On technique︎︎︎
What a Body Can Do: Ben Spatz
Practice and technique: The escape of practice from technique only seems like freedom if we treat technique as a constraint. But technique, as we have seen, is more than habitus or performativity. It structures all levels of practice, from the conscious to the unconscious, and is completely interwoven with agency throughout. There is no way to escape technique, nor any reason to search for such an escape. Rather than attempting to distinguish between practices based on the extent to which they are technical, we would do better to ask what kinds of technique structure a given practice and how different practices may be similar or different at the level of technique. By the same token, rather than searching for a practice that transcends technique, we should search for the pathways and areas of technical exploration that are most necessary to our lives and communities.
While I have argued that technique is transmittable and repeatable, performance theory has for some time now tended to emphasize the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the live event. What McKenzie has criticized, as the ‘liminal norm’ in performance studies (1998) is an example of the trope of excess: It romanticizes and reifies the allegedly excessive qualities of embodied practice, ignoring the extent to which such practice is structured by repeatable technique.
conscious and unconscious
habitus and agency
to master or be mastered
From Sally Banes’ Gulliver’s Hamburger: Defamiliarization and the Ordinary in the 1960s Avant- Garde”
“…it seems obvious that ordinary movement would have no allure
Allure was embedded in the mirrored technique classes, the accepted glamour of the dance world of the times. Ordinary movement was barely noticed activity embedded in one’s environment (here reference to the mystical, the parable about fish being unconscious of water.)
It is the job of dance students to bring the unconscious movement of their bodies into the realm of consciousness; to form not only the movements of their bodies but the source of the movements (in the mind) into an array useful for patterning in the customary choreographies of their culture.”
On Gaga:
“Gaga challenges multi layer tasks. It is fundamental for gaga users to be available for this challenge. At once we, the users, can be involved in moving slowly through space while a quick action in our body is in progress. Those dynamics of movement are only a portion of what else might go on at the same time.
We are letting our mind observe and analyze many things at once, we are aware of the connection between effort and pleasure, we connect to the “sense of plenty of time”, especially when we move fast, we are aware of the distance between our body parts, we are aware of the friction between flesh and bones, we sense the weight of our body parts, we are aware of where we hold unnecessary tension, we let go only to bring life and efficient movement to where we let go…
We are listening, seeing, measuring, playing with the texture of our flesh, we might be silly, decorating our inside, we can laugh at ourselves.
We learn to love our sweat, we discover our passion to move and connect it to effort, we discover both the animal in us and the power of our imagination. We learn to appreciate understatement and exaggeration, we discover the difference between joy and pleasure and use both to protect ourselves from injuring and hurting our body, we learn to apply our force in an efficient way and we learn to use “other” forces…
We become more delicate and we recognize the importance of the flow of energy and information through our body in all directions!
We discover the advantage of soft flesh and sensitive hands, we learn to connect to groove even when there is no music.
We become more aware of people in the room and we realize that we are not in the center of it all. We never look at ourselves in a mirror, there are no mirrors. We become better aware of our form. We connect to the sense of the endless of possibilities.
We explore multi dimensional movement, we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are ready to snap, we are aware of what we are made of, we are aware of our explosive power and some times we use it.
We change our movement habits by finding new ones, we can be calm and alert at once.
We become available…”
From Jonathan Burrows:
The aesthetic agenda held within our bodies from a lifetime of training create perimeters that both enable and limit our ability to imagine what might also be possible...how might we hold onto these physical blessings, whilst liberating ourselves from the boundaries they sometimes set to our imagination…
The audience enjoys skill, but anybody doing what they want to do, and doing it well, appears skillful.
The way you move affects the way you think about movement.
Technique is whatever you need to do, to do what you need to do.
When you first learn a new pattern your brain looks for similar existing patterns to copy. The material that looked fresh the first day has become oddly familiar the next, its freshness inhabited by the ghost of old movement. This is very clever, but sometimes frustrating.
Every act of dancing is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking.
