Semblances of Form: A Phenomenology of Improvising with Performance Scores Emily Elizabeth Sweeney Submitted for completion of MRes Performance & Creative Research degree, University of Roehampton School of Drama, Theatre, & Performance, September 2013 Introduction

‘Semblances of Form: A Phenomenology of Improvising with Performance Scores’

considers performance scores in the context of choreography, internal and external writing, and the emergence of form. I began this research with the following series of questions: What are the feelings elicited by choreographing and performing with a score, and what might be the significance of those feelings? What effect does a score have on the performer’s perception of the performance situation? What is its effect on the observer’s perception? What types of affects, states, and meanings are scores particularly suited to catalyze? How is the notion of internal drawing (or ‘scoring’) related to our sense of ourselves, as people and as artists? When I interact with a score, does it enable me to articulately apprehend non-conscious forms of intelligence?

Drawing and scoring are methods for resonating with documents, for sculpting a state in which inside and outside productively break down. All drawing, abstract and representational, elicits this feeling of an idea becoming present, shifting from one place (the imagination) to another (the page). A mark is a static residue from the eternal movement of thought – a still point from which meanings cascade. The mark’s very inadequacy, its separateness from and inability to touch all that exceeds it, is the base of its function. To draw something is to move towards it and away from it at once, simultaneously touching and taking perspective.

In the interest of clarity, I introduce here my understanding of the main terms and ideas on which I rely throughout this thesis: Emergence, Improvisation

Emergent phenomena arise from cooperation among multiple entities engaged in

complex sequences of actions and interactions. These entities are what comprise the phenomenon, but the phenomenon exceeds them – it has effect and relevance beyond any of their singular intentions. In this way, emergent phenomena are always in relation with their surroundings. While a form’s emergence may in one way distinguish or separate that form from its larger context, it does so in a way that, at the same time, makes its connection to that context more palpable and explicit. Emergence is a concept used by philosophers, systems theorists, scientists, and artists to describe ‘products of dynamic, self-organizing systems operating in open-ended environments’ (Sgorbati 2013: 8). Emergence happens in the in-between. Emergence requires a gap – multiple gaps. These gaps are spaces where chance and change become possible, which is vital. An essential quality of emergent systems is that they can initiate and integrate change. They are adaptable. Two examples of emergent phenomena are the processes identified by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and neural behavior within the human brain. In each case, the system’s capacity for simultaneous cooperation and pliability beyond any singular intention is what makes it extraordinary.

Emergence, then, is a form of unconscious intelligence, as there is no single subjective intention or direction that conducts the behavior of an emergent phenomenon. Emergence is possible even when an entity is not self-aware: ‘But even outside any encounter with human perception, the electron, the mountains, the tree involve perceptions. They arc perceptions in themselves…’ (Massumi 2011: 26). Emergence is behavior that means more than we intend. To acknowledge and source emergence in our own thought and artistic practices requires us to constantly question whether our conscious, felt, or ‘rational’ understandings are in fact the entire story of any given situation. Inevitably, they are not. Taking into account the subjective

experiences of other humans, as well as an event’s historical and social context brings us into an oscillating state of thought where we are cultivating a meta-mind – a mind that considers the ways in which its own subjectivity is subject to the world and everything in it.

Working with emergent thought in relation to human consciousness involves a zooming in and out of focus, a shifting of awareness between macro and micro levels of perception and attention. Indeed, emergence as a phenomenon apprehended by the human mind puts that mind into a state of perpetual movement, in which it cannot settle on a single point of view. In my experience, the improvising dance artist learns to manipulate this body-mind state, shifting her perspectival frame from broad to microscopic many times a minute, cultivating a spectrum of perspectives that carry her awareness from inside to outside, blurring the distinct border between. She then forms the movement residue of this shifting body-mind state in space and time, shaping an experience that can be apprehended and built upon by observers and fellow improvisers.

Emergence also describes what happens in between my intention and the event, as the complex system of my immediate and global environments, as well as others’ subjectivities always impact whatever performative proposal I offer to them. What emerges from that encounter is the work. Working with performance scores allows my intention to emerge in between the score and me. The score document always means more than it represents. I know, when encountering a score, that my actions will spark different and unforeseen meanings from it. I find emergence to be a helpful concept to keep in mind whenever I am working, as it helps me to cultivate multiple perspectives on any given situation. As artists, we are now offering our works up to a world of people who are fascinated by (and involved in contributing to) an ever-widening stream of images, signs, narratives, and codes that are proliferating at a faster rate each day. Whatever I do as an artist, whatever I intend, I am always acutely aware of the inevitable emergence of unintended meanings from my work as it is engulfed by this stream. Drawing & (and) Writing Drawing and writing are different things. I know this because, among other reasons, I feel competent at one and not the other. But there are important similarities between writing and drawing, and I want to ask permission to refer to the two acts interchangeably in this text. My reasoning is that writing and drawing converge in human experience as acts of inscription – both qualify as the making of meaningful marks. Writing and drawing are different graphologies, and their differences bring to mind their similarities; both are already related to cultural ways of seeing and/or thinking. They are both semblances:

From Benjamin, semblance is another word for nonsensuous similarity. Another way of approaching this is to say that through the activity of language, the directly felt qualities of experience present in bodies and objects in nonsensuous trace-form can cross over into each other with greatest of ease, incomparably increasing the world’s potential for self organizing (Massumi 2011: 122).

As such, both drawing and writing are subject to intertextual relations, and immediately upon emerging onto the page both enter into dialogue with a vast fabric of other drawings and writings. Typically, and most intimately, both occur on the horizontal plane, the body of the writer or draftsperson hugging the paper to which her hand and mind are addressed. After Water Benjamin (‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’, 1917), Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (1997) and André Lepecki (2006) write about the horizontal plane as ‘that of graphic marking, of writing – ‘it contains signs’’ (Benjamin quoted in Lepecki, 2006: 66). The force of the horizontal plane is not insignificant:

…his [Pollock’s] actions on the toppled canvas, his walking on it, his spilling of paint on it, clearly suggested that there was a potential for trespassing that could be taken by whoever would be willing to venture out of the pictorial frame. In 1958, Allan Kaprow famously described how Pollock’s actions on the toppled canvas inspired him to create his own actions and ‘happenings’ (Lepecki 2006: 66).

And so one moment in the contemporary opening of the visual arts dialogue to space and time was Pollock’s shift from the vertical to the horizontal. This shift from vertical to horizontal is somehow related to visual arts’ beginning to perform. And so, in placing writing and drawing side-by-side on this horizontal plane (or perhaps one atop the other), I propose that they intermingle for the purposes of this text because they share the physical sense and cultural meaning of a body opening out into the realms of the mark and the sign. Scores, Choreography

When I refer to scores, am I referring only to scores that are physically manifested on the

page? No, I am not, though my recent experimentations have involved material score documents. Scores can also be perceptual or mental frames whose articulation remains in the virtual realm of the mind (except for the resulting performance). If this is true, then how does choreography-as-writing differ from a score? There is a subtle difference between writing a score and giving it to someone and choreographing a work of dance on someone. At their extremes, choreography is more akin to a body being written on (or with), and scoring is more like a body being offered a grid on which to write. Or, traditional choreography is more like a short story, while a score is an outline for an interview. The interpreter of a performance score has more authority with regards to the content of the score’s ultimate performance than does a dancer whose body has been articulated in detail by a choreographer. I am generalizing and indicating extremes here. These differences in authority (or authorship) are not inherent in any individual choreographer’s work with choreography and/or scores. Many choreographers work in the spaces in between scoring and choreography. Making, The Mark, & The Trace

I have often asked myself why I enjoy writing (manually, that is), to such an extent that on occasion the vain effort of intellectual work is redeemed in my eyes by the pleasure of having in front of me a beautiful sheet of paper and a good pen: while thinking about what I should write, I feel my hand move, turn, join, dive, and lift… I am an artist, not because I am representing an object, but, in a more basic sense, because in writing my body knows the joy of drawing on and rhythmically incising a virgin surface (its virginity representing the infinitely possible). …Writing is not only a technical process; it is also a joyous physical experience. –Roland Barthes, from Introduction to La Civilisation de l’écriture (Druet, R. and Grégoire, H. 1976)

I begin here, with Roland Barthes’ reverently inclusive statement, because I find myself torn while reading it, adamantly agreeing and disagreeing with him, simultaneously. Drawing is, of course, not solely the inscription of a ‘virgin surface’, but an entry, via the line, trace, or mark, into an intertextual exchange with all other such inscriptions – past, present, and future. Drawing is not a one-way ejaculation of mind onto paper; it is an intertwining in which ‘mark and surface participate in a dialectic exchange of positive and negative values, shifting object-ground relations’ (Rosand 2002: 1). Barthes himself, most famously in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), steps away from the primacy of the artist’s ‘joy’ and posits that it is in the reception of the reader that a text erupts into meaning. Indeed, for Barthes, ‘the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced’ (Barthes 1978: 147). And so, I sense a performative quality in Barthes’ writing about writing in that opening quote. It verges into the theatrical, even, when the very writer who killed the Author, eight years later turns around and basks in that Author’s joy.

Barthes’ sensuous involvement is vital to generating what Brian Massumi calls a ‘semblance’, or abstraction: ‘this appearing of the drama of an experience’s self-enjoyment in the act’ (Massumi 2011: 17). Really, the title ‘The Death of the Author’ is itself dramatic, as what Barthes is proposing for the Author is not actual death, but change – an opening to the Other within. And change not only for the Author, but also for the Critic, and therefore literary discourse, for ‘…the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic’ (Barthes 1978: 147). Julia Kristeva’s feminist proposals for literary criticism offer a structure on which this dying Author can rest and, perhaps, revive herself. This is intertextuality, or ‘a way of placing us, readers […] in front of a

more or less complicated and interwoven structure’ (Kristeva 2002: 9). Kristeva herself lifts intertextuality from the page into the body when she writes:

Intertextuality accesses the semiotic, that trans-verbal reality of the psyche from which all meanings emerge. The etymological meaning of ‘semeion’ is a distinctive mark, a trace, an engraved or written sign, that makes us think of the Freudian ‘psychical’ marks, called drives, rhythmical articulations of embodied impulses and psychical movements (ibid).

