2024 Dance Limerick shared document

greetings friend,

When referencing this document, please remember that all depictions of anatomical structures are approximations of averages, and are all necessarily reductive. The aim of collected visuals and descriptions is to provide you with orientation points, and support you in navigating through your experience (-ing) and your research (-ing). Anatomy, as is embodied by you right now, is an emergent* phenomenon, a material expression of your and your ancestors’ continued intra-acting with the world. It is currently evidencing results of a process that has been ongoing since the literal beginning of time.

From what I can tell, most artists I admire agree that the motivation that moves one towards creativity comes from some unknowable source. What I had hoped to do with this workshop is give some examples of how it is possible to recognise, orient towards, and move with the unknowable in a critically-aware way. Critical here does not stand for negative or antagonistic. Critical stands for informed, empowered, situated, oriented, self- and co-regulated with the World. I wish you good relationships and informative, encouraging, and generous examples on your way. Strong sails and long keels with get you across the wildest of the oceans safely.

Thank you for your generosity, commitment, and patience. It was a true honour working with you.

till we meet again, pav

*Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (link)

original stage design for mozart’s die zauberflöte

dance limerick’s starred ceiling

website:

www.pavleheidler.com/2024dancelimerick

password:

observingworlds

most recent update:

2024-11-21 (reading list)

2024-11-05

questions?

if any questions come up, please send them to me at

pavleheidler@pavleheidler.com

i’ll respond as soon as i’m able

if the questions relate to this document, i’ll update the document accordingly

😇

instagram @pavleheidler

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general reflections

circle

I tend to start my classes with or in a circle. I find a circle in most cases to be the best way to situate the room. I usually open the circle with a brief introduction and a question formulated along the lines of a how are you?, and what are you currently working on?. I tend to come up with the day’s protocol after the responses to my question(s) have been shared and the circle has been closed.

dialogue

I like to organise my classes in dialogue with the participant. This is both to ensure that the participants get the satisfaction of having their specific interests addressed, and to create an opportunity for bonding. Additionally, it’s a way for me to learn about the context that I find myself in and the people that I’m relating to. Plus, it’s a fun challenge for someone like me who is both neurodivergent and a skilled improviser.

language

I like speculating, fabulating, philosophising, and above all, writing. In class, for example, I do a lot by way of storytelling. Storytelling is how I manage atmosphere, it is also how I navigate group dynamics through embodied dives. My relationship to and fascination with language and languaging is an integral aspect of my practice… but it is also evidence of my neurodivergence. I like to be conscious of that.

Although conducted largely through storytelling, my classes are meant to be deeply embodied. I take care to communicate that in class.

situatedness

There are several reasons why I choose to work like this. The most important has to do with situatedness. Working as a freelance pedagogue, my time is often extremely limited. I’ve learned over the years that I can get the most out of the time I’m given when I situate my work within the context of the participant’s immediate experience (need, curiosity, or desire). When addressing the participant’s immediate experience, I’ve observed that participants tend to respond positively (A) because they feel seen and (B) because they’re offered access to skills that they recognise as immediately and specifically useful. As a result, the participants tend to feel encouraged and empowered and appreciated, which i care about very much.

regarding situatedness

I situate my practice within the expanding fields of dance and choreography, where dance and choreography are understood to be critical practices; critical as in critical for the development of the general field of body-based knowledge, and critical as in analytical and self-reflective. The expanding fields of dance and choreography I situate within the western tradition of staged dance and choreography, the development of which stems from the court of Louis XIV and thrives in the present moment there where the artistic and academic modalities are encouraged to intersect.

One of my main areas of research concerns the notion of Cartesian dualism, i.e., the mind-body split. Within my practice, I am observing some of the ways in which the application of Cartesian dualism in the West complicates the study of dancing, e.g., by forcing us to associate our thinking with a single part of our anatomy, thereby restricting our relationship to thinking itself with linear, language-based standards. Most dancers have, of course, experienced thinking beyond the linear, and beyond the language-based. My question is, what happens when we consider all those non-linear and non-lingual experiences as cognitive experiences? How does our practice change when it becomes knowledgeable even when its, e.g., intuitive? I often identify my aim within this area of research with the term embodiment; I intend the term embodiment to represent the effort opposite to that of a split, i.e., the effort to integrate that which we traditionally associate with “the mind” with what which we traditionally associate with “the body” into a dynamic operative unit.

