole performance falls away like writing on water, one thing becoming another, all surprising and all making unpredictable sense. I was absorbed in a flow of possibility inside a fine craft rowed by a timeless mariner. Dilley⁷,in an introduction to Ruth Zaporah’s action theatre manual subtitled The Improvisation of Presence, wrote of Ruth’s performance:

‘each moment unfolded from the moment before, flavoured with outrageousness and haunting familiarity…I know how it was , with her, with me, she was showing me something I already knew as if for the first time’.

In Debra’s suspension I am on the edge, not of my seat but the edge of my breath. What is unconscious is all at once conscious. I hang at the threshold of in and out, listening for the tide to turn. It’s so peculiar, I don’t know what will happen next, this moment that is already so sweet and full. I both want and don’t want the next thing. I sense a hundred little open doors in my skin, a hundred little doors in the air of the room, a hundred little doors in the mind.

I had seen improvisation before of course, but this struck me as new, from a seed bed of contact improvisation with the touched awake 360 surfaces, acute attention to inside and outside - distinct spaces only in words. My memory skips now to master contact improvisers Kirstie Simson and Jori Snell improvising alone and at other times together. I am struck by the space around them, between them and the listening. It is as though the space is as thickly supportive as a mattress, the next thing already waiting. They fall backwards with disciplined abandon plus a spoonful of trust. I skip to an inside memory of dancing a contact duet for the first time, my eyes are closed and I am following. It seems so effortless to do, so thrilling. I don’t know a thing about the form, so I can only be with the touch and follow the swinging doors inside of it. My memory is again of a suspension of time and space. The suspension is so plush with possibility I imagine it is how seeds must feel at that precise turn of spring - all winter-cold dark-waiting and then - there is an up and a down and both at the same time are possible in this particular heat exchange of light and soil and water. In my first ever contact dance I close my eyes and follow. I am out of the way and have become background. A roaring flow pulls and laughs and renews itself 

i n f i n i t e l y . It keeps going and spills over itself. This is how the world is made I am sure of it. The world is an excess of this, this froth of excitement stirred into the bone. It harnesses the glee in the laughter and shakes down, shakes into the sturdy bones of being and gets the air in the marrow participating with all its solemn integrity and purpose. It too re-patterns and resets.                   And then it is over. The human body is exhausted and spent, high alert clicks off and it rests,  slows gears, down-changes, naps like a wolf and the true partner in the dance, the wave of Knowing, laughs a bright light laugh and finds other delights. I didn’t know how to place all these experiences, I confused them early on as attraction and now I feel the well-knowing of a different love, a worlding love. Name it perhaps - ‘For Give’. It’s texture is clear and immaculate and soft as a thin stream of water from the tap which runs cool, not making a sound, as you sip at the kitchen sink in the night sleeping house.

CLOSER

Aarhus, Denmark.

Six women meet for practice in lokale 1.4. at Folkestedet (Danish 'the people's place'). It is upstairs. The floor is always clean, the space is always warm. Our practice begins and ends in a circle together. The circle is a measuring tool. I notice things shift inside the practice of an hour and half by way of our circle. Our practice has a simple structure, requiring no prior dance training. ‘In a beginners mind there are many possibilities, in an expert’s mind there are few’ is a statement written by zen master Suzuki Roshi and often referred to by improvisation teachers. You come as you are8. Yet something happens that physically draws us closer. We begin with a certain perimeter around our bodies. Our visible edges have a formal clarity, a recognisable shape to cut around each person and a name attached.  At the end we are a huddle. Feet, hands, thighs, shoulders touch in odd asymmetry. We are one thing in our many.We are blended. What happened? There has been a dismantling and a cohesion. Yet nothing has been lost, and there seems to be more. 

PARADOCS # 2

I made this small manual to collect ways of exploring the eye prior to practice. 

I collected the tasks to use as warm ups. Some tasks are offerings from practitioners, other tasks are made up during the research time. 

PARADOCS # 3

(30 pages of 100)

I made and kept this  'alongside' notebook as an accompaniment to the research process. It is a record of the möbius- strip-thinking necessary around moving and being moved, seeing and being seen. The tone of the research thinking-doing turned me inside out. It was partly because some of the qualitites of experience are only to be glimpsed, and never grasped. There were flashes of momentary insight. I have been learning to skate the osccilation between delicate precision and the richness of a foggy place of knowing. So I drew and wrote, as hints to the experience, and as a lure for memory. This was my way of coming closer to sense-making, to deal with my fear of losing what I experienced, when needing to whittle the knowing to make sense in academic protocols. 

I called the book  WITH(   )NESS.