State, space, attention
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As an artist I’m interested in that which affects human beings, and the nature of being – and I don’t necessarily differentiate between my experience of life and performance. Over the years I’ve found different states, the psychological, emotional and altered of interest in my choreographic dance practice. I regard them as material in my work – in a sense, the practice becomes a kind of channeling. This special kind of approach to choreography leads to particular demands and I’ve found I give myself away to the process. I am not attached to a form rather researching a state that leads to form, or the shape of performance. In some ways this practice is an extension of somatic work, in which I’ve trained, and it can be beneficial to work with those who have some experience of somatic practice. But the work with states calls for a commitment that goes beyond the somatic. In this practice we challenge ourselves. The work inherently questions normative boundaries in multiple ways, of: selfhood; otherness; the group; and those to do with constructs of both performance and the audience/performer relationship. The work is perceptually open, accepting of the not-yet-known, and borders often become questioned. This process means the frame in which we’re working is not static but always alive. You may encounter fears and the dialogue you develop with these contributes the creative process. Privileging internal processes in performance that embodies states is more of a risky experimental activity than adopting a text, or more typical choreographic approach. A lot of this is sensory, perceptual, internal work, and much of it can be unconscious – so, we allow for this to emerge. Necessarily you need to trust your feelings.The process is experiential and not always easy to translate into words, however, for practice, a workable way of encapsulating these ideas, expressing the principles, is by means of the terms space and attention. Through states we experience literal and metaphorical space – by seeking to question boundaries we can change space. I’ve found that the consideration of attention, interrogating what attention means, its nature, movement and function, typology has become a natural outcome of this work with states. Attention’s importance relates to perception, cognition, awareness, consciousness as well as to societal and political issues arising from how we are choosing to pay attention and to what end: what values, beliefs and education we are developing. I don’t see the choreographic work as separate from what is going on in the world and in my life. The current time of pandemic and the surge in social media bring new questions regarding how we are paying attention consider space in the world.
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Note: In the spring of 2021 our research process began to employ the term ecology of attention as an encompassing way of describing the complex processes and dance practice of ‘Space: Golden Dream 2’ –in which considering the nature of attention is key for performers and audience. Subsequently we became aware of Yves Citton’s ‘Ecology of attention’ (2016). While Citton’s book is certainly of relevance, our primary focus here is with attention as dance practice and the potential for inclusive experience with audiences.
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Attention 1
Developing an ecology of attention. Attention has its own inquiring qualities – ordinarily we attend in order to function, to know - and as we explore the nature of attention for dance we see there are different kinds of attention. At times we are very consciously directing attention, at other times this conscious directing of attention can impede or alter an embodied activity. The practice is one of learning and differentiating how we make use of attention. We can direct attention but at the same time we also aim to be receptive to that which we don’t know, the outside or beyond, which is always simultaneously present. And so, we’ve moved towards applying openness and attention to include that which may be beyond the immediately apparent. When we begin to operate in this manner, developing a process of paying attention to that which is already there, infinite possibilities are revealed. (We can think of this as fractal, where all things are made up of ever decreasing patterns). For example, noticing the air, giving attention to the particularity of the air that is present, its quality, how this may change in different areas of a given space. This sense of inquiring, that leads to the infinite, beyond the immediate, through an embodied practice of attention – being present in order to go beyond – takes us into unknown territory that can have ineffable, unknown, or mysterious qualities. The very act of paying attention in this way is itself not an everyday activity and very different from what may be expected in dance methodology. However, attending in this manner is in some ways very familiar, it’s comparable, for example, to how we may experience music – the sound may be transformative, it can take you somewhere else, as double bass player William Parker has described people listen to music because they want to see beyond the horizon. And this attending while being open to the ineffable, seeing beyond, is common across religious and quasi-religious activity. While the practice of attention can be described in physiological and biological terms, and this is important, the practice here extends to attention as an artistic tool in which imagination is also at work. Returning to the example of paying attention to air, this may evoke a sense of awe, and brings a different energetic quality that ties to embodied stillness, movement, or sound. Attention becomes an artistic practice that is a conjoining of the apparent, the physical, perceived through the sensory and the imagination. As the process immerses us in the creative process that is physiological, biological, psychological, sensory, and imaginative, we become the attention as we place ourselves/attention in different spaces
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The practice of attention
The practice begins by considering the nature of attention and more consciously
directing this to different parts of body. The next step is to observe our attention itself – but this creates its own question – we don’t usually pay attention to how we are using attention. This is the paradigm of the dance practice: from giving attention internally and moving to the external we observe how attention travels and circulates. This leads to working in the more integrated performer/audience frame. In performance, the attention of the audience is bent towards the gap – but the audience have to find the gap for themselves. The idea of the gap leads to the Gap Score: from which we watch the
audience enter, we don’t ‘erase’ anyone, the body moves from itself, attention is in the gap. And so, the simultaneous elements of: moving, flowing, being communicative, giving trust, accepting risks, and sensing became the modus operandi for the performers nurturing the required state for performance. When a dancer practices this ecology of attention alone, within the dramaturgy, as a timeline, as well as following the agreed score, they allow for unpredictability, for the inclusion of elements that are not-pre-determined, and this comes through the sensing of the outside.
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