INSIGHTS, FINDINGS and IMPLICATIONS

I offer the findings of my PaR for anyone in the role of witness. Their role as witness may be in  dance practices, therapeutic contexts,as awitness of a friend,a family member,a child,the more-than-human or one’s own inner activity. These findings, formulated as practices, are valuable for supporting the place of listening/looking inany context and field of our life long, ever-intricate duet with the world. My research has been immersed in a concert of ways of looking, vision, insight, attention, perception, blind sight, eye function, hind sight, hidden in plain sight, attention, seeing, observing, regarding and noticing.

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.

I present the insights are arranged in three broad fields

Easy Eyes as Boundary Object

I consider Easy Eyes as a ‘boundary object'. A boundary object is something, a material matter or an idea, that carries over from one group to another, groups which may have different points of views or beliefs. The object itself is plastic enough yet robust enough to maintain its inner coherence so that it can be shared in value even though the context in which it is received is different. The concept of boundary object was offered by sociologists Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer in 1989. It applies to social to science and technology as well as social theory:

objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites (Star and Griesemer 1989).

In this instance, Easy Eyes is a boundary object between the two modalities of understanding the world:material reductionism and relational process. I argue that EasyEyesactsasaboundaryobject,functioningasakeyforunlocking,unlearning,de-linkingand reorienting ways of seeing. It is both robust and plastic in the manner described. It is moveable and nomadic as it is situated in the occipital orbit of the body,carried around on the skeletal architecture. It is independent and embodied. It is in the near-by, it is ‘within reach’ (Ahmed 2006 ). It is a sensory organ. It can both receive information and actively pursue information (Gibson 1966) and is not isolated in a distinct sensory system but is part of a perpetual system that is mysterious (Spira 2008), a-modal (Stern 1985, Manning and Massumi2014)and reciprocal.It is both hidden and visible. Close your eyes, open them. Try it now. The door of the eye is always open. It’s a subversive un/doing, the quiet revolution. It hinges at the waist* of seeing and being seen, in order to re-order the world on the fly.

3. Reflections on the socio-political implications of this eye practice and its potential to delink dance praxis as part of the projecy of decoloniality. 

TheAs-Yet-Unthinkable Movement

I hope many people will articulate this. I think it is because we don't have to stay with separate items, give them artificial connections, then try to impose the result on ourselves. The implicit, murky at first, soon opens into so much more, all already interrelated from underneath, genuinely – even embarrassingly real. The implicit rangesdownintotheuniversewherelifeflowsup,andmovesforwardintolittlesteps of “Oh ...” and Hmm...” which have the person's unique intricacy and flavour. The steps come from directly sensing the edge of what is right there but implicit’

—Eugene Gendlin, Vision Statement for Focusing

When I began this research, I asked a question from the schema of separation, from the ideology of materialist reductionism. I impacted this by researching within academia which highly prizes this objectified view, scientific precision and rational distancing requiring an object in the hand, written in a language that names and classifies things and concepts. Gendlin calls this the Unit Model (2017). It is a useful way to see the world. We have bricks! We can build what we need by stacking up parts and understand by breakingdownandpickingthingsoutonebyone.WhenthisUnitModelisbraidedtopower, things take on a representation and violent systems grow (Foucault 1977; Haraway 1988).  Once a thing is labelled, it can be ordered, settled and controlled. A hierarchy of importance and value is attributed. A force of scarcity operates and governs behaviours, choices, ways of being and knowing. McGilchrist (2009, 2021) explains the kind of attention thataccompaniestheseparationview.Thelefthemispherefunctionsinthisway,channelinga beam of attention to parse what it wants from the background in order to grab it. The left hemisphere operates the grab - whether to order the hand to grab it or to grab the thing by assigning a name.

