Trusting Relating for Creating
By Jorge De Hoyos
29.1.2020 | final-semester essay for MA SODA at HZT
Throughout the process of creating and presenting my final Masters Thesis solo-performance “Spirited” on 4-5 December 2019 at Uferstudios, the issues of trust and mistrust have been appearing and disappearing in permeating ways bridging the artistic, (inter)personal and spiritual spheres. As the contexts, temporalities, and perspectives connected to the process continue to shift and slide among each other, a network built from pathways of trusting and the cracks in need of repair continue revealing themselves in surprising ways and through different forms. A world begins to reveal itself through multiple dimensions of trusting.
What kinds of trusting and mistrusting took place that contributed to the world-making of “Spirited”? Such insights offer a vantage point to reflect on the larger relationship between trusting and world-creating: how does trusting build worlds?
For the purposes of this shorter essay though, the kind of trusting that I begin to focus on is the process of self-trust—the multi-dimensional pathways of self-trusting that allowed for the creation of the piece but also the conditional and limited scope of this self-trusting that revealed themselves as foundationally unresolved issues in the final performance. More specifically, this tension between trusting and mistrusting as related to the self can be traced in issues of my gaze as a performer. The two main issues connected to the gaze that I will examine are: what is exactly meant by this “self” that I have been trusting? and then what potential worlds can be created or not by these specific “self” understandings?
First, sketching out a framework of self-trusting…
In the introduction to Ethnographies of Trusting anthropologists Vigdis Broch-Due and Margit Ystanes reference philosopher Trudy Govier’s (1997) observation of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Together, they identify how much contemporary research on trust still acts from premises set forth by Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) where he “read humankind in himself” and made universalist arguments from the position of his own enquiring “I” (Broch-Due and Ystanes 2016: 8). What he understood by this introspection was a fundamental untrustworthiness of human nature and that humans ultimately engage in trusting an absolute sovereign power to ensure that their individual needs are met. More than his conclusions, however, the nature of the self-contained and self-affirming premise from which he draws such conclusions is what is, rather, at stake in regards to how it relates to foundational concerns in my art practice. According to Govier, Hobbes reached his conclusions by trying to assume what he, himself, would do if given someone else’s circumstances, and this is also something that I have often done as one who has primarily made solos.
Broch-Due and Ystanes argue that the epistemological premise of Hobbes is based upon a personal, Western assumption and fails to account for “how trust and mistrust are produced in actual landscapes of multiple subjectivities” (Broch-Due and Ystanes 2016: 22). They point to “classic anthropological concerns such as notions of self, intimacy, sociality, embodiment, kinship, morality and political processes” as examples of layered components that interact and evolve to form worlds much more complex than what the perspective of a Western, universalizing “I” could perceive.
Though the practice of imagining the subject positions of others helps to think expansively beyond one’s own sphere of concerns and perceptibility, in often working alone in the dance studio as I have done, the danger of assumption and limited perspective persists. This “I” remains a constant site of tension between trusting and mistrusting myself as I make work.
Having majored in Cultural Anthropology as an undergraduate, I came away very clear in the knowledge that there is no main truth that can be applied universally—such an assumption would be unaware of its own potentially power-privileged and colonizing position from which it speaks. James Clifford’s “Partial Truths” (1986) was a major takeaway for me, for example. From the fragmentation of perspectives and subject positions that his and other texts on cultural relativism pointed to, I became acutely aware of the existence of blind spots—so overwhelmingly so that I quit Anthropology after graduating. I had become too self-conscious and wary of making claims for fear of falling into the trap of speaking too universally and too blindly.
I could not trust myself, or I mistrusted trusting myself. Or, the effort required to account for all the factors that contextualize the position from which I might speak felt doomed to endless self-reflexivity. To be subjective felt taboo as it could easily be ignorant, lazy or irresponsible. Guilty feelings of privilege (i.e. male, United States, light-skinned, educated, “heteronormative-acting,” etc.) could easily undermine and twist the value of whatever it is that I would want to communicate from a position of my “self”.
