Group rehearsal – week 2

02/06/2021 Helena and Marie

We reiterated a similar process to last week.

-1st: 15min of individual moving, attending to one’s body and attention.

-2nd: recap and enhance common knowledge on fascia.

-3rd: move again with the awareness of the knowledge gathered. How does it inform your experience? You can stop anytime to write or draw.

–4th: move with the awareness of the connective tissue between the dancers.

Outcome:

Helena: ‘Fascia is linked to proprioception: your body knows what it is doing and parts of the body have a relationship to other parts.’

Questions :What is the dancer’s body?

‘It’s an integrity structure where forces are spread out evenly, there is an intelligent compensation. The whole body is alive rather than dislocated.’

Metaphor of scar for non conductive.

‘To include someone in your kinesphere is like expanding your proprioception.’

Using shape: Connection between space and the lines of the body.

Sense of elasticity and integrity amongst us. 

‘In contact improvisation, there can be a hierarchy of attention, when there is weight bearing it becomes more structural. It can miss the attention to poetry and to the space.’ 

Question: How to keep a sense of sensitive response to the environment? 

Marie: ‘I felt a deep connection center-periphery. Not in a linear way but in infinite threads of possibilities. The drawing (hereunder) surprisingly shows similarities with the fascial  fibrous network, as chaotic patch of fibers interwoven.’

Drawing by Marie

The elasticity of space in-between.

04/06/2021 Helena, Jo, Olivia, Maya, Pete (online)

Score 1 and 2:

We carry on our practice of moving individually in the same space, gathering new knowledge: watching videos and pictures on fascia (from Strolling under the skin by Guimberteau, and Fascia by David Lesondak, 2017). Then moving together again with the awareness of the fascia between us.

Words and images we played with :

Scaffold, architecture, elastic, continuous tension, compression. The image of the ghost heart experience: a heart where only the fascia remains, which has been filled with stem cells. After a while the ghost heart grows into a heart again. This shows how much the shaping and surrounding of fascia gives information to the cells and creates an environment where the information is transmitted. 

Outcome:

The first two scores really felt like a self regulating practice as well as a group regulating practice. Where there was no forced interaction or judging, no expectation but instead a presence and a harmony that was co-created by the group. 

Harmony doesn’t feel like it is necessarily joyful or beautiful. Today the energy felt heavier. Harmony seemed to translate into balancing, grounding the energies. 

Helena mentioned that it was harmonious but not homogeneous. 

The term peripheral vision and attention was used. The interconnection feels multidirectional rather than in one direction. This in turn re-emphasised the non-forcing aspect of the relationship between the dancers and not having expectations. 

Drawing by Josephine

Came up the question of how much attention do we put into something? 

I was aware of the layers of attentions, not necessarily focused or peripheral, but a wider spectrum of layered and voluminous (in volume) attention. 

To explore next time: How the spherical fascia of the eye informs our three dimensional vision? 

Without mentioning it at the beginning, spiral and helical shapes came up few times. 

Drawing by Maya

The drawing here above is almost a representation of the fibres and the ground substance: the contrast and complementary relationship between the fibrous tensile network of fibres and fibroblasts and the jelly-like, viscous ground substance (constituting altogether the ECM, extra-cellular matrix).

Drawing by Olivia

Score 3:

We focused on the architectural aspect of fascia, the fibrous and viscoelastic aspect, the transmission of tensional and compressional forces (mechano-transduction) using elastic bands between dancers.

Outcome:

Different strategies came up to deal with keeping the continuous tension: either spiraling into the band, or stepping on it, the most common version was to reorient and reconfigure the body in relation to oneself, to the partners and to the space around. 

Most dancers felt more connected, like in a bubble, with a greater sense of responsibility for the whole than without the bands. 

The gaze was sometimes more focused, and a gaze connection between dancers happened by itself. So even though the focus could be sharper, it was not forced.

Dancing online:

Pete, the online dancer, seemed to find strategies to connect with the rest of the group. Again these strategies happened by themselves rather than forcing them or intently finding a connection.

Pete who was online was in kinesthetic empathy with the dancers playing with the elastic bands. By watching the dancers playing with the bands, he was able to feel the connections between the dancers as a more tangible experience, and could feel it in his body too.

Pete worked with compressional forces while the rest of the group experimented with continuous tensional forces: he stuck a stick between 2 different body parts. Because of the rigidity of this compression force, the rest of the body compensated and contrasted: it became malleable and fluid.