Improvised Dance Practice as Research
January 4th, 2007What follows is a paper that was first presented alongside performance and photographic images at a conference in Banff, Canada.
The paper discusses the relationships between different modes of knowing in improvisation and locates my own dance practice as research. It relates in particular to my installation ‘Threshold:Fleshfold’.
A Little Fleshy Philosophy– Improvised Dance Practice as Research
Vida L Midgelow
Score 1. ‘Traveling through routes in the body’
I was wondering how I might start…
…whether I would start or whether it possible to know.
I just start… without plan - without a predetermined direction – without any known end. Following routes and noting emerging pathways. Tracing along bones and sinew. Moving around organs and in muscles.
I should move on… I could be enjoying myself too much in this practice, in this writing with the body. Is such sensate pleasure allowed in the recasting of dance practice as theoretical embodiment?! - my dancing body as critical mass.
Threshold: Fleshfold
The atmosphere is cool. Shadow lines intersect. Standing between two oblong frames she shifts her weight, the back elongates and pitches forward at the pelvis. Her hip pushes out to the side – distorting the shape of the body. Both knees bend. Extending her arm out, she lets it drop and swing from the shoulder. This is a body dancing, a dancing body. This is a body in transformation, a body which refuses definition. This is a body reaching, searching, researching.
A voice is heard. She makes a sharp turn of the head.
Have you ever felt the morphology of the body whilst jumping?
Have you ever experienced the process of becoming whilst spinning?
Have you ever considered the importance of the Deleuzian fold whilst rolling?
I can recommend it.
Investigating improvised dance I seek out multiple embodiments and chart my own improvised choreographic installation Threshold: Fleshfold as Practice as Research (PaR). Blurring boundaries between theoretically-informed practices and choreographically-informed theories I revel in the pleasures of a sensuous hybridity and the viscosity of a fleshy ontology for, I propose, it is when shifting in-between that new spaces, new corporealities, and new theories, arise.
Threshold : Fleshfold – is the result of a collaboration between Brendon O’Connor, a spatial designer, and myself, a dance maker, with especially commissioned music by Robert Wilsmore. Working together and in parallel Brendon and I created two intersecting works born out of shared research and discussions, and realised in two media. Our attentions focused on the interrelationships between spaces, and between bodies and spaces.
The installation is made of fine wood panels and transparent surfaces in repeated modular forms. It uses the concept of the architectural corner as both a termination and starting point of space to create multiple boundaries that exist as both real and virtual. This installation is the context for an improvised solo dance performance that evokes the intensive interconnectivity of bodyspaces in intimate and subtle ways. Folding, touching and curving this improvised dance is both sinuous and serene. Foregrounding connectivities and flow in what might be considered a Deleuzian manner, Threshold : Fleshfold seeks to interlace different orders of space and surface, and to blur boundaries between the inside and the outside, and between bodies and architectures.
Threshold : Fleshfold encompasses then a number of fields of research that are interrelated and were variously brought to the fore through the research process, such as: the conceptualisation and experience of space, challenges to dominant visuality and perspectival viewing, methodologies in solo and interactive dance improvisation, Conceptualisation of the body as fluid, transforming and sensate and finally interconnectivities and foldings. What I am interested in here is not the installation as a whole but the nature of the dance improvisation that is integral to Threshold: Fleshfold and the implication of improvised dance practice per se in the context of PaR for the academic community. Thereby Threshold: Fleshfold is here operating as an experiential case study – as a springboard for discussion.
Practice as Research and PARIP
Working against the traditionally acknowledged modes of research as established and disseminated in scientific and written forms the pursuit of practice as a form of research and knowledge creation has become increasingly important during the past ten years to the research cultures of the performance arts (Piccini c.2002/3: 1-2). PaR is, however, a contest term that resists closed definitions. However very simply stated, PaR is frequently used to suggest a relationship in research between theory and practice. The acceptance of practice as a mode of research acknowledges that there are fundamental epistemological issues that can only be addressed in and through practice — that practice ‘can be both a form of research and a legitimate way of making the findings of such research publicly available’ (Painter 1996, cited in Piccini c.2002/3: 2).
Whilst this appears a simple definition – it is of course problematic conceptually and laden with issues in terms of the nature, status and worthiness of PaR. Engaging with these PaR debates in the UK has involved the formalizing and institutional acceptance of performance practices and processes as arenas in which modes of research and knowledges might be opened in order to situate the performance work of artist/scholars in the governmental Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). PaR in this frame is clearly not innocent but politically loaded – as research funding has been based upon successful outcomes in the RAE.
