Yesterday, I found that the tree had just about withered—yellow lines lifting into the days of heat.
Today, the gray rain thrashes over the silent harbor while wind from that faraway island lilts near the open windows of my studio.
Naming dance calls forth revelatory turbulence: remaking worlds, inventing worlds.
As dance—a method of touching space and corporeal world-making—calls on us to encounter the unpredictable, it will require new performative archaeologies, methods of co-creation, and more nuanced networks of exchange across live and digital platforms. Before we can consider distinct types of dance, their names, vocabularies, and specific methods, finding a way to recognize dance in its most elemental form—as it lives in the space between here and there—we can begin to articulate how dance makes the world vibrate.
Dance the Sense-Body
The activation of the sense-body establishes and mobilizes our activity in the world. My approach to the sense-body is informed by four points of orientation: deaf and disability studies theorist Mairian Corker on ‘Sensing Disability’; my own work on hearing, deafness and the third ear (a listening body that works at the interstices of the senses, often through synaesthesia); Gilles Deleuze on microperceptions; and the work of Arakawa and Gins, poet-architects who write about the architectural body.
Though we must move towards an understanding of diverse sensory frames that cross disability, gender, culture, and race, it often becomes apparent that, while we may want to claim the translatability of sensory frames, they are often incommensurable. The effort to bring about an agreement through language is all too often an effort to universalize sensory experience and ends up circumventing, even erasing, the bodies it claims to be including.
In order to amplify the sense-body, we need to listen to: [t]iny perceptions [that] are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are the components of each perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain (Deleuze, 1993: 87).”
This articulation of the sense-body provides a way of orientating ourselves towards diverse phenomenologies and events of experience.
Dance Space- Architectures
As we navigate bodies, spaces and multiply unfolding orientations, there is ‘something more’, however, than simply a diversity of experience. This is what Arakawa and Gins term the ‘architectural body’ in which architecture operates like a skin in relation to the moving body. We can think of this phenomenology as a sequence of passages through ‘landing sites’. They write: ‘similarly to the way a person flexes her muscles, she also flexes her surroundings’ (Arakawa and Gins 2002: 41). ‘The body is sited. As that which initiates pointing, selecting, electing, determining, and considering, it may be said to originate (read co-originate) all sites’ (5). Arakawa and Gins name the types of landing sites as ‘perceptual, imaging, and dimensionalizing’.
Architecture forms the skins we dance, and dance forms an architecture we become.
Transformation, translation and turbulence are the mutually constitutive registers that promulgate the sense-body – that is, the stitching together of bodies, materials and architectures as ‘events’. This perpetual dynamic leads to new forms of visual tactility and tactile visuality, expanded spaces of revelatory turbulence. With both the stage and the city as laboratories, we can find ways, as a part of the collective endeavour required by revelatory turbulence, to do work that, as it were, thinks itself.
Dance leads us into places where we can experience the immanent intersections of colliding spheres of bodies, relations, histories, sciences, industries, and cultures.
Dance generates movement scores that activate as that mystical see-er/do-er between what is and what can be.
NB: The above includes partial excerpts from: Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2014). “The Turbulence Project: Touching Cities, Visual Tactility, and Windows.” Performance Research Journal. Paul Carter (Ed.). Vol. 19.5: 13-22.
References
Arakawa, Shusaku, and Madeline Gins (2002) The Architectural Body, Birmingham: University of Alabama Press.
Corker, Mairian. (2001). “Sensing Disability,” Hypatia. Volume 16, No.4, 34-52.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2006a). Hearing difference: The third ear in experimental, deaf, and multicultural theatre, Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2006b). ‘Hearing difference across theatres: Experimental, Disability, and deaf performance’, The Theatre Journal, 417–36.
Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2009). ‘Uneasy alliances: Art as observation, site, and social innovation’, in Working Papers in Art and Design, Vol. 5, University of Hertfordshire, http://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ le/0013/12424/ WPIAAD_vol5_lindgren.pdf (Accessed 9 October, 2014).
Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta, Davis Schneiderman and Ton Denlinger, eds. (2009). The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.
