August Aside

Guest Writer, Leighann Kowalsky

This weekend I'm (Leighann) performing a CI duet with a practitioner (Auggie McGillicuddy) who has no previous dance performance experience. Auggie is a musician, so standing in front of an audience is not the new piece - the new piece is using his body as the tool to make physical, relational and attention- based art happen live, with another human, in front of other humans.

In rehearsal, we talked about the score, we talked about the underlying CI principles that we want to use to shape our movement - we even talked about how much (or how little) we want our compositional brains to inform our co-created choice-making. Then we talked about transparency.

In a training with Nita, she'll talk about transparency as a cultivated tool of "flesh that exists as mind". She's got pretty specific physical and conceptional cues to train this!

I've experienced her offer a "Three Single Actions" score to folks, where the idea is to get so SO clear on what the movement is. Gesture that is imbedded in function - a clarifying, if you will. In experiencing this, the act of identifying the physical doesn't "simplify" the attentional world surrounding the event - but rather distills - perhaps enunciates - it. It's still complicated! It isn't "simple"! But, I can express it with exactitude - no less or more than is needed.

This is true also, in "attentional actions" - not just an action I might use my upper arm to move through. When transparency in the dance draws us through the physical into relational and attentional actions, the performance quality* makes a massive shift (perhaps toward experiential opportunity). My mind (that is also always a body) is made visible to a viewer. In their relation to me as a performer, this transparency means they can be with me in a way that satisfies - soothes, even - their most basic human need to join. This is possible in other settings, of course, and eye-contact is not at all needed for the transmission!

When a Contact dancer, with all the impressive skills for falling and flying and "staying with" and on and on and on, can also get so totally transparent in their attention - the capacity for co-creation for the dance (or for life, as in the case of Assembly Contact in Portugal!) grows exponentially. But beyond that, beyond the dance, our ability to be with one another, to be as one another, shifts.

I think Nita feels excited about the way skills for this can expand beyond the performance, and beyond the dance (ensemble or otherwise), into life itself. A vulnerable thing, surely, but with skills for it, the act of becoming transparent is a tool you can pick up and put down when needed. In a world that is desperately out of relations, we both wonder what this can do for us.

*"Performance quality" of a dance with viewership - or not! Transparency can draw us through the physical into relational and attentional actions that cause the quality of the dance being done (for an audience or not) to make a massive shift. The satisfaction or soothing of being with, can be true between a duet with no outside viewership. It can be true with just a dance partner!

Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter