Paea and I sat and read “Phenomenological Space” this morning/afternoon. An interview with Hubert Godard and Caryn McHose for Contact Quarterly (it would appear I have only read one thing since being here in Perth) – Summer/Fall 2006.
The idea was to read the material at the same time and then discuss/consider any resonances that resulted from our (mutual) introduction to Godard’s thinking.
What became clear, very quickly, to me was that I was going to have trouble pinning his thinking to any one aspect of my practice. I was stimulated creatively (in terms of considering corporeal and audience/performer spaces), personally (in terms of his ideas concerning expectations), as an improviser, and more broadly on issues related to a conceptual understanding of space.
It is tricky to know where to begin. What was significant?
My notes read as follows:
space – imaginary
topos – real (geometric or measured)
space is linked to our personal story.
notion of kinesphere – subjective space – a “gradient of perspective”.
one subjectivity meets many subjectivities, where subjectivity includes personal history & expectation, but also sociological context.
“My perception of space is organised through the habits of our sociology and by the geography.”
p.35: “The reason, for example, that dance contact is so important is because it’s a way to renegotiate: first, the distance to other people; then, the vectoralization of space; then, the many levels of perceiving.”
He describes his notion of the “non-cortical gaze” – a way of looking that is not about naming. “This non-cortical gaze allows you to have very easy body reading because you have the capacity to incorporate people in your subjective space; you are in the space, the space is in you.”
I began to think about the unsighted work we did last week – to try be more clear about what is being negotiated. I have a feeling that independent dancing is central to the work – and yet this independence is ‘touched’ by a concern for the other. The degree of proximity or severence between the unsighted and sighted participants allows a quite precise exploration of the (spatial) edges of the duet. For the sighted person there is (of course) a responsibility to keep the unsighted dancer safe, but at the same time to insert and tease a geography of assisting, resisting and (here’s another attempt at finding a suitable word) DISTORT (others might be: circumvent, mislead, hoax??) what is occuring. For the unsighted mover there is a tension between continuing the corporeal noticing of the sighted, whilst at the same time ‘testing’ the outline of the duetting space.
Godard’s clarification (or delineation) of space (imagined) and topos (real) might also help to clarify what is being practised in this unsighted work. Could it be the overlap between these real and imagined phenomena that is the line on which we are acting/moving?
Towards the end of our session, I asked Paea about what she experienced/considered as she read the material.
She talked of the “space within” her body – and of not hanging on to the way it (her body/moving) should be — “I don’t lose my thread but I stay open”. For her this thread was “of finding my rigour” [It is interesting to consider the notion of rigour as a noun] – “ways to be in movement that I don’t know about”
David arrived eating his lunch and we discussed the idea of “centre” in dance – and he mentioned that Martin Keogh described the body as being polycentric … of being capable of negotiating multiple (parallel?) centres whilst moving.
This idea sits with what was a dense period of thinking and reading. I feel like there are many many strands of Hubert Godard’s thinking (in this one article alone) that I’d like to reflect on, explore and integrate into my current practice.
Tomorrow.
