We don’t need to be literally touching to be in contact with the world and each other: light touch our retina, smell touch captors in our nose, sounds touch our hear drum, so one can say that all the senses — touch, hearing, smell, taste, and vision—are ultimately tactile. Thus the world is constantly touching-affecting-composing us, as we are touching- affecting-composing it in return, to the point that one can question whether the dichotomy between body and environment, inside and outside, the other and me, really exists.
Composing the body-ies, composing the space’s observatory will be an opportunity to experience the relationship between perception, imagination and composition. Listening to sensations will be the core of our practice, not as a means for gaining or capitalizing knowledge, techniques or tricks, but as a means for staying available to present circumstances and composing with local conditions/presences.
Each session will articulate movement explorations and compositional games inspired by Tuning Score, a collective compositional practice developed by the American dance artist Lisa Nelson. It will borrow and adapt warm ups that activate attention, perception and body systems. We will practice the compositional games indoor and outdoor. Players will cycle back and forth from being in action and being in observation. This change of perspective will afford them to receive direct feedback from their actions. They will use an operating terminology coming from choreographic and editing practices to act directly on the composition arising (begin, enter, exit, pause, repeat, sustain, reverse, replace, redirect, end…) They will collectively tune the space in order to compose an experience that makes sense for them. The collective attention will support the emergence of poetic spaces where duality between doing and watching, inside and outside, the other and me might temporarily vanish.
More info about Lisa Nelson and Tuning Score: Conversation in Vermont: Lisa Nelson