Coming together for the third time, now at Performance Space, we have begun to develop small experiments around the conversation between somatic bodywork and the crafting of body-centred technologically mediated or augmented audience experiences. Seeking moments of transformation of the ordinary. It’s not as easy as you might expect. The idea that I had originally conceived was slowly dissected and reformulated as we began to test materials and insert the body. The body as always is the ultimate test. My doctoral thesis had this tenet at its core. Yet I was still surprised at how radically the body (the experience of individual bodies) can affect conceptual understandings or imaginings.

Materialisation of concept for Surging Verticality

Video of Catherine having her movement initiated and supported by the tensioned cloth attached to her heels, after being guided by Maggie through a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement of lifting her heels and arms.

surging-verticality-catherine-001

In thinking through what I may be offering at the PSpace residency, I made a rough sketch of the elements to consider in designing the aesthetic experience.

• Contextual activity, tasks, trajectory
• Constraints, strategies
• Attention – internal/external, diffuse/directed
• Action – imagination/physical
• Roles – performer, witness, aide, co-performer

My initial proposal is to develop a work requiring the interaction of 2 people, connected and constrained in different ways. What is it like to move in a fettered fashion? For one participant, their movement is assisted and constrained by a walking frame and extremely high heels. Part of the ritual is having the shoes put on and removed by the witness/aide. Perhaps one person is blindfolded or masked at certain points. The witness/aide gently directs the participant to explore various states of being, through the reading of scripted cues. Cues are for directing attention and generating movement and experiential qualities, perhaps the use of imagery and artefact. Should biofeedback or motion sensors be incorporated? What would their role be? Amplification/extension/distortion?

Production requirements:

• high heeled shoes in a few sizes
• walking frame – OTS or custom
• motion sensors that can be attached to ankles and other body parts, eg. pelvis, head

This morning we had an unusually early start, rising with the sun and heading over to Bundanon to resume Jonathan’s workshop. I started off where I had left, walking up the Amphitheatre Track. I passed by the tall spindly tree but it didn’t call to me like the other day. I kept walking up the steep track towards the peeling bark tree, hoping for a rekindling of the sensorial effects of the previous day. I slowed in my tracks to watch a few birds hopping about in the bush. It was quieter today, the insect din not so loud, a few bird calls, the occasional rustle of a larger animal. I started to think about the noise I was introducing into this scene. I walked up the slope as quietly as I could, very carefully placing my feet on the ground, taking note of what was below – crisp leaf, crackling bark, rubble, stone, sand. I was forced to slow down my movements, becoming highly aware of the shift of weight from leg to leg, the articulation of the joints in my feet, the shifting tensions in my muscles, where I placed my arms. My aim was to minimise my intrusion on this landscape, all the while listening to what the bush was singing. This was a possible ‘intervention’ for others to enact.

My reverie was interrupted by a pestering horse fly. It circled me tyrannically. I pelted down the slope back out onto the open pasture. And still it followed me. I walked back past the fence until I neared the garden of the house. I stopped and noticed a large stick that had caught my attention the other day. I picked it up, thinking I needed something to defend myself from the giant flies and other potential dangers lurking in the bush. I proceeded to practice spearing fallen leaves, in preparation for the flies. I took care to involve my whole body in the action, recalling the problem with girls throwing balls of only using their arm.

Broken tip with speared leaves (substitute for flies)

I confess I got bored with the bush. I headed to the river for a swim. The river was perfection. A large still body of water, encompassed by bush and a thin strip of sandy beach. Translucent and warm, an invitation to submerge oneself. I entered slowly, walking straight ahead into the water as the sand slowly dropped away below my feet, the water creeping up my skin in a soothing caress. As the water reached my chest, I felt my breathing become more laboured, the compression of the water. I wanted to keep walking in until my head was under, but as soon as my feet lost the bottom, I destabilised, feeling the contradictory thrusts of gravity and buoyancy.

It was so peaceful in the water, my body felt young and lissome. Little fish cavorted around my ankles, one brave enough to take a nibble. I tried to catch them with my hand. I created structures with my body for them to swim in and around.

PALM TO PALM

A seemingly simple exercise in pairs. Sitting opposite each other within arm’s reach, pressing palm to palm. Maggie’s only instruction. We wait …

A listening … tremulous vibrations in Jonathan’s fingertips … tiny shifts back and forth.

Maggie talked about the language of constraints

…

THE BRAIN

We develop habitual paths for action/cognition in our brain. Yet alternative paths are possible, lying dormant. The habitual path is the path of least resistance. To develop new paths or ways of being, we may need to block the habitual paths. Closing off one of the senses, like being blindfolded, assists this process.

attention assists learning

newborn infants have a high and constant supply of nucleus basalis. It is thought to facilitate learning – I need to read up on this, as I didn’t catch all of Maggie’s explanation.

The function of nucleus basalis in the brain

Maggie asked us to draw our brain. Then draw the functions of our own brain that were strongly or weakly developed.