Within the context of my research, experience comes first. this means that, by the time I come to reading, I am reading to help me understand how to relate to my experiences. most frequently, i find reason to read fantasy and sci-fi, black and diversity study, and memoirs written by queer folk. Here is a short list of books I am very fond of and refer to frequently.

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click to expand for list

body-mind centering® in the context of a dance class

when asked to feature BMC® in the context of a dance class, and when meeting a new group of participants i need to determine who of the participants has what level of experience with BMC® (or another somatic technique) before suggesting engagement in any specific activity. depending on the level of experience and the kind of experience participants may have, i will consider reflecting on the following topics:

somatics in a dance class, a brief history of somatics and a note on ethics (what to pay attention when teaching and being taught somatics in the context of a dance class) + performativity (how do we “read” bodies when working with somatics in a dance class, procedures); (what is orientation?)
basic structure of the nervous system: peripheral, central, and local, somatic and autonomic, sympathetic and parasympathetic + proprioception, interoception, and vestibular; sensory input and motor response; lower and higher cognitive processes, what is a reflex and how to recognise it; the macro and micro sensing apparatuses; (what is sensing?)
what is cellular consciousness, how does the concept of cellular consciousness challenge our understanding of cognitive hierarchies and the way we think of “self”, maybe even “personhood”, brief history of the mind-body split + the potential of this inquiry to inform our understanding and practice of democracy. (what is thinking?)

the question of ethics + performativity, how do we read bodies would potentially require some examination of:

performativity in gender and queer theory, a brief introduction to the work of j.l. austin and judith butler;
application of performativity to dancing and choreography, an introduction to reading dance history from the perspective of performativity studies;
differentiation between dancing and choreography relative to the concept of embodiment and expression, a brief introduction to the treatment of expression in BMC® + affect theory;
examination of choreography relative to writing and the concept of principle-based performative-practice.

please note, all these points refer to actions that can be performed as movement-based experiments in the context of a studio practice. experiment is the primary method i will be referring to in the studio. “experiment” will be defined in real time relative to all or any of the points above (how do you conduct an experiment when you’re both the observer and the observed?).

procedure:

opening circle,
dive,

cerebrospinal fluid;
gravity;
cellular breathing.

experiment no. 1,

clarity;

lunch
experiment no. 2,

clarity with added experience;

closing circle.

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction

In our work we’ve touched upon the characteristics of a practice I call The Process of Materialisation of Fiction.

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction is: a developing answer to a continual questioning – and is: a self-reflective dance practice. This practice suggests a way in which to study the ability of the individual’s nervous system to translate information (back and forth) between the “felt,” “sensed,” “imagined,” “immaterial” and the “materialised,” “physicalised,” “moved,” “spoken,” “performed.”

In as much as the “felt” and “sensed” etc. is “inwardly oriented,” and so functioning in the realm of the invisible: the “intimate” or the realm of “internal dialogue;” so is the “materialised” and “physicalised” “outwardly oriented” i.e. “performed,” visible to the scrutinising gaze of the public eye. How these two worlds relate to one another is the question around which this practice is danced.

drawing © pavleheidler

2024-08-29

i first started writing the following to add to a travel grant i was asked to hand in on behalf of a choreographer i am working for. writing this, i experienced a moment of clarity, which is why i’m sharing the text with you, as an example of dancing clarity in writing.

i like to say that my job is to make people's dreams come true.

whenever i say that sentence, i am reminded of my training; it's like something in my mind softens and i become conscious of the brilliant, relational sensitivity of my cellular existence and/or consciousness; social components of life recede in that moment, allowing bodily materiality to step into the spotlight and so transform or influence the way i can relate to others or participate in this world. it is through this process–of saying and remembering what i think my job is–that i keep becoming a dance artist.