Beyond the status of the blank page that is to be drawn upon (whether it is ‘virgin’ or a palimpsest of cultural, aesthetic, psychological, and myriad other human tracings) there is the status of the body writing or drawing. ‘The self-reflexivity of the drawn mark, alluding to its own making, quite naturally implicates the maker…’ (Rosand 2002: 13). In drawing, we lose track of our own intentionality. We become sentient of the perpetual casting off of traces of ourselves – excess affect that sometimes settles in materials, sometimes in the bodies of others. After Maurice Merleau-Ponty, drawing is also an intertwining, a chiasm, a hyper-dialectic:

Hyper-dialectic refers […] to a region of human consciousness that is indifferent to interiority and exteriority, the cognitive and the non-cognitive, activity and passivity, and even the human and the animal (Kaushik in De Preester 2013: 237).

To put it simply, drawing is an ambiguous, multi-layered state of body-mind. And yet, this writing/drawing body-mind is fundamental to our historical understanding of

human psychology. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung discuss the spatial and temporal aspects of our psyches’ functioning by constructing systems of internal inscription and the narrative (and non-narrative) play of signs. Taken at its simplest, the unconscious suggests the presence of knowledge that originates inside the self but beyond the realm of the conscious mind. This fundamental division, or différance, implies a dynamics of movement that Freud explores in various models of writing throughout his body of work. In ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ (1967), Jacques Dérrida illuminates the relationship among writing, the trace, disappearance, and Freud’s formulating of the unconscious.

Freud’s early work concerned the search for material correlates for psychical phenomena. He theorized ‘two kinds of neurones’ – permeable (sensory) neurones, which ‘offer no resistance and thus retain no trace’, and ‘other neurones’, which would ‘retain the printed trace’, and ‘thus afford a possibility of representing memory’ (Dérrida 1978: 200-201). Freud eventually moved away from seeking exact physical correlates for psychical phenomena, but his continued use of writing as a model for the functioning of the psyche is clearly present in his essay ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925). In it, he proposes The Mystic Writing Pad as a metaphor for consciousness that ‘offers both advantages: an ever-ready receptive surface’ that also contains ‘permanent traces of the inscriptions that have been made on it’ (Dérrida 1978: 223). Addressing related questions of the dynamics between memory, perception, and consciousness, Jung’s concept of the Archetype (1959) is similarly literary in its approach. The archetype is ‘literally pre-existent form… […] …without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action’ (Jung 1990: 48). Archetypes are ‘unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words… patterns of instinctual behavior’ (Jung 1990: 44).

I want to return here to a consideration of Barthes’ waxing poetic about the feeling of inscribing a blank page, and its importance to his sense of himself as an artist. The unconscious (collective and personal), as elucidated via Archetypes and the Mystic Writing Pad, are less places or things, and more ‘writing(s) without ink’ (Dérrida 1978: 229) – writing that transmutes pre-form into form. This transmutation evokes a feeling – the joy of which Barthes exclaims. And that feeling involves self-deception: ‘The ideal virginity of the present’, according to Dérrida, ‘is constituted by the work of memory’ (Dérrida: 1978: 226). The seduction of that ‘virgin surface’ (it also being a metaphor for a state in which one temporarily forgets all ideas and inscriptions that came before) is important to cultivate, as it allows the artist to experience the directional sensation of pulling forms, ideas, and images from inside herself and manifesting them outside of herself.

Writing is unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is that there be neither a permanent contact nor an absolute break between strata: the vigilance and failure of censorship… (Dérrida 1978: 226).

This sensation of ‘giving birth to an idea’ is important to most artists, on some level, no matter how theoretically aware of post-structuralist, post-modernist discourse and its dispersal of the Author they are. Barthes’ oversimplification of the act of drawing/writing, his emphasis on the joy of inscription, is a testament to this psychologically and culturally relevant element of artistic ‘creation’ – in the European modernist tradition, the artist is the one who knows the feeling of ideas emerging from the body-mind.

So, writing happens when energy/knowledge/form comes from the inside to the outside. But does writing not also happen when energy/knowledge/form goes from the outside to the inside? Jung’s proposal that Archetypes are ‘certain type(s) of perception and action’ and Dérrida’s suggestion that ‘writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself [is conscious of itself]’ (Dérrida 1978: 224) suggest that we write ourselves not only from the inside out, but also from the outside in. ‘…[P]ure perception does not exist: we are written only as we write’ (Dérrida 1978: 226). Writing, then, like perception, is bi-directional and bi-sectional. It moves in two directions: internal-to-external and external-to-internal. It also bi-sects the self:

‘[P]erception,’ the first relation of life to its other, the origin of life, had always already prepared representation. We must be several in order to write, and even to ‘perceive.’ […] A two-handed machine, a multiplicity of agencies or origins – is this not the original relation to the other and the original temporality of writing, its ‘primary’ complication: an originary spacing, deferring, and erasure of the simple origin… (ibid).

That illusion of the ‘simple origin’, that originary, creative feeling of ‘rhythmically incising a virgin surface’ is vital to artists practicing in all mediums. It is quite neatly evoked by the act of drawing or writing on a blank piece of paper.

There is even inherent in the word ‘draw’ a sense that something is being pulled out, extracted from something else (or, in some cases, from ‘nothing’). If something is ‘drawn out’, it is made evident, highlighted. I take this literally in my own drawing practice, which often involves tracing already two-dimensional images in order to extract from them a line or form that I can isolate and relate to as a movement score (see Appendix B). This is one of the reasons I enjoy engaging with the concept of ‘drawing’ in the context of making movement; I have often had the sensation that what I am doing while I am improvising movement is extracting, or drawing that movement from any number of possible movements afforded by my body and its environment. I need only pull gently, and movement spools out as long as I am providing some traction with my attention. There is also the element of chance involved in ‘the draw’, which addresses for me the gap between my intention and the reality of my body’s moving (see Appendix D). In his text about the temporality of drawing, David Rosand writes: ‘Perhaps only dance offers a comparable art in which means and end, the how and what of significance, are so perfectly identified’ (Rosand in De Preester 2013: 215). Othering: The Différance between the Artist and the Score

I other myself, otherwise nothing happens. –Helen Cixous (Writing Not Yet Thought, 2012)

In making a mark, a word, a line, I externalize myself. This self-externalization makes it possible for me to resonate with my self, thus shifting both the self that resonates and the self that is externalized. Mark-making is a material way to track and guide this othering, but there are more fundamental splits that must occur before the self can make a mark. The self is already an othering.

[I]f we think of interior monologue, we see that a difference between hearer and speaker is necessary, we see that dialogue comes first. But through that dialogue (the iteration of the back and forth) the same, a self, is produced. And yet the process of dialogue, differentiation-repetition,

never completes itself in identity; the movement continues to go beyond to infinity so that identity is always deferred, always a step beyond. ‘Différance’ names this inseparable movement […] differentiation and deferral (Lawlor in Derrida 2011: xxiii).

Performance scores further an imaginative doubling of consciousness. They catalyze a gap that emerges between self and self; they modulate our awareness and cognizance of the space in between intention and emergence. Score making allows the artist to mark forms and ideas while simultaneously moving away from them. Scores make forms appear in order that they might change and disappear, allowing an artist to become sensibly aware of the mutability inherent in the complex emergence of a performance situation. In collaborating with the score, she has articulated to herself and others that she is relinquishing her role as sole Author of the event. The event is taking place in relationship to the score. Its meaning originates in the score, and yet the event might come to mean anything else besides. A performance score is a tool that allows human consciousness to be present at an event, to apprehend the emergence through self-reflectivity of the immensity of energies, densities, contexts, and meanings that converge around an artwork. A Score qualifies as an artistic tool. As such, it is integrated into one’s body schema (one’s neuronal body map) as an extension of the body-mind. The feeling of this body-mind extension is exemplified when we speak of ‘touching something’ with a stick, or the ability to negotiate the expanded body of an automobile (Blakeslee & Blakeslee, 2008). And so score is a double extension of the body-mind: an extension of its ideas, and an extension of its sense of its own borders. There is something intriguing to me in this double extension, as it is, again, a re-envelopment of my own ideas, but in a deeply physical and unarticulated way. If there are ideas on the score, and the score becomes a part of my body map, then the ideas are also somehow a part of my body map – part of the way I am navigating in the world.

A score offloads a portion of the social and cultural personae of the performer. It allows her to roam free in her improvising behavior, in which she exits language to physicalize from her senses or to attempt impossible acts asked of her by the score. If she roams with a score in her hand, she can trust the score to do the signifying, leaving her body to roam beyond the land of the signified. Via this affect of othering self from self, performance scores serve to unfix meaning, to rearrange signs not by turning away from them, but by diving deeper into them or by pulling them deeper into us – by taking them into the body. Choreographic, drawing, and improvising states of mind are organized around gaps – entries into the body via specific sensory lenses that generate and shape movement. These acts of othering are necessary for choreography and improvisation, when the body is re-created in ways that are not solely social, formal, or energetic, but have the potential to be any of these in any combination. In order for the body to become material, the subject that normally identifies with that body must disattach, approaching its own body-mind with this productive schism intact.* *Practitioner: Deborah Hay

I recognize my choreography when I see a dancer’s self-regulated transcendence of his/her choreographed body (Deborahhay.com, 1998).

It is through working with American choreographer Deborah Hay on the 2012 Solo Performance Commissioning Project on the score ‘Dynamic’ that I have recognized the potential that a score has for opening a productive rift in the relationship between my intention, my perception, and my action (see Appendix C). This is a stated goal of Hay’s scores, which form the basis for her choreography. She makes explicit use of the term ‘choreography,’ and though her scores require a dancer to generate improvised movement material from beginning to end, she valorizes the term ‘choreography’, I believe, in order to emphasize the score’s writing/rewriting of the performing body.

The contradictory propositions open the system because they do not function as pointing to an object or to a subject, to a form or to a content; they point to nothing that could be present as such. They point beyond presence (Dérrida 2011: xvii).

Hay’s scores are full of ‘contradictory propositions’, requests to perform impossible tasks. She is interested in working with highly trained dancers because she is curious about the effect of asking them to subvert some of the main tenets of their dance training – to fundamentally alter their highly developed sense of their body’s relationship to itself. ‘Dance training subverts my ability to separate from my personal experience’ (Bissell on PCAH.us 2012), Hay has said. And, while she is supportive of the dancer’s attempt, she does not pretend that the process of cultivating a ‘non-attachment to the personal experience’ (ibid) is a comfortable or easy one: her ‘interrogation of the body’s relationship to itself can be unsettling. The questions she asks can become, in fact, confrontational’ (ibid).