My practice is fostering improvisation in MoverWitness relation, in the practice of CDP, in community settings with un/trained dancers. Everything about this practice does not fit into the Unit Model. There has been an attempt in my life to fit dance into a discipline, a script form that represents something else. Ballet was my first devoted learning. I loved it for atime. I understood it with the Unit Model.I thought the dancer had agency of the dance and perfected execution and staging. I thought they performed something they controlled, an objectforanaudience,thatreducedthebodytoanobjecttoo.Evenimprovisation,at the edge of the Unit Model thinking, was a product of a dancer. Something in me still thought this even though my experience was different. The Unit Model is tenacious. But danceisfleeting.Itisalwaysarrivingandalwaysleaving.Iexperiencetheheightofaliveness in the moment of joining its flow, as a mover and as a witness. Dance passes through the body. The dancer is danced.

The second mode of understanding the world is that we are relation (Akamolofe 2024; Manning 2016, 2023; Gendlin 2018; Haraway 2015). We are not IN relation as one subject meeting another subject. We are already, and always and automatically relation (Barad 2007; van Tonder 2024). Gendlin speaks of this relation as interaction-first, the ground form of our living process. We, as living processes, entwined and enmeshed with all the other processes going on, create conditions for our carrying forward.We do this on every level. We do it with other living processes of all other things.  The separation and distancing of the Unit Model are functions at the basis of what we refer to as ‘common sense’. It has become the modern template, script and framework for how we live. Coupled with power it can become violentandthepulsingcirculatingexpression of patriarchy, racism, extractivisim, genderbias etc. This is also referred to as the ‘major’ (Manning 2016, Manning and Massumi 2022), the ‘minor’ is what the major disregards and often disavows.In my research I held these two schemas at the same time. The two schemas of the unit model and interaction-first(EN#2,#3), the major and the minor. At times I held them taught like a bow string, the effort causing a trembling of all I thought I knew, shuddering from the forge of embodied critical thinking.

2. A reframing of contemplative dance practice as firstly, a transformational infrastructure

and secondly, as place of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures. 

Slow Seeing as an embodied technique that contributes to the project of decolonising dance praxis.

Where do we see from? Where do we think from? Where do we move from? With the invigoration of Manning’s concept of the minor gesture(2016)braided with concerns of the project of decoloniality, and the ground of interaction-first (Gendlin 2018) it is a matter of the margin. It is a matter of letting the view fold in from the outskirts, to place myself at the edge, and step further back, to disperse into the weld of the world, to be ‘with’.

Dance veteran,Siobhan Davies says ‘we know the body has knowledge and it draws on its experience and is in tune with who we are, who we are with and where we are.It knows the whole body situation’ (Davies 2024). Dancers are able to do so through the porosity of the not-border oftheir skin (Gendlin 2018). All is information and it is only ‘major’ habitus (Bourdieu 1980; 1984) that stand in the way of flourishing forward in as-yet-unthinkable ways.Davies follows: ‘if we allow it to exist for us, then we can do more - we can do more than play’ at which her interviewer, Guy Clayton, cuts in to say: ‘we can be fully intelligent’.

I propose Easy Eyes as an embodied technique that invites an entry into the experience of relational seeing. I consider it an open door (allowing) to the more-than play at the edges of our thinking and doing. We expand the territory of our whole feeling, doing and thinking in this manner.We manoeuvre in the margins (Massumi 2002) with minor attentions, and from the background something formulates itself, something we have not-yet-thought, that is profoundly adapted to the thriving of the whole. The project of decolonial thinking critically and sharply examines dominant structures of knowledge and their relationship to power and the we inhabit this in body, space and thought.It shines a light on the ways in which a new place and way of thinking can undo the substratum layers of systems of power and representation that are violent and destructive to the world’s (human and more-than-human)flourishing.Yet what is the practice of this in small as well as big w ays? Inside of our everyday actions and attentions, how do we turn from the Unit Model to the Process Model relational way of seeing, being and knowing? Where do we see from? How can we shift within the moment of our doing or the moment of our thinking- from seeing it from place of remove and distance to a place of seeing with?

The eye practice can be a doorway and a tool for this turn. It is able to trouble a host of epistemological concerns relating to power, as global south dance scholar, Lianne Loots says, we have ‘constructed our(dancing)histories to either support or subvert historical power operations in our present and past society (Loots 2012: 54). Easy Eyes is a tool for looking straight and not looking away (Guilfoyle 2017) so that we can reorient (Ahmed 2006). Much like South African dance scholar Kristine Johnstone (2023) has proposed, the reciprocity of touch has a political potential to jump cut inertia to activation. Similarly, Easy Eyes is a lever,a door,an embodied technique that is applicable and accessible in and across any fields of dance practice, belief and knowledge systems. It is an embodied technique within a battery of techniques toward the decolonising project of dance praxis.