My idea of my brain as a distributed entity, with dark swamps of creative ferment

An opportunity to play with a range of sensor-based prototypes/tools and costume. The session was structured so that each person had 3 minutes to try out a prototype, followed by a quick group discussion.

Somaya offered “Idio”, an apparatus that generates sound in response to accelerometer data provided by two accelerometers, one strapped to each wrist. My impulse was to play with the relationship of the accelerometers on my wrists, to see what effect this had on the sounds generated. It reminded me of an approach to generating movement imparted by my dance teacher, Annetta Luce that had a particularly powerful effect on my own dancing. That is, by relating one part of the body to another, be it elbow to ankle, head to coccyx, or heart to ovaries. The positioning of the sensors on the body can facilitate this.

George had patched together a simple, yet mesmerising sound generator that took accelerometer data from a Wii remote handheld. His motivation was to encourage slow movements. The sounds generated were tinkling bells +. I decided to draw on my Butoh Bodyweather training in bizeku, where you move as slowly as possible. In doing this, I listened to the sounds produced – delicate and meditative – , but did not attempt to influence the nature of the sound through my actions. The delicacy and fragmented phrasing of the sound made me wonder about a group of performers composing a soundscape through the intermingling of their individual effects.

Jonathan had rigged up an array of liquid crystal panels that changed their opacity in response to data from a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor used ultrasound, with the distance calculated from the delay in the reflected wave. In playing with it, I tried approaching from different angles, at different speeds, to see where the envelope of sensing ended and its sensitivity to change in position.

My offering was costume, with a view to body augmentation, wearables and organic? environments. I had draped a skin-coloured stretchy fabric over a beam and stitched the ends together. This created a membrane or cocoon for people to inhabit and play with. The costume consisted of a plain skin-coloured bodysuit that could be stuffed with a variety of padded shapes filled with dacron soft-fill and/or popcorn. The popcorn gave a nice weightiness and texture to the pads. I was interested to see how people would react, explore, experience. And later to imagine the connections between the use of costume and the sensor technologies …

For many, the putting on of the garments was a performance in itself … and very funny.

George escaping the cocoon

Lizzie's big bust

Catherine's corrugated legs

Jonathan testing the limits

Maggie crawling to the cocoon

Working with clay – what a treat! I absolutely loved it. I felt like Auguste Rodin, shaping human form out of a lump of clay, so malleable, yet requiring physical force, an engagement of the whole body not just the hands. Imagining the flesh, the volume, the density, the boniness, the receptivity to touch.

In the first session Catherine asked us to sculpt a body out of clay. In the second session we sculpted our own body while blindfolded. The body was to assume a posture or gesture familiar to us. In between these two sessions, Catherine lead us on a Feldenkrais exercise working with tilting the pelvis, articulating the spine and rotating the entire arm from the shoulder. At the beginning of the exercise, she asked us to register where the act of sculpting still resonated in the body. For me, I felt a glow in my abdomen, lower arms and hands.

My first body sculpted out of clay

The first clay sculpture had an almost chicken-like lower half, swollen abdomen, drumstick thighs. The chest was like heavily whipped water, almost ravaged. I wanted to show the intensity of emotion experienced in this part of the body. The clay allowed a easy translation of the dynamic, emotive qualities of human experience.

My body in clay ... sitting cross-legged

I felt a freedom being blindfolded, not caring so much about getting the visual form “right”. The pleasure in the body moving and making, feeling and stroking the clay, came to the foreground. I sculpted standing up, feeling the force of the earth under my feet feeding through my body and hands into the clay. I took heed of Catherine’s reminders about taking care of my body in the act of making … where was I holding tension, where did it hurt … shifting to a new position.

I notice my sculptures were both incomplete forms, offering suggestions, ambiguity in interpretation.

EXPERIENTIAL ANATOMY

In the act of drawing my own body outline and skeleton, i found myself ocscillating between drawing from the felt sense (how my imagination traced the edge of the body, the weightiness of bones and flesh pressing into the floor) and drawing on known anatomical models and ways of depicting bones. My sketchy knowledge of anatomy, the exact shape of bones, was challenged in this exercise. But then, that wasn’t what the exercise was about.

modes of representation, how to draw a bone, limited/limiting resources/skill, falling back on known ways, not really attending to the felt sense of my body

body image – constructed, imagined, lived, distorted

For Merleau-Ponty, the body image is dynamically constructed according to the value of the task.

I had difficulty gauging and translating the actual length or dimensions of my neck (i live with a long neck) into a visual representation, drawn on paper. I drew my neck longer than it actually was, despite using my hand to measure its dimensions. When drawing my body and checking visually what a certain part of the body looked like, I got mixed up between what it looked like in a prone position and what it looked like in a standing position, as the fall and twist of the limbs is different in each. At some point, Catherine made the statement, “what are you trying to do”. I then realised that I was attempting to achieve an accurate visual rendering from the outside, rather than a rendering from the felt internal sense of the body. In response, I began to vary the quality of the linework to suggest the quality of the felt sense of the limbs and bones, in particular, the heaviness or lightness, the torsion.

the felt contour of the body, focus of sensation, wavering line of coincidence, staying with, dropping out

Drawing from felt sense ... or not

THE SITUATED BODY

Wandering in the pastures and bush at Bundanon. Taking note of the effect of the environment on my bodily sensations and in turn, whether the attendance to the felt experience influences or changes my perception of the external environment.