Hay’s work with scores seeks to write for the dancer an internal observer of a different order. While she is in the studio with dancers engaging with her scores, Hay peppers the space with questions like: ‘What if where I am is what I need?’ and ‘What if my whole body at once is my teacher?’ (Hay, 2012). Minute-to-minute she will remind you to ‘Turn your fucking head!’ in order to refresh your visual palate, thus resetting and reestablishing your relationship with your body. In the libretto of the score for ‘Dynamic’, she asks: ‘What if my choice to surrender the pattern, and it is just a pattern, of facing a single direction or fixing on a singularly coherent idea, feeling, or object when I am dancing is a way to notice where I am not?’ For Hay, dancing is a space where she can ‘learn without thinking’. She is precise and demanding in her score language, and this sophisticated exchange between language and the graceful impossibilities it requests subverts the dominance of the knowing, rational, conscious self. Her scores include explicit requests to split sign from signified: ‘What if you call wherever you are zigzagging?’ ‘Remembering to call your movement weaving is constant.’ (Hay, 2012). I become aware that simply holding a word in mind while moving changes the way that movement arises and lives in my body. Dance Notation: Marks without authority

Dance notation consists of: the translation of four-dimensional movements (time being the fourth dimension) into signs written on two-dimensional paper. (Note: a fifth ‘dimension’ – dynamics – should also be considered as an integral part, though usually it is not.) (Guest 1984: xiv).

Ann Hutchinson Guest also offers a reminder that dance is not the only discipline or trade that has shown a vested interest in movement notation, and so the issue of recording movement on paper has always been an interdisciplinary concern, with science, athletics, and dance each contributing to and drawing from the movement notation dialogue according to its own perspective. Dance notation has been an unstable practice throughout history, both in its degree of relevance, and in the perpetual arising and fading away of various systems for notation. ‘Although many systems of notation have been put forth over the centuries, (we know of around 87 [Guest 1989]), dance notation is still sparsely used’ (Kolff in Voogt, A. and Finkel, I., 2010: 358). Politically, dance notation is an ambiguous topic within dance, as dance has self-identified as ‘art that disappears’, or art that ‘becomes itself through disappearance’ (Phelan 1993: 146).

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance (ibid).

Is dance caught in a simplistic reading of Peggy Phelan’s decree? ‘Has any other time-based art been so identified with its own impermanence?’ (Franko 2011: 328). Dance has a fraught relationship with its own remains, and to the material world in general, as it is an art form often composed of subjects. And the marginal status of dance notation within contemporary dance practice is evidence of this inherent difficulty.

Dance notations have no precise cultural status, the occupy no place of authority or of symbolically invested reference. The scribe of dance is a quite small and modest scribe, provisional and without posterity. He scribbles his ‘hieroglyphs’ […] in the shadows of writing (Louppe 1994: 19).

Yet, there is some inherent relationship between dance’s performance (that which moves and disappears) and the residue that remains. ‘Movement has the uncanny ability, in the words of experimental phenomenologist Albert Michotte, ‘to survive the removal of its object’’ (Massumi 2011: 107).** **Practitioner: Myriam Van Imschoot

Brussels-based writer and performance artist Myriam Van Imschoot makes works that

concern the archive, anachronistic media, and ‘modes of communication that stretch time and space’ (Van Imschoot, 2013a). Working at the edges of ephemeral art forms, she is ‘curious about what persists notwithstanding – in the form of traces, debris, echoes’. In her piece Black Box (2009), ‘an interactive jukebox with self-made records containing testimonies on improvisation’ (Myriam Van Imschoot, 2013b), she addresses ‘the sound archive in contemporary and auditive culture’ (ibid). Of the body, Van Imschoot writes: ‘The flesh is never a safe ‘home’ of departure or arrival, nor is it an interiorized history one ‘owns’; rather, it constantly functions in a loop with other modes of mediation’ (Van Imschoot Make-up-productions.net, 2005). Archival traces are what constitute us – our memories – our self-contextualization. ‘…([A] dislocation to locate oneself as oneself)…’ (Van Imschoot Make-up-productions.net, 2005).

Van Imschoot’s solo Living Archive (2011) responds to a ‘personally collected sound and interview archive’ (Myriam Van Imschoot, 2013b). In this piece, which often takes the form of a durational installation during which Van Imschoot inhabits the archive, Van Imschoot’s interest is ‘to divest the archive from its Enlightenment legacy in favour of new theories of ecology […] and older pre-modern approaches, such as divination, mimickry and sympathetic magic’ (squareVZW. 2013).

Choreographers and dancers draw and write (in the body and on the page) every day in studios all over the world. What are they drawing? Are they adhering to a system that is translatable to other dancing bodies? Most likely not, as contemporary dance does have a certain stake in addressing the unwritten body, the body as a palate of infinite (human) movement potential. Adhering to a system of notation is akin to adhering to a singular language (or technique) in dance – these techniques, historically, have limited what is imaginable within the body. Indeed, the majority of dance drawing and writing is deeply personal and specific to a particular body engaged with a particular dance. ‘Bachelor machines, linked in each case to a specific choreographic language itself destined to disappear, they [notation systems] have disappeared as well, traces even more evanescent then the phenomenon they sought to account for’ (Louppe 1994: 19).

As we trace the history of dance notation from Arbeau’s 1589 Orchesographie, we can see that the problem of capturing movement on the page only becomes more and more complex with time. Where Arbeau could assume that the page was his dance floor and omit any reference to the upper body and limbs (for which he was criticized by his contemporaries, because dance notation was never uncontended), Laban, working in the 1920s, can be attributed as ‘the first to posit the writing of dance as a consignation, not of formal figures, but of deep sensorial realities which inhabit the human body…’ (Franko 2011: 29). How could one possibly do that without creating a system that is complex enough to approach the esoteric? Indeed, reading a Labanotation score requires extensive specialized training, and it could only ever really be considered as a form of ‘deep storage’ – not for immediate, intuitive sensory reference, but for reading over time, in collaboration with the body.

I am still dazzled, and always initially overwhelmed, when I open a new score. With the exception of solo studies that use a familiar dance vocabulary, I cannot conjure the dance upon the page: I must move into the space, disassemble the notation signs and then reassemble them in and through my body before I am able to understand what is written. […] The score demands my active physical participation: I must dance it if I am to know what is written… (Watts 2010: 7).

Whether we consider systematized forms of dance notation or the private but vital scribbles of contemporary choreographers, something interesting emerges: in private (in the studio), alongside its very public love affair with music (which has also long served as a method for ‘writing dance’), dance has been cavorting with writing, drawing, and the page at least as long as it has concerned itself with choreography, and likely much longer.

If we think of choreography as writing, it may be because the very concept of dance depends in some measure on the notion of a trace in which the body, language as sign, and the gesture of drawing coincide as the very definition of what dancing means (Franko 2011: 334).

‘Choreographic Objects’: Dance & Digital Media A quick note about dance notation in the age of digital media: the capturing of movement via the mark has been complicated by our improved ability to capture, dismantle, and analyze movement on video. The paper score now seems outdated, primitive. Why keep working with it? I suppose this entire thesis addresses itself to that question. To talk about the emerging digital dance archive, I will borrow a term that has emerged in this new frontier of digital dance: ‘choreographic object’. Coined by William Forsythe, one of the contemporary choreographers currently experimenting with digital dance capture, the

…choreographic object, or score, is by nature open to a full palette of phenomenological instigations because it acknowledges the body as wholly designed to persistently read every signal from its environment… […] A choreographic object is not a substitute for the body, but rather an alternative site for the understanding of potentialinstigation and organization of action to reside (William Forsythe on Synchronous Objects, 2013, emphasis mine).

This paragraph could be describing a choreographic score notated on paper in an entirely personal script. But upon closer reading, I can distinguish a subtly scientific quality in the language (as emphasized above). Taken in Forsythe’s context of digital choreographic documentation, what is implied is ‘the emergence of a new ‘choreographic object’’ (deLahunta & Whatley 2013: 4).

The emergent digital dance archive includes (though is not limited to) such recent projects as: Siobhan Davies Dance Replay; Digital Dance Archives; Choreographic Objects and Motion Bank (William Forsythe); Capturing Intention, Pre-Choreographic Elements, and Inside Movement Knowledge (Emio Greco | PC); and Living Scores and Enhancing Choreographic Objects (Wayne McGregor/Random Dance). This new choreographic object is concerned with scientifically documenting and analyzing dance movements – much like Labanotation. But where the choreographic object differs from Labanotation is that it aspires to remain comprehensible at the same time that it is comprehensive. Contemporary digital dance documentation wants to draw from the rigor of past analog movement analyses, but it ventures one step further across the bridge that separates us from choreographic drawings and writings, which are ‘unfinished writings that exist but halfway, in the absence of the body that alone can read [them]’ (Delahunta 2004: 68). Digital dance documentation offers the promise that comprehensive movement analyses and representations can be captured and offered in a myriad of usable units to anyone who wants them, without extensive prior induction required. Video gives us the ability to quickly and cleanly distinguish human (and all other) movement patterns and qualities, to disattach them from their associated bodies, and to re-represent them in accessible formats.

Johannes Birringer, who runs DAP-Lab at Brunel University in London and is one of the primary scholars in the academic discourse on digital performance documentation, lauds Scott deLahunta (another prominent scholar in this discourse) for his ‘comprehensive vision of a new ‘dance literature’ exploring also various ‘non linguistic forms of description and collateral knowledge relations’’ (Birringer 2013: 8). I do think that choreographic objects have the potential to show us new territory with regards to our non-linguistic, pre-cognitive interaction with and reception of dance, and all movement – in other words, to move our conception of dance away from the sign. The dynamics of digital dance analysis capture and pull dance movement into a

new and fundamentally different machine, which reflects that movement back at us in seemingly endless, un-inscribed, and as-yet-unknown ways. The dynamics of dance notation pull dance movement into the already inscribed body, which reflects that movement back at us in the familiar signs and symbols that human bodies have been using to reflect themselves for thousands of years. And so the value of dance notation (as opposed to the choreographic object) is not that it captures and holds movement; its value is its specific proposal to represent movement in signs and languages. Choreography, even, emerged within the context of movement approached by the sign. The emergent digital dance archive has the potential to not only change dance notation – it has the potential to alter our very notion of choreography. Scoring, Score

The Score bends time, space, and body towards an identifiable continuing-in-relation to

one another, and to the score. Its use in performance implies and moves among multiple meanings of the word ‘score’:

A cut, notch, mark A line drawn; a stroke, mark; a line drawn as a boundary A track, trace of footsteps (Obs.) The essential point or crux of a matter; the state of affairs, the (present) situation To cut, mark with incisions To cut superficially; to make scores or cuts in; to mark with incisions, notches, or abrasions of the skin To produce (marks, figures, etc.) by cutting. to record or express by cuts or notches To draw a line through (writing, etc.) in order to cancel To record by scores (Oed.com. 2013)

All of the associations and actions implied in the above definitions adhere to the word ‘score’ and are present in my imagining of scores for performance. In the history of art, ‘scoring’ and ‘score’ have come to be associated with two broad categories. The first involves ‘accurate’, archival documentation of an event, which enables that event’s reproduction in the future. The complex and comprehensive scoring tradition of classical music is one of the most common and functional examples of this. This type of scoring aspires to be a form of documentation – another word for this is ‘notation’. Indeed, the web site of the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) insists that ‘dance scores function for dance the same way music scores function for music […] captur[ing] movement on the page so that it can be shared in all parts of the world and with future generations’ (Dancenotation.org. 2013).