1. 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.

Contemplative Dance Practice as Tranformational Infratructure. 

As a community dance artist I am animated by ethical-political concerns,motivated by ways to imagine, experiment, build, inhabit, delight -in new forms of common ways of being and doing together. CDP is a form that is made to practice meeting what is, in ‘this very moment’ (Dilley 2020), in this day, in this moving arrangement of people and these constellating affects. As transformational infrastructure, CDP makes opportunities for expanding ways in which bodies can be affected by other bodies,and in process to open up new possible forms of life whose value is not specified ahead of time. We can’t get too attached, the dance is gone as it emerges, we can barely take it home in a sentence and the only through-line is the anchoring arc of our attention⁵⁸. I close with a quote from Anahid Nersessian’s remembrance of Berlant’s force in being with the world together with others (Nersessian 2021:n.p.). This is the site of the research and returns us to the title: Holding Open Space.

All freedom has is a tune, which seems even less than a song; it’s a snippet, an air. What Simone did was play it loud,and what Lauren heard in that amplification—inits virtuosity and fury—was the transformative labor of undoing one form of existence and surging toward another.

Reframing Contemplative Dance Practice as a practice of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures

Through out the PaR I ask: what is the witness doing? Through the PaR I can answer more precisely: the witness is holding space open.How?The witness is holding it open by taking the layer of representations, interpretations, judgements, opinions, ‘shoulds’ and hanging it on a nearby hook. The witness is holding the space open so the mover can let the images arriving from the space and the ‘back of the mind’ to meet the moment without sanction. The witness holds the old patterns of perception and interpretation at bay so the mover has space to transfer the as-yet-unthinkable into shape. They cannot plan this, they have to join something already in motion. The witness and the mover prepare for this joining, by cultivating a state of readiness so that a certain receptive state can welcome the dance. The witness and the mover are attuning to each other to find out how things can move through them and how they can join. 

CDP is where I can practice this place of passage in this way. It is possible to be slow with the witnessing of intrinsic and extrinsic senses.It gives time to a direct experience of undoing frameworks and inviting the as-yet-unthinkable movement. The practice is undertaken in a collective. The Slow Seeing principle makes a warm welcome for the minor gesture (Manning 2016). It takes the form of radical embodied witnessing. It requires making space to witness as-yet-unthinkable movement without foreclosing it with a name, a description, a value, a judgement, a resistance. It welcomes movement as having it’s own full and undisclosed purpose. It requires letting frameworks so deeply tethered to our ways of being, emerge and move on without finding purchase. It requires keeping a steady supply of warm interest in all that is blooming and worlding.It is to value the ocean of knowing in another and in oneself and to follow what may form freshly in the meeting.

The experience of Easy Eyes

Ways to encourage Easy Eyes in the physical body include: allowing the muscles of the eye to soften and rest in the cradle of the occipital orbit. Let the muscles of the face, cheeks, upper lip, soften. Other places will join this softening, the front of the neck, the upper chest, collar bones, shoulder, forehead, scalp, back of the neck, softening and breath easing…notice a veil-light slipping toward the backspace. Let it happen. Let it happen in the warm way of a sunny afternoon. Notice a slow, shifting sensation bloom toward the hammock of the back space. There is nothing to do, but receive and welcome the view. 

In the context of Dilley’s (2020) five eye practices for the mover, Easy Eyes is a mingling of two eye practices at the sametime:direct looking and peripheral seeing. In a converation with DIlley (2024) where we discussed this PaR discovery she suggested it can be added to the original five eye practices, as a sixth. 

Graphic artist,LyndaBarry(2015)draws a spiral to court a certain state of mind that invites her drawing to pass through her body to her hand and to the paper. In the same way Easy Eyes courts a certain state of attention that readies us as a place of passage for the dance. I have symbolised Easy Eyes using Barry’s spiral - resting it in the hammock of our broadening attention.

