Around 15 years ago, I decided to stop sharing my artistic research in the form of performances. Instead, I chose to frame teaching as an artistic practice.
The performances that I had been making had migrated from theatres into gallery spaces, inviting more and more audience participation. To regard these events as classes was a logical next step.
Occasionally, people comment that they experience my classes as participatory artworks; that they get it makes me smile.
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In an interview entitled The Value Of Dance As Practice (1), Chrysa Parkinson explains her choice to dance for others her artistic practice rather than to follow the accepted career path of becoming a choreographer.
While there is tendency to regard working as a dancer as of less value than the “real” artistic work of a choreographer, teaching is often considered even further from real artistry; something one ends up doing to support oneself financially; ideally, to be avoided altogether.
Just as Chrysa Parkinson chooses to ascribe artistic value to the dancers’ work of creation and performance of material for choreographers, I choose to ascribe artistic value to the creation and sharing of material in the form of classes.
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I think of teaching as a convenient fiction. I’m conscious that the act of teaching, of guiding people through an experience, is performative. I share my research by performing teaching.
It is convenient because I get paid for doing it. And it is a fiction because I don’t believe anyone can teach anyone else anything.
What I do believe in is learning. Albert Einstein is supposedly (mis-)quoted as saying: “True learning is an experience, everything else is just information.” In Feldenkrais’ terms, what a good teacher does is create the conditions for learning.
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I remember a heated discussion with a fellow student when I was studying at the SNDO back in the early ’90s. In essence, they argued that a dance performance has the power to impact someone’s life. I argued that the truly radical potential of dance is realised not through watching a dance, but through experiencing dancing.
The most resonant definition of dance for me comes from Anna Halprin: dance is a particular way of paying attention (2). Any moment can become a dance experience by shifting one’s attention, deepening into physical sensation, with an attitude of playfulness, free from having to achieve or produce anything.
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Our experience is shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves about who we are. A source of these stories is the cultures through which we move. In Moshe Feldenkrais’ terms, we move in accordance with our self-image. (3)
We can experience the effects of images directly in relation to our sense of our physical body. This is called ideokinesis. Spelt with a small “i” it describes a phenomenon, while with a capital “I” it refers to a specific body of work stretching back to Mabel Todd. (4)
Sit or stand and imagine that your head is a balloon filled by warm air that floats upwards. There’s no need to try to act it out, in fact if you do that then it won’t work. Simply entertain the thought. I like to frame it in the spirit of “What if …?”, after Deborah Hay. Notice what changes.
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Feldenkrais’ ambitions for his method were to free people from reactive behaviour born of past conditioning. He was one of the pioneers of systems theory; his method works explicitly with sensation and movement as he regarded them as more concrete and amenable to change then thoughts and emotions.
To paraphrase Alan Watts, ego is reflected in the body as unnecessary muscular tensions. (5) Both physically and, more conventionally in psychology, ego develops as a defence. In postmodern dance and somatic practices, one explicit aim is to release unnecessary muscular effort.
When we sense less effort in our system, one way of interpreting these moments is that we are freer of the stories that bind us to our past; our history. Open to something new.
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Feldenkrais proposed a novel definition of violence: “The imposition of one person’s ideas upon another.” (6) It’s provocative since the ideas can both be directly imposed by others or, more insidiously, accepted cultural conventions that once learned we impose upon ourselves.
One set of ideas that I’m researching are those of anatomy. I realised two decades ago that experiential anatomy is simply another form of ideokinesis. We look at images in medical anatomy books and explore their embodiment in ourselves through movement and sensation and in others through touch. (7)
We invite these images into our experience and they shape it. But unlike, the balloon example, which is clearly a fiction, these images are presented as holding authority and conveying truth. And that I question.
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Western medical anatomy is very specific culturally and historically. The word itself is loaded; etymologically it means to cut apart. And it is largely based upon assumptions established as a result of cutting apart poor, malnourished, mostly dead (!) criminals in the 1400-1600s.
It is also tied in to the development of perspectival drawing. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was among many things an anatomist who was the first to draw anatomical cross-sections.
Biomechanics, the science of how bodies move, arose through the work of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679) who based his insights upon the building technologies of the time; continuous compression structures (stacks of bricks) built with the help of levers and pulleys.
In this model of anatomy applied to movement, the forces of weight and support travel through the bones. While this works in simple standing, it never matched my experience once I started moving.
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Over the last thirty years or so, a new model of anatomy, biotensegrity (8), has emerged from within the medical community. It is a work in progress and is left-field for sure. It models movement differently.
Biotensegrity is complex and this summary necessarily superficial. It takes its name from the tensegrity structures that originated in the meeting of Buckminster Fuller with artist Kenneth Snelson (9) though it draws upon many sources.