Movement is a hard thing to get a hold of. No movement can be repeated exactly, and the sense of what were doing is constantly altered by our shifting perception…maybe not being able to get a hold is a useful quality?
Movement disappears because we’re so good at making it more efficient. You see something and it looks extraordinary, and then you see it a few days later and it’s exactly the same, but suddenly looks quite ordinary. The body of the dancer has mastered it, and its original extraordinariness – which came from the impossibility –has been replaced by an ordinariness of ease.
Speaking about Forsythe: From Erin Manning
In movement alone, in its own order, uncontrasted with language, any point is already overfull. The overfullness of movement with itself, on its own plane, Forsythe says, must be felt for movement to be made.
The move is less a point than a vectorial gestural nexus: a differential, dynamic knot of potential variations on itself. A milieu of movement potential synthetically including an infinity of disjunctions.
The dancers are instructed to “take the movement as far as it will go” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). But if you are attentive to where it is going, you feel it move in more than one direction.
From Manning’s’ Thought in the Act:
The question of dance is: “What is it about a position that made it motion?” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Answer: the dynamic knot. The differential gestural nexus. Feel the spray, field the nexus, form the movement out of the feeling. Keep in touch with the forming motion, “chain the sensations rather than the positions” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Giving up your position and getting in touch with the forming feeling of the motion triggers what Forsythe calls an “activation”: the field throws a curve amid a spray (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Movement’s order is an ordering of formative feeling activation. Making movement concerns this fielding, from the middle, in the gestural milieu, more fundamentally than any notion of form in the completed sense.
This answer to the question “what is it about a positions that makes it a motion?” raises another question. What do we see of what makes a motion? What is predominantly seen is indeed a line of movement: the arm describes a curve. But this visible form of the movement is only a certain salience of the field of motion. It is but the striking, to the eye, of a dominant vector. Form is a simplification of the field occurring between registers, flashing up from their difference to each other. The visible form of a gesture is a distancing of movement from itself. A movement seen is a visual effect of movement’s envelopment in a larger differential field of different orders, different registers of experience, different keys of life, rhythmically rolled into the moment, in their difference from each other.
Movement in itself, as itself, can only be felt. The task of the dancer on performance night is to make visible what can only be felt. To make visible what can only be felt is not the same as performing a move. It is not to imitate or reproduce a movement form. “Things happen, but are not performed,” Forsythe warns his dancers.
You don’t want to perform your work. Do it without portraying” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). You do it without displaying. You don’t perform it in that sense. You just, like, enter into the sensation. Field the point, chain the sensations, and the audience also will feel the movement’s making, in the flash-form of its visual effect. They will eye your differential gestural nexus at a distance. The activation of your point-field will activate the optical spray of their field of vision (what James Gibson calls the optical array; 1986). Dynamically, the visual activation will be analogous in its dynamic contours to the movement spray.
Practice and technique: The escape of practice from technique only seems like freedom if we treat technique as a constraint. But technique, as we have seen, is more than habitus or performativity. It structures all levels of practice, from the conscious to the unconscious, and is completely interwoven with agency throughout. There is no way to escape technique, nor any reason to search for such an escape. Rather than attempting to distinguish between practices based on the extent to which they are technical, we would do better to ask what kinds of technique structure a given practice and how different practices may be similar or different at the level of technique. By the same token, rather than searching for a practice that transcends technique, we should search for the pathways and areas of technical exploration that are most necessary to our lives and communities.
While I have argued that technique is transmittable and repeatable, performance theory has for some time now tended to emphasize the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the live event. What McKenzie has criticized, as the ‘liminal norm’ in performance studies (1998) is an example of the trope of excess: It romanticizes and reifies the allegedly excessive qualities of embodied practice, ignoring the extent to which such practice is structured by repeatable technique.
conscious and unconscious
habitus and agency
to master or be mastered
From Sally Banes’ Gulliver’s Hamburger: Defamiliarization and the Ordinary in the 1960s Avant- Garde”
“…it seems obvious that ordinary movement would have no allure
Allure was embedded in the mirrored technique classes, the accepted glamour of the dance world of the times. Ordinary movement was barely noticed activity embedded in one’s environment (here reference to the mystical, the parable about fish being unconscious of water.)