The top of the yawn 

Easy Eyes is, similar to Fehmi’s comment on courting open state attention, ‘strangely resistant to instruction’ (2007: 17). It is not achieved through trying or actively doing. It is found through allowing. For Fehmi he achieved his first recording of alpha brainwave synchronisation the moment he ‘accepted his failure’, a moment he describes as ‘surrender’ (2007: 6). Two other practitioners speak about this state. David Hall, a feldenkrais practitioner speaks of an allowing at the top of the spine (2020). Tension and rigid patterns in the neck can’t be actively fixed by doing something differently. As the heavy head nods back and forth on the axis it is freed and supported by an ‘allowing’ attention. This is a similar principle to ‘sitting in the synapse’ (Cohen 2024). The allowing feeling is a bit like the gliding feeling as you pedal a bike and suddenly can freewheel. It is the top of the yawn. EasyEyes is a technique of un/doing through allowing.It might feel a littlecounterintuitive,that a disciplined practice can feel so ease-full and effort-less.

Contemplative Dance Practice as a Radical Hospitality for Fugitive Gestures 

My interest has always been to widen my own and others’ capacity for maneuverability, comfort, and the ability to operate in the margins. What do I mean by margins? They are often the places that are flagged up through discomfort or friction. They are the places at the periphery of our perception that fall off the edge of the social, political or public script. They are the edge moments, referred to by other thinkers as the ‘break’ (Moten 2003), the ‘crease’ (DeLeuze 1993 ), the ‘fold’ (Tim Ingold 2007 ), the ‘cut' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) the ‘glitch’. (Legacy Russell 2020) , the ‘gap’ (Smith 2012). This is the territory of the minor gesture (Manning 2016) and boundary thinking (Mignolo 2013) that accompanies the major gesture of the script. They are often small movements, flickering and glimmerings, that are uniquely faithful and responsive to affect that is lively in the virtual. In short, the margins are the space in which the script gives way, fails, slips, hesitates, or has trouble operating.

Movement improvisation is a practice that attunes to the multiple frequencies of this virtual terrain. In order to improvise we practice flexible sensibility of the body/mind -mind/body. We practice correspondence (Ingold 2017) and response-ability in collusion with the virtual and the actual (Massumi 2015) and we practice openness of attention, we practice following movement’s agency, and we practice saying yes. 

When we find ourselves stuttering, hesitating or slipping for some reason - physical or otherwise- we are offered a moment of choice. We are quick to censor ourselves before we have the chance to find out what else is there. What if we widen that moment - choose to dwell in the thick of the instability, to stay open and curious? What are our resources to operate and be comfortable in the margin between knowing and not knowing? The margins are where the scripts begin to break down. Scripts are formations of power, where power comes into conversation with discourse. It is important for me to challenge them as they are destructive in their reduction. The scripts are well known and never not there: patriarchy, colonialism, gender, perspective, neurotypicality, extractavism. This is the ethico-political dimension to working in the margin and dwelling in the margins.

Movements may arrive in their own rhythms and places and spaces. Viewed through a Major lens, some of the spectrum of movements might be labeled from the major vocabulary ‘madness’. They are fringe movements, movements of margins and flickers, the edging movements, the minor and fugitive gestures that are quickly disavowed by the major. Yet, these are the movements of wellness, faithful to the specific situations with a knowing of the vast past (Gendlin 2018;Schoeller 2022). There is knowledge here. In my experience in the practice, movement arrives quickly and is gone quickly and in the warm trace of its passing is a treasure of information. Thought catches up to the intellectual pursuit of the body.It is interesting to recall and collect words to reflect the experience in CDP but not within the scope of this research. What has emerged in this research and is put forward here, is another way of understanding the urgent and necessary work of witnessing within this practice: as an improvisation of its own. The task of witnessing within CDP is to create an ongoing radical hospitality for fugitive gestures in another as well as oneself. It is in each others company, in the equal exchange and common cause of the MW relation, that strong, tender and unimagined grammars bloom freshly for our flourishing.