dancing as a way of knowing, and other things

For you as the reader when you hear the word dance I want you to imagine a being-with. It is practiced movement that involves the everyday. This involvement takes place as observation, participation and / or performance. 

I believe in a blurry line of art practice and everyday living. The process and action of art making exists moment-to-moment and is influenced by how / where I am physically positioned. These events exist through sensing and doing. In this view: dance is a relational practice between body and other where, I argue, my body performs as a reading tool.

A “tool” here is an access-point or in some cases a prosthesis—an extension—to gain understanding and phenomenologically reflect with intention and guidance. An “other” here is not to bare otherness or oddity to a dance partner, but to broaden the possibilities of who / what one can dance-with.

In my studies here I am using dance to deepen my relationship to perception. American philosopher and writer Alva Noë so brilliantly speaks to perception and sensory movement skills saying, “[d]ance is, if you like, an enactment or a modeling of this fundamental fact about our relation to the world around us.” [1] Dance in this case encompasses performativity beyond just human, and welcomes choreographic principles to nature, object, place, and atmosphere to name a few. 

This relational enactment is especially interesting when you consider performance and choreography being witnessed by an audience—invited or uninvited. But more on that later. 

This year has brought me to really observe where dance lives in the everyday. This reflection has realized my walking practice. The practice opens my senses—beyond the visual—and allows for the potential of a reciprocal spatial understanding.

Rebecca Solnit speaks to walking, its history, and its methodology in her book Wanderlust. She speaks “[t]o walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.” [2]

The word reading surfaces. 

The word landscape surfaces.

The word memory surfaces.

For me, I feel this expansion when moving-through places and this potential for pasts, presents and futures to arrive just with this simple constant act of falling forward.