2021
[Fig.1]
Published in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, edited by Independent Dance and Movement Training, Volume 12, Issue 2, June 2021
ISSN: 1944-3927
[BEGINNING]
Three years ago, I began a collaborative project, entitled Blackbird
(2018), with dance-artist Katye Coe and filmmaker Charlie Cattrall. The
premise was to create a dance work that explores the single dancer, She,
embodying the power of her voice and limbs, and the voice and limbs of her
kindred blackbird. The questions we asked ourselves as we sat in a dance-studio
were: How can we embody the invisible relations between human and animal?
How can one body perform the flock of many? How can Stefan’s voice, Katye’s
movement and Charlie’s camera create a dance?
We spent time in fields and abandoned marshlands of the British West
Midlands, home to the local blackbirds of the area. We listened to their
singing at different times of day and we sat in silence where they slumbered.
We walked into woodlands and swam down-river and drifted from one agenda to
another. We found scores for animistic dancing in Ted Andrews’ seminal book Animal
Speak (Andrews 1993) and used them to practice transfiguration. Katye would dance and
speak her dancing, Charlie would film the dancing, and I would echo Katye’s
words, sounds and movements while guiding her somatically and
phenomenologically. Through my own choreographic mirroring of Katye’s somatic
exploration, I would closely follow her felt-bodily stance as she travelled
into the out-of-body realm, attempting to connect with the blackbird. In naming
how she was feeling whilst moving, she would send me a lifeline to stay grounded
in the physical world. In repeating her words, movements and sounds back to
her, I would keep the portal between the here and there open. We both needed to
be in continuous movement, conversation and relation, otherwise the connection
would sever. Charlie would capture these fleeting moments, these spiraling
dances and songs onto camera, our carrier bag of memories of animistic dancing
now archived in a virtual hinterland. In hindsight I would describe the dance
practice that we were developing as one that follows Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction, a container of sensibilities and prompts, a library
of somatic tools and exercises that could be invoked in a non-linear manner. I
hope to offer some of these tools to you, reader, by asking questions in
parallel to this recounting. I invite you to use these questions as prompts to
explore your own somatic landscape and internal weathering and worlding.
How can you explore the edge where a tree
meets the ground, the edge where you end, and the landscape begins? Hold the
tree where the animal sleeps and then hold the earth that supports the soles of
your feet. Hold the bird that has lost its wings.
Setting oneself the imaginative task of becoming a blackbird seemed
to shift something in our nervous systems, bringing our perception of gravity,
speed and orientation to the surface of our choreographic experience, as well
as our embodied and projected tolerance for sensations belonging to that which
is not human.
What would it be like if you touched into
the edges of your capacity to tolerate interpersonal and interspecies
difficulties? What would it be like to hold your judgement as well as your
ability to discern, to hold others’ experiences within your own embodied
nervous system, to hold empathy for yourself in the movement of dissonance? If
in company, can you hold one another’s dancing as well as holding each other?
This choreographic learning is one that happens through
collaboration and the implementation of another practice called Somatic
Experiencing® (P. A. Levine). This latter is more commonly used as a form of trauma-therapy that
attempts to create conditions and spaces of safety where a body can express its
story through sequences of sensations. SE® aligns itself closely with older
earthly practices of soul-retrieval, helping individuals find pockets of
energetic life-force that had got frozen in the body’s memory field when that
body's nervous system got overwhelmed with something traumatic. Energy that
gets stuck in the body can fester until it forms into a spiritual wound over
time, or sometimes referred to as a soul wound (Menakem 2017). In the therapy, the person is invited to track sensations within
the body, noticing and naming what surfaces when asked: What is happening in
your body right now? What do you notice in your body? What wants to happen
next?
In this project, we combined our phenomenological ability to sense
into spaces, histories and the fields that surrounded us, coupled with an
awareness to track our bodily sensations while in movement. We sought for
healing through movement. Healing in this instance means feeling that you are
in the right place and of the right size, that there is a balance of give and
take and that every next physical movement led to a stance that could sensationally
be perceived as better and not worse. This choreographic learning was defined
by the delicate edge between the spiritual and the danceable, that is, a
generative and creative space where the personal could be used to access the
otherworldly, and where the artistic/choreographic could become a methodology
for healing the relationship between human and the other.
How might you hold love for the inanimate
that lives on within you?
Dr. Peter A. Levine, the founder of SE®, describes trauma as a
vortex formed in the side of a riverbank that has been struck by lightning.
Every one of these vortex pools has an equal and opposite counter-vortex that
forms within the river itself by the laws of physics, or as he calls them, the
healing vortices. Sometimes we will hear the siren’s call and want to dive
straight down into either of these swirling pools, to submerge ourselves in the
depths of our pain or pleasure. We can do this unconsciously until we
dissociate to another realm. At that point the magnitude, weight, and impact of
those feelings may well have overwhelmed our body’s ability to tolerate
sensation. Interestingly enough this metaphor stems from years of observing the
ways in which both reptilian and mammalian animals react to danger, especially
their physiological reactions when entering into states of fight, flight and
freeze.
The knowledge of these animalistic orienting responses guided us in
the way we understood the blackbird, the ways in which we attempted to expose
our singular and collective nervous systems in the habitat of the bird. In
becoming a bird, we had to configure our orientation response to sound, touch,
sight, smell and a deeper somatic stance of what it means to resonate with
another species.
