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Virtual Tuning: 

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Tuning is a process of finding others when they are not physically close through micro movements: it is a method of connecting to each other by opening up your perception and awareness to the sensory experience of those practicing with you. Tuning is a way to establish relationships and build community, in which you prioritize being open to exchanging knowledge, material, and sensation from your peers and their environment in order to inform your own movement.

 

Begin in any position that allows you to see everyone who is in the space. Take the first five minutes to become familiar with your own space and those of your peers: observe their bodies, their architectural spaces, and the objects around them, in addition to your own. Experience this new shared world through your five senses: what do you notice? What is your experience of sight, touch, sound, smell, taste here? Register your observations and use your awareness as material to inform your micro-movements. Each movement is slow and emergent: it is movement that comes from the exchange between perceiving the group (bodies, physical space) and your own desire to initiate action. 

  

11/05/20

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Begin in a place where you can perceive your own image and those of the others with you.  Allow yourself to find your own body, those of others, and the physical space around you at once: your architecture is their architecture and vice-versa. Stay within your position for at least five minutes but resist conceptual and physical stasis — that is, although your body can be still and maybe even restful, your conceptual process is active and exploratory of the frame. Let your vision take in everything and allow yourself to feel a part of the ecology around you and your peers. Take these first five minutes to establish your relationships-- with the computer, each other, your space (which is also their space)— being physically closer helps. Your first movement is emergent.  Allow everything that happens to be in the space. Nothing can be deleted. Embrace the frame, allow yourself to play with proximity to the camera in such a way that the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Time is not linear so anything that is introduced can come back in at a later point. Nobody owns any of the movement. Utilize the haptic through shaking, slapping, rhythm to make the space between us tactile. It circulates. It is adapted by the other dancers. It is not about call and response. Do not drop everything that you are doing. No idea of scarcity. Recognize what’s happening in space so you can return to it. Youyou can mouth., residue residence. you can mirror.

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11/13/20

Score written with Randy, Sanchita, Emily, Miya

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Begin in a place where you can perceive your own image and those of the others with you.  Allow yourself to find your own body, those of others, and the physical space around you at once: your architecture is their architecture and vice-versa. You can try to take more risks in the choice of movements and postures you take. Allow yourself to be influenced by the space of the others. Allow your perception to attend to what the others are doing so that it can serve as information for you to pick up and integrate into your own body and movement if you’d like. Everything that is introduced in the space has to stay. Play with breath and voice and allow yourself to be influenced by the sounds around you and within the group. changes in the environment- someone peeking into the room, entering or exiting. Allow the score to be porous so that there is space for changes and new information/bodies to enter and be welcome. We are co-creating an ecosystem 

Something is needing to be burst open with your support. Expand your perception of what intimacy is by acknowleding all of the intimate relationships you have with people youve never touched or shared space or time with. You need something sharp, like a knife, perhaps. Feel into your exhaustion, but don’t attach. Open up your perception beyond the visual: when you see yourself and others around you, try to hear them, try to feel their environments as you can feel your own: what is the temperature in their space? What is the texture of the thing you dreamt of last night? of the ground on which they begin their practice? Allow the sounds from the other people’s space to affect your movement choices. Pay specific athen suddenly burst and allow the breath to enter y 

When disruption occurs, acknowledge it. Everything everything everything is always happening at once and is at once ordinary and out of the ordinary. Detach. Attach. Detach. Attach. I belong to myself. This is your practice. Change is inevitable but it’s not something to rush to with open arms and no foresight. Change is not  precious, it’s not an environment based on novelty and uniqueness but rather a place in which we acknowledge change as part of the shared lexicon in our space. What else is constant? What is variable? Nothing is fixed. Yet boundaries. How to begin from the beginning and think about strengthening one’s relationship to other bodies in the zoom space when you are not close to the camera? Refresh your eyes and focus in between the score and renew your connection to your own space. 

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11/20 #1 hi. Say hi to me. (and i’ll say hi back). 

Written by Miya, Sanchita, Emily

 

Begin in a place where you can take in both your own surroundings and the surroundings of the others-- this includes the zoom space, your body, and their body. The borders of what “the thing” is are very permeable. Take the time to attend to the liminal ephemeral space that is being co-hosted by the three of us. We are creating an ecosystem which is dependent on the information each of us brings, but we are creating a fourth thing beyond the one two three bodies. I wanted to move slower and stay and linger longer but i felt like i needed to keep up with all of the information. Maybe its about staying slow but your perception  being fast. Not fast. Alert. I want to speak with you and create together, not at you. What are the limitations of what i can offer and when i need to retreat. What is the separation between me as one and the three of us as one and the fourth thing we create as one. 

You are a breathing and lying thing and that can’t be denied. When you breathe, so does everything around you even if their breath feels different and sounds not like breath at all. Breath evolved into yawn and yawn into sound of the mouth cavity and that evolved into a word. Words sound different when they don’t come from your own body and yet here you are, trying to catch up with them. Say a word time after time and it loses its own meaning (or maybe it’s your attachment to it). The utterance of a word has a trajectory. Going really close to the camera, taking my elbow really close, blurred the image of what was being seen. Sometimes, you move far away from the camera but never far enough that you lose the connection — whatever that means to you. Create unfamiliarity, not distance. Thinking here about making familiar unfamiliar. Sporadically making sentences together as the movement is continuing to emerge in space. Is the texture of the movement same or different when spoken with words? How is the state of my attention when I am speaking or deciphering what others are saying or about to say? Do I care about making meaning or do I care about being attentive and responding to others? These aren’t the same thing. Words are not scarce but they’re not unimportant either — save them for moments that feel right. The process of sensing the moment to speak or not as part of the score. 

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11/20 score #2 So what if we went Sideways?

 

Slow down. Slow down and tell yourself again: slow the fuck down. 

Breathe. What does breathing turn into. Itterative utterances that dissapear or linger or recirculate. That get cut off completely or taper out. Perceive what the others are doing but don’t drop out of what you’re doing. Dropping out is not an option because dropping out implies leaving this world entirely — or it’s about making things about you (hint: it’s not about you). Emergent song, emergent singing. So what if we went sideways. How to stay slow and place no hierarchy on movement or text. It’s not as if the meaning comes through the words or that the words clarify the movement; but it’s also not that the words are abstract references and the “true meaning” can be excavated from the body. What about working in tandem just as we work in tandem with each other? I notice when I start speaking or breathing or singing or producing anything sonic my movement turns constant into more of a flow than a slow emergence — are these things different? I dont think so, but i guess i’m seperating them? I’m not sure how to tend to them equally without converging the two or making a binary. What informs you to respond with your body? I am thinking through how to be together with all of our needs. But how do others know our needs without our desire to disclose?

Do you ever feel like attending to others allows you to efface yourself in a way that is, in itself, an act of care?yes but how to also care for yourself. How to tend to our individual and collective needs and co-construct this world together. Take moments to return to your bodily impulse (?) or rather the score that you have built into the space with others. Finding the fourth thing that you have collectively created and recognizing the movement choices/trajectories you have taken to craft that new thing. I found it hard to stay in the fourth thing. I kept slipping out.

 breath turning into intention for the next movement. So what if i told you that we were going sideways and that sideways wasn’t the right way to go. 

Who are you trying to impress? Remember that nothing in the space is meant to be only for you and for you only. Instead, when someone calls, you answer — but not right away. Take a minute (two, three...slow down, remember?). Spontaneity doesn’t rely on speed; it’s not about getting there first and being the first one to be recognized. Recognize each other. Recognize that everything you put into the space is deliberate and its permanent and even if you feel the impulse to try something new and enter a new item into this abundant basket, take a minute to breathe. what are you making visible through your dancing? What are we trying to make visible, at all?  What do you need from your environment to create or propose something new in your space?

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11/27/20

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Really take the time to perceive the information in my body and in my environ

ment, which is also to notice and perceive what information i receive from their body and their environment. Opening up the space between perception and response/reaction (this is key for me). This in between space is so rich. What is the economy of what you are “paying” attention to. Allowing information to arise, circulate, disappear, and re-emerge. Keeping my whole body still except one body part allows me to really perceive the minutiae of each movement (is it only my toe moving or only my eye ball moving). How many different ways can you say hi? Through gesture, words, how does the wave circulate and re-emerge into other parts of the body? What does it look like for the eye to wave? The foot to wave? The finger? Sternum? What is the “hi”? A greeting? A point of connection? A way to recognize and language an encounter? What signifies an encounter? How are different images read and perceived in and by different bodies?

— (this is similar to what I’ve written in the last section — about reaction as not replication, not about making something legible to somebody else because it exists as reaction nonetheless) Signified and signifier. 

Easing into change. Emergence is not only guided by the shifts in your body and what your body needs at that time but also what the “room” needs at that same moment. Every subtle shift in your body is amplified in this shared space. (yes, i like the idea of thinking about the room as an additional body but also thinking about the shared room that we operate within and how each unique environment calls for collective response)

(this makes me think of our previous conversation around the three of us creating the shared “fourth thing”) what does the ‘fourth thing” need? This could be the space, but that space also holds our encounters, all of our shared information, our interrupting, looping, fractal points of connection. 

When you take the eyes away from the screen, you take the people and the shared space with you in your body as a resource to guide your consecutive emergent movements. Loop?Your movement then feeds back into the collective space. 

(right, so, when you take your eyes away from the screen, you remain tied to the “fourth thing,” which allows you to literally separate yourself from the screen i.e. take your gaze away but the fourth thing remains present)-- i love this concept. 

When do you experience or feel the urge to say ‘hi’ to others? What are you able to communicate or are trying to communicate with that greeting? Sharing the same scenarios? Seeing each other, others seeing you, you seeing them (i’m going to ligia) in this “precarious” moment? 

Noticing micromovements before any “real” movement — your perception is both directed at watching, observing, and absorbing those around you but also at your own twitches, blinks, breaths; all of this is essential and all of this is emergent

Emergence is not only about moving when spontaneity strikes nor is it about following every impulse; emergence is, in many ways, selective, in that you are judicious about when you choose to move and when you choose to observe only. [I am trying to think of this in terms of precarity and what would it look like to choose in a precarious situation, maybe? How we choose and what we choose (to do, to say, to dream about, to question, to inhabit, etc…) will change drastically being in precarious situations, like the current one.]

(right, but, the purpose is to avoid being “reactionary” — reaction (response?) and reactionary are not the same thing. Your response is emergent but it’s not as if you respond without an emphasis on care, on whatever) 

yes!

Think about reaction not only in terms of its visibility. In other words, you don’t need a visible reaction to react. It can be internal. If someone says hi to you, you don’t need to respond ‘hi.’ maybe you just think about it. You say hi to yourself in your mind but that ‘hi’ is still a reaction and it still exists within the energy of the environment. You adapt the vocabulary into your body but its manifestation doesn’t need to occur immediately. Let go of immediacy. It’s not about doing something “first” because this environment doesn’t privilege innovation in the way that other spaces do. We forget about “moving big,” we forget about being “interesting.” 

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12/4/20

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Slow down. Try to find the movements in stillness. You can never fully be still because your internal organs are still moving and working and you are breathing. There is still so much movement. Where are the points of tension? What do you do about this? Do you push through discomfort or tension or is your body giving you information that it is time to move on? Allow yourself to stay in it beyond the point where you get the impulse to move. Slowing down the body creates so much space to see and feel all the possibilities you were moving too quickly through before to notice or experience. Open up the space between sensing and reacting. You do not need to impulsively react. This is not about being reactive. It is about noticing and sensing what you are perceiving as material that can inform what and where you go next. I tried to see you all but struggled to find you today. I was distracted by my camera not being in a good place and I yearned to feel more connected to you both. We all began on the same level, in the sense that each body was in contact with the floor. Yet, this similarity and near-uniformity somehow produced distance (or even disconnect) — for me, it reinforced the need to begin with proximity even if the proximate only remains temporary and changes relative to the person involved.  

Ask yourself what each sensory experience is and what it requires of you: ask yourself to see your own image and those of others moving with you; ask yourself to feel the temperature of their space, the textures that they touch (is your floor soft, is my back aching because of the hard wall behind it). Ask yourself if you can smell what’s beyond their immediate room. Do you start to construct other people’s spaces in they are dancing beyond what you can see? How does it affect your own movement? I’m thinking through the role of projection in relationship to perception. But doesn;t all relation-buulding require some degree of projection? Don’t we, at some fundamental level, find connectivity in what we imagine someone to be like, what we imagine their perception is of us, what we imagine constitutes the connectivity (or just moments of feeling connected) between us? What is the place imagination has in this practice? Is it about perceiving what you can literally see and tactically feel or can imagination also be material that can inform us? Begin in a place where your body isn’t static yet (visually) still and is ready to move into the next movement. Your body should not appear static because your mind is excessively active — although not distracted. You are entirely focused on yourself and on others and what happens when you become attuned to them and their choices. Attuning is a choice. It is a choice to know someone else and experience the most fundamental empathy. You cannot, of course, know their exact sensory experience but attuning allows you to access the possibility that senses go beyond the individual self. You ask yourself to experience fifteen senses (yours and your two peers’) and then you pause. You pause and you absorb and when you feel the impulse to move, you continue to absorb for three, four, five, twenty breaths longer — as if you cannot absorb enough. What if you fail to attune in this process? How do you enter into the practice after you have taken a pause? What if the pause doesn’t direct you back into the practice but leads to someplace different? 

Can seeing the other person’s body in stillness or the other person noticing that stillness helps you find that stillness within yourself? This isn’t the place where you are silencing your internal movement instead you have intentionally decided to not move in this moment but notice movement within yourself. Does observing another person’s stillness function as an affirmation of your own choice? Sometimes, it feels like you need a reminder (or even an “ok”) to be still and that is prompted by the stillness around you

Does the lighting in your room vis-a-vis in the other people’s room ask you to read their movement in a certain mood? Does the color and intensity give a distinct emotion to all of our movements?

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