Personal Research - Notes
This essay aims to summarize my recent readings and further notations for my self-directed research.
As to better support my recent projects and deepen my knowledge on my interest towards choreography and performance; I found relevant to research on sense experience and how knowledge is achieved by the interrelation between brain - body - world. One of my references being Alva Noë, one of the theorists that inspired the EEC programme - Embodied Embedded Cognition.
Noë investigates the structures of experience and consciousness (what philosophers call phenomenology); Presenting experience as the "basis of accessibility", allowing humans into "achieving access to the environment".
In an interview with Marlon Barrios Solano, part of the Embodied Techne Series (2012), Noë discusses "Dance As A Way Of Knowing".
He explores the idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process. Motion as "sensory motor understanding is what brings the world into focus for consciousness."
Noë highlights the fact that motion relies on a "temporally extended involvement", which enhances sensorial perception and consequently produces sensorial change: "transformations that happens in you while you go across the process; what is that transformation? Is understanding, is seeing connections, is knowing your way around."
Dance as a way to enact experience, thinking in motion - "dance in a sense of performance is an enactment or modeling of this fundamental fact about the world around us, which we dynamically interact with.".
In dance, along with similar kinesthetic experiences, the human body reaches an intense sensorial perceptual experience, composed of information from many places in the body, finding the need to have an understanding of/ control over of sensory consequences of their own movement. It can be seen either as personal, depending on the case- collective, confrontation - creating great awareness.
Other comments on my readings:
On the book Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, and particularly a text by Jeroen Fabius - Con forts fleuve, politics of perception in the work of Boris Charmatz, a point on the relation between communication and perceiver, although in the theatre context, seems to relate the same way in overall modes of performance, including dance:
"In dealing with politics, theatre cannot compete with the directness or speed with the means of communication of mass society. But, at the same time what characterizes communication in contemporary society is the loss of the communicative. A spectator can no longer assess the value of what is presented; everything is reduced to information; the gap between experience of an event and perception of the event is so big, that there is no way to assess what really is determining one's experience. "
"Theatre can respond to this only with a politics of perception, which would at the same time be called an aesthetic of responsibility (r response-ability). Intead f the deceptively comforting reality of here and there, inside and outside, it can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception - Hans-Thies Lehmann"
Massumi also seems to have been a useful theoretical reference for the undergoing works and research :
"stop thinking in binarisms, but rather in terms of emerging , passing into, i.e. dynamic unities and unmediated heterogeneities, and to think of perception and thought as two poles of the same process ", by Brian Massumi - Parables of the Virtual, Movement, Affect, Sensation