Practice
Three attention, One, Dissolving in emptiness, Distribution of attention, Tricks for your mind, Trust equal risk, Unknowing, Gaze singularity, Attention has movement, Tracking the trajectory, Communicative, Layers of the responsiveness, Embodiment of attention, Disappearing presence
Space is an encounter: an integrated shared experience between performers and audience. The choreography starts from human perception, through sensing and noticing we are working with what is there: that which the audience brings on each occasion which is different each time - by its nature an unknown.The performers highlight the sensorial with relational awareness, connecting with the audience in a manner that transforms the performer-audience dynamic and a sense of shared, collective space is made. Through sensing and noticing performers feel the presence of the other and a ritual of performance develops as embodied action and spoken word emerge. The sensing and perceiving balanced by the ritual of performance form twinned pillars of the dramaturgy.
Barbara Berti: Tell me about how you experience of Space’s work with attention.
Paolo Rosini: It’s not easy to explain. I feel like my mind is the idea of perception. Sometimes I feel attention is physically moving from somewhere else, it’s not just me pointing with my eyes, or thinking in a place, but I get the sensation of having the possibility to really expand something from the inside to the outside space - like an extension of yourself. But then I find a collision in my mind bringing me back into a more material perception of life which suggests to me that this is not true but an illusion of the mind. It’s tricky, the mind doesn’t allow me to really understand, to trust the feelings. But I think it comes with practice, the more I practice the more I feel something changing in my body … it’s like the perception of the body – through sensing I go into a state of feeling perception, then I go back to a more cerebral reality and it kind of disappears. It’s difficult for my mind to understand how to place it and keep it. So there is a contrast between the cerebral and the state and I’m wondering how much it has to do with stillness before moving, stillness in a deep state of perception, opening gates to senses. But movement also helps because while you are moving you give more space to the body and less space to the mind. So you can go towards things. When you stand still the mind might have more presence. I can clearly see now that when the attention is outside towards the inside to see how it looks from the outside, it’s composing, I can see this is part of myself, of my practice. As you said (BB), don’t think about composing because the composing will come by itself by finding the state. But the mind tends to find a safe place that protects yourself from holding this unfamiliar state. In dance, it’s easier to place a form as a kind of first layer, that can offer orientation and security, rather than exploring more open, emotional states. When you don’t know where to go the tendency is to place the form, the compositional in the front, offering a materiality, but then you don’t give space for things to come out. Instead, I sense this attention as movement by stretching attention between the space and the inside of my body, it helps me to activate this process, this extends from inside to outside, it goes through the body, the intelligence of the body rather than the one of the mind.
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The trajectory of state
Space is concerned with the specificity of embodiment of both performers and audience (rather than with the abstracted, generic idea of ‘the body’) and the transition from individual concerns to a more present, collectively embodied space. We describe this transition as a trajectory of state and it begins with attention and sensing. While the mind is intertwined within the process, attention is foregrounded, in ‘the first row’, with the mind in ‘the third row'. Through attention, a through theme of space, dancers in Space attend to the heart, the back and the eyes.
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The piece begins with the movement of the heart. The heart as sensorial embodied knowledge grounded through physical presence. The heart’s power as a universal symbol with metaphorical resonance is expressed through presence, movement and words. From there we build awareness of the back, a commonly forgotten aspect, the inaccessible lumbar in particular is typically unfamiliar, relegated by our more imposing and interactive frontal, social selves. Becoming aware of the back, more fully embodied, brings us to the physicality of our attention. The image of the back also resonates with that of our unconscious selves – a powerful and influential yet hidden aspect that we commonly don’t attend to in daily lives. Together with the presence of the back, awareness of the eyes extends attention’s reach. Eyes are commonly associated with presence and attention yet the nature of our seeing, gaze and visual presence is more nuanced and differentiated by Space’s concern with the nature of attention. Closely connected to the brain, or even as an extension of the brain, we may search for meaning in the eyes of the other, reading their intentions and emotions. The practice of Spaceworks with two aspects of the visual: firstly, the gaze as an expression of the social persona, much to do with the regulated presentation of self in social space. The second aspect is of particular interest for the practice: that is the seeing eyes as presence, both bringer of presence for each individual and communicating of this presence for others. Attention binds the ways in which heart, back and eyes become employed in Space. We distinguish between intellectual attention and physical attention: in our daily lives we are encouraged and habituated towards an economy of attention while the practice of Space is concerned more with an ecology of attention. We are encouraged in daily life to use the capability for attention within the limitations created by technological systems, economic goals, educational constructs, and societal mores. Currently, the unregulated arenas of social media offer stark examples of how our attention may become limited through psychological and emotional exploitation as companies complete for the monetisation of our attention. The way in which we give our attention is clearly a political choosing, yet how aware are we of this? Through the frequently involuntary giving of attention, often in habituated default mode, we are adapting, self-regulating, and unwittingly conforming to structures which also greatly limit us and in so doing the human potential for giving attention, the space where our attention can go, is foreshortened. The concern in Space is with sharing embodied attention in the moment of performance, creating an opening, an opportunity to look anew, to notice that which we haven’t considered, and in the process of performance we question some presumptions of life. As we navigate the trajectory of state our focus transitions between individual concerns and the collective and the shared space of performers and audience develops its own quality. Sound is important in the practice bringing a further immediacy, offering additional communicative layers of meaning, reflection and celebration supporting the preoccupation with attention. The piece begins and ends with music; spoken word offers a narrative of sensing and space; at other times speech is a reflexive, meta commentary on the performance’s process.
Accepting what each audience brings involves the softening of boundaries between performers and audience, working with an unknown element. This may be unexpected and unfamiliar, and through the piece’s unusual nature, the strangeness of being presented with the unknown, of transitional states, humour frequently emerges. Ultimately, we’re interested in allowing the audience to become as responsible as the performers in the transaction that is the performance.
Attention in attention
Awareness, noticing, giving attention are all terms that apply to how we introduce and situate heart, back and eyes. By attending to these, the goal is to transcend the everyday preoccupation with presumed givens and the mundane that preoccupy cerebral thought and to foreground the experience of embodiment through the attention. This dance, referred to as the attention in attention, becomes a guiding through-theme of Space. In life, we tend towards shifting our attention automatically, while maintaining a separated inner and outer identity. The self others see is the attention we present; often this what we would like to be identified with. But what if we drop this presentation, this image of self, and attention is used instead as a sensing tool to observe the overall schema. What then if the attention is allowed to observe attention itself.
The networked ritual
‘The gesture that welcomes a single audience member is also a welcome to all who share it.’ (Paolo Rosini).The audience and performers form a single networked body.
And the geography of our bodies is synonymous with the geography of the piece.The practice works knowingly with the network of performers and audience in the process of performance. Through attention, movement and words; sensing and noticing, performers continually actively engage withthe outer and their inner space and the border between performers andaudience.This resonates with shared experience in rituals across cultures and, similarly, the process of performance here is a transcending, an experience of change,to ‘move on up’ from where we’ve started. Space’s balancing of action and sensing questions received ideas of choreography;rather than choosing and routines, noticing through the body into sensing, working with the body as a multiplicity that serves the dramaturgy,the performance of Space is also a study of human perception.