The focus of much of the research in to PaR in the UK has been spearheaded and galvanised by PARIP – an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project - which has sort to generate debate through conferences, seminars, and artistic projects in this thorny area. For example in 2003, and then again in 2005, PARIP held large international conferences that addressed through performances, papers and discussion groups the following areas:
‘How does ‘practice as research’ problematize notions of ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ practices?’
What might be the various epistemologies of and knowledges generated by practice as research?
What kinds of resourcing/plant/infrastructures are needed for practice as research?
What makes an instance of practice ‘count’ as research?
Does practice as research involve different methods as a result of its framing as research as distinct from ‘pure’ practice?
How might the multiple locations of practice-as-research knowledges be conceptualized and assessed/evaluated/judged? And who decides?
Must practice as research include some form of disseminable ‘reflection’ or is the practice in performance/screening contexts sufficient to stand as research outputs? What might be the role of documentation across media?
(www.bris.ac.uk/parip/sep2003.htm)
I have been particularly interested in two of these areas: what types of knowledges are generated (or at play) in PaR and how these knowledges are accessed – made knowable – made shareable - in order that they can be disseminated.
Dance Practice as Research (DPaR)
Whilst much of my earlier choreographic work could be called DPaR - Dance Practice as Research, it was in 1999 that I first sought to articulate the nature of my work in this frame in a collaborative paper written with Jane Bacon (formerly Mulchrone) for the Society of Dance Research seminar Exploding Perceptions – Performing Theory : Theorising Performance. This paper sought to illuminate The Collection (1999 - a dance video work by Bacon and Midgelow) and to verbalize the ways in which ‘theoretical perspectives were actively used and explored to guide artistic choices’ (Midgelow and Mulchrone 1999: 15).
In June 2003 I further explored some of these ideas at a Drama in Education conference (IDERIE) held at University of Northampton, UK. At this conference I presented a performed ‘research conversation’ with Franc Chamberlain. This conversation was entitled Practice as research: Falling between two stools? The two stools referred to in the title could be seen to represent the areas of theory and practice. The working premise of the conversation was that in PaR there is an important relationship between the epistemologies of practice and those of theory. In a playful manoeuvre two literal stools were placed in alongside each other, such that as theory and practice Franc Chamberlain and I could shift seats and speak from two perspectives.
But…
What if one should steal the clothes of the other? (What would the sheep look like in the wolves clothing)?
What if they should lean in toward one another? Would they both collapse into an uncatergorised chasm? Would they lean together equally? Would they press into each other to support one another’s precarious position?
What if they should kiss? What would be the result of this sharing?
Would it leave an abrasive mark? Could it form a new being?
If it should create a new being, what would this being look like?
Like a diva crossed with Judith Butler she steps out…(hints of Pina Bausch’s women perhaps!)
Like a ballet dancer crossed with Félix Guatteri she falls…(flashes of Sylvie Guillem dancing William Forsythe)
Embodied knowing – Theories of embodiment
Beyond these formulations of theory stealing from practice or visa versa, or of two entities touching is a more radical one – one which I as dancer/academic have come to recognise in myself, one which reflects my own experience. That is the concept of embodied knowing. In this formulation there is only one stool and that stool acknowledges that all knowledge is embodied for, as Carol Brown has pointed out, there is no ‘fleshless ontology, no way of knowing that is not also aligned to bodies of specific kinds and their leakages’ (2003: 2).
The type of embodied knowing I am referring to here incorporates and goes beyond any traditional formation of a dancers bodily knowledge – that is the deep mastery of the body attained through years of practice and experience. Rather I am also referring to an ontology of the bodily in which theories and practices are embedded and embodied, existing in movement practices reflexive and critical ways. The forms of knowing and knowledge are various – abstract and concrete, experiential and conceptual, physical and visual – and encompass both know how and know what.
This is not as straight forward as it may seem, for even the briefest rehearsal of traditional notions of body and knowledge reveal the ways in which body / mind and knowing / doing, remain within a Cartesian framework. The neglected body has stood, and often still stands, in a marginalized domain along with woman, native, queer and other others! Even the recent obsessive discussions of the body by numerous writers have seemed to leave the body, the person, behind – as a highly theorized ‘no-body’ takes its place. Perhaps we should not be surprised at these disembodiments, but when we look to dance – a highly embodied practice, we find a continuation of these Cartesianisms. For the tendency of dancers to evoke bodily knowledge and the sensate above other modes of knowing is just as dualistic in construction as the academic inclination to reduce the lived experience to abstracted concepts.
It may be however that if bodily actions are allowed to carry their own inscriptive weight, over just sex or regimented practices, they may empower us with a new sense of human agency. For rather than the body being written upon it can be seen to take up the act of writing. By breaking down conventional epistemological structures dance practices as research may shape and participate in the structuring of meaning production, thereby making signs as well as embodying them, initiating as well as responding.
This mode of embodiment is multi-coded and deconstructive. By drawing to together theorising and dancing – conflating the dancing body and theoreticians (traditionally a static writing) body – an articulate questing form evolves creating mutability and fluidity instead of stasis. This dancing body might propose ‘a body that is less an empty signifier (executing preordained steps as it obeys blindly to structures of command) than a material, socially inscribed agent, a non-univocal body, an open potentiality, a force-field constantly negotiating its position in the powerful struggle for its appropriation and control’ (Lepecki 2004: 6). This mode of embodiment, when dance become a critical practice, is, I suggest, at the centre of dance practice as research.
My experience of this embodied knowing resonates with the useful contributions made to these debates by performance studies professor Susan Melrose (2005). She has convincingly argued that the use of the theory / practice dualism is as unhelpful as the mind / body dualisms discussed above. She has pointed to the seemingly obvious, yet generally overlooked, fact that there is no necessary relationship between theory and writing. Rather writing, dancing, and singing are all modes of expression which may, or may not, incorporate critical or more specifically theoretical enquiry. The continued use of a theory / practice model – wherein – theory and the mind are attached to the written and spoken word, and practice is attached to the dancing (non-speaking) body fails to recognise the bodily practice of writing, and the mindful theorizing of dancing.
Body, blood, mind, thought.
Less, more,
me …
in neither place and in both.
The physical patterns of the dancer, the critical awareness of the philosopher,
the playful shifts of the improviser
The know how, the know what, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy, theory…these not separable elements. They layer and intersect … forming and informing moments of movement and evolving patterns. But it is also clear that whilst my improvised work is also my reading of various theorists of difference – the filtration of their ideas through a practice - the practice is not a demonstration of theories - the theory is not causal. Rather the practice develops through its own logic, its own methodology, such that the knowledge embodied is not simply a demonstration of a pre-theorised intellectual position but an explication of its own internal discourse that can be understood via its intersection with other varied discourses. In this way improvised dance practice generates ideas – generates knowledge.
Score 2 . ‘Alignment is everywhere’
I carry her with me. I know this.
Years of practice have embedded her deep within me – in my bone, in my muscle, in my synaptic pathways.
I worry.
Will you know?
Will you know that I know?
Will you recognise the game? Will you be able to see her within in me?
Can you read me?
Indulge me…
I am enjoying myself too much. This sensorial, sensual shifting… I am dissolving in my own pleasure.
I am staging my own disappearance
I am a body moving … I am a body writing
But can you see the script across the wall?
Can you locate the practices in my body?
Is this body that is reaching, searching, researching resonating with you?
Are you following me?
Perhaps I have lost you. Perhaps like the dancers that went before I have disappeared. Perhaps I should cover you in further words?… would this be appropriate? Would this help us to find each other? Should I historicise my practice? Would some context assist you?
Improvisation: Context and Ontology
Unfolding and unravelling Threshold : Fleshfold emphasises the transient and the sensuous over the fixed and the visual. These features are heightened due to the improvisatory nature of the work. Styled through Release dance the improvisation is conceived in ‘image clusters’ (to use a Skinner Releasing term) that guide but do not restrict the improvisation. These image clusters are free floating in that they exist as concepts with guidelines attached, (games or scores if you will), from which I work, but these images do not provide a structured movement vocabulary, any pre-set order or predetermined location for the improvisation.
Shifting through images clusters such as ‘A pose that is not fixed’; ‘Travelling through routes in the body’; ‘Everything folding at once’; ‘Alignment is everywhere’ and ‘Resting and Relocating’ the dance improvisation shifts between the external architecture of the space and the internal architecture of the body, resonating with poststructuralist articulations of space and connectivity. These images, in line with Release forms of movement shift the emphasis away from ‘the (static) look of the body, as a body that is available to an observing eye,’ towards ‘the person’s co-ordination, fluency, efficiency, ease and enjoyment of movement’ (Dempster, 1993: 18). This type of bodily presence is in line with new and postmodern dance artists who, since the 1960s, have been searching for alternative audience performer relationships and have been developing different bodily aesthetics. Using the grounding of release dance then enables me to emphasise the ‘disordering of the visually dominated sensorium so that other, culturally neglected senses, might be experienced more fully’ (Dempster, 1993: 19).
Forming shifting textures and landscapes this dance seeks to bring the audiences attention to the detail of each movement and of each specific moment in time for, in an improvisation such as this, the movement develops in the moment of enactment. Threshold : Fleshfold thereby invites an alternative way of looking, a looking which focuses on the detail of moments and interconnections within moments, rather than the consideration of grand composition - for the grand composition is never complete. Through these transformation processes the identity of the body comes to be in constant flux, mitigating against fixity and singularity.
The choice to perform through improvisation is not an impartial or naive one. This mode of presentation has been associated with the practices of the 1960/70s groups Grand Union and The Judson Church Dance Theater, and the artists/practices, such as Contact Improvisation, that came out of these (Banes, 1986). These groups used improvisation in performance as a way of breaking free from the perceived strictures on and of the body in modern dance forms. Significantly, the assertion of improvisatory practices in the late 1960/70s coincided with the growth of the women’s movement. Improvisation was seen as part of the mobilisation for change and a method of working which destabilised hierarchical relationships and empowered the performer. Also the broader social conditions of the period encouraged the conception of individual liberty and equality which forms such as Contact Improvisation embodied (Novack, 1990). Through the 80’s and 90’s a rather more critical, perhaps cynical, view of these idealistic visions is evident (Banes, 2003).
The territory of dance improvisation can be framed around the interrelationships between spontaneity, discipline, skill, flexibility, intentionality and unpredictability. As an improvised work there is an attempt to track back and forth between the known and the unknown, or rather exist in a place of ‘unknown knowing’. Susan Foster notes that the ‘known’ incorporates: ‘behavioural conventions established by the context in which the performance occurs’; ‘structural guidelines that delimit the improvising body’s choices’; ‘the individual body’s predisposition’ (training patterns); ‘any allied medium’ and ‘that which has already occurred previously’ (2003: 3-4). So for me the ‘known’ encompasses: the established image clusters and my practiced responses to these; release and other body training systems; the arrangement of space (although this changes in each new location); the music score; compositional experience; previous performances of the improvisation and the conceptual framing of the work.
So what is unknown? The unknown might be the specifics of the movement (I start with no plan of what, when and where – rather this emerges in the moment). The unknown might be the emergence of unexpected trajectory – a new image, a new texture, a new vocabulary. The unknown might be the relationship to the audience – for this is negotiated a new at every performance and in each moment. These unknowns are not unexpected but part of the process of improvising – they are what improvisers train themselves to be aware of and to be open to. However, the unknown is often, due to the repeated dualism of mind / body in dance, considered to be ‘a letting go’ - a letting go of control, a letting go of the known, a letting go of thinking processes, letting go of the ‘mind’, in order to ‘free’ the body! This is clearly an unhelpful replay of body/mind dualisms and overlooks the mindfulness of all bodily articulation. As Foster phases it:
Each body segment’s sweep across space, whether direct or meandering, is thought-filled. Each corporeal modulation in effort thinks; each swelling into tension thinks; each erratic burst or undulation in energy thinks. Each accented phrasing or accelerating torque or momentary stillness is an instance of thought. Conceptualised in this way, bodily action constitutes a genre of discourse.
(Foster, 2003: 6-7)
This improvising body, this body styled through release dance, is not then a ‘free’ or natural dancing body. I am not asserting an essentialist position. For whilst letting go of the assurance of pre-choreographed work allows the focus to be placed on transformation, the improvised movement is clearly located and locatable and the unknowns are framed by known circumstances.
Forgive me… perhaps the practice is sufficient… yet these things are easy to fetishise… easy to loose ones self within.
Weight moves from left to right.
A rotation of the head – the eyes open…a pause, a knowing look.
Lowering to the floor – a rest.
A roll in the hips is reflected in the shoulder and ripples through to the hand.
The moment, the movement, is gone but yet continues to resonate, only to return, yet somehow different. Layering one moment on top of another a composition, of sorts, emerges.
In an academic context obsessed with accountability the accessing and assessing improvised dance as PaR is an important and contested area. Improvisation challenges the knowledge paradigms of traditional hard science – that is – testability and provability. For these are not helpful and do not suit much PaR in general or improvised practice specifically. However to espouse an ‘anything goes’, a ‘free body’, an utter relavitivism, is not helpful – or ‘true’ to the practice either (Nelson, 2003). And here I have veered between sense-making and a revelling the luscious moments of dancing.