Anthropology’s great lesson of self-reflexivity had thus sparked a crisis of self-trusting. As a response, I turned to dance and performance-making so as to find a realm where the subjective could have more space to act with less preemptive restriction and what felt like heavy contextual bureaucracy. To dance, create and perform required that I express boldly and unapologetically from a sense of a personal, subjective self. In a dance studio or on the stage, emotions and embodied desires were often the main grounds for communication, and this allowed me a necessary sense of freedom. The philosopher Bernd Lahno argues that trust is an emotional attitude, that “genuine trust is an emotion and emotions are, in general, not subject to direct rational control” (Lahno 2001: 172-173). Through turning to dance and its emotional dimensions, I was taking on a new way of trusting. It felt good and expansive to suspend a hyper-regulatory mindfulness that I had developed.
Continue sketching: trusting and mistrusting inner space…
At the beginning of my turn towards art, I took a study course with dance scholar Mark Franko called “The History of Dance and Hysteria” which focused heavily on the work of choreographer Pina Bausch. It introduced me to her aesthetics and creation process where she asks questions to the dancers to which they offer embodied, performative, and—which is significantly important in a discussion of “self”—personal responses. Bausch famously states that she is not so interested in how her dancers move but in what moves them. Such an interest points to an inner, subjective world. Each dancer on stage, as I have observed in live performance or on video, seems to dance from a fully-proclaimed “I”. Their individual presences reflect a sense of a subject that feels emotions, struggles, dances, enjoys, thinks, and interacts. I desired to train myself as a dancer to be capable of such strong presence and to construct theatrical work that an audience could feel connected to and relate to as fellow subjects in the world.
A major method for me to create dance, therefore, has been to excavate and cultivate my inner space. By inner space, I mean the realm of the self, or the personal world of memories, emotions, and desires as well as potential capabilities revealed through playing with Stanislavki’s “magic if” (1936). I ask myself questions similar to how Bausch questions her dancers, and I respond in solo sessions mixing approaches from Authentic Movement and Automatic Writing but through the body. I record most sessions so as to be more present as I move knowing that I can study myself on video later. Indeed, watching myself express an inner space has often evoked associations to a hysterical body—a self that is at times too expansive in its movements and simultaneously too confined in itself to articulate clear forms. Often at the beginning of a session I see this person very still and calm, and then different subjectivities seem to act out in multiple, surprising ways. It is a paradoxical “self” I observe through watching the videos; it ranges wildly from seeming extremely centered and contained to decentralized and lacking parameters. I trust this body, my “self,” despite its seeming contradictions because me, as the mover, and me, as the observer, are aligned in a similar aim. We are on the search for movement that has communicative potential that can then be shaped and composed for performance purposes.
Since beginning with this method almost ten years ago, I have been trusting in the capacity of this inner space to connect to a universal source, reflecting as a microcosm larger patterns of humankind and nature. This introspective practice stands admittedly and uncomfortably close to (and perhaps even exceeding) Hobbe’s enquiring “I” which reads humanity within himself and draws universalizing conclusions from that self-same premise (Broch-Due & Ystanes 2016). In order to become an artist though—to satisfy a desire and need to dance and make art—I had to cultivate a way of self-trusting that was responsive to critiques of oppressive and limiting constructions of self yet still maintaining a substantial grounding in an inner world—one of multiple subjectivities, yes, but still contained within a tangible idea such as a “self” that could serve a necessary anchoring and orienting function for navigating creation and performance processes.
Lawyer and scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s contribution of Intersectionality comes to mind. In her iconic article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), she complicates and expands notions of identity to reveal how some “selves” are systematically erased by the more dominant conceptions of “selves.” To illustrate, she articulates and criticizes a single-axis framework as a mode of analyses that does not account for the multidimensionality of African-American women’s experiences. Black women, in legal cases of discrimination for example, have been considered along a single-axis framing of either race or gender instead of an intersecting, multiple-axis framework that reveal how both identity constructs combine to create a totally different and unique experience: black AND female.
The tension in holding a sense of self in my work has to do with the fact of trying to juggle awareness of many intersecting factors that make up the solo subject on stage that acts and performs. How many intersecting axis can a framing of “self” hold before it loses its integrity and consistency within the given artistic situation? How many axis does it need to sustain artistic merit and hold audience attention?
The ambivalence in trusting my “self” has to do with: 1) the fact that the self is always in process, multi-dimensional and, therefore, subject to change; and 2) I worry that I haven’t researched and articulated through language enough to adequately tease out and weave together interests and influences from disparate fields of inquiry, such as the spiritual and philosophical spheres, that inform my approaches and perceptions of the self. The first issue is a matter of practical trial and error, while the second is a matter of fear and/or discerning adequate levels of knowledge, authority and preparedness.
It takes two to be ambivalent…
I spoke with my mentor, artist-philosopher Arno Böhler, in a recent Skype conversation to get his thoughts from watching an online link to my performance, “Spirited,” and to discuss his impressions in relation to the theme of trusting. The theme has been appearing and disappearing in surprising ways throughout my SODA studies.
When we first met in a 2-day seminar in June 2019, I had described my third-semester research as cultivating my intuition through dance improvisation so as to deepen my presence and to find strategies to dissolve internalized obstructions that limit my potential to improvise performance confidently. He responded by saying that it’s a matter of trusting that the archives will open. It’s a matter of trusting that the labor of preparation has already been done and that the moment of presentation is in allowing for that work to reveal itself as it unfolds on its own timing and logics in the moment (Böhler 2019).
The theme of trusting did not specifically appear again until midway through this last, fourth semester. While debriefing a week after I had finished performing “Spirited,” my artistic collaborating assistant, Ahmed El Gendy, gave feedback about a main issue he experienced in the process. He observed me as struggling with trust issues at all levels: mistrust towards him, towards which dance material to develop, in setting compositional structures, in minute practical decisions like time-management or setting out actionable tasks, etc. His observation came as a big surprise to me but for differing reasons. In one way, I felt grossly misunderstood in that I had been traversing along a personal-spiritual pathway of deep and prolonged trusting—trusting in my capabilities but also in spiritual ideas like the universal Law of Attraction and seeing the life-process as a co-creation between individuals and source energy[1]. In another way, however, I could grasp Ahmed’s perspective. From his point of view, I must have seemed extremely mistrusting of factors outside the range of my inner space where I could not control.
At one point in the process, Ahmed outlined three levels of attention: the micro, macro and the practical, or in-between. These translate as follows: The micro level can refer to basic movement research which precedes and underlies the process of shaping and composing material. The macro level would be having a sense of the larger themes and concepts—the “why” and the connection to the philosophical, political and spiritual spheres. The practical, or in-between level was where we both noticed that I tended to fixate and get stuck. This was the level of trying to structure elements and make order of the materials in space and time. The mistrust that he perceived was in my difficulty to release fixation on this level in order to take what felt like precious and scarce time to tend to the micro and macro spheres that were greatly needing of attention. He proposed (outside of the official rehearsal sessions we had planned) to have me do exploratory and improvised sketches as a way to get back to the level of somatic research so as to take a break from anxious looping around mid-level, compositional concerns. Despite internal resistance, I eventually surrendered to his proposal, and this revealed a vital expansion of insight and potential for the process. For this crucial step to have happened, I had to trust him. I had to suspend a rigidity of self-trusting—to trust outside of my “self”—in order to enter into a necessary expansion and new understanding.
From gazing ambivalently to Adventure Gazing…
In the skype conversation with Arno Böhler, I began by offering that my gaze as a performer is an observable system of action that reveals qualities and intensities of trusting and mistrusting taking place in the performance. I came to more consciously problematize the gaze after having seen the video myself and having received feedback from others. There seemed to be unresolved issues with how I see the audience, how they see me, or how we should see each other. Prepositions here matter: Am I purposely looking upon the audience? Do I look to them? Or am I not looking at them at all? Of course, all these ways of seeing were constantly interplaying throughout “Spirited,” but the question “what is my relationship to the audience?” arose, and with it, implications of unresolved issues like intentionality, orientation and trust.
He agreed with my assessment. He described me in the performance as full of confidence, strength and dancing with full commitment for myself and to the cosmos, but he was not sure of my relationship with those who had come to see my work. I explained how my art-making practice has prioritized cultivating a deep connection to a personal, inner space so as to produce material that I trust is grounded in layered human experience. A limitation that I have observed though is that my inner space commitments can be too-controlling and isolating producing a gap in communication—either I’m not understood or I haven’t properly addressed myself to a spectator. Especially if a performance situation is new or feels especially risky, I fear to make eye contact with people and the world around me. I might get lost in the gazing outwards and forget the task at hand. I may become too self-conscious in being witnessed, or I might feel unsure of discerning appropriate levels of participation and interaction that making eye contact would open up the potential for.
Trusting becomes difficult given the tension I feel between having a plan to carry out and being open for deviation. Cultural theorist Gesa Ziemer outlines such a dynamic through differentiating between a strategy and a tactic, respectively. In her chapter “Situational Worlds: Complicity as a Model of Collaboration,” she values tactics for their potential to create complicity between partners to dynamically react to contexts that arise in the moment and create new situations (Ziemer 2011: 240). “Complicity,” she states, “cultivates the accessing of twilight zones and permits informal working processes and intimacy” (Ziemer 2011: 236). Spaces of twilight zones, intimacy and informal working processes between me and an audience are worlds that I hope to cultivate through my art practice. However, building enough trust to relate at deeper, vulnerable levels of subjectivity is a formidable challenge.
Arno Böhler had some helpful insights and tips over Skype. In our first live meeting in June 2019 he had discussed Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the soul as the capacity of someone to be always outside of itself, in relation to the world (Nancy 2014). Now recently, he proposed that I reconfigure my sense of inner space as a relational space in that it has the capacity to relate to, literally, everything…
“So a space in which you are able to connect with the world. The inner space not just as being you and yourself but as the capacity also to enter into relations with trees, with animals, with human beings, the audience, with absent beings. It’s not isolating itself from the world, but it starts to see that the relations towards the world are also emerging from that space.
Nancy has a nice word. He calls it ‘becoming worldwide’. Not like the internet, but that the inner space starts to have enough space to welcome others into it and then it becomes relational. To think of it more as a dialogue and not get locked down into duality of being in or out, but that I am grounded enough to open myself to go out from here and touch them and receive back what they respond.
And it’s very nice if you go into the etymology of the word experience. It means having the courage to go out and to make an adventure. Ex means going out. Then to go through, adventure, risk. So, to have the courage to go out of yourself in order to make an experience. You go out to adventure, to meet and go in touch, and from there bring the touch back home. So that you leave that dichotomy of you being here and there are the others, but that you start to infold the others into yourself and yourself exfolding into the others, to lose that duality which is always fearful.
You have to bring the experience home so that you’re not just losing yourself in the worldwide and going out, but that you dare to have the out become an inner experience of yourself. And it’s very much the relational space between audience and performer that there is this courage of going out there to reach them, address them, and from there you come back to yourself” (Böhler 2020).
In, to outer space…
In a recent trial teaching lecture and workshop session at the HZT, performance director Ong Keng Sen described his interest in expanding dance, and he described the dancer as a world-creator. If dancers have the capacity to create worlds then his expansive wish is that these worlds expand into spaces outside of colonized thought patterns and globalizing production models. This outer space, he describes, is one of enjoyment, but even more specific than that, as he references the political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennet (2001), one of enchantment, of ethical generosity.
Ethical generosity—enchantment, resonates as a feeling I want to experience in creation processes and performances for both myself and an audience. It resonates as a driving-force desire, a desire grounded in positive experiences inscribed in my body-memory when I felt enchantment for myself, an other, and/or a collectivity which included myself. It is a specific quality of feeling connected, perhaps like appreciation, newness, surprise, a paradoxical simultaneity between wanting and receiving. As a decolonized, outer space, it feels capable of expansion without losing an integrity of structure; its sense of being connected sustains its vitality. It feels like trusting.
I want to gaze into enchanting galaxies and live in enchanting worlds.
Bibliography
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics,
(Princeton University Press, 2001).
Böhler, Arno. “Thinking Bodies. Philosophy as Artistic Research,” (SODA 301 Intensive, MA Solo/Dance/Authorship, Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz, Berlin, 11-12.06.2019).
Böhler, Arno. (Skype conversation, 19 January 2020).
Broch-Due, Vigdis and Ystanes, Margit. “Introduction: Introducing Ethnographies of Trusting,” in Trusting and its Tribulations: Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust, ed. Vigdis Broch-Due and Margit Ystanes, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016): 8, 22.
Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986).
Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," in University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Accessed 27 January 2020. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
Franko, Mark. “The History of Dance and Hysteria,” (Theater Arts course, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2003).
Govier, Trudy. Social Trust and Human Communities, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 (1651)].
Keng Sen, Ong. (Trial Teaching Lecture for SODA Professorship, 21.1.2020).
Lahno, Bernd. “On the Emotional Character of Trust,” in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: Vol. 4, No. 2, Cultivating Emotions, (Springer, June 2001): 172-173, accessed 14 January 2020, doi: 178.0.54.46.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “On the Soul,” in Corpus, trans. Nils Hoydas and Timo Obergöker, (Zurich: diaphanes, 2014).
