The dancing body

I guess what interested me about this project, and what excites me about dance in general, is the new kinds relationships between movement, perception, sensation and space that dance as a practice can engender.

I've always been interested in Arakawa and Gins' project - architecture against death/ reversible destiny/ we have decided not to die - which examines the way in which 'procedual architecture can help people achieve a reversible destiny' examining the 're-linking of the body and the world to one another' (Araakawa and Gins, 2002: xiii). Here architecture, rather than viewed as a passive stracture, 'actively participates in life and death matters' because it can affect the way the body moves through and come to know space (Arakawa and Gins, 2002: xi). But what is key about this is that it recognises that the body is in movement, the body can move in different ways, and different sorts of movement gives rise to different perceptual, sensing, even I guess you could say, philosphical kinds of affects.

I was also recently reading about the sense lab the other day: http://thesenselab.com/aboutthesenselab.htm which focuses on sensing bodies in movement, exploring the relationship between the sensing body and philosophy. The statement on their website reads:

'Because this relation between sensing and knowing takes place chiefly in our bodies, and because to “know” via the senses involves a movement toward that knowledge (we move to touch the object we see, for example), theorizations of the body in movement are required. Through a rigorous engagement with the moving body (the dancing body, the body in art, the body in relation to technology), The Sense Lab proposes to re-think the inter-relation of movement, sense and the senses in art practice and philosophy.'

I find dance an interesting discipline because it has such a strong relationship with movement, sensation, affect etc. This is exciting because it could be argued that moving (and thus perceiving and sensing) differently allows us to know and conceive of knowledge in new ways.

I feel like I need to go back to that excitement that I initially felt toward the concept of movement, because I think that this could not only create new kinds of potential for the dance and the film/ media to communicate, but it might also create some interesting kinds of potential that the conceptual focus of the work can explore.

Cheryl and I talked for a while about the notion of reconfiguring. I think the term twisting has also been used.

reconfigure: verb, to change the shape or formation of, remodel, restructure.

twist to combine, as two or more strands or threads, by winding together; intertwine.

Twist is a bit of a difficult one to pin down, because it feels so arbitrary, and can be conceived in a whole range of ways.

There are other words I'm thinking of too: a kind of notion of dance/ movement/ film/ culture that somehow (or is somehow) dissolved/ decayed or - perishes, but that is then reconfigured, or actualised, or moved in a new way. So twisting is almost the wrong kind of vocabulary (well in the defition above anyway, but of course there are other definitions that I didn't include) because it implies that you have some kind of pre-defined materiality - ie the thread, that can be pulled together, but there is nothing outside of the thread that you start with. But I do like the idea of being open to the unknown quantity, the potential that is created through the movement/ dance, or dialogue between that process and the other aspects of the work (film, sound, etc) that is uncertain until you find it So perhaps reconfiguring isn't quite right either - Arakawa and Gins make a differentiation between reconfiguring and constructing, and perhaps what I'm trying to say here is that the reconfiguration turns into a kind new sort of construction at some point in the process (a little difficult sometimes in the context of this project! - but a way of working, that when it can be realised can open a pathway for critical and I think experimental work).

But going back to the things I was talking about early on in this post, I think what is interesting about the notion of dance and movment is not just how this type of traditional dance might be affected by the... perhaps force, or new connections offered by its engagement with processes that have historically been foreign to it (ie contemporary music, film, different sorts of costuming or even a different way of dancing) but how the result of that affect actually might have an impact on concept - ie what are we actually learning from the way in which the dance is changed by this kind of engagement (and even how the other mediums are changed by their connection with the dance) and is there something in the new kinds of movements and connections that arise, that can allow us to make a different kind of statement about ideas of culture, diaspora etc (can the movements enacted in the actual work allow new kinds of theoretical engagments allow us to know in new ways)