However inbetween these extremes its possible to ‘know’ improvisation like one might ‘know’ a palimsest in which layers of knowledge and practice rub on and off one another – for knowing improvisation requires an engagement with an ever shifting territory. This territory, in the practice of improvisation, is, as outlined above, one of ‘known unknowns’ – which, like a Barthesian open text - may have multiple points on entry and untold directions but is still recognisable as knowable if discussed in its own terms. Nevertheless in a commodity and replay obsessed culture, driven by the requirements production, evidence and assurance, the art of erasure that is improvisation remains a subversive one - something to be used and celebrated I think. But this is also difficult, perhaps dangerous, place to be when such work is also tied to research assessment strategies and to funding.
What if all the billion, trillion cells in your body could all fold at once? (with thanks the Deborah Hay)
What if you could shift, trace and travel through the routes and spaces in your body?
What if alignment was everywhere?
What if space could fold, collapse and turn in on its self?
What if your outside and inside should merge?
Score 3 . ‘Everything folding all at once’
Folding in-between
Noting the ways in which theory and practice are both experienced bodily Threshold: Fleshfold folds in-between to blur binaries of seeing / being seen, inside / outside, body / space, theory / practice. For via the conflation of embodied practical knowledge and more traditional forms of academic knowledge it transforms and destabilises both modes of knowledge and their accompanying values. By drawing together theory and practice into a single hybrid form, which is framed as fluid, this improvised dance offers a challenge to traditional epistemologies and histories, suggesting mutability and transformation instead of stasis. Such forms of embodied knowing have a crucial role in dance practice as research as they give rise to changing corporealities, ontologies, and to an expanding field of improvised practices.
Copyright 2006, Vida Midgelow
Endnote
1 An earlier version of this paper was first presented at PARIP 2005 International Conference, Bretton Hall, University of Leeds, UK
Bibliography
Banes, Sally (1987) Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post- modern Dance, Middleton: Wesleyan.
__________ (2003) ‘Spontaneous Combustion: Notes on Dance Improvisation from the Sixities to the Nineties’, in Cooper Albright, Ann and Gere, David (2003) Taken by Surprise: A dance improvisation reader, Middletown: Wesleyan: 77-89.
Brown Carol (2003) ‘Thinking Moving Beyond the Box’, Keynote speech, Practice as Research in Performance Conference: University of Bristol, UK. Available online at www.carolbrowndances.com
Chamberlain, Franc and Midgelow, Vida (2003) ‘Practice as research: Falling between two stools?’, a performed research conversation, IDERIE Conference: University of Northampton, UK.
Dempster, Elizabeth (1993) ‘ Revisioning the body: feminism, ideokinesis and the New Dance’, Writings on Dance, 9,: 10-21.
Foster, Susan (2003) ‘Improvising Body, Improvising Mind’, in Cooper Albright, Ann. and Gere, David. (2003) Taken by Surprise: A dance improvisation reader, Middletown: Wesleyan: 3-10.
Lepecki, Andre (2004) ‘Introduction: Presence and Body in Dance and Performance Theory’, in Lepecki, Andre (ed) (2004) Of the Presence of the Body, Wesleyan: 6-13.
Melrose, Susan F (2005) ‘Words fail me: dancing with the other’s familiar’, Key note address, Towards Tomorrow?, International conference at the Centre for Performance Research: Aberystwyth, 6-10 April 2005.
Midgelow, Vida and Mulchrone, Jane (1999) ‘Intertextuality and the postmodern ethnographer: The making of a digital dance Video’, in Briginshaw, Valerie (complier & ed.) (1999) Exploding Perceptions - Performing Theory : Theorising Performance, Conference Papers, Society for Dance Research: University of Chichester: 15-18.
Nelson, Robin (2003) ‘Between positivism and perfumery: locating knowledge paradigms for par’, Conference paper, Practice as Research in Performance Conference: University of Bristol, UK.
Novack, Cynthia (1990) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Madision: Wisconsin Press.
Piccini, Angela (c.2002/3) ‘An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research’, web publication. Available online at www.bris.ac.uk/parip.
Useful websites:
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK: www.ahrc.ac.uk
Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP), UK: www.bris.ac.uk/parip
Governmental Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), UK: www.rae.ac.uk
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