i say 'dreams' to capture something of the range of interests and capacities i've encountered working as a dancer in the field. at one end of that range or spectrum i find something like a concern with prestige, at the other the inexplicable urge to love a seemingly random and irrelevant abstraction. a choreographer like Cristina Caprioli, whom i worked with for a better part of a decade, has required of me to hold that whole spectrum in my imaginary at 15:49h on a Tuesday afternoon as I moved along the paths determined by her materials, looking for ways to become the one who’s going to show her something that, up until that very moment, she'd only ever seen in herself.

which is where ‘truth’ becomes interesting, doesn’t it? because, of course, when talking about ‘dreams coming true’ we’re talking about something subjective, not objective and definitely not reasonable. artists, traditionally speaking, do not deal in reason. ‘reason’ is not of our lineage and was never meant to be our responsibility; we’d never have come up with ‘reason’ on our own. what artists do and have been doing, the way i understand it, was evidencing all the different ways bodies in this world are able to perceive and make sense of their environment, their experience, their relationship. artists are like gardeners of alternatives, tenders of options, committed to protecting the complexity in texture and range of what it could mean to be alive.

QUALIFICATION ≠ EVALUATION

reading list:

nonfiction

Artistic Research in a World on Fire by Lucy Cotter (link)

And Then, You Act by Anne Bogart

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (link)

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stephano Harney

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad

12 bytes by Jeanette Winterson (essays)

Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway

Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado

This Life by Martin Hägglund

Everybody by Olivia Laing

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde (essays)

The Privilege of Partial Perspective by Donna Haraway (essay, link)

Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk

anatomy

Sensing, Feeling, and Action by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (link) !!!

A Journey to the Centre of the Cell (essay, link)

The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio (feelings)

The Second Brain by Michael Gershon et al (“gut feeling”)

fiction

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Parable of the Sower + The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin

Earthsea Chronicles by Ursula K. le Guin

conversations

2023 merehobbyists in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2022 The Supergiant Star Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2019 sappho’s conversations (to Vimeo)

2018 The Event Horizon Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2018 sappho’s conversations (to Vimeo)

2015 The Moon Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

2015 The Sun Practice in Conversation (to Vimeo)

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videos and quotes:

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Bogart 2007, p. 95 (and then, you act)

“I own an old Tiffany clock, inherited from my grandparents. It is a clock that must be would by hand once a week. One day, in my haste and insensitivity, I would the clock too hard and it broke. My hand had not sensed the millisecond that the winding had reached its limit. I executed the move and plenty of feedforward—intent and will—but experienced very little feedback. I turned it too aggressively and the mechanism broke.

The French director Ariane Mnouchkine proposes that an actor needs to be ‘concave and convex’ and describes receptivity as active. The mark of a great actor is the ability to balance feedforward with feedback. An actor with a lot of feedforward and not enough feedback comes across as aggressive and invulnerable. Although we may be impressed by their prowess, ultimately it is hard to find empathy or interest in their situation. An actor with too little feedforward and an excess of feedback merely seems narcissistic or lethargic. Again, you do not care about them. An effective actor extends out into the world and at the same time allows him- or herself to receive impressions back and be charged by the experience. as an audience, we viscerally live through the actor’s sensual taste of the moment’s returns.”

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

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brown 2017, p. ?? (Emergent Strategies)

“What is Emergence?

