Intersensoriality and emplacement / The cornerstones of my choreographic practice for babies

Choreography of attention

Throughout my choreographic practice, I aspire to introduce a broader understanding of dance and choreography in the context of both artistic and social experience. I work with choreography as expanded practice - which takes as its starting point a re-thinking of choreography as a general referent for any structuring - extended beyond dance, bodily expression, representation and style. I perceive choreography as the organization of attention and as such I apply it to strategies, protocols, spatial structures and movement of the audience itself.

Interrelational ecology and immersion

My choreographic strategies are devised on the basis of a phenomenological approach to perception and the connections between vision and movement. As such, they are directed towards first-hand, direct, immersive experience of the audience, heightening their awareness of perception as embodied and interdependent with its surroundings. Therefore I work with synergy of choreography and installation art and their capacities for activation of the audience. I conceive safe and stimulating performance environments in order to generate an interrelational ecology, providing unique conditions for a wide variety of interchange and communication. The audience is challenged to reorganize their repertoire of responses in accordance to unfolding events - they are invited to engage in a playful and open-ended experience that does not present concrete goals but rather encourages them to explore and discover a new form of being-in-the-world. With this approach, I am aiming for a multi-modal and affective experience of both child and care-taker. The role of the care-taker is emphasized as adults are invited to support and follow their child and to share the experience.

Intersensoriality and emplacement

My practice is problematizing socially limited sensory hierarchy and exploring of non-western sensory profiles in relation to extents of audience involvement in the constitution of their own experience. The emergent paradigm of emplacement suggests the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment and it allows questioning of our relation to sensuous materiality of the world (Howes 2005). This approach relates to increasing evidence from neuroscience on the interconnectedness and interactions of sensory areas of the brain, which is proving that nothing is “purely visual or purely auditory, or purely anything' (Howes, 2005)

Sensuous and responsive performative practice

The performative practice implemented in my performances concerns the ongoing, mutually influential exchange between the performers and audience - open to and informed by the environment, aiming for an active and shared role in the ecology of the event. It is based on the high level of the interchange between performers and audience with the emphasis on the perceptiveness of the performer - the practice which is in constant negotiation with all the information in the space.

Agency

The structure and the content of my work insist on decentralised spectatorship in order to raise the audience's awareness that "there is no one 'right' way of looking at the world, nor any privileged place. By proposing multiple perceptions of a single situation, it denies the viewer an 'ideal' place from which to contemplate the work (as defined by the artist) and instead assigns an emancipatory role to their activation. I share the perspective of some installation artists who see ‘psychological rigidity’ in 'seeing things from one fixed point of view', relating a single-point perspective to patriarchal ideology (Bishop, 2005). Therefore, I see agency and the 'idea of activated spectatorship as a politicized aesthetic practice', as noted by Claire Bishop (2005). Moreover, as she formulates it, 'this type of work conceives of its viewing subject not as an individual who experiences the art in transcendent or existential isolation but as part of collective or community' (2005).

Durational format

Essential for my work is the durational format. By performing for 3-4 hours in the continuity, once or twice per day, the audience has a unique opportunity to enjoy the installation upon their personal therms - to arrive at the time which suits them the best and stay as long as they like to, ideally, within the 6 hours running time. This format acknowledges and considers the heterogeneous nature of the audience and utterly respects the individual needs of both babies and adults, as well as the time needed to process this multifaceted experience. The performance environment provides the conditions for active exploration, social exchange, exhilaration, intimate moments, falling asleep, etc. The fluctuation of various modes of attention is most welcomed and essential for the constitution of audience experience on individual basis. By providing resistance to an ever-accelerating pace of life (Shalson 2012) durational format has a capacity to transform both performer and audience, affirming the sensation of “simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming.” (Bergson, 1907).

*

“The sensation is neither in the world nor in the subject but is the relation of unfolding of the one

for the other through the body created at their interface.”

(Elizabeth Grosz 2008)