Choreographic Lab

Today we looked at a 15 minute video of Sara’s work. Sara asked me (Jane) to facilitate a discussion of her work using a ‘Focusing’ approach. The idea was to respond to the work from our ‘felt sense’ or ‘felt experience’ of viewing the work. Sara would take notes but not respond to the feedback. The group would give ‘felt responses’ but not ask questions or offer opinions.
My comments here are about the process of using focusing as a tool or framework for giving feedback to artists/makers.
I am the one who has introduced focusing into the Lab because I believe it offers us many possibilities. The primary idea behind this is that we can give attention to our palpable experience of a thing done/seen/experienced or of a thing as we do/see/experience it. I want to infuse our critical/cognitive faculties/functions with something Other, with the sensuous, visceral and imaginative. I want our language to open up, to flower in our attempts to speak to each other about our work.
During this process I am always aware of the ’spaces between’ people and objects. By that I mean that I am not just trying to listen to the words people say or even include the actions they make with the words spoken. What I mean is that there is often a way to nudge people towards a ‘felt sense’ of their experience without attending to the words they are speaking, the judgments they are making. When we begin to do this work I am never sure where we are going or what will happen, but I am always certain that something will happen. And it does.
Focusing asks the individual to turn their attention inwards to find a ’something’, a felt sense, of the thing they are experiencing (which might be an inner process such as the creative processs or an external experience such as viewing a performance). In doing this, the individual is asked to try and speak from the ‘felt sense’, finding language that articulates from this inner place rather than from a place of perceived ‘knowing’ which will most likely include a set of ideological as well as aesthetic assumptions. From the ‘felt sense’ we work outward - gently, slowly, embracing ‘not knowing’, our swaying, gliding move towards language reminding us of the way we slowly incline towards our love.
When all was done. Sara, I just wanted to say I loved it!

After the showing of my experimental piece Intimacies at the Choreographic Lab, we retired to a discussion about the work as a group. Jane Bacon postulated that we use an adaptation of the ‘Focusing’ technique to flesh out various kinds of reaction to the work. Based in my rather out-of-the-ordinary technique for sourcing and structuring performance material, the piece was particularly difficult to discuss. While it engaged with the traditions of contemporary dance and contemporary music, it also existed outside of both of these, yet could not really be constructed as ‘live art’. As many of the sourcing techniques used were somatic and psychosomatic in nature, the work was meant to interact with audience ‘flesh’ and ‘emotional flesh’.

For these reasons, I found the focusing technique very gratifying. A number of elements made this the case.

Firstly, the process was managed by a third party, Jane. Having Jane manage the verbal interventions permitted me to observe them without needing to get involved with ‘personal distance’ - I did not have to be objective; Jane managed the conversational dynamics for me, like an extremely adept panel convenor might do, but with much more sophisticated emotional awareness. The discussion was documented.

Secondly, I got to engage with the visceral reactions of the lab members. As my work addresses itself to the visceral, it was extremely gratifying to actually have a facilitator take the work back to a place where comments emerged from the felt, lived experience of the watchers, and where the technique insisted on observers OWNING remarks - a very, very rare practice in the performance world. This meant that Jane constantly worked to move beyond language that employed value judgment or aesthetic value judgment, and asked witnesses of the piece to actually engage with how they felt about the work and what it made them experience. While this might sound very new age, it was in no way flaky or disincarnated - indeed, Jane allowed the tone to be firey or anxious when necessary. This meant I was ‘face to face’ with a wide range of reactions ranging from what we generally think of as positive to what we generally think of as negative. These existed, however, outside the realm of value judgment: they were more about emotion, which is more of a form of energy than anything else. This gave me a very pure kind of information about audience reaction to my work.

At the time of the focusing exercise, I was ‘high’. When I complete a performance process, I get a kind of adrenaline rush that carries me through for days after a show. I felt this show had been a real achievement in terms of my own professional pathway. This bliss overrode some of the elements of difficulty about the focussing process, and I was not, at the time, aware of how some of the profound nervousness around the piece affected my heart. Jane did her best to ensure that value judgment was re-expressed as owned emotional content, and succeeded. However I think the piece provoked some very strong emotion such as rage and anger, and at the time, I was too blissful to notice that these affected me; I did, however, notice the more ‘positive’ effects. Perhaps I was also in denial. I think I should have asked to be somewhat ‘held’ in my expressive place myself, afterward. I don’t mean held by arms and cuddled - I think I should have been more expressive about my emotional reactions to everyone else’s emotional reactions. Perhaps what I needed was to feed back on these after a time delay. At the time - really until today - I did not identify that need.

That being said, the piece also provoked profound emotional connections with other people that were extremely pleasant and heart-warming.

The focusing technique provided an impassioned model for feeding back on artwork. Ultimately, it is a technique I prefer above all others, because I prefer to frame artistic expression as expression that generates communicative élan and reaction. As this was a first experiment with the technique to feed back on a live piece in this way, it was a gripping taster for me. I would be interested in developing the model to perhaps genuinely engage with audiences during and after performance, as part of the performance experience. The experience also, however, helped sharpen my awareness of my own needs when faced with certain kinds of, and energies of, expression. This need is mostly about taking the exchange process to its ultimate end, and completely resolving the content of emotional expression. Focusing could contribute to developing a totally different means of engaging with performance experience for audiences, and is a profound feedback tool for an artist with interests like my own.
Yvon Bonenfant

I’m interested to know more about what you do…

Developing the focusing, Lerman models and creative responses. Using Hincks ‘5 Facets of Creative Process’ model and working with a witness in one area of the model (Delving, Raising, Assaying, Articulating or Outwarding). Hincks’s model is intended to be used to enable the creative process rather than to comment upon it. Therefore we are going to play around in a sort of back and forth (in and out, rocking, returning, undulating, spiralling…) motion, to see what works when we re-enter the studio or the mind-set of a particular idea, movement, etc. and use the model to help focus a process oriented discussion.

