FACILITATORS

It was with great enthusiasm that a group of dancers and musicians gathered again to learn from two exponents of contact improvisation and dance research. They are Thalia Laric and Manuela Tessi. After two years of being in Amsterdam where they teach and study, they revisited SA to offer further training in this field.

My interest in their work is to be reminded of the ethics, the techniques of relationality and the physics of being in physical contact with another body. One cannot receive enough of this exposure as it feeds one's own senses of movement and human touch and all else it may bring about as a view on the complex yearnings of being human at this time.

AFFECTIVE AGENCY

My actual interest lies in an idiosyncratic extension of this work. The techniques of contact could bring a physical competency with other people's bodies, such as understanding weight, gravity, flow and how and when to exit from such a contact. However, such close proximity also awakens other facets of being, because people feel, sense, are stirred, perturbed. Yet once the contact is made the capacity to manage all these experiences comes as part of the deal, so to speak, as one's becoming. Start with the body, and all else feels home.

I am fortunate to have had experiences with Thalia and Manuela to reinforce the basics of movement with other bodies. This basis literally supports further technical developments to enrich the contact on a more affective level. Affect is the term generally used to acknowledge that we feel through our bodies, that it is not possible to coin that feeling in a word that would describe the experience with exactitude. Emotions are generally wordable feelings (anger, sadness, freedom etc) whereas the affective roams in the senses and feelings, indescribable as language. It is one thing to touch another body, and it is another thing altogether to allow this contact to reach into oneself so that affective responses are elicited, and to remain with this affect as the inspiration for the next movement engagement.

Of course, the affect that erupts with one person is completely different from another, and therefor experience with different bodies would be important to expand one's affective "bodying," the latter a term by Erin Manning. To mark movement as ever so much a complete human experience, more than only a physical one, is a perspective often uttered with difficulty and it requires a curiosity of one's whole experience to justify its existence, even if uttered in words.

BIOGRAPHY

Each person enters contact with others with your biography intact. Let's presume you come as a "parcel" to meet another "parcel" so to speak, each with a history and present experience that is about to reveal and unfold as a new narrative to all involved. This leads me to acknowledge the field of not only two persons but also the room, and other bodies, the consciousness roaming in that field, and of course, it does not end there, as we all know.

I wish to highlight two of these performances that I had the fortune to have had during the final days of the Music-Dance 2021 event. Both were with two very different performers. However, a theme emerged in the two performances that has an overlap. Having said this, I do want to make sure that it is understood that I consider each contact in real time with any individual as a distinctive event with very specific affective embodiment, narrative and outcome.

This is an ideal place within which one can study yourself and each other. And the availability of video or photographic material is a great help. Lindsey Apollis, our resident photographer was responsible for capturing moments that are worth studying. What do you learn? You see parts of yourself as far removed from selfies as you may get. And what is more, you discover affect in your thinkfeelmattering (another Manning term) that may grant you access to yourself in ways you may never have considered. In truth, you are expanding your movement vocabulary, and as such your biography.

As such, let me highlight that my perspective on my ageing process is a riveting one. Ageing changes one radically, and never is one day the same as the previous. Ageing is truly transformative. Its staggering pace leaves one barely able to note what has actually shifted. In fact, one could say that ageing is shape shifting without ceremony, ritual or mood alteration. For that reason, being on the floor and discovering one's being anew each day, is the real meaning of privilege. How I wish to be in the world has everything to do with how I age. And being on the floor with younger artists exponentially multiplies this perspective on myself.

PERFORMANCES

Two of the performances, in their execution, brought me these valuable experiences, namely to discover affective contents in myself that elicited narrative value about my life at this stage. And, of course, on stage.

With the included images from these performances, I will attempt to bring a perspective, a mere interpretation of what my narrative was with being with these two artists. Of course, their narrative would be radically different, and so it should be.

Performance ONE

The first performance was with Nico Athene. Our musicians were Garth Erasmus and Sumalgy Nuro, both highly competent for their improvisatory skills, sensing the moment of movement and bodying and supporting the unfolding narrative second by second.

As I studied this performance I was again heightened by the extremely transformative value and role to be played by the face. How does this work in improvisation?

While being taken by movement and sound, listening to what calls me, my dance formed around one quite specific focal point, namely that my face became animated through the movement. But that may not be the apt direction of this exploration. It may well be that what transpired, or what came as inspiration was, first, as face. So, it would be more correct in my experience to state that my bodying was inspired by what my face initiated. This is a specific discipline that performers may only experience in spaces where Butoh is being practiced.

This performance was a slow progression from two sides by Nico and myself with varying intensities and proximities. I was aware of this spatial demarcation while sensing what was happening in the room.