Within dance, there have been many proposals for comprehensive scoring systems (Ann Hutchinson Guest chronicles an astounding number of these in her 1984 book Dance Notation). Currently, the most integrated system is arguably Labanotation, which was developed in the early twentieth century by Hungarian choreographer Rudolf Laban in an attempt to capture movement by recording as many of its dimensions and qualities as possible. The professional organization for practitioners of Labanotation (DNB), currently holds scores for works by: ‘George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, Bill T. Jones, Doris Humphrey, William Forsythe, José Limón, Laura Dean, and about 270 others. Each year DNB assists in staging around 150-200 performances from scores’ (Dancenotation.org. 2013). Typically, this type of score is not present in the moment of performance in music or dance, except as a mute mental reference point for the performer; they are referential objects whose physical presence in the space is most often minimized and taken for granted. Similarly, it is possible that an audience member who is a student, performer, or researcher of classical music might ‘read’ the score during a musical performance, but it is rarely a part of the composer’s design, that the physical score be apprehended alongside the music.

The second type of Score is more akin to a sketch, a design for open-ended action wherein chance forces cause an event to emerge in the consciousness of the performer(s) and observer(s) according to certain rules or filters. John Cage’s 4:33, and event scores by Fluxus artists George Brecht and Yoko Ono are well-known examples. This type of score is a recipe, a

prescription, or a ritual whose elements combine to affect a shift in the perceptions of the performer(s) and observer(s). The performer alone might engage with this type of score, as it catalyzes her to a sensory, emotional, and/or movement state that results in action of some kind that is then perceivable by an observer. Or the score might be more present in the space of performance, finding its way into the hands of the observers, or otherwise displayed or projected.

These two types of scoring – the descriptive, archival score that captures and the prescriptive, proposal score that catalyzes – describe two poles of scoring behavior; contemporary scoring practices in performance might combine and comment on any elements along this spectrum. The historical trajectories of these two types of scoring, and their relation to one another, are related to art’s collective move away from art-as-representation and into the current expanded field of artistic practices. I feel the presence of both ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ scoring in my own artistic practice; my scores slip among these historical and contemporary functions of the score. Scoring catches me among simultaneous acts of generating, disappearing, and capturing in performance, which I find provocative territory. The score is a resonating, material object that affects my body through its very existence (in that I adhere to it, consider myself in relation to it, no matter what it catalyzes in me). Further, the contents of the score affect me through subtleties of line and language. I like to maintain an unstable relationship to scores, treating what was generated as a trace document (‘drawing while watching’) as a proposal for performance. In fact, I am intentionally vague in my use of the word ‘score’ when discussing it with fellow performers and when presenting scoring practices to audience members, in particular with regards to time. A score can occur at any point in relation to an act: before, during, or after. If a document that was generated in response to a performance is then turned to and re-enveloped into the performance in some way, it is a score. Spatial and temporal concerns are inherent in a score document, as those pages are a pause in action somewhere along an event’s becoming. A score might originate an event as proposal; it might capture an event-in-progress as residue; and it might emerge afterwards as testimony. Residual or testimonial scores might become originating scores in future iterations of the same work. In this way, scores are a physical membrane for a semiotics in/of space and time, demonstrating the ways that choreographers loop and weave time and space in on themselves through movement, memory, and documentation.

Dance score documents are unique, ‘as if what allowed itself to show through here, on the surface of a sheet of paper observed in its transparency, were all the possible surfaces that movement haunts in their very texture, yet still leaves blank, unmarked’ (Louppe 1994: 13). Dance traverses the space between inarticulateness and articulateness, and the drawings of those finding form in that terrain ‘come to trace on the surface of paper all that which the body’s movement sets resonating in the deeper regions of consciousness, where no word can reach’ (Louppe 1994: 26). One of the main reasons that I enjoy working with scoring and drawing in performance, and in particular drawings and writings produced by observers, is because what is left on the paper does affect me differently than other drawings and writings that do not reach out so insistently for the dimensions of space and time. I am at once bolstered and destabilized by this residue, which reinforces the notion that my own memory of the performance event is only one of many. This is a main function of the Scoring Archive that I began in the context of this masters program – to document the event’s multiplicity, to capture something of all that escapes my grasp Maps

I want to note that there is another form that I consider to be very close to the Score, and that is the Map. A map is a document that means more than it expressly indicates. ‘The map: a field of concepts’ (Wood, D. & Fels, J. 2008: 190). Yet, certain maps have geographic authority and wield quite a bit of power. As such, ‘the map is nothing more than a vehicle for the creation and conveying of authority about, and ultimately over, territory’ (ibid). So maps, in their traditional, power-laden sense, become an imposition on a situation. They have a similar quality as historical classical music scores that purport to be the performance (the ‘work of art’), when there are many other dynamics at work during any live musical performance than could ever be contained in a

score. Music is a discipline that regularly separates the concept of the music from its performance, and alternate forms of receiving music (via recording and scores) have become standardized in a way that has not occurred in dance. Though, of course, the field of performance has also been expanded within music by ‘those who have accepted the sounds they do not intend’ (John Cage in Iversen 2010: 51), those who ‘now realize that the score, the requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness, is not an accurate representation of how things are’ (ibid). John Cage suggested that ‘Music is an oversimplification of the situation we actually are in’ (Cage in Iversen 2010: 89), much like maps.

The map is a reference object that reinforces a certain reality, in the same way that the multitude of potential drawings that might emerge from any given situation reinforces the reality of all perception. But unlike reference objects, a score most often retains close association with its original author. Maps are presented as ‘authorless’. It is amusing to me to read ideas written about maps that are very similar to Jonathan Burrows’ writing about Score: ‘Maps objectify by winnowing out our personal agency, replacing it with that of a reference object…’ (Wood & Fels 2008: 191). Burrows is suggesting that this winnowing can be a good thing in a performance situation, and I agree with him. Similarly, a dynamic that I find to be a positive aspect of scores is presented as a negative aspect of maps: ‘This authority, apparently descriptive, is inherently prescriptive’ (Wood & Fels 2008: 191). Maps might exert power over us, while the Score is approached voluntarily. Voluntarism is an important aspect of improvisation and contemporary art as a whole, and art is one realm where we are encouraged to follow our ideas to their extremes, which might have shocking or painful results. Artists occasionally do themselves harm, but voluntarily – they are willing subjects to their ideas, and their scores. Score as archive: The temporal aspect of scores

My own work touches lightly upon the dialogue about the Archive in visual art. I am

interested in the implications of entering into a power relationship with a document, but I have not yet explored it explicitly. For me, collaboration with a score is a productive relationship, though I am curious to explore its power dynamics in more detail. Also, the Archive in visual art is linked with the history of Photography, which has always had an archival function. I see the Score as having the archival function for choreography that Photography has for landscapes and street scenes. I am writing now of scores that are written in a combination of sign and language: they are the appropriate medium to document choreography because choreography consists of bodies, signs, and language.

An archive is a collection of documents that has been given some official capacity for representation. Artifacts contained in an archive contain authority, though the keepers of the archive might mitigate that authority through interpretation. Scores can also possess an authoritative presence in a performance situation, and the performers might mitigate that authority. Thus, there is a way in which scores can function as archival documents. I find this function most intriguing when it is considered in the context of a score that I have written for myself. In scoring, I am telling myself to do something, but I am allowing time to elapse, inviting the interruption of chance and my own potential reinterpretation of my own thoughts. The resulting performance is a combination of knowing and surprise, a response to oneself over time. In writing scores (much like a writer keeping a journal) a choreographer can become aware of the shifting, indeterminate nature of her own subjectivity. So the othering effect of scores is not only spatial, but also temporal. (See Appendix B) Chance, score, event, trace

Neither object nor subject: event. –Brian Massumi (2011: 6)

Chance is inherent in drawing, which is represented by the Trace. Drawing always exceeds representation because the trace of the drawing body can escape intention: ‘The gesture of

drawing is, in essence, a projection of the body’ (Rosand in De Preester 2013: 215). The Trace is a concept that links drawing with the temporal processes of becoming that is inherent in all bodies and objects:

This means that the separable forms that objectively co-populate the world are themselves traces. Objects are traces of their own detachment from the order of immediately attuned, affectively inflected, direct perception that gave rise to them. […] From this perspective, a body or object is a self-archiving of a universe of felt relation. Separate forms are a tacit archive of shared and shareable experience (Massumi 2011: 115-116).

Chance also manifests within the force and ‘desire of the line’, which comes into play once the drawing begins, as articulated by Matisse: ‘One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter or where to die away’ (Matisse quoted in De Preester 2013: 210). Chance is also inherent in the gap between the score and any event that arises in relationship to the score. Chance has been present in the awareness of artists to one degree or another throughout art history, but there was a particular convergence of concern with Chance, in particular as it related to the Score, in the Fluxus movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the main ways in which Fluxus ushered Chance into art practice was by positing the expansion of the frame of what constituted art, or performance. The choice of the Fluxus terms ‘event’, ‘happening’, ‘simultaneity’, and ‘dance construction’ are telling in that they draw attention to the contingency of the performance situation, to its status as a simultaneous convergence of elements and ‘distribution of disparate effects’ (Young 2012: 39).

Anything that happens within the space and time in which a Fluxus artwork is manifested might be considered part of the artwork. The Fluxus artists’ terms for their work are elemental and signify an attention to forms before (or without) content. There is a sense in which these terms are describing the physics of performance – the nature of what a performance is as a spatio-temporal occurrence. The term ‘event’ also decentralizes the performance situation, placing the artist squarely amidst all present:

The ‘subjective’ is not something preexisting to which an event occurs: it is the self-occurring form of the event. The dynamic unity of an occasion of experience is its ‘subjective form.’ Actually, there is no ‘the’ subject. There is no subject separate from the event (Massumi 2011: 8).

