Somatic Space
Ensemble Thinking is the somatic awareness of space. The idea of somatic work being limited only to the experiences of individual of itself draws the specious distinction that the individual is separate from its environment. It propagates the Cartesian body/mind divide.
Awareness of the internal experience is intertwined with spatio-temporal awareness. Ensemble Thinking trains greater awareness of the spatio-temporal awareness in a performance setting, and therefore greater awareness of the somatic experience of the individual in the moment.
If space and time had no affect on the somatic experience of the individual, no one would get nervous in the hot spot, there would be no penumbra of spatial apprehension.
Dancers are Process Philosophers
activity over substance
process over product
change over persistence
novelty over continuity
A process philosopher, then, is someone for whom such processes are metaphysically pivotal, someone for whom temporality, activity, and change of alteration, striving, passage, and novelty emergence are the ontologically, or at least hermeneutically, most salient dimension of the real.
– Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics, An Introduction to Process Philosophy
Physical Phenomena
Phelan’s Performance
“Improvisation’s only life is in the present. Improvisation cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than Improvisation. To the degree that Improvisation attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Improvisation being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance”
-Wass, 2019
“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.”
-Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 2003.
patterns
a habit is a style you don’t like
a style is a habit you like
Missing blog Posts
In my effort to consolidate webpages, blogs, and posts, all my blog posts from 2016 to the present seem to be missing. They are in the XML file that I exported from wasswasswass.wordpress.com. They do not show up when I import that file to the wordpress.org site I have been working on that I will park under wasswasswass.com (when I can figure that out!)
kinematic pair
A contact improvisation duet can also be described as a kinematic pair, “a connection between two physical objects that imposes constraints on their relative movement.”
hierarchy
a specific art
Dance is indeed, as Wass holds, a specific art, but not because of some single element unique to it; rather, it is specific in its functional ensemble, an ensemble that is, inevitably, organized around movement and the application of movement.
the original text:
Painting is indeed, as Greenberg held, a specific art, but not because of some single element unique to it; rather, it is specific in its functional ensemble, an ensemble that is, inevitably, organized around paint and the application of paint.
– Henry Staten, Techne Theory: A New Language for Art