From here onwards a long period unfolded which could at best be described as primordial. I was not human in my way of being. It was a shape shifting scenario where I connected with the wrought effects and affects springing from my face. It moved into the widest of possible shapes. There was nothing to anything I had experienced before in facial work. My tongue twisted and curled and it felt particularly mollusc-like (although I aimed to veer away from comparative descriptions of human movement out of principle). Two distinct states emerged, the wrought tongue, guided and initiated by my lower lip, and a wide, open mouth with my head bent over backwards, often with tongue stuck out as far as possible.

These extreme states satisfied a specific desire, or affect, in the moment: the desire for extremity of being, beyond its cultural representation, more primordial and elemental. The response to my face was the extension of my hands and fingers in every possibly way. But the immense gratification of giving myself an extreme state of being had a world of its own, and, characteristic of space-time dimensions of experience, receding. The gratification as such was that I kept at the initiation by my lower lip, guided by it, while the affect could spread throughout the rest of my body, although it was limited as affect into my lower body.

By then Nico had progressed towards me, all mostly horizontal on the floor, with different intensities of focus and penetration of gaze. Suma excelled in unusual musical production while Garth sustained a repetitive mouth bow mantra. But the time Nico's feet reached me in the unusual way of facing the floor, and my hands could frame her feet, my dance was already well established within a genre of face-hands-other dancer's feet, as a cameo of elementality with the potential of complex dimensions. This ontology brought an unstable shivering in my whole body.

Nico turned to face me. Still shivering, I sensed that our contact closed up. In one move she lifted her hand and put it to the side of my head. Immediately it stilled the shivering. My tense body released and sank into the head support. Nico then adjusted her hand to lower my head in a most gradual and inevitable journey towards the floor when it could rest, as if a final place to be.

Performance TWO

The performance with Selah Joy was another narrative altogether. I call it a narrative as, when one studies the progression of the performance, there often seems to be a beginning, middle and end, the arc, as actors often say, to the progression. The musicians were Garth Erasmus on indigenous instruments and James McClure on trumpet.

The progression followed as one would generally notice at the cathartic exposition of any authentic movement, and therefor in a duet like this.

The fulcrum of this catharsis was when a finger on my left-hand hooked on the corner of my pants' pocket and could not progress. This tiny (co-)incident was the initiatory moment for my affect to gain grounds and I was flooded with a theme that roamed in my consciousness for the past two years.

It was my being with a young body, and the phenomenon of youth in the epoch of the Anthropocene of which the pandemic was the most current, that unleashed an affective performance. I was flooded by the feelings of sorrow at youth's condition, a sense of future uncertainty, the loss of self-confidence, the prohibition of contact, the threat of policy at spontaneous acts of youthfulness, the dangers of unemployment to the life force of a young person, and the body of youth, compared to mine (which has had the privilege of living youth so very differently, albeit with other concerns) none of which has had such a universal effect of uncertainty.

At this point Garth connected with the affect. He came close and played his haunting flute over my body, while my body was over that of Selah's. Through this cameo of the young body, mine over hers and the resonance of Garth's flute above it all I allowed the flooding of affect into a howl of sorrow. Selah, being the consistent factor here, held her position and only moved to embrace me gently. My finger got unhooked and I allowed the full extent of the effect of my image of the young body in my embrace, the full length of her body that I mustered to embrace, the universe of the young person. Then she uncurled and laid with her body open towards me. Then she moved in behind me and I felt the scenario was shifting into another dynamic. We opened our limbs while a core was between us. With her weight she held me in gravity, protectively. A thorough process was unfolding. She lifted me strongly in her arms and with secure stance to take my full weight. This position progressed until we were both standing. She was available and I felt her presence, still, and secure behind me until her arms lifted mine to lengthen out above my head. I gained balance and composure. Her hands moved over my head, over my crown and down my neck. This helped me to be totally independent of Selah, one arm raised. I moved away and witnessed her raising her arm in turn. My movement progressed to one of fully acknowledging her until we stood close together facing each other.

Selah is a dancer who established herself with a supremely powerful signature of dance in various settings. Dancing with an elderly person in this manner, allowing herself to be facilitated by affect from a fellow dancer and sensing confidently what the process of this catharsis demanded from moment to moment, is a genre that I deduct she could confidently add to her beautiful array of dance practice.

Writing myself through this performance, with the assistance of Apollis's images in itself is the healing of sorrows, and the confirmation of the confidence and strength youth has at this precarious time. I am a witness of it, and it fortifies me.

AGEING AS PERFORMANCE

Performing with these artists is a privileged journey to discover an ontological clarity, momentarily of handing myself over to younger people. The exquisite acts of surrender into anguish, derangement, sorrow, defeat in the presence of the next generation concluded in the manifestation to raise up. What better exploration and research could an elder expect in a shamanic and artistic milieu where the unknown is revealed in nothing but a surrender in the presence of artistic and psychological competency. It could not have been choreographed or composed. It could be revered for its innate wisdom of the old truth: the natural cycle will return, new strengths will reveal themselves when given the opportunity and courage will come from mysterious depths.

Photos by Lindsey Appolis