How do we see ourselves research?


We both agree that role of a practitioner-researcher might be multiple from the onset of the research process. The very ground for it in this research process is already a curious doubling, since we are going to focus on two complementary perspectives, one of a researcher/dancer and the other of a researcher/choreographer.
As we discussed it with Kenzo, it is most important for us to recognize the value of subjective knowledge obtained both through experiencing and observing the process, through transitory stages of stepping in and stepping out of it, complementing praxis with reflection.
This constant mix and interaction of the processes of involvement and reflexivity constitutes the 'tissue' of our work. It is grounded in inter-subjective dynamics and revolts around personal construction/re-construction.
On the Meta level though, the process needs structure in terms of planning and performing activity. After a good couple of brainstorming sessions, we are not able to foresee any single methodological tool to use in our explorations that already look too dense to tackle easily. We are more than certain then that through on-the-spot concocted exercises and practical employments of working ideas, we will resort to some sort of a hybrid working approach. This pluralistic approach means resorting to multi-method, experimental techniques, tuned to a particular daily hunches in the studio.
Improvisation is the key. we would like to keep the pattern of three improvised sessions a day.

carrying out transducing

We are working with a text. It is "INCIPIENT ACTION – THE DANCE OF THE NOT-YET" by Erin Manning. I am reading it while moving across the space, trying to stay as natural in movement (while reading aloud) as possible. I can be facing different directions, reading it to the space rather than to us.

For the sake of the exercise, understanding is less important. We are interested if the reading as an activity based on a particular text, here Erin Manning's, spurs any physical activity (in a form of a responsive effect) that might or might not win over the general habit of prioritizing comprehension of the text in a still concentrated posture over experiencing it through the active (here, motile) body.

Kenzo is lying down with his eyes closed…

Question: How did it feel during the session?

(Kenzo)
It brought more space and potent, mobilizing vibrations...

focus

Question: Can Kenzo compare his current frame of mind and type of involvement to the one from his previous research project:

(Kenzo)
He had to manage and guide, cause of the company of the dancers.
He was stepping outside and was rather seeing them, the dancers, do things.
The current research lets him concentrate on details. It also works for him on a different - slow, zoom in level… with some therapeutic effect on one side, yet with an expectation to work differently and be stimulated to achieve some powerful results as a performer. Again, he would like to forget the performance quality work and concentrate on the current, without being pushed. He wants to restore his basic motivations to dance (!)… to go back through the basic for the sake of further development.

back to basics


We are starting off with the first daily research session today.


I am watching Kenzo move while thinking and changing my viewing positions... Watching the space filled with a solo movement, I’m lying on the floor, trying to see a difference by experiencing a different viewing position... Lying is quite cool the whole verticality of dance gets spread out in a horizontal stretches between the floor and the ceiling. The floor and the ceiling are now the walls...


Question: What are Kenzo's expectations about the research as you think about it today at the very outset of it?

(Kenzo)
Kenzo would like to get back to simply enjoying movement - since he has been busy with choreographic work a lot lately; it overtook all his time for personal development as a dancer.
This starting off activity, an improvised warm up in the studio brought him back to his real self, to the origins of the dance he makes; it feels like coming home to him. The very enjoyment of the origins of his own movement that come from him as a dancer, and which precedes being a choreographer, is the very purpose here. He feels free from the need to be effective, or delivering a product.

Back to basics.

Kenzo feels it is very important for him to get back to the basics of his own movement, to look at his own work from the very basic level and with it, from the core again; without choreographing anything. It is relaxing and exploratory at the same time.

Being watched by me, makes a change to his dance exploration too.

He says that while he is moving he doesn’t want to frame it as a warm up at the same time… it makes the moment lose the ambition... he just becomes the person who is warming up, he loses his power...
He would like to sustain the fluidity of such activity in the studio, and keep up dancing at a spontaneous level...
He is describing that level… he mentions: relax and relief, joyfulness and revelation, positive stimulation...

He would like to keep the performative parts of the research fluid, with no framing of 'now we move', 'now we talk' schedule…

(...)

He likes a more organized agenda in the studio as well though..., so the natural combination of the two could be cool… The balance could depend on the state of being/feeling/mode that we have on the day itself.

Kenzo Kusuda’s choreographic style - subjective overview

(Text based on my recent participation in a rehearsal for Kenzo’s latest and currently toured piece “Honey Crypto”)

When working in rehearsals with dancers, kenzo looks and cares for their true and felt engagement in movement. The precision of the felt comes first; it precedes the performance, and gets incorporated in a true form. He is not looking for the suggested movement interpretation or its best copy but its frank realization.

The creation of the true (to the dancers themselves first, then shared with the audience) dance reality gets supported by techniques of visualization. Kenzo makes the dancers interact, imaginatively, with objects or make believe emotions, etc. to create a more powerful movement realization. Shared relationships and sensations are the base for sequential gestures.

Even the passionate phases of released, wild movement are preconfigured upon a relationship with the audience, they are not free-floating. The wild always seems to have its controlled end, be it in an established eye contact with the audience or the ways the space is being explored, creating a selection of close up or perspective relations. Those, both physical and visual relationships evolve during the course of the piece and round up viewing expectations.

Again, the invitation to the spatial, visual and felt relationship is much deeper than a give-and-take game, more involving than a performer – recipient interrelationship. The dancers are expected (by Kenzo) NOT to show the brilliance of the performance BUT to invite the audience to feel the brilliance of movement itself, as a phenomenon. The feeling, I mean here, is the sort that lets one lose him/herself in the motion. The dancers are not performing per se but inviting to their world of movement through the shared joy of action. It is that act and true feel for that enchanting thrill of action (in both adventure and quiver sense!), and its momentous spin, that shapes the atmosphere and that matters at all.

It is the invitation to shared ‘forgetting’ oneself in motion with little recollection of ‘what have just happened?’. Metaphorically speaking, what Kenzo proposes to experience is dancing on traces of memory, played out upon contrasted energies, and causing triggers strong enough to wake up the senses yet on the expense of losing oneself in the movement performance. It is a ride on a roller-coaster that combines heavy windy climbing with throws into the underground leaving us with sensations only.

When I watch Kenzo’s work I feel his dance is much less about formatted images, staged positions or choreographic stances, but more about embracing artificial splits and inventing vivid connections. He has an ability to unite opposites and to combine energetic potentiality with softness. He creates rich metaphorical and somewhat juxtapositional associations in my head when I watch his pieces, like those of a splashy soaked sponge or a drooling pinscher. So it just might be that the movement quality of what he presents and what I associate with ‘animal sliminess’ is what Kenzo calls ‘eloquence in dumbness’.

Infiltrating Presence (Realisms and virtualisms of meaningful events)


Dialogue between Dragon and Phoenix. If I were Dragon, it would be stimulating to be challenged and playing around with Phoenix. In this research " Infiltrating Presence ", I invite Nuska Peszke as my counter force who reflectively interact with me from both theoretical and practical point of view.
Actively contemplating on what level will it be capable, for a performer, of communicating what he/she supposes/intends that particular experience to be communicated to the witnessing bodies, and at the same time observing, wanting to know intently " What is actually being communicated ", and reaching into those gaps where the creativity of " that particular experience " is waiting there yet untouched.

What does the presence?

[Dragon] To me? To you? Or To all of us being present here in this particular space where this particular experience is taking place?

[Phoenix] Well, what particular experience are we talking about? Are we experiencing the same experience at all? How do you know that the two people sleeping together dream the same dream?

[Dragon] Which two people are you taliking about?

[Phoenix] Well, I don't know what I am talking about. Oh, I know, maybe one person is the performer and the other is the audience..!

[Dragon] Or, one could be your body and the other could be your intention..?!

[Phoenix] Or, or, one could be that what you do, and the other would be that what you think you are doing..??!


Nuska:
The starting point to our research is an interest in studying creative relations within a tenanted space.
*
Even a seemingly empty space is not static. It can speak, with or without our ability to listen. It is not stuck with how we encompass it with vision. Instead, it is constantly turning out to be what we make of it, in every second of the encounter.
Presence can be a simple feature with its on and off function, or an online or offline status. It is either there, or it isn't.
Yet, it can also be elusive if we extend our frame of focus, and begin to mind the in-between stages, and so created dynamics. If we extend the focus wide enough, there is no frame to what is present. What will be there instead will simply come too late to called 'the past', and too early to be called 'the future'. The state of becoming.

How do we understand the moment?
Where is it happening?
How to practice its metaphysics with the body?

If we concentrate on presence not in relation to the sensually confronted objects, but in relation to what processes are in the moment of happening, we will notice the subjectlessness of space. Through this state of discarded subjectivities we will also acquire new abilities to communicate with it and through it. It will become obvious that events and processes are constructed of forces, not agents. It is then not the combination of substances which appear true to our senses that construct the 'being and communicating with the space' but volatile (ever-changing) fluxes of energies. It is the fluctuating activities that constitute the moment, the space, and us - as phenomena, rather than substances.

Are we then able to strip down the space of its physical boundaries through interaction?

Understanding is the basic factor for creating (rich, positive and effective) relations, communication and interaction.
Meaningful communication presupposes meaningful Interaction.
Consequently, for the understanding with the space to happen we have to tune our bodies to it and allow contingency, change and novelty-emergence guide the process of communication. The present body is not there to respond (to the past) but also to pre-produce action (predicting/feeling for the future), something as if the body's dispositions were the matters of both: 'if-then' and 'so-if' situations.
In so doing, our bodies cannot be understood as stable entities, but as continuous manifestation of our engaged in the moment dispositions.

We cannot deny the substantiality of the body, but it is important to remember that it is dispositional properties that are epistemologically fundamental to our understanding of it, and these are to be revealed through manifestations. Without them nothing is detectable, connected or knowable. For without processes there is no access to dispositions, and without dispositions substances lie outside our cognitive reach. Things are what they do:) and we get to know and understand them only through their active and meaningful manifestations of themselves to ourselves.

Now, how are these processes dependent on kinds of location within a space?
And how would they continue to change how they communicate with one another if we allow for virtual presence?
What is the modus operandi of the real and present and what is that of the virtual and non-present? Is there a distinction at all? And how far can we localize our meaningful presence on a scale of virtuality continuum?