The artist should choose an area of their process they are interested in knowing more about and the witness helps them use the focusing process to go more deeply into their bodily experience of that particular aspect of process.

So, for example, I might want to know more about the role of staging in your performance piece so we might decide to go to articulation, which is essentially the creative process of making but on spending time looking at the formal properties of the piece we might discover a need to move to Assaying to see if what has been articulated still has a congruence (in a bodily felt way) to what had a sense of aliveness in Raising.
A good way to imagine this process is the RSVP cycle by Anna Halprin. We will move into a moment of process, begin to articulate something about that moment, then perhaps return to the practice to see if we can play there to improve or change something, then begin to articulate something about it once again. So we are doing something of an overstitching (for those of you who did sewing at school…)

Precisely where we enter this model will be determined by where you are in your creative process. However, the aim is always the same – to use ‘the gap’ created in focusing (or to draw on the ‘implicit’ as a place where we can move into language from the bodily felt experience) in order to speak or move from a language that is grounded in our bodily experiences (of both maker and viewer) of the creative work.

Summary of 5 Facets Model…
Delving the situation is already give and allowed; we enter and play there. We are like a child exploring within givens it would never stop to think about. This is the space, this is the size of paper, these are the colours we have, this is the body I have, this is the situation I am in.

Raising we lift-up what interests us. If in Delving a fish might nibble your line, in Raising you’d lift it up and see if you wanted to cook it. It’s the facet to begin to bring out initial themes, issues, ideas, images, conceits, concepts, movements, etc, that you know you want to work with or explore more.

Assaying there are processes of probing, questioning, detailed exploration of themes, trails, tests, research, studies, attempts. This can be a systematic approach, or it can be a time where there is a lot of drafting, studies for…, all types of iteration. Here one is working to progressively match the sense of what you are creating to the form of the expression you work with.

Articulating we manifest our creation and the work is finalised. It is the facet of the process that produces the creation. The concrete expression of a work is situated in a specific finalised form. It occurs at a precise point of engagement where the felt-sense of what you want to express concretely forms.

Outwarding we engage with the dissemination, reception or performance of completed work. It includes the relationships one has to audiences and situations that the work may appear in.

Focusing process reminder…
Bringing awareness into your body
OR waiting until something comes into my awareness
OR choosing an intentional starting point and waiting to see what of it wants your attention

Taking the time you need to feel it in your body (getting the direct bodily experience of your process/product…This place may be much richer than the words you can give to the experience, this is ‘the implicit’, the thing we do before we can only begin to add interpretations)
OR sensing the lack of clarity or the lack of language to describe this moment, giving this bodily experience time and space to emerge

Now beginning to settle down with this particular bodily experience
OR sensing how it feels from this point of view
OR letting it know I hear it

Taking time to sense any changes
OR thanking my body for revealing all of it
OR sensing if there is something that wants to be known

OR a creative response…
The artist should choose an area of their process they are interested in knowing more about and shows that moment to the witness who creates a response in practice (dance, movement, sound, etc).

Structure of the process…
Work in a dyad/pair but you can also work in three’s with two people watching if agreed. Feedback from the process is taken to the whole group for further debate and discussion.

When in the whole group everyone should attempt to work with focusing. We will ask the artist what they would like to speak about and in what area they would like feedback.

A suggested approach to group feedback…

The artist drives the questions and focus of the discussion not the group. Key to this is ‘what are we wanting to know here?’ This way we are sure to focus on what is of concern to the artist rather than foreground our own interest, judgments, opinions (these should be kept at bay).

Questions and responses from the group should be framed as positive and open-ended.

After this process we might move into subject matter and opinion if the artist would like to – here we reveal our own agenda before speaking (I have an opinion about…would you like to hear it; this piece made me think about the architectural folds in the space and the fleshy folds of the body, is that something you are interested in?)

Artist may choose not to respond at any time and to stop at any time.

Everyone should try and acknowledge that the responses come from a bodily felt experience of the work and the experience of listening to a discussion about the work. The job is to tease out, or at least acknowledge, the relationship between our own judgments and value-systems and those of the artist.

The final stage is to state some of the mis-givings, misconnections, etc between the artist’s intention and the audience perception of the work (for example, we have talked about the use of blurred images in the video but not about how this work fits into the larger genre of video dance). These should be offered in as positive way as possible and not explored but stated for later development.

If we can articulate these ‘misfits’ then we might begin to find a way to move into an interactive process that incorporates both sides rather than just the intention of the artist. When we can do this it might be possible to move to a position, collectively, where we can evaluate, critique or review the work.

Bibliography
Bacon, Jane (2005) ‘Psyche Moving: Focusing and Active Imagination in movement based performance making and psychotherapy’ in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, London: Palgrave
Hincks, Josiah (2003) ‘5 Facets Model of Creative Process, a model’, unpublished article available through the author via www.focusing.org

Worth, Libby and Helen Poyner (2005) Anna Halprin, London: Routledge