Stanislavski, Konstantin. An Actor Prepares, (New York: Theatre Arts, 1936).
Ziemer, Gesa. “Situational Worlds: Complicity as a Model of Collaboration,” in Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, ed. Gabriele Klein and Sandra Noeth, (Transcript Verlag, 2011): 236, 240, accessed 13 January 2020, doi: 87.123.193.90.
[1] Such ideas are informed by many sources such as various sessions with healers, the author and teacher Caroline Myss, my artistic and parapsychological mentor Ingrid Müller-Farny, and perhaps articulated most succinctly by the non-physical entity who is channeled through Esther Hicks named Abraham Hicks. There are a number of books, countless video and audio recordings, and YouTubes of Abraham Hicks teaching. Such influences will be documented in the workbook.
By Jorge De Hoyos
29.1.2020 | final-semester essay for MA SODA at HZT
Throughout the process of creating and presenting my final Masters Thesis solo-performance “Spirited” on 4-5 December 2019 at Uferstudios, the issues of trust and mistrust have been appearing and disappearing in permeating ways bridging the artistic, (inter)personal and spiritual spheres. As the contexts, temporalities, and perspectives connected to the process continue to shift and slide among each other, a network built from pathways of trusting and the cracks in need of repair continue revealing themselves in surprising ways and through different forms. A world begins to reveal itself through multiple dimensions of trusting.
What kinds of trusting and mistrusting took place that contributed to the world-making of “Spirited”? Such insights offer a vantage point to reflect on the larger relationship between trusting and world-creating: how does trusting build worlds?
For the purposes of this shorter essay though, the kind of trusting that I begin to focus on is the process of self-trust—the multi-dimensional pathways of self-trusting that allowed for the creation of the piece but also the conditional and limited scope of this self-trusting that revealed themselves as foundationally unresolved issues in the final performance. More specifically, this tension between trusting and mistrusting as related to the self can be traced in issues of my gaze as a performer. The two main issues connected to the gaze that I will examine are: what is exactly meant by this “self” that I have been trusting? and then what potential worlds can be created or not by these specific “self” understandings?
First, sketching out a framework of self-trusting…
In the introduction to Ethnographies of Trusting anthropologists Vigdis Broch-Due and Margit Ystanes reference philosopher Trudy Govier’s (1997) observation of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Together, they identify how much contemporary research on trust still acts from premises set forth by Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) where he “read humankind in himself” and made universalist arguments from the position of his own enquiring “I” (Broch-Due and Ystanes 2016: 8). What he understood by this introspection was a fundamental untrustworthiness of human nature and that humans ultimately engage in trusting an absolute sovereign power to ensure that their individual needs are met. More than his conclusions, however, the nature of the self-contained and self-affirming premise from which he draws such conclusions is what is, rather, at stake in regards to how it relates to foundational concerns in my art practice. According to Govier, Hobbes reached his conclusions by trying to assume what he, himself, would do if given someone else’s circumstances, and this is also something that I have often done as one who has primarily made solos.
Broch-Due and Ystanes argue that the epistemological premise of Hobbes is based upon a personal, Western assumption and fails to account for “how trust and mistrust are produced in actual landscapes of multiple subjectivities” (Broch-Due and Ystanes 2016: 22). They point to “classic anthropological concerns such as notions of self, intimacy, sociality, embodiment, kinship, morality and political processes” as examples of layered components that interact and evolve to form worlds much more complex than what the perspective of a Western, universalizing “I” could perceive.
Though the practice of imagining the subject positions of others helps to think expansively beyond one’s own sphere of concerns and perceptibility, in often working alone in the dance studio as I have done, the danger of assumption and limited perspective persists. This “I” remains a constant site of tension between trusting and mistrusting myself as I make work.
Having majored in Cultural Anthropology as an undergraduate, I came away very clear in the knowledge that there is no main truth that can be applied universally—such an assumption would be unaware of its own potentially power-privileged and colonizing position from which it speaks. James Clifford’s “Partial Truths” (1986) was a major takeaway for me, for example. From the fragmentation of perspectives and subject positions that his and other texts on cultural relativism pointed to, I became acutely aware of the existence of blind spots—so overwhelmingly so that I quit Anthropology after graduating. I had become too self-conscious and wary of making claims for fear of falling into the trap of speaking too universally and too blindly.