A tall, spindly tree holds my attention. Its surging verticality commands an uplift in my own posture, a rising and thinning, a thin energetic line upwards. The surrounding trees conspire in this uprightness.

A surging sense of verticality

Further along the track, the peeling orange bark like a contagious skin disease rivets me to the spot. I stay a while, watching, listening. The sound of a leaf falling on the dry ground startles me. I feel a grabbing in my chest, the space above my diaphragm spasming. Another leaf or branch drops. I tune in to the staccato cascade of sounds, twitching and turning towards each sound. On the alert, ready to gather and move … my own small drama in the bush.

I stay with this listening. My own foot steps sound clomping and insensitive, out of place in the delicate warble of the bush. The steep slope invites a small musical phrase of footwork. Dry leaves rustle and crunch under my dancing feet.

Danielle Wilde has devised this simple, yet fabulous wearable interface, the hipDisk. I met Danielle at OZCHI2008 in Cairns. The hipDisk consists of two disks that you wear above and below your waist. An array of soft switches is positioned on the perimeter of each disk. A sound is generated when two switches touch. The disks exaggerate and make visible the changing relationships between the torso and the hip in motion. Cap it off with an Esther Williams-style bathers and swimming cap, multiply the number of performers, and you get this wacky musical ensemble playing The Girl from Ipanema.

http://www.daniellewilde.com/iWeb/daniellewilde/hipdisk.html

One thing that resonates from this first workshop is the refreshing openness and intimacy of everyone here. An openness to listen, a willingness to share. The focus on the body perhaps supports this.

One thing that I desire is to make things in the weave and wash of stirring, inspiring conversations. To shift from a focus on the development of design methods and tools, to the application of these methods and tools, together with the methods and skills of others in the project, in the production of an actual interactive work. Or should I say, experimental prototypes! Or perhaps new ways of working to produce such things. I do desire that new spaces are created that draw out and seduce us into more playful, curious and novel ways of moving … that bring an aliveness to our everyday existence.

One thing that I can offer to the group is the ability to mediate between the danced, the felt and the designed. This is an ability that I am still in the process of cultivating. In my design research practice, I am interested in ways of traversing between the felt, experience (particularly of movement) and ways of representing movement that can act as resources for design. Some of the methods and tools I work with include movement-oriented personas and scenarios, Laban floor plans for representing spatial trajectories of people, scenario enactment and movement improvisation scores for prototype and user testing. I am especially interested in the creative potential of the moving body and how we can generate design ideas and concepts from the experiential, moving body. The notion of making strange with the moving body is one approach that demands we interrogate our assumptions about our bodies in movement through a range of movement-based techniques.

It is such a pleasure to be working from the body again. Paying attention to it, slowing down, extending my range of movement, moving into my potential, rejuvenating. How to incorporate such bodily practices into my everyday work, as well as everyday life?

The Feldenkrais work is very interesting … I found it to be a very structured, precise inquiry into the relationship between the mechanics and anatomy of the body and the felt, conscious sensation of the body at rest and in motion. The use of language is important … a care towards the choice of words and their evocations and assumptions about the body. There is a questioning. I am intrigued to learn more.

My workshop today on Laban movement analysis was an experiment. An experiment in teaching the Effort-Shape description and an experiment in applying the system of analysis to live bodies engaging with interactive artworks.

How to teach the Effort cube? Some of the basic Effort actions are easier to access firstly with arm gestures, e.g. Flick. Then we need ways of involving the whole body or initiating the movement from a different source … ?

Everyone was very receptive and had plenty to say on their experience of the Laban system. Some interesting points from the participants regarding learning the system were:

• it was easier to perform an imagined scenario from everyday life than generate movement from abstract concepts of weight, space, etc. (like dancers do)
• the mirroring exercise did result in the observers gaining a strong bodily understanding of the initiator’s movements, but perhaps only in form. The intent or context of the movement was not easy to grasp and without this, the embodiment of the movements seemed hollow to some.
• the mirroring exercise revealed one’s own habitual movement patterns in relation to the movements of the initiator.
• the continuous repetition of the action or movements allowed the gradual registering and recognition of a range of characteristics of the movement – different sensations and qualities emerged over time. Then one could begin to describe the characteristics of the movement in the process of moving. The attention to Effort-Shape revealed the complex dynamically changing inter-relationships between the Effort-Shape parameters.

The notating of Effort-Shape during observation of audience was challenging! A template was provided with the individual parameters across the top. Each person had to figure out how to record using the template and this resulted in a great variety of ways of transcribing. The notated movements were very fragmentary. Was there any value in notating as we did?