The artist is subject to the event, no different from (and ultimately with no greater authority than) the audience and all others who might interact with the event through observation, writing, reading, or artifact. The event is emergent, ‘partak[ing] of the potential bequeathed it by the general background activity’ (Massumi 2011: 22).

As the Fluxus movement occurred at a crossroads of artists practicing in music composition, choreography, visual art, poetry/writing, sculpture, and performance, there was a sense of coming together to air the grievances of each artist with regards to his or her own culture of artistic practice.*** ***Practitioner: Simone Forti

American choreographer Simone Forti was a member of the Fluxus group of artists

(published in ‘The Anthology of Chance Operations’ by her then married name, Simone Morris). Forti’s ‘Dance Instructions’ were influenced by her encounters with her teacher John Cage, and her peer George Brecht – these were short, haiku-like instructions that established situations pregnant with multiple potentials, then left to unfold as they will.

One man is told that he must lie on the floor during the entire piece. The other man is told that during the piece he must tie the first man to the wall. –’Instructions for a Dance’, Anthology of Chance Operations (Brecht 1962)

Forti experimented with chance procedures in making movement scores that were then represented sometimes on paper, sometimes in space, and sometimes in her imagination. In the mid and late 1960s and 1970s, she travelled around the United States, participating in multiple

communal living situations, developing her improvisation practices in the context of other artists and social experimenters who were employing drugs and the resulting mind alteration as methods to tap into previously unencountered realms of themselves.

I never lost my sense of identity and I always knew that I was Simone. But all the acid I took seemed to break down the barriers to perception and communication between the myriad systems and processes which house the self and within which my own identity lived as one interpretation among many others with which I coexisted as in a fertile jungle of interpenetration of life (Forti 1974: 18). As an improviser, Forti was concerned with the way the body’s senses have been written

by its cultural and architectural environment. I’ve wondered if systems passed on organically arbitrary units tend to reinforce a territoriality of exclusive space through an arrangement of vibrational disinfectants. And I wonder if certain functions can atrophy and cause an imbalance in the powers that reside in the human animal (Forti 1974: 119) Forti’s work with scores and improvisation makes very specific inquiries into the emergent

nature of what might appear to be Chance. Her piece Face Tunes employs an instrument specially designed to read scores traced from the outlines of people’s profiles. ‘As form seemed to be the storage place for presence, I hoped that the act of translating a coherent aspect of a set of faces to a corresponding form might awaken a more primitive level of pattern or ghost recognition’ (Forti 1974: 76). These melodies that emerged from facial contours offer evidence that ‘mind takes many forms, and as words are just a kind of notation, mind is in no way limited to verbal man’ (Forti 1974: 91). Forti’s exploration of improvisation as a method for unwriting the body involved the encounter between scored (or ‘known’) ideas and what might result from them. For Forti, a score was not what directed the situation, but a situational agent to be manipulated.

Realizing that one could choose the distance between the point of control and the final movement performed, I came to see control as being a matter of placement of an effective act within the interplay of many forces, and of the selection of effective vantage points. This made me start trying to take precise readings of what points of control I was using, and wanted to use, and to what effect (Forti 1974: 36). One of the conventions that was weighing heavily on composers’ minds at the time was

that of the Score: why it had become ubiquitous in music, whether it was in fact necessary, and what its effect had been on the practices of musical composition and performance. In the Fluxus publication An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962), the 25 artists represent a dizzying range of positions on Score and Scoring. On the one end is Jackson Mac Low’s open-ended invitation: ‘The text on the opposite page may be used in any way as a score for solo or group readings, musical or dramatic performances, looking, smelling, anything else &/or nothing at all’ (Jackson Mac Low in Brecht 1962). On the other is Richard Maxfield’s essay ‘Composers, Performance, and Publication’, in which he welcomes in a new era when the composer is ‘working directly with sound with his [sic] new sensitive electronic tools’, which means there is ‘no further need of the universal but obsolete symbols on score paper (do-it-yourself performance recipes suitable for voluminous publication)’ (Richard Maxfield in Brecht 1962). And there are many voices that fall in between. In Fluxus, there was generally a sense that all conventions of performance should be scrutinized to ensure they were serving the purposes of the event’s becoming. So, while Chance was certainly not a constant feature in all of the artworks proposed by Fluxus, the issue of ‘How much chance?’ was a constant concern. Fluxus artists recognized Chance: some valorized it, while others celebrated the opportunity to lessen its impact on their work.

Once the apparatus or instruction is determined the artist then adopts a posture of waiting to see what will happen. It is rather different, then, from strategies involving high-risk spontaneity where outcomes are just as unpredictable, but where the posture is one of making something happen rather than waiting to see what will happen (Iversen 2010: 12).

Performance scores are an effective staging ground for chance, for they allow artists to hover in between generality and specificity, chance and intention.

…[S]cores […] integrate indeterminacy and interactive repetition into a collective performance practice that negotiates the potentials of the distribution and dispersal of experience with the embodied specificity of the live encounter (Young 2012: 41).

It has been said that Chance lends itself to the ‘idea of creating a dense field of resonating sound rather than a melodic, linear musical experience’ (Iversen 2010: 14). Fluxus scoring practices have been referred to as ‘a shift towards extreme generality… […] … The status of the score as a work can never be fixed, because it can only be seen through this continual movement, this dynamic between seemingly opposite forces’ (Iversen 2010: 82). Yes, perhaps with the dispersing of experience comes a generality of intention on the part of the artist. As one audience member who attended my performance of SCORE at Rich Mix asked: ‘HOW IS THIS A SCORE? WHAT SCORE ARE YOU FOLLOWING THIS TIME?’ (Audience 2013). But there is still the desire for specificity, which is embodied in the inevitable singularity of the event. In an event, specificity is not gone from the equation, but it has shifted from the intention of the creator to the serendipity of time-space and the experience of the observers. While I am writing a score, I ask myself: Am I curious about how the realization of the score will unfold, or am I concerned with the articulation and manifestation of my own ideas in the score’s realization? The reason that I like working with scores is because they live in this ambiguous territory where they are sometimes considered despotic controllers, sometimes pitiful equivalences, and sometimes staging ground for the unknown.**** ****Practitioner: George Brecht Fluxus artist George Brecht was a chemical engineer who studied composition with John Cage. He had an engineer’s perspective on art and art making, seeking to identify the fundamental elements of ‘art’, ‘event’, ‘chance’, and other creative processes. However, the mechanics that he uncovered were far from dispassionate, and he approached the creative process (and work with chance in particular) with reverence. If art is ‘something constructed, from a starting point of preconceived notions’, then ‘as art approaches chance-imagery, the artist enters a oneness with all of nature’ (Brecht 1966: 7). He was intrigued by the chance procedures of the Surrealists and Dadaists, such as the cadaver exquis [exquisite corpse]. He called his own work with chance ‘the irrelevant process’ (Brecht 1966). Brecht’s performance scores are driven by a tense interplay between specific instructions and open-ended occurrence. They are simple, elegant examples of the powerful frame that a score places around an event.

Silence thus becomes full of inaudible sounds which only word scores can transmit… With this shift to perceptual activites, the ‘event’ scores becomes as much an invitation to find an ‘event’ as to perform it… ‘For the virtuoso listener’, Brecht observed in 1959, ‘all sound may be music’ (Iversen 2010: 81).

He is also concerned with the way that chance can reveal certain cultural and personal conditioning of which we might not normally be aware: ‘Chance in the arts provides a means for escaping the biases engrained in our personality by our culture and personal past history, that is, it is a means of attaining greater generality’ (Brecht 1966: 14). Feeling Form

Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create (Dérrida 1978: 4-5).

I have long been aware that my artistic practice involves the seeking out (desiring, even) of particular mental-physical states wherein I am chasing and shaping nascent sensations, ideas, movements, and images as they emerge from and/or around my body in performance. Someone who has observed a few of my performances remarked that my practice is, on some level, ‘to do something without knowing how to do it’ (Sweeney, 2013). Another offered that she feels my dancing is based on my ‘ability to be affected’ (Sweeney, 2011). I propose that these are fundamental elements of the thinking state of the dance improviser, who creates form from her curiosity about the possible meanings to be plucked from this stream of sensations, ideas, movements, and images from and around her body, and their subsequent becoming. She seeks these emergent phenomena not only with her eyes and ears, but with her whole being.

What it means to feel bodily energy changes: it is now immediately thought-felt, in perpetual nascency, unmediated by any predetermined idea of finality. This change, this gestural opening to an experience of movement unlimited, is the semblance of meaning produced by dance as pure movement, or what Gil calls ‘total movement’ (José Gil in Massumi 2011: 140).

It is this feeling, by which ‘bare activity’ is perceived, which the dance improviser sources in order to manifest form. Because choreography, or the generation of movement, involves the seeking, sensing, and cultivation of nascent forms within the body-mind, the feeling of forms and ideas as they arise and are realized in space-time becomes familiar to the dancer-choreographer.***** *****Practitioner: Susan Sgorbati/Emergent Improvisation

I began dancing with Susan Sgorbati at Bennington College in 2002, just as she was

bringing her ensemble improvisation practices into dialogue with scientists working in biology and neuroscience. She had been teaching improvisation for nearly 20 years, and had just gained new language and structures to support her thinking. While composing in ensemble improvisation, she and her students had noted forms that repeatedly emerged, and were now elaborating upon their similarities to emergent systems in nature. ‘My research and practice seek to develop the skills required to embody and recognize patterns of natural living systems that arise in the present moment’ (Sgorbati, 2013: 6). The improvisation forms that Sgorbati has designed to catalyze an ensemble and the individuals within it into the ‘self-organized criticality’ are simple rules, ‘constraints that make complexity visible’ (Sgorbati, 2013: 8). These forms have names like Simple Unison, Complex Unison, The Remembered Present, and Recall Form. Emergent Improvisation as it is practiced by Sgorbati and her collaborators draws on emergence at two levels: it seeks to identify emergent patterns and structures that arise from an ensemble of dancers, and as those patterns emerge, it brings those patterns into dialogue with emergent systems that have already been identified in the natural world. So the dancer is not only shaping an improvisation moment-to-moment; she is also gaining embodied knowledge of how elements of her memory work, and how her body-mind is designed to pick up on cues from other body-minds. A dancer can develop a feel for these emergent phenomena, which is very different than that elicited by reading about the function of memory and mirror neurons while stationary.

