June Aside
One of my teachers at Bennington College where I was getting my undergraduate degree in dance, Judith Dunn, gave us a really powerful assignment in our Dance Composition class. I learned a great deal from it, although perhaps differently than was intended initially by the assignment. The assignment was to find something like 7-10 candid photos, I no longer remember how many, of people engaged in their worlds (no set-up shots allowed) and then put these photos in an order, and make a phrase going from one moment to the next, drawing the pathways, finding the timing, and cultivating a physical sensibility to them.
I was every bit as fascinated by the performance of these physical moments, having only visual information about them, as I was by the compositional play that brought them together into contexts and dynamics. What I learned in paying attention to their performance was that each person was organizing their physical form, in order to know the world they were embedded in and the activity they were accomplishing – the throat open to the breeze, the eyes nearly closed but looking right, brow knitted, a chest collapsed so that the upper back and shoulders were exposed. I started to see the mind framed as body with attention alive in that embodiment. Somewhere in this duration, the attention, which I understood at the time (early 1970’s) as the mind acting in the body, became a fascination… and it remained that way through the formation of Contact Improvisation which I understood as body mind's organized toward their “need to know” dynamic motion in milli-seconds of physical surprise or potential. Physical readiness included the body’s surfaces expanding and collapsing, like breathing open their perceptual “need to know” each moment unfolding.
Many years later I read the (18th century) philosophical work of Spinoza, who used the Latin word “conatus” to frame how "Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being." I understand this as a moment-by-moment endeavor so that as I act I am outwardly and inwardly organizing to know this moment – and it is taken to an extreme in Contact Improvisation. I appreciate this as persistent bodily based seeking to thrive.
I look for this bodily inquiry of attention, when I watch people now. It leads me to understand their moments. Especially watching dancing, it becomes the sense-ability I love. Primed by curiosity, a “seeking dance” may travel within and beyond the flesh. It grazes on its experience by defining moments as they are found, not before they are found. It inquires of them. It is defined by a refusal to predetermine where or how each moment moves, even while immersed in its discovery, compelled and even propelled by its trajectory.
This dance is radically open, moved as much by wonder as by circumstances. Immensely responsive, it roots in improvisation. It luxuriates in the uncertainty that is countered by the vitalizing need to know where each moment leads. There is craft in this balance between seeking and making. Revealing and finding, wondering and discovering – all are words improvisers use to describe their process. Great dancing holds this improvisational “seeking” potential, whether tightly choreographed or not.
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter