Dance Art Practice
Vision - Backspace Awareness
What’s behind?
Open up my whole sensations in the back space, listening to the whole space.
How do we build up sensations and perceptions?I started to explore some dance and movement-based books talking about sensations and perceptions. People share similar sense organs and receptors, but everyone’s perception is unique. Perception is the interpretation of sensation. How people sense depends on the current state of being, the awareness and alertness at a specific moment. The sense filters unnecessary information to interpret, otherwise people would become overwhelmed by loads of information to receive and interpret. There are many factors affecting how people interpret and perceive, including culture, language, family, previous experiences, habits, intention, attention, etc., and the neuroscience structure of the perceivers as well.
Most of our senses are in the head – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting. We also use these senses to orient ourselves in space. Since images and imagination are part of my motivation, vision, which is, seeing, plays a main role in this research and practice.
So how do I change the one micro element affecting how I sense, and affecting how I perceive, hence affecting how my body responds? I start from the simplest also the most difficult dance and movement – walking. The “direction” is the element I choose to experiment with at this stage.
Walk Backward ---> Sensations & Perceptions ---> Embodying: Body response
Listening around, the body and the air, the soundscape
Open up the back sense and the back space, what’s behind
Anatomy, how does my body reorganise the alignment
To the very present moment
With the uncertainty, I tend to walk more circular and less straight/square How does it change the way I walk, if there are many people in the space? How does one person alone in the space with many objects in the space?
What is walking backwards telling me (about perceiving)?
Based on the awareness I build up in the process of walking backwards, I open up the back space in movement. Try to carry this awareness, move forwards (back-front), move sideways (left-right), fall and rise (up-down), and twist. The first layer is back-front and left-right as on the same level, the second layer is up- down to create different level, and finally with twisting, more possibilities occur. For example, the curve appears, the arch in space happens.
It perceives as the body is opening up its awareness, hence expanding its space. More 3D, sphere, of the spacial body is created, and it can be carried as long as the body moves. The body is not flat anymore, it creates sphere and cube, which makes me thinks of Forsythe’s improvisation technologies, and the kinescope in Laban Notation, the nine points which Forsythe dancers use a lot.