It is arguable that this intimate familiarity with the emergence of nascent forms is familiar to all who engage in creative endeavors, and I don’t disagree (this is, in fact, a variant of Barthes’ state of joy). What I am proposing here is that the dancer-choreographer is subject to a particular configuration of body-mind, nascent form, and identity over time. Humans’ eyes and ears hold distinct cultural and psychological values, and the designed stimulation of these senses forms the basis of artistic practice throughout history. The dancer also sources and references kinesthesia, the specific feeling that can result from engaging consciously with one’s proprioceptors. The sense of form’s arising is integrated into the dancer-choreographer’s sense of her body, and becomes a mental-emotional-physical state that she recognizes and identifies with.

Only the organic can approach the threshold of this space swept clear of signs, only movement can designate it and, simultaneously, what is most unattainable in it: the possibility ‘to arrive by physical means to the most impalpable realm of thought’ (Louppe 1994: 10).

Of course, there are few such physical spaces, swept clear of signs. Certainly, the body is not typically one of them, as the human form is one of the most sign-laden of all. If our experience of our bodies does escape the realm of signs, it tends to be during exceptional states that remove us from our everyday context: use of psychedelic drugs; transcendental meditation; severe injury; or prolonged illness. Dance, on the other hand, has simultaneously embarked upon an ‘endless journey beyond inscription’ (Louppe 1994: 10) at the same time that it is an art form, and therefore subject to intense association with human sociality and sign – it undergoes scrutiny according to the rules of language.

While modern European and American choreographers eluded to the existence and potency of a realm outside the sign (artists such as Martha Graham and Mary Wigman often concerned themselves with the physical expression of psychoanalytic and archetypal depths), they also engaged actively, and in a relatively fixed relationship, with the sign. This changed during the twentieth century as choreographers began to question what the performing body can reveal about (de)signification and (de)representation. In contemporary dance,

it is less the sign than the very process of signification that dissolves. This is not the formulation of another language. It is a transformation of re-presentation itself. It is a trajectory between the real and the sign. This trajectory is perturbed by the presence of a living body, intervening as such. … Dance de-represents; it courses through zones of perception where meaning can only be invented amidst the debris of signification (Louppe 1994: 10-11).

Many artists have contributed to this dissolution of signification within the field of dance, using diverse methods and producing aesthetically divergent products to explicitly de-inscribe the body and its performance context. Dance, like much of art after modernism, has been concerned with the erosion of the modern, intentional, unified Subject and Author.******* ******Practitioner: Trisha Brown American choreographer Trisha Brown has long been acknowledged as an artist who seeks to bring choreography into direct dialogue with the visual arts. There are many elements of Brown’s contributions to this dialogue over the course of her career, but a persistent strand has been drawing and dance. Brown’s choreographic and automatic, danced drawings have been exhibited in visual arts contexts internationally, and she also incorporates and subverts symbols and conventions of the visual arts in her performed choreographic works. I am particularly interested here in André Lepecki’s discussion of her 2003 performance in Philadelphia of an improvised work called It’s A Draw/Live Feed. In it, Lepecki suggests that Brown’s encounter with drawing while dancing opens possibilities for the body to subvert signification:

On the ground, Trisha Brown becomes not a grapheme, not a sign, not a symbol, not a figure, but as formless as paint hitting floor. Her falling is a becoming formless. Splattering, Brown’s dancing-drawing escapes perspectival economies of the gaze and of symbolic signification (Lepecki 2006: 71).

Her performance, despite resulting in exhibited and exhibit-able products, simultaneously subverts the economy of the singular art product that is associated with the singular artist. Through her use of the fall to acknowledge gravity as co-author and her ‘dizzying simultaneity of genres and acts’ (Lepecki 2006: 74), Brown’s danced drawing

…allows us to consider other ways of making art, or of thinking about the relation between art and space that refuses the colonial implications of marking a territory with the artists’ flag (Lepecki 2006: 72)

Brown’s work Floor of the Forest (1970) gave drawing a corporeal turn, as dancers navigate a grid strewn with clothing through which they extend, drape, and pull themselves, defining and redefining the contours of their bodies as they go.

Visibility, Invisibility, & The Line This direct perception of the arc of an event gathering up its immediate past and scurrying it forward toward an immediate […] future is an example of a semblance. If the arc of the event is seen, it is seen nonsensuously, as an abstract line… (Massumi 2011: 17).

Phenomenology and its practitioners have long been intrigued and informed by the phenomena created by artists. Art, they suggest, has the ability to expose something about the potential relationships among our bodies, our senses, the sign, and the workings of signification. Line, as it enters our bodies: ‘The peculiarity of the actually drawn sensuous line is doubled by a perceptually felt abstract line. Their in-between is constitutive of the semblance’ (Massumi 2011: 134). Thus, ‘…the poem for Heidegger, like the painting for Merleau-Ponty, teaches us to see significations that are operative on us in a way that resists propositional expression’ (Parry 2011: 4). In his writings about the way in which visibility and meaningfulness are co-constitutive, Maurice Merleau-Ponty turns to artists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee to provide examples for his thoughts.

Merleau-Ponty’s term ‘visibility’ refers to more than ‘what is able to be seen’; visibility refers to that which can be apprehended and meaningfully internalized. The visible and the invisible are indivisible, in constant relation to one another.

[T]he visible itself is not in time and in space, but not outside of them either, since it is what in the present announces and harbors an immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere (Lingis in Merleau-Ponty 1969: xlv).

The visible refers to that which has already been meaningfully internalized and arises again within the body-mind when lines, shapes, colors, and other sensory inputs recombine in us. In English, we say ‘I see’ when we understand a proposition. ‘It is more accurate to say that I see according to, or with it, than that I see it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 164). And so the flesh of our bodies and the flesh of the world intertwine through vision; in seeing, we write the world, and the world writes us. Neurologist Oliver Sacks quotes Goethe to open his essay ‘The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See’: ‘The Ancients said that the animals are taught through their organs; let me add to this, so are men, but they have the advantage of teaching their organs in return’ (Sacks 2003). The ability to see meaningfully is not solely a function of the visual apparatus. Sacks has written extensively about the ways in which the ability to see is not inborn and is cultivated by environment and culture. He uses as examples blind patients who had recovered the physical ability to see, but who had no wherewithal to interact with the world visually. Sacks himself suffers from prosopagnosia (‘face blindness’), which means that the lines, contours, shadows, and movements that make up a human face are perceivable to him, but they do not form themselves into a comprehensible and recognizable face. This intertwining of vision and what is seen is a main element of what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘chiasm’, wherein ‘what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a ‘state of consciousness’ ends as a thing’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 215). In the chiasm, ‘there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We function as one unique body’ (ibid). Therefore, Merleau-Ponty asks: ‘Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 138).

Something can be visible (sensible) even if it cannot be seen, and artists specialize in just this: ‘giv[ing] visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 166). Merleau-Ponty proposes that artists engage via their bodies with a ‘system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a nonconceptual presentation of universal Being’ (Merleau-Ponty in Tanke and Mcquillan 2012: 460-461). They then set about ‘multiplying the systems of equivalences, toward severing their adherence to the envelope of things’ (ibid). One powerful tool in this severing is the Line.

Whether it be representational or nonrepresentational, the line is no longer a thing or an imitation of a thing. It is a certain disequilibrium contrived within the indifference of the white paper; it is a certain hollow opened up within the in-itself, a certain constitutive emptiness—an emptiness which […] sustains the supposed positivity of things (Merleau-Ponty in Tanke and Mcquillan 2012: 462).

The Line is one of many tools that artists have relied upon to develop skills that allow them to manipulate the sensible within the realm of positivity, but outside the realm of signification. The Line, and art more generally, draw our attention to a thing standing alone, while simultaneously suggesting everything that surrounds it. Lines are:

the convivial edge of emergence: one line indicating all, presenting the continuity of variation that is the shadowy background of existence. And at the same time effecting separation: the spectral distinction of what actually appears. Merging; emerging. Virtual; actual. One line (Massumi 2011: 88).

Lines are a form of embodied becoming, much like the human body and the lines that we identify with it.******* *******Practitioner: Tony Orrico

Dancer-choreographer Tony Orrico began to develop his danced drawings within the context of a ‘physical symmetry practice’ (Tonyorrico.com, 2013). Orrico uses his body as a tool of measurement, exploring the area allowed by his outstretched arms; indeed certain of his Penwald Drawings do remind me of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – a human body surrounded by the geometric lines and forms that cascade off of it with every move. Orrico’s web site statesthat he is ‘fascinated with how physical impulses manifest into visible forms, […] [and] the notion that creativity is an emergent force’ (Tonyorrico.com, 2013). His work is concerned with the direct trace of a moving body performing hypnotic, repetitive, delimited gestures. There is no pause to consider perspective or accuracy of representation in this drawing while it is being made, as it casts off the moving body like dust. The way that movement inhabits and produces line is directly encountered in Orrico’s work, where ‘line density becomes record of [his] mental and physical sustain as he commits his focus to […] extended durations of drawings’ (Tonyorrico.com, 2013). Curiously, his site also states: ‘the master of each drawing is a conceptual score of Orrico’s efficacious techniques, imposed variables, and specified durations or objectives’ (Tonyorrico.com, 2013). I would say that there is no ‘master’ of these drawings. Although they appear to be pulled from the air, they are the trace of an emergent process, wherein a master becomes obsolete (or at least subsumed into a larger process of emergence). The Transcendental Signified, Imagination, Improvisation

If dance has embarked upon an ‘endless journey beyond inscription’ (Louppe 1994: 10),

then where is it going? Might it be gesturing towards that barely-ideated non-space that Dérrida refers to as the ‘transcendental signified’? In which direction would this journey take us – towards the inside, or the outside? Is direction even a parameter in this journey? The ‘transcendental signified, that is, a concept independent of language’ (Derrida 1978: xv) is certainly gestured towards in dance, which is always other than – in excess of – any language used to describe it. If the dancer in general signals the unnameable expression that is beyond language, then the dance improviser probes and manipulates the body-mind’s encounter with this unnameable as her medium. She becomes skilled, even virtuosic, at simultaneously formulating and un-formulating the ‘transcendental signified’ using space, time, and a moving body. She directs what Massumi calls ‘bare activity’: ‘the just-beginning-to-stir of the event coming into its newness out of the soon to be prior background activity it will have left creatively behind’ (Massumi 2011: 3). This stirring is ‘how dance means’ – its movement is what the audience converges around, as well.

To what it [dance] can do best, and better than any other technique of existence: give immediate meaning to bodily gesture, in and of itself. But what ‘meaning’ can pure bodily movement have once it is ‘broken’ and ‘emptied’? Only a creative semblance of meaning – a speculative meaning of a singularly dancerly kind (Massumi 2011: 139).

If I imagine what the unnameable might be, I become immediately aware that the only space where I can form an image of the unnameable is within my imagination. In fact, I can imagine that the ‘transcendental signified’ shares qualities with my imagination, as my imagination is the only entity I know of that is capable of manifesting absolutely anything of which I can conceive. ‘Imagination is the freedom that reveals itself only in its works. These works do not exist within nature, but neither do they inhabit a world other than ours’ (Dérrida 1978: 7). Art making is the inhabitation of this imagined space, the pulling of imagined forms and ideas into material life. To make art is to behave as though all imagined things are possible. ‘A prevalent feeling among many painters that lets them make a space in which anything can happen is a feeling dancers may have too’ (Cunningham quoted in Lepecki 2006: 65). Improvisation is an art form that concerns itself with the potential of the affect of that ‘space in which anything can happen’. While, in fact, there are many things that will never happen in a dance improvisation, the practice of imagining that anything could happen is (more or less) part of the improvising experience. Performance scores are like tethers into this unnameable space where anything can happen. They are tenuous ropes made of words and signs that lower/lift/pull us into the territory beyond.******** ********Practitioner: Lisa Nelson

Although the dancers of that time were temporarily cut loose—sweeping the movements of daily life, ‘natural’ movement behaviors, and athleticism onto stages and proposing new frames for looking at dance—I yearned to see something else. Something underneath the dancers’ interaction with each other and the architecture of the space, something of the dancer’s interaction with herself—the internal dialogue that shapes the surface (Nelson 2004: 20).

American dance artist and improviser Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores are a loose collection of sensory and writing practices for improvising dancers. From an online repository of writings by Tuning researchers: ‘In ‘tuning,’ we practice together, using both movement and verbal calls. Through these, we communicate our desires, our imagination, and our memory, in a shared image space. And with this material, we compose live art, together’ (Tuning Scores Log 2013). Like Hay, Nelson’s work is preoccupied with vision, and how our senses are informed by our active engagement with the world, and are far from passive receptors of information. Tuning Scores are identified by practitioners as ‘vehicle[s] to attune to an individual and collective sense of space, time, and behavior’ (Galanter, 2005) which puts me in mind of the score as tether – something for all improvisers in a space to hold onto, to form themselves around. I like Nelson’s use of the word ‘score’ in this context because there is no single Tuning Score. Rather, I believe the term is used because it brings with it that idea that a score is built for the collective, not to control but to support and structure. At Earthdance, a dance residency center in Western Massachusetts where Nelson and her colleagues sometimes work, there is on the wall in the kitchen a sign that reads:

Late Night Dish Score Wash, Dry, Put away

When I am at Earthdance, I have always loved the agreeable, cooperative spirit that is affected in me when I call ‘washing the dishes’ a ‘score’. I don’t feel like the sign is telling me to do the dishes. Rather, I feel that it is indicating what the expected behavior is for everyone in the space, in order to keep it functioning for everyone’s multiple purposes. There is a potential democratizing effect in tangibly involving a score in performance.

According to Lisa Nelson, such a democratic ‘sharing’ of the tools will help the audience enhance their observation: ‘When the intelligence of the system appears it can be very fun’. Ultimately, the aim, she says, is not the score itself (its execution) but what it produces and facilitates. Scores are not systems to cultivate as such, but a ‘generatrix’ for more complex interactions to happen and to observe (Van Imschoot in Make-up-productions.net, 2005).

Line & Movement Scoring and performing from scores are experiences that center on identifying, qualifying,

and following lines of movement. Traditional musical scores are clearly built around straight and curved lines in a variety of horizontal and vertical configurations, and the ‘phrase’ of music moves forward according to the same momentum present in ‘lines’ of written text. When I am designing scores in the studio, I am occasionally working with lines as representative of phrases or pathways of movement, and I consider whether I want a grid of lines to assist these representations (graph paper), in place of an empty field. Lines are imprints that we readily relate to events – to space, time, and dynamic. Scores often contain lines that perform different functions, and those lines have visual qualities that are associated with their scoring functions. Lines that appear erratic enough that they might be hand-drawn (as with musical notes) pull movement and shift position. This pulling and shifting happens along lines that are perfectly straight, steadfastly representing the perpetual linear march forward of time. These time lines occasionally run up against lines that were not fabricated by the traversal of a point from A to B, but have been stamped there as barriers – lines free from movement, or containing a different kind of movement – a halting movement. Lines sculpt various threads of experience for us, and we associate them with that function.

There is an inherent relationship among point, line, and movement. Lineality, which is constitutive of all drawing in some way or another, can be distinguished from point with regards to its relationship to movement. Line is points in continuity, or points in convergence. Action (gesture) is inherent in line, as is the passing of time (as the line passes from point A to point B). It also implies, even directly communicates the experience in space and time of the line’s maker.

There are certain linear forms that we experience. However, we do not experience them as we would see them drawing in some space before us, but rather as if in the constant movement of the self we were to mimic each linear movement ourselves. We feel them the same way the person who drew them did and at the same time as the material with which they were drawn. And the drawing of each line, each change of place, is simultaneously an experience of the self (Steiner in Butler and Zegher et al., 2010: 78).

Line not only reaches into space and time, but it is also directly related to our formulation and transmission of aesthetic and creative experience. In scoring, we carve a pathway (a line) for our perception to follow, thus immediately exposing all that is not perceived. In becoming acutely aware of all that is not articulated in our witnessing, all that is witnessed outside of language and conscious thought, we desire to make marks on the page that capture this excess – that somehow contain that which escapes. Often, lines of one sort or another structure these marks that grasp at the space, time, and affect of an event.

…line [is] the element that generates form and, as such, the determinant of a way of perceiving the world. ‘It was through the conscious line – through being conscious of the line before focusing consciousness on the object – that the artist could cognize not the object itself but what lay within that object: the non-objective forces that give structure and movement to it, to the world of space and time as such… Art would express a perception, whether it was an intuitive thought or a sensation, and transform this non-objective sensation into knowing’ (Malevich in Butler and Zegher et al., 2010: 47-48).

Line has, then, the double function of embodying both movement and fixation. Line shares this quality with Score.********* *********Practitioner: Dana Reitz

Dana Reitz was my dance composition teacher at Bennington College, and she was one

of the first people to introduce a regular drawing practice into my studio time in a course called Finding Form. She would request that her students draw all of the dance phrases we would bring to class, so that we would come equipped with both drawn and danced materials. We also drew all throughout class, the entire time we were performing and working with our phrases. Drawing

while watching enabled me to identify and apprehend qualities and lines of movement that threaded their way through my own work, and that of others. Drawing was also an important part of Reitz’s practice before she became a teacher:

When working on a dance piece, one of my main concerns is to find a rhythmic phrase to work from—something I can repeat, settle into, and begin to vary in as many ways as possible its time, tone, shading, coloring, accentuation, and intensity. What comes before and what surrounds the phrase influences the dancing of it and the perception of it. The resulting shapes and forms are continuously changing. Drawing is another way for me to work the same process. It is a tool that allows me to see, outside of myself, the direct result of performing a rhythm as I hear it, without trying to copy a completed shape or even to predict one. It is another way to get at the energy that motivates movement, the direct line of intent and attention, the underlying current of form (Schwartz: 1982).

Choreography: Body & Sign

Recent dance scholarship, in particular the writings of Mark Franko, André Lepecki, and

Laurence Louppe, suggests that evidence of the complex intertwining of dance and writing in the European tradition is to be found in the etymology of the word ‘choreography’. Tracing its first version to 1589, when Jesuit priest Thoinot Arbeau titled his famous dance manual Orchesographie, which means ‘literally, the writing, graphie, of the dance, orchesis’ (Lepecki 2006: 7), Lepecki proposes that, as dance and writing were ‘compressed into one word’, they ‘morphed into one another’, producing ‘qualitatively unsuspected and charged relationalities between the subject who moves and the subject who writes’ (ibid). Choreography is, therefore, a ‘technology that creates a body disciplined to move according to the commands of writing’ (ibid). ‘Technologies are abstract-event multipliers and disseminators. They are prostheses of the life of abstraction. Aliveness engines’ (Massumi 2011: 147). This technology emerges in early modernity, which, Lepecki suggests, is not a coincidence: ‘It is not by chance that the invention of this new art of codifying and displaying disciplined movement is historically coincidental with the unfolding and consolidation of the project of modernity’ (Lepecki 2006: 7). Not only does the concept of ‘choreography’ train a disciplined body, a ‘linguistic entity’ (ibid), but dancing and choreography are forms of inscription, and as such, space and body become palimpsests, eternally inscribed and re-inscribed through authored movement.

Something called choreography remains in the wake of its performance. In other terms, choreography denotes both the score of a dance and the dance itself as perceived in real time and space—which raises the question: When we observe a dance, do we also observe (its) writing? (Franko 2011: 321).

It is as if the letter, the diffuse textuality inscribed in life, had immediately – and since time immemorial – impressed its seal on the heart of the destiny of dance, an invisible sign which movement and its projection in space will little by little decipher, transcending the mark (Louppe 1994: 14).

Choreography links the body to the written, to the page, through practice. It is a form of writingin the body, and, notably, practitioners of this writing in the body (choreographers) quite regularly engage with their material (the body, space, and time) through writing and drawing on the page. Dance scholar Mark Franko suggests that ‘geometrical dance, as a choreographic rather than a notational phenomenon, inverted the relationship between dance and text, making dance appear textual in its very performance’ (2011: 323). Dance notation and dance that concerns itself with geometry, as much of Renaissance and Baroque forms of dance do, are related to one another, and there is no way to know which originated which. Did the notion of choreography as writing emerge from the body, or from the page? Or is it in fact impossible to make such temporal distinctions about the intertwining of body and page, as they emerged in relation to one another? It is not possible to identify the first moment that the body and the page

became entangled in human history. It is likely that there were many such moments, only one of which was in 1589 with the publication of Arbeau’s Orchesographie.********** ********** Practitioner: Julyen Hamilton

Poet and dance and music improviser Julyen Hamilton experiments with the ways that

language (or sounds close to language) inhabit the bodies of the performer and the observer in the event of an improvised performance. Hamilton ventures beyond language in the form of gibberish while dancing, and the intertwining of his speaking body, his singing body, and his dancing body allows one to sense him as a complex and responsive vessel, ingesting, combining, and recombining multiple systems of knowledge and expression.

the kinesthetics of language from where do we speak when do sounds become words how do words occur how do they occur to us how might poetry happen listening – surdity – and absurdity verbs and bones nouns and organs adjectives and organs adverbs and muscles is there a difference between the words composed when sedentary and those which come when moving the play between the movement of words and the movement of the body in space thoughts from a moving body thoughts from a stationary body movements around a silent mouth movements around a talking mouth song and air Julyen Hamilton (Tanzquartier Wien, 2013)

Improvisation & The Unwritten

‘Freedom’ is a persistent fixture in discussions of improvisation and the arts – and yet its precise meaning is rarely examined. In fact, in most cases it seems to function as little more than shorthand, pointing toward something good with vaguely political implications. This casual use of language has real-world causes and effects, even in the seemingly self-contained realm of dance (Goldman 2010: 15).