‘Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions’—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. There are examples of emergence everywhere. Birds don’t make a plan to migrate, raising resources to fund their way, packing for scarce times, mapping out their pit stops. They feel a call in their bodies that they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other, each bringing their adaptations. There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other. (Responding to destiny together.) Destiny is a calling that creates a beautiful journey. Emergence is beyond what the sum of its parts could even imagine. A group of caterpillars or nymphs might not see flight in their future, but it’s inevitable. It’s destiny. Oak trees don’t set an intention to listen to each other better, or agree to hold tight to each other when the next storm comes. Under the earth, always, they reach for each other, they grow such that their roots are intertwined and create a system of strength that is as resilient on a sunny day as it is in a hurricane. Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance. But each seed can create a field of dandelions. We are invited to be that prolific. And to return fertility to the soil around us. Cells may not know civilization is possible. They don’t amass as many units as they can sign up to be the same. No—they grow until they split, complexify. Then they interact and intersect and discover their purpose—I am a lung cell! I am a tongue cell!—and they serve it. And they die. And what emerges from these cycles are complex organisms, systems, movements, societies. Nothing is wasted, or a failure. Emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. It’s all data.”

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Moten and Harney 2013, p. 26 (The Undercommons)

"[...]: it cannot be denied that the university is a place or refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gipsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university." (emphasis added)

24:26 “Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”

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Haraway 2016, p. 16 (Staying with the Trouble)

"The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who wrote The Gender of the Gift based on her ethnographic work in highland Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), taught me that ‘it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).’ (4) Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking practices. She embodies for me the arts of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode. It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Strathern wrote about accepting the risk of relentless contingency; she thinks about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds. In 1933, Alfred North Withehead, the American mathematician and process philosopher who infused my sense of worlding, wrote The Adventures of Ideas. (5)

SF is precisely full of such adventures. Isabelle Stengers, a chemist, scholar of Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, radical thinker about materiality in sciences, and an unruly feminist philosopher, gives me ‘speculative thinking’ in abundance. With Isabelle Stengers we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. In the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s philosophy, she maintains that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences. This is what she means by cosmopolitics. (6)”

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anatomical references and study materials:

soma <> σῶμα

SOMA (ancient greek) for:

body,
one’s life in the physical world,
material,
person,
an entire thing,
(math) three dimensional object.

Wikipedia σῶμα

terminologies

As you move through different materials and engage in your own explorations, and especially if you start reading about anatomy, don’t be alarmed when you discover that the same word can be used to describe different anatomical structures, or physiological phenomena.

It may help to check when the material was published, and by whom.

If you ever get disoriented when reading about a particular structure, take a moment, and—when ready—reread the sentence that confused you, retrace the image, give yourself some time, and a new experience.

If a definition of a structure or a property does not make sense, if it evokes no feeling in you, that description might simply not work for you. Find one that does.

Start with those descriptions, those images that you can make sense of in-the-moment, no matter how basic they may be; work with them, understand them, play with them until they stop making sense. When an image that meant the world to you becomes a bit boring, underwhelming, or simply stops capturing your attention is usually when you’re ready to look for a new image; maybe a slightly more complex image, a more detailed description, or a more nuanced interpretation. Remember that the experience of learning is cyclical. Read about the learning curve.

nervous system classification

the nervous system can be classified in several ways.

central (brain and spinal cord);
peripheral.

somatic (intentional),
autonomic (homeostasis):

sympathetic (fright, flight, or freeze),
parasympathetic (rest and recuperation).

reflex

Most frequently, a reflex will be defined as an involuntary action activated through “a reflex arc” in response to a specific stimuli. An example of a reflex arc when we looked at the sensory-motor coördination (see below for image).

One of the crucial characteristics of a reflex is that it requires stimulation to occur. In BMC®, a reflex is often described as existing in a state of potential until that time comes when it is embodied in response to an appropriate stimulus. In class, we stepped on a balancing ball to trigger some of those reflexes that BMC® classifies under righting reactions.

Remember the Moro reflex? The one that extended our arms laterally to support us in regaining a sense of orientation and balance? Remember how quickly the Moro reflex showed itself in some bodies? You can often recognise involuntary actions relative to how quickly they show up. You can also recognise them by asking the person, Did you notice what you did with your arms? Look at their face when you ask them a question like that, you may get to appreciate the most wonderful expression of surprise.

Here are some examples of definitions of reflexes I found online:

“Reflexes are automatic and involuntary actions the body produces in response to certain stimuli. While some reflexes can involve muscles and movement, others involve internal processes within the body.”