I could not trust myself, or I mistrusted trusting myself. Or, the effort required to account for all the factors that contextualize the position from which I might speak felt doomed to endless self-reflexivity. To be subjective felt taboo as it could easily be ignorant, lazy or irresponsible. Guilty feelings of privilege (i.e. male, United States, light-skinned, educated, “heteronormative-acting,” etc.) could easily undermine and twist the value of whatever it is that I would want to communicate from a position of my “self”.
Anthropology’s great lesson of self-reflexivity had thus sparked a crisis of self-trusting. As a response, I turned to dance and performance-making so as to find a realm where the subjective could have more space to act with less preemptive restriction and what felt like heavy contextual bureaucracy. To dance, create and perform required that I express boldly and unapologetically from a sense of a personal, subjective self. In a dance studio or on the stage, emotions and embodied desires were often the main grounds for communication, and this allowed me a necessary sense of freedom. The philosopher Bernd Lahno argues that trust is an emotional attitude, that “genuine trust is an emotion and emotions are, in general, not subject to direct rational control” (Lahno 2001: 172-173). Through turning to dance and its emotional dimensions, I was taking on a new way of trusting. It felt good and expansive to suspend a hyper-regulatory mindfulness that I had developed.
Continue sketching: trusting and mistrusting inner space…
At the beginning of my turn towards art, I took a study course with dance scholar Mark Franko called “The History of Dance and Hysteria” which focused heavily on the work of choreographer Pina Bausch. It introduced me to her aesthetics and creation process where she asks questions to the dancers to which they offer embodied, performative, and—which is significantly important in a discussion of “self”—personal responses. Bausch famously states that she is not so interested in how her dancers move but in what moves them. Such an interest points to an inner, subjective world. Each dancer on stage, as I have observed in live performance or on video, seems to dance from a fully-proclaimed “I”. Their individual presences reflect a sense of a subject that feels emotions, struggles, dances, enjoys, thinks, and interacts. I desired to train myself as a dancer to be capable of such strong presence and to construct theatrical work that an audience could feel connected to and relate to as fellow subjects in the world.
A major method for me to create dance, therefore, has been to excavate and cultivate my inner space. By inner space, I mean the realm of the self, or the personal world of memories, emotions, and desires as well as potential capabilities revealed through playing with Stanislavki’s “magic if” (1936). I ask myself questions similar to how Bausch questions her dancers, and I respond in solo sessions mixing approaches from Authentic Movement and Automatic Writing but through the body. I record most sessions so as to be more present as I move knowing that I can study myself on video later. Indeed, watching myself express an inner space has often evoked associations to a hysterical body—a self that is at times too expansive in its movements and simultaneously too confined in itself to articulate clear forms. Often at the beginning of a session I see this person very still and calm, and then different subjectivities seem to act out in multiple, surprising ways. It is a paradoxical “self” I observe through watching the videos; it ranges wildly from seeming extremely centered and contained to decentralized and lacking parameters. I trust this body, my “self,” despite its seeming contradictions because me, as the mover, and me, as the observer, are aligned in a similar aim. We are on the search for movement that has communicative potential that can then be shaped and composed for performance purposes.
Since beginning with this method almost ten years ago, I have been trusting in the capacity of this inner space to connect to a universal source, reflecting as a microcosm larger patterns of humankind and nature. This introspective practice stands admittedly and uncomfortably close to (and perhaps even exceeding) Hobbe’s enquiring “I” which reads humanity within himself and draws universalizing conclusions from that self-same premise (Broch-Due & Ystanes 2016). In order to become an artist though—to satisfy a desire and need to dance and make art—I had to cultivate a way of self-trusting that was responsive to critiques of oppressive and limiting constructions of self yet still maintaining a substantial grounding in an inner world—one of multiple subjectivities, yes, but still contained within a tangible idea such as a “self” that could serve a necessary anchoring and orienting function for navigating creation and performance processes.
Lawyer and scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s contribution of Intersectionality comes to mind. In her iconic article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), she complicates and expands notions of identity to reveal how some “selves” are systematically erased by the more dominant conceptions of “selves.” To illustrate, she articulates and criticizes a single-axis framework as a mode of analyses that does not account for the multidimensionality of African-American women’s experiences. Black women, in legal cases of discrimination for example, have been considered along a single-axis framing of either race or gender instead of an intersecting, multiple-axis framework that reveal how both identity constructs combine to create a totally different and unique experience: black AND female.