One of the problems inherent in conflating improvisation with freedom that Danielle Goldman identifies in her book I Want To Be Ready is that this suspended state of creative freedom does

not translate to the same degree of freedom in the world at large. It is easier to achieve freedom in art making than in negotiation with the political and social realities that surround that art making. ‘The suggestion that one could escape confinement only to enter into or become aware of another set of strictures […] is vital to understanding the political power of improvisation’ (Goldman 2010: 17).

An example of the vitality of this illusion of freedom in dance improvisation is present in contemporary training methods common to the dance improviser. It is generally agreed that, in order for her to improvise successfully, the internal space of the classically trained dancer needs to be unwritten via Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation, Qigong, Axis Syllabus, and myriad other forms that are concerned with expanding our awareness of the ways that movement and energy inhabit the body. The dance improviser must train in order to ramble beyond the pathways through her muscles and nerves that she has learned from others. However, the internal space of the body can never be a completely blank slate because a) all physical un-training, even if it is intended as an ‘undoing’ of dance training, is still comprised of systems of training and b) physical strategies are necessary in order for the dancer to perform. For the improvising dancer, then, acquiring skill is a question of hovering in between physical technique and physical unknowing – a back-and-forth between a naïve investigation of the body and the negotiation of the knowing body’s response to these investigations. It is a negotiation of that space between the moment that I am seeking form, and the moment form is found.

This negotiation becomes the improvisation. But the negotiation itself is a trick of consciousness and perception, one aimed at forgetting, which allows us to believe that we negotiate one intentional line of action through time and space in a field that we perceive to be endless. But we do not do this. While we think we are doing this, we are in fact generating excess affect that expands to form a frame around the entire event of the improvisation – a frame that can move further from the event, providing a view as though from the distant future (considering its position in artistic and social history) or closer to the event (to wonder in the spark of consciousness in the eyes of the dancer, the quickening of her skin). Ultimately, in improvisation, what is unwritten is the idea of the Author, as guide or as tyrant. What is implied by improvisation (and eventually expanded into all art) is that intention is no longer the primary determinant in how a work of art comes to mean. The artist’s intention becomes unwritten.***********

***********Practitioner: Nancy Stark Smith Where you are when you don’t know where you are is one of the most precious spots offered by improvisation. It is a place from which more directions are possible than anywhere else. I call this place the Gap. The more I improvise, the more I’m convinced that it is through the medium of these gaps – this momentary suspension of reference point – that comes the unexpected and much sought after ‘original’ material. –Nancy Stark Smith (Albright 1989: 47).

One of the founding practitioners of Contact Improvisation, American dance improviser and educator Nancy Stark Smith has long used drawing as a method to help her track her experiences while improvising. She, like Barthes and many others, writes about deriving a sensual, fulfilling feeling from her dancing drawings. ‘I liked the way they looked, they satisfied me. They seemed to precisely capture the frequency of my mood, mind, and body rhythm’ (Albright 1989: 42). Stark Smith also writes of the relationship that she noticed between the unpredictable forces of Contact and the familiar territory of language:

Contact […] has sought not so much to bridge the gap between writing and dancing as to probe this space itself: ‘my focus was not on the historical context nor the visual form of the written symbols, but on what happens between an experience and the telling of it, the translation from one medium to another’ (Albright 1989: 39).

Contact Improvisation is a dance form wherein the body is rewritten in the context of its encounter with another, similarly mutable body. In the practice of Contact, ‘social relationships, physical hierarchy, gender roles, and personal interaction are constantly rolling, shifting, and sliding in and

out of view’ (Albright 1989: 39). Contact was charged with the political implications of improvisation as a practice of freedom, coming of age as it did on the college campuses of 1970s America. Seeing, drawing, touching

There is a tremendous difference between seeing a thing without a pencil in your hand and seeing it while drawing it. –Paul Valéry (Rosand 2002: 13) The painter ‘takes his body with him,’ says Valéry. […] It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 162). Texture is an example of haptic vision: you immediately seehow it feels (Massumi 2011: 71).

All three of the above quotes describe the haptic reversal that is inherent in drawing. ‘[Haptic] refers to touch as it appears virtually in vision – touch as it can only be seen’ (Massumi 2011: 57). In looking, I am touching with my eyes. In drawing, I am stroking my surroundings with the intent of transforming this visual touch into a representation that is informed by my seeing-touching. Drawing is a form of re-embodiment. It brings seeing one stage deeper into corporeality by making the seer on some level sentient of the relationship between seeing and touching. Both seeing and touching are necessary in multiple ways for drawing to occur; neither is sufficient alone. And this touches on a fundamental facet of consciousness: ‘The senses are always also taking each other up, coming into and out of each other in one way or another […] They never function alone’ (Massumi 2011: 75). As much as we might separate the senses in our effort to understand them, they are all interrelated. Drawing is a way of experiencing this interrelation. The Score & The Observer

I cannot be caught in immanence. –Paul Klee’s epitaph (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 188)

Scores become an inter-given, capable of relaying unstable experience. It is possible for a score to direct the behavior of everyone in the performance situation, performer andaudience. In order to further investigate the effects of ‘score’ and ‘scoring’ as concepts offered to the audience, I have been experimenting with inviting the audience to create written or drawn scores in real time while they observe a performance. These documents, which I collect, are traces of the multiplicities converging around an event (see Appendix B).

Every event is singular. It has an arc that carries it through its phases to a culmination all its own: a dynamic unity no other event can have in just this way. The unity of the occasion is the just-this-way in which the phases of the arced unfolding hold together as belonging to the same event (Massumi 2011: 3).

The scores produced by the audiences are traces of the multiplicity of forces and affects that act on this ‘arced unfolding’. These documents fundamentally shift the relationship between performer and audience, and they do this in a few ways. First, committing any aspect of your observations during a performance to the page immediately instills your observations with an authority, a presence in the material world. Even if what is left in the trace is a minute portion of your experience as an observer, the process of selecting and imprinting that minutiae on the page is evidence of your observations. During the performance, while the audience is scoring, a sense of cooperation emerges. A cooperative effort replaces the situation where my collaborators and I are doing and the audience is watching. Yet, the audience’s participation in the event does not unduly influence the procedure of the event. The audience members are asked to expose

elements of their experience, but not in the language typical to performance. They are asked to engage with the realm of the written, to pull performance down to the page. Their experience shifts from the invisible to the visible. They do this as a community. This brings into the space the suggestion that a performance situation is a convergence of experiences. ‘Most people are busy scribbling. Few are watching’, observes an audience member in his notes (Audience 2013). And that is fine with me. I do not need them to watch me in order to feel that they are a part of the performance equation. And long afterwards, I am still referring to their documents and discovering new ways in which they saw what I was doing. ‘The drawing is as-good-as subjectively real’ (Massumi 2011: 133). I believe all of these documents. They are all true.

By handing the audience pencils and paper, I am giving them tools to physicalize perception (‘what is seen’), much like dance. Their degree of agency is at least closer to my own when they are asked to document their experiences. While writing about ‘haptic vision’, Brian Massumi proposes a ‘kinesthetic vision’. ‘The other sense [besides touch] that virtually appears in dynamic visual form is kinesthesia, the feeling of movement’ (Massumi 2011: 71). He is talking about what is receivable by an observer via vision, and how many of our other senses are present in the activities that we associate with our eyes: ‘kinesthesic and haptic vision […] are pure optical appearances of other-sense qualities of life’ (Massumi 2011: 75) (see Appendix D). Research into mirror neurons and kinesthetic empathy have already established that the audience is having more than a visual experience when they are watching dance. And when I ask them to assume an attitude of contemplation and expression (which huddling over a page with a pencil is) I bring their bodies into the performance in an active way. Then, their drawings bring their thoughts into the performance in a material way. ‘But how often are we offered an invitation to write (or draw) about what we see? Not often enough, obviously. I wish I could see more of what people around me are scribbling’ (Audience, 2013). All of this seems to me to strengthen the mesh that stretches between my action and the audience’s perception – that mesh from which the performance emerges (see Appendix A – Tracings).

How does the presence of a score in a performance impact the observers of that performance? What does it do to the relationship between the audience and the performer? Does it change the relationship between the audience and the event itself? Jonathan Burrows got me thinking about this when he wrote in A Choreographer’s Handbook:

When a performer reads their score during the performance, it can help mediate between them and the audience. The score then represents, in a way, the piece itself, separate from the personality or desires of the performer. This can allow the performer to disappear at times, giving the audience space for a more direct and personal relation to the dance, music or text they’re seeing or hearing (Burrows 2010: 143).

And so, the score stands in for the artist as social person, and the dancer as social body. I like this diffusing effect that can be achieved by the inclusion of a score, as it gives some authority to a virtual-human entity, which scatters the performer and performance beyond the social into the realm of the material. Paper, documents, instructions are virtual-humans – humans whose personality and desires have been offloaded onto the page, simplified, de-bodied. The score becomes a terrain that all inhabitants of a performance situation may traverse.

Acknowledgements Thank you to my family, who supported my months huddled alone in a corner room, writing: Fred Breunig, Margaret Grace Sweeney, Gregory Sweeney, Christopher Sweeney, Elizabeth Hope Zimmerschied, Karl Wilhelm Zimmerschied, Joseph Warren Sweeney, Mary Elizabeth Murray, William Karl Murray, Lauren Breunig, & Matthew Ragan And with particular gratitude for her patience - to my mom, Patrice Murray To my collaborators, who have so often and generously put their ideas, bodies, sounds, and skills at my disposal: William “Bilwa” Costa, Martín Lanz Landázuri, Jil Stifel, Christian Schroeder, Mariella Greil, Asher Woodworth, Shannon Stewart, Stina Nilsson, Bari Kim, & Florian Tuercke To Simon, Adrian, PA, & Jen: for all of your support throughout my MA year To Jen & Paul and Elisabete & Kerem, for providing homes away from home To London; México City; Vienna; Berlin; New York City; Brattleboro, Vermont; and Findhorn, Scotland: for being places To the 2012 Deborah Hay Solo Performance Commissioning Project: for seeing me, and inviting me to be seen To see more of Emily’s work: http://emilysweeney.net

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