This is where we introduced the SE® technique of pendulation, the
act of swaying between the two vortices, physically and somatically (P. A. Levine 2010). You take a bit of activating material, you track it, you ask it
where it wants to move to, and you attempt to discharge it, returning then to
the resourceful place, the out-breath that allows you to drop a level
energetically. The next time you visit that memory or sensation, and if you’re
feeling it is safe and you’re ready, you might climb a step lower into the
trauma-vortex, trying to discharge a bit more of what remains stuck. It’s a bit
like peeling layers off an onion, with care and consideration, at just the
right pace.
To work somatically in our case meant to fully embody the sensations
that arose in the process of embodying the blackbird, and then sit with those
sensations and allow ourselves to move through them.
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[Fig. 2]
My research has shown that it is the ability to tolerate both pain
and pleasure which can lead to the autonomic nervous system restoring its own
balance. That means to have a nervous system that is able to self-regulate and
have a healthy orienting response when needing to fight, flee, freeze or be in
social engagement. Rather than simply speaking of this pendulation in
therapeutic jargon, what we explored in Blackbird was moving, speaking
and sensing the choreographic journey from one vortex to the other. We
attempted to first learn from the animal, and then learn from our own bodies.
What emerged was a collective form of storytelling through dancing upon the
peaks and troughs of a sin-curve, embodying what it means to seek shelter, to
fly away, to play dead and to discharge. We made ourselves at home in a woodland
meadow in Kenilworth, depicted in the last photograph, a place we would keep
returning to practice this choreographic learning and practice making
sanctuary with the blackbird (Akomolafe 2020).
The edge of disciplines is an edge that I
want to draw your attention to. It is the physical edge of the spaces where
dancing and other practices takes place. It is also the meta-edge of our
conscious awareness as it extends into those dancing bodies other than our own.
It is also the edge between a spiritual and an artistic intention that we set
when we decide to dance. To hold that edge means to hold the capacity to be in
multiple places at once, to hold information both in the neocortex and all
throughout our Vagus Nerve, that is in places such as the belly, the heart and
the lungs. This is the edge where you can learn how to build tolerance for that
which does not belong to you, as you dance the story of another, sentient or
otherwise.
This specific form of movement, combining animism with
nervous-system tracking is a practice that can emerge in a space where the
participants share a desire to move into something or somewhere, intosome shape, form or intent. It is movement that emerges out of necessity and
intention, and within itself holds multiple biases and subjectivities: the
fleeting, the random, the awkward, the tender, the nonverbal, the inarticulate
and the ugly. It can stop all of a sudden, it can go on for hours and in one
form of another it is labor that is paid. My contribution to this journal
edition is one of choreographic knowledge-making that happens through practice.
These reflections stem from several years of exploring how the Vagus Nerve aids
us in moving in and out of the embodied, and how one can use that practice in
different forms of spaces and semiotics. In our project, Blackbird (2018),
our main ambition was to explore animal-human relationships through
choreographic-therapeutic modalities. In this way we tested whether our dancing
had any effect on our ability to practice affect, resonance and empathy with
the blackbird and with any other animals we found in our immediate vicinity.
I leave you with a score on the facing page that you may interpret
and use as you please. It is a drawn score that you can follow so that you too
can develop your animal-speak. This score is intended as an interruption to
your daily cycle, a digression that may interrupt the verbal and the articulate.
I invite you to decide on a clear beginning and allow the ending to be felt,
and everything in-between are prompts for your delight. Remember that the map
is seldom the territory.
Find
a clearing in the woods and decide on an animal that you want to make contact
with.
Surround
yourself with trees and decide how big your Field is, that is your container
and capacity today.
Sense
into the life of this creature, its daily cycle, its needs and desires, its
predators, its preys and its friends.
Begin
to move in a clockwise direction along the outer edge of your Field. Circle it
three times.
Now
begin to spiral towards the center of your field and then pause.
Begin
to visualize the transformation of your body from human to animal.
Begin
the transformation, starting with the soles of your feet, all the way to the
top of your crown.
Sense.
Dance. Scream. Sing. Track. Embody. Cry. Laugh. Keep on going until you feel
you are done.
Reverse
your transformation and then begin to spiral outwards to the outer edge of your
Field once more.
Circle
your way out of your Field three times and exit a different way than the one through
which you arrived.
Keep
on moving and do not look back.
[END]
Acknowledgements
The project
described in this essai, Blackbird (2018), was created in collaboration
with Katye Coe and Charlie Cattrall. The initial research and development (August
2018) was supported with funding by Culture Hub Birmingham. My translating of
that research into written form was supported by the Society for Dance Research
under the Ivor Guest Research Grant (December 2020).
Images Cited
Fig. 1, Blackbird. Rehearsals filmed in August 2018,
featuring Katye Coe, Charlie Cattrall & Stefan Jovanović performing in
Kenilworth Common. Filmed and edited by Charlie Cattrall. ãStudio Stefan Jovanović, Katye Coe, Charlie Cattrall.
Fig. 2, A Score for Animals. January 2021, drawn
by Stefan Jovanović, interpreted from writings from Animal Speak (Andrews
1993). Studio Stefan Jovanović.
Works Cited:
Akomolafe, Bayo. 2020. “I, Coronavirus. Mother.
Monster. Activist.” Scribd. 2020.
https://www.scribd.com/document/466902311/I-Coronavirus-Mother-Monster-Activist-by-Bayo-Akomolafe.
Andrews, Ted. 1993. Animal
Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small.
Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Worldwide.
Levine, Peter. n.d.
“Trauma Healing.” Somatic Experiencing - Continuing Education.
https://traumahealing.org/.
Levine, Peter A. 2010. In
an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness.
North Atlantic Books.
Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My
Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts
and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.
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