The tension in holding a sense of self in my work has to do with the fact of trying to juggle awareness of many intersecting factors that make up the solo subject on stage that acts and performs. How many intersecting axis can a framing of “self” hold before it loses its integrity and consistency within the given artistic situation? How many axis does it need to sustain artistic merit and hold audience attention?
The ambivalence in trusting my “self” has to do with: 1) the fact that the self is always in process, multi-dimensional and, therefore, subject to change; and 2) I worry that I haven’t researched and articulated through language enough to adequately tease out and weave together interests and influences from disparate fields of inquiry, such as the spiritual and philosophical spheres, that inform my approaches and perceptions of the self. The first issue is a matter of practical trial and error, while the second is a matter of fear and/or discerning adequate levels of knowledge, authority and preparedness.
It takes two to be ambivalent…
I spoke with my mentor, artist-philosopher Arno Böhler, in a recent Skype conversation to get his thoughts from watching an online link to my performance, “Spirited,” and to discuss his impressions in relation to the theme of trusting. The theme has been appearing and disappearing in surprising ways throughout my SODA studies.
When we first met in a 2-day seminar in June 2019, I had described my third-semester research as cultivating my intuition through dance improvisation so as to deepen my presence and to find strategies to dissolve internalized obstructions that limit my potential to improvise performance confidently. He responded by saying that it’s a matter of trusting that the archives will open. It’s a matter of trusting that the labor of preparation has already been done and that the moment of presentation is in allowing for that work to reveal itself as it unfolds on its own timing and logics in the moment (Böhler 2019).
The theme of trusting did not specifically appear again until midway through this last, fourth semester. While debriefing a week after I had finished performing “Spirited,” my artistic collaborating assistant, Ahmed El Gendy, gave feedback about a main issue he experienced in the process. He observed me as struggling with trust issues at all levels: mistrust towards him, towards which dance material to develop, in setting compositional structures, in minute practical decisions like time-management or setting out actionable tasks, etc. His observation came as a big surprise to me but for differing reasons. In one way, I felt grossly misunderstood in that I had been traversing along a personal-spiritual pathway of deep and prolonged trusting—trusting in my capabilities but also in spiritual ideas like the universal Law of Attraction and seeing the life-process as a co-creation between individuals and source energy[1]. In another way, however, I could grasp Ahmed’s perspective. From his point of view, I must have seemed extremely mistrusting of factors outside the range of my inner space where I could not control.
At one point in the process, Ahmed outlined three levels of attention: the micro, macro and the practical, or in-between. These translate as follows: The micro level can refer to basic movement research which precedes and underlies the process of shaping and composing material. The macro level would be having a sense of the larger themes and concepts—the “why” and the connection to the philosophical, political and spiritual spheres. The practical, or in-between level was where we both noticed that I tended to fixate and get stuck. This was the level of trying to structure elements and make order of the materials in space and time. The mistrust that he perceived was in my difficulty to release fixation on this level in order to take what felt like precious and scarce time to tend to the micro and macro spheres that were greatly needing of attention. He proposed (outside of the official rehearsal sessions we had planned) to have me do exploratory and improvised sketches as a way to get back to the level of somatic research so as to take a break from anxious looping around mid-level, compositional concerns. Despite internal resistance, I eventually surrendered to his proposal, and this revealed a vital expansion of insight and potential for the process. For this crucial step to have happened, I had to trust him. I had to suspend a rigidity of self-trusting—to trust outside of my “self”—in order to enter into a necessary expansion and new understanding.
From gazing ambivalently to Adventure Gazing…
In the skype conversation with Arno Böhler, I began by offering that my gaze as a performer is an observable system of action that reveals qualities and intensities of trusting and mistrusting taking place in the performance. I came to more consciously problematize the gaze after having seen the video myself and having received feedback from others. There seemed to be unresolved issues with how I see the audience, how they see me, or how we should see each other. Prepositions here matter: Am I purposely looking upon the audience? Do I look to them? Or am I not looking at them at all? Of course, all these ways of seeing were constantly interplaying throughout “Spirited,” but the question “what is my relationship to the audience?” arose, and with it, implications of unresolved issues like intentionality, orientation and trust.