The body is modelled as one contiguous whole, a process unfolding in time rather than an object. When one region moves, the whole responds. What we have thought of as discrete structures are instead modelled as fields of activity. Form follows function.
There are no skeletal joints, at least not as we recognise them, and force doesn’t pass across them. Force is distributed through the interaction of compression and tensile elements throughout the whole. This interaction is scalar, all the way down to the cellular level; molecular even.
I am exploring how to embody this. What is emerging is a language of shapeshifting. Inviting in this new model fundamentally changes what I experience when I move and when I touch others.
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Another line of research, since I am working with directing awareness, is into the nature of consciousness itself. Just search for “the hard problem of consciousness” (10) and enter the rabbit hole; the problem is how does matter produce conscious experience?
The materialist answer is that the brain produces consciousness. Another possibility is that the universe itself is conscious and the brain functions more like a filter; a way of focusing and tuning in to consciousness This opens to animism, panpsychism, object oriented ontology.
I play with the image of human consciousness, awareness, as a field around the body and the possibility of shaping that field; that we touch with our attention; that human consciousness is just one variety of consciousness in a conscious universe.
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The beauty of exploring these issues of anatomy and consciousness is that it’s not science – I’ve nothing to prove – and it’s not pedagogy – I’ve nothing to teach. In framing what I do as artistic research, there is freedom for this work to be speculative. I’m curious how it lands.
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I’ve heard it argued that poetry can “change the world”.(11) In daily use, language can become transparent. It disappears for us, creating the impression that what is talked or written about is self-evidently out there, real. Poetry challenges this by bringing awareness to language’s materiality.
There is a price to pay for the use of language. In the Spell Of The Sensuous, David Abram (12) charts how language both grew out of the environment, but ultimately separates us from it.
In english, we talk about spelling out words. We also use spell to refer to a state of enchantment. Language casts a spell on us.
For all my commitment to engaging in practices that grow a body of experiential knowledge, language is in fact my medium. The practices that I develop are shared by guiding others through them with words.
I’m acutely aware of my use of language. At times, I describe as transparently as possible the tasks I’m inviting people to engage in. At other times, I try to cast a spell, through the enchantment of words, to invite the possibility for people to experience themselves and their being in the world differently.
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In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti (13) argues that thinking differently is not enough to meet the multiple challenges facing us in this historical moment. She repeatedly calls for new subjectivities and proposes the arts as a context that offers a possibility in which to explore them. We need to experience differently.
We grow out of this earth but seem to have forgotten that. Sadly the consequences of our disembodiedness challenge not only us humans, but our more-than-human cousins too.
To quote Steve Paxton: “How important is dance? I think it may be critical!”. (14) Perhaps through developing dance and somatic practices that open our perception to interbeingness (15), refined and shared with a poetic sensibility to language, we can support the creation of new subjectivities. Perhaps not only poetry, but dance can “change the world” too?
NOTES
1. The Value Of Dance As Practice, interview with Chrysa Parkinson, Dancehouse Melbourne, 2016
2. Breath Made Visible: Anna Halprin, feature length film about the life and career of Anna Halprin, directed by Ruedi Gerber, 2009
3. Awareness Through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth, Moshé Feldenkrais, Harper & Row, 1977
4. Ideokinesis – this approach can be traced back to Mabel Todd though the name “ideokinesis” was later applied to this body of work by Lulu Sweigard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideokinesis
5. Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, Alan Watts, New World Library, 2010
6. This story is told by Larry Goldfarb in the audio recording of his workshop Foundations of Learning: Understanding Development and Change, 1993
7. One aspect of Body Mind Centering is experiential anatomy. For Bonnie Cohen, the medical images are starting points, and she has offered many insights from her experience that add to or contradict the authoritative medical anatomy.
https://bonniebainbridgecohen.com/pages/body-mind-centering
8. For an introduction to biotensegrity see the video
Biotensegrity & Dynamic Anatomy, Steven Levin, 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnpshtyvWr0.
9. Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson met at a Black Mountain College. Many students and faculty became influential in the arts, Merce Cunningham and John Cage among them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College
10. David Chalmers and the hard problem of consciousness, Colin Mathers, Medium, 2024
https://medium.com/@matherscd/david-chalmers-and-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-0909ef73a744
11. Ezra Klein Interviews Jane Hirshfield, New York Times, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/podcasts/ezraklein-podcast-transcript-jane-hirshfield.html
12. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1997
13. The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti, Polity, 2013
14. The Wise Body : Conversations With Experienced Dancers, Jacky Lansley, Bristol : Intellect, 2011
15. Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh: An Interview, Helen Tworkov, Tricycle, 1995