Megan Monte What are reflexes? Definition and examples

“[…] according to 1989 guidelines issued by the American Academy of Neurology, “[…] Primitive reflexes and vegetative functions […] are either controlled by the brainstem or are so elemental that they require no brain regulation at all.”

PubMed Central (PMC) What is a reflex? A guide for understanding disorders of consciousness

“REFLEXES are processed in the spine and the low-brain. They are our most primitive responses.”

Internet Archive Sensing, feeling, and action : the experiential anatomy of body-mind centering : Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge

(page 141)

RIGHTING REACTIONS (page 127-129)
MORO REFLEX (page 144-145)

sensory-motor coördination

Broadly speaking, sensory receptor registers proximity to heat, triggering the sensory nerve. The sensory nerve delivers electric and chemical stimuli to the back of the spinal cord, and via the inter neuron, passes the stimuli to the motor nerve. The motor nerve reaches from the front of the spinal cord towards the periphery, engaging appropriate responses via effector organs, mainly muscles and glands.

Remember the conversation in which we compared compared sensing to a motor response, whereby the act of sensing becomes evident in the physiological changes you’re experiencing as you’re relating to the environment? As opposed to it [sensing] being compared with the words you speak to yourself internally when you decide that you are, indeed, sensing something?

homeostasis

In biology, homeostasis (British also homoeostasis; /hɒmioʊˈsteɪsɪs, -miə-/) is the state of steady internal physical and chemical conditions maintained by living systems.[1] This is the condition of optimal functioning for the organism and includes many variables, such as body temperature and fluid balance, being kept within certain pre-set limits (homeostatic range).

from Wikipedia

the meninges

The brain and spinal cord are enveloped within three layers of membrane collectively known as the meninges, with the cranial meninges specifically referring to the section that covers the brain. From superficial to deep, the three layers are the dura, arachnoid, and pia—the term “mater,” Latin for mother, often follows these names (i.e., dura mater, arachnoid mater, pia mater).[1] The dura, Latin for “hard,” is composed of dense connective tissue and adheres to the inner surface of the skull and vertebrae. The arachnoid is a thin, wispy membrane that lies just deep to the dura and is superficial to the pia, the very thin, clear membrane that directly adheres to the surface of the brain and spinal cord. Forming from these layers are three clinically significant spaces, or potential spaces (sometimes called cavities): the epidural, subdural, and subarachnoid spaces, from superficial to deep. The chief function of the meninges is to protect the contents of the brain and spinal cord.[2]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539882/

cerebrospinal fluid

The CSF [CerebroSpinal Fluid] is clear and very slow moving. Its movement is powered by the cranial-scaral/coccygeal pump (movement between the skull and the tail). It has its own rhythic cycle called the CSF Rhythm (CSFR) which is different than theblood pulse and respiratory rhythms. Like the blood pulse, the CSFR can be felt in all parts of the body.
Internet Archive Sensing, feeling, and action : the experiential anatomy of body-mind centering : Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge
(page 78)

CSF appears to have several important functions. One of these functions is to provide a buoyant force to support the brain and spinal cord. The brain has a significant amount of mass (approximately 1500 gm) while at the same time being relatively malleable. However, since the CSF surrounds the brain, it dissipates much of the downward force that would normally act on the organ. This dissipation reduces the stress on the brain and allows it to maintain its shape. When surrounded by adequate CSF, the brain exerts significantly less tension on exiting nerve roots.[5] Another function of CSF that comes from its physical properties as fluid is to protect the brain from the damage that would result from a sudden movement of the skull. Any rapid acceleration/deceleration of the head has the potential to injure the delicate contents contained within. The CSF helps reduce the potential damage in such an event by acting as a cushion and a shock absorber.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470578/

procedure:

opening circle,

dive,

cerebrospinal fluid;
gravity;
cellular breathing.

experiment no. 1,

clarity;

lunch

experiment no. 2,

clarity with added experience;

closing circle.

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction

In our work we’ve touched upon the characteristics of a practice I call The Process of Materialisation of Fiction.