He agreed with my assessment. He described me in the performance as full of confidence, strength and dancing with full commitment for myself and to the cosmos, but he was not sure of my relationship with those who had come to see my work. I explained how my art-making practice has prioritized cultivating a deep connection to a personal, inner space so as to produce material that I trust is grounded in layered human experience. A limitation that I have observed though is that my inner space commitments can be too-controlling and isolating producing a gap in communication—either I’m not understood or I haven’t properly addressed myself to a spectator. Especially if a performance situation is new or feels especially risky, I fear to make eye contact with people and the world around me. I might get lost in the gazing outwards and forget the task at hand. I may become too self-conscious in being witnessed, or I might feel unsure of discerning appropriate levels of participation and interaction that making eye contact would open up the potential for.
Trusting becomes difficult given the tension I feel between having a plan to carry out and being open for deviation. Cultural theorist Gesa Ziemer outlines such a dynamic through differentiating between a strategy and a tactic, respectively. In her chapter “Situational Worlds: Complicity as a Model of Collaboration,” she values tactics for their potential to create complicity between partners to dynamically react to contexts that arise in the moment and create new situations (Ziemer 2011: 240). “Complicity,” she states, “cultivates the accessing of twilight zones and permits informal working processes and intimacy” (Ziemer 2011: 236). Spaces of twilight zones, intimacy and informal working processes between me and an audience are worlds that I hope to cultivate through my art practice. However, building enough trust to relate at deeper, vulnerable levels of subjectivity is a formidable challenge.
Arno Böhler had some helpful insights and tips over Skype. In our first live meeting in June 2019 he had discussed Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the soul as the capacity of someone to be always outside of itself, in relation to the world (Nancy 2014). Now recently, he proposed that I reconfigure my sense of inner space as a relational space in that it has the capacity to relate to, literally, everything…
“So a space in which you are able to connect with the world. The inner space not just as being you and yourself but as the capacity also to enter into relations with trees, with animals, with human beings, the audience, with absent beings. It’s not isolating itself from the world, but it starts to see that the relations towards the world are also emerging from that space.
Nancy has a nice word. He calls it ‘becoming worldwide’. Not like the internet, but that the inner space starts to have enough space to welcome others into it and then it becomes relational. To think of it more as a dialogue and not get locked down into duality of being in or out, but that I am grounded enough to open myself to go out from here and touch them and receive back what they respond.
And it’s very nice if you go into the etymology of the word experience. It means having the courage to go out and to make an adventure. Ex means going out. Then to go through, adventure, risk. So, to have the courage to go out of yourself in order to make an experience. You go out to adventure, to meet and go in touch, and from there bring the touch back home. So that you leave that dichotomy of you being here and there are the others, but that you start to infold the others into yourself and yourself exfolding into the others, to lose that duality which is always fearful.
You have to bring the experience home so that you’re not just losing yourself in the worldwide and going out, but that you dare to have the out become an inner experience of yourself. And it’s very much the relational space between audience and performer that there is this courage of going out there to reach them, address them, and from there you come back to yourself” (Böhler 2020).
In, to outer space…
In a recent trial teaching lecture and workshop session at the HZT, performance director Ong Keng Sen described his interest in expanding dance, and he described the dancer as a world-creator. If dancers have the capacity to create worlds then his expansive wish is that these worlds expand into spaces outside of colonized thought patterns and globalizing production models. This outer space, he describes, is one of enjoyment, but even more specific than that, as he references the political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennet (2001), one of enchantment, of ethical generosity.
Ethical generosity—enchantment, resonates as a feeling I want to experience in creation processes and performances for both myself and an audience. It resonates as a driving-force desire, a desire grounded in positive experiences inscribed in my body-memory when I felt enchantment for myself, an other, and/or a collectivity which included myself. It is a specific quality of feeling connected, perhaps like appreciation, newness, surprise, a paradoxical simultaneity between wanting and receiving. As a decolonized, outer space, it feels capable of expansion without losing an integrity of structure; its sense of being connected sustains its vitality. It feels like trusting.
I want to gaze into enchanting galaxies and live in enchanting worlds.
Bibliography
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[1] Such ideas are informed by many sources such as various sessions with healers, the author and teacher Caroline Myss, my artistic and parapsychological mentor Ingrid Müller-Farny, and perhaps articulated most succinctly by the non-physical entity who is channeled through Esther Hicks named Abraham Hicks. There are a number of books, countless video and audio recordings, and YouTubes of Abraham Hicks teaching. Such influences will be documented in the workbook.