It is the job of dance students to bring the unconscious movement of their bodies into the realm of consciousness; to form not only the movements of their bodies but the source of the movements (in the mind) into an array useful for patterning in the customary choreographies of their culture.”
On Gaga:
“Gaga challenges multi layer tasks. It is fundamental for gaga users to be available for this challenge. At once we, the users, can be involved in moving slowly through space while a quick action in our body is in progress. Those dynamics of movement are only a portion of what else might go on at the same time.
We are letting our mind observe and analyze many things at once, we are aware of the connection between effort and pleasure, we connect to the “sense of plenty of time”, especially when we move fast, we are aware of the distance between our body parts, we are aware of the friction between flesh and bones, we sense the weight of our body parts, we are aware of where we hold unnecessary tension, we let go only to bring life and efficient movement to where we let go…
We are listening, seeing, measuring, playing with the texture of our flesh, we might be silly, decorating our inside, we can laugh at ourselves.
We learn to love our sweat, we discover our passion to move and connect it to effort, we discover both the animal in us and the power of our imagination. We learn to appreciate understatement and exaggeration, we discover the difference between joy and pleasure and use both to protect ourselves from injuring and hurting our body, we learn to apply our force in an efficient way and we learn to use “other” forces…
We become more delicate and we recognize the importance of the flow of energy and information through our body in all directions!
We discover the advantage of soft flesh and sensitive hands, we learn to connect to groove even when there is no music.
We become more aware of people in the room and we realize that we are not in the center of it all. We never look at ourselves in a mirror, there are no mirrors. We become better aware of our form. We connect to the sense of the endless of possibilities.
We explore multi dimensional movement, we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are ready to snap, we are aware of what we are made of, we are aware of our explosive power and some times we use it.
We change our movement habits by finding new ones, we can be calm and alert at once.
We become available…”
From Jonathan Burrows:
The aesthetic agenda held within our bodies from a lifetime of training create perimeters that both enable and limit our ability to imagine what might also be possible...how might we hold onto these physical blessings, whilst liberating ourselves from the boundaries they sometimes set to our imagination…
The audience enjoys skill, but anybody doing what they want to do, and doing it well, appears skillful.
The way you move affects the way you think about movement.
Technique is whatever you need to do, to do what you need to do.
When you first learn a new pattern your brain looks for similar existing patterns to copy. The material that looked fresh the first day has become oddly familiar the next, its freshness inhabited by the ghost of old movement. This is very clever, but sometimes frustrating.
Every act of dancing is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking.
Movement is a hard thing to get a hold of. No movement can be repeated exactly, and the sense of what were doing is constantly altered by our shifting perception…maybe not being able to get a hold is a useful quality?
Movement disappears because we’re so good at making it more efficient. You see something and it looks extraordinary, and then you see it a few days later and it’s exactly the same, but suddenly looks quite ordinary. The body of the dancer has mastered it, and its original extraordinariness – which came from the impossibility –has been replaced by an ordinariness of ease.
Speaking about Forsythe: From Erin Manning
In movement alone, in its own order, uncontrasted with language, any point is already overfull. The overfullness of movement with itself, on its own plane, Forsythe says, must be felt for movement to be made.
The move is less a point than a vectorial gestural nexus: a differential, dynamic knot of potential variations on itself. A milieu of movement potential synthetically including an infinity of disjunctions.
The dancers are instructed to “take the movement as far as it will go” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). But if you are attentive to where it is going, you feel it move in more than one direction.
From Manning’s’ Thought in the Act:
The question of dance is: “What is it about a position that made it motion?” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Answer: the dynamic knot. The differential gestural nexus. Feel the spray, field the nexus, form the movement out of the feeling. Keep in touch with the forming motion, “chain the sensations rather than the positions” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Giving up your position and getting in touch with the forming feeling of the motion triggers what Forsythe calls an “activation”: the field throws a curve amid a spray (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Movement’s order is an ordering of formative feeling activation. Making movement concerns this fielding, from the middle, in the gestural milieu, more fundamentally than any notion of form in the completed sense.
This answer to the question “what is it about a positions that makes it a motion?” raises another question. What do we see of what makes a motion? What is predominantly seen is indeed a line of movement: the arm describes a curve. But this visible form of the movement is only a certain salience of the field of motion. It is but the striking, to the eye, of a dominant vector. Form is a simplification of the field occurring between registers, flashing up from their difference to each other. The visible form of a gesture is a distancing of movement from itself. A movement seen is a visual effect of movement’s envelopment in a larger differential field of different orders, different registers of experience, different keys of life, rhythmically rolled into the moment, in their difference from each other.
Movement in itself, as itself, can only be felt. The task of the dancer on performance night is to make visible what can only be felt. To make visible what can only be felt is not the same as performing a move. It is not to imitate or reproduce a movement form. “Things happen, but are not performed,” Forsythe warns his dancers.
You don’t want to perform your work. Do it without portraying” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). You do it without displaying. You don’t perform it in that sense. You just, like, enter into the sensation. Field the point, chain the sensations, and the audience also will feel the movement’s making, in the flash-form of its visual effect. They will eye your differential gestural nexus at a distance. The activation of your point-field will activate the optical spray of their field of vision (what James Gibson calls the optical array; 1986). Dynamically, the visual activation will be analogous in its dynamic contours to the movement spray.
Welcome to mapping collaboration, a toolbox for workshopping and creating across disciplines...
In spite of a long history of interdisciplinary creation, from our earliest recorded arts to our present moment, artistic pedagogy has created divisions between disciplines. This has left artists in a "post-Babel" condition where we don't share the same language and definitions. It’s also encouraged artists to develop practices for devising, creating and composing work that are distinct to their disciplines.
In spite of a long history of interdisciplinary creation, from our earliest recorded arts to our present moment, artistic pedagogy has created divisions between disciplines. This has left artists in a "post-Babel" condition where we don't share the same language and definitions. It’s also encouraged artists to develop practices for devising, creating and composing work that are distinct to their disciplines.
The inspiration for this project came from faculty and students at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts where BFA, MFA and PhD programs in Dance, Theatre Production and Design, Visual Art, Film, and Music and Sound all work together in studio settings and playfully experiment with processes of art-making.
We wanted to create a database of projects, assignments and theory that we collect inside the studio and from research happening in other places. We are curious about how we collaborate and how structures reoccur, translate and deviate from one discipline to another.
Composition is central to these processes and offers a base for our approaches and experiments. We are excited about what our students are doing and inspired by the new languages in contemporary art and performance we continue to see develop.
︎︎︎select a category above to build assignments, learn more about how artists process ideas across disciplines and to create a collaborative process of your own
︎︎︎these tools are collected and used in workshops and classes; some are resources from artists; some are quotes about art-making and how bodies think and listen; others are ideas to expand and disrupt your own training and processes.
︎︎︎Each idea is intentially short- and not meant to be executed as written, but to be adapted to your own practice and specific project/context. Some may be taken in parts or combined with others to spark new ways of training and making together.
︎︎︎submit your own ideas and tools so we can keep building this site!
︎︎︎select a category above to build assignments, learn more about how artists process ideas across disciplines and to create a collaborative process of your own
︎︎︎these tools are collected and used in workshops and classes; some are resources from artists; some are quotes about art-making and how bodies think and listen; others are ideas to expand and disrupt your own training and processes.
︎︎︎Each idea is intentially short- and not meant to be executed as written, but to be adapted to your own practice and specific project/context. Some may be taken in parts or combined with others to spark new ways of training and making together.
︎︎︎submit your own ideas and tools so we can keep building this site!
