The first post of the new year…I attended and presented some of my research on intersubejectivity at a conference at the University of Exeter from 6-8 January 2006. The conference was called The Changing Body in Training and Performance. I’m just in the process of looking over my notes and have a collection of thoughts I think are worth posting. Many of these thoughts arose out of listening to the presentations of others or out of the practical workshops that I participated in…the thoughts are organised in the order in which I wrote them in my notebook so you may or may not read with a logical flow…

Thoughts and quotes from a presentation by Drew Leeder from Loyola College Maryland, USA:
“Mindscape opposed to landscape; mindscape is something that man has made from his mind, landscape comes out of nature.”

Think about what the space does to you.

“Dance privileges human exchange.”

Quotes from a presentation by Shigenori Nagatomo from Temple University Philadelphia, USA:
“We need a holistic approach in our training because we are habitalised to think that the mind dictates the body. This is not so. The relationship between the mind and the body is non-dual.”

“The term mind comes loaded with baggage. When we use the term mind we turn it into cerebral hell but we need to expand the notion of the body…” Merleau-Ponty uses the term lived-body not bodymind. We cannot divorce mind form body. “Mind is a term of achievement. Like learning. We have a higher level of this knowledge of bodymind as performers because we are trained.”

Quotes from a presentation by Pam Woods who was performing an adaptation of Deborah Hay’s work. Quotes below are from Deborah Hay but delivered by Pam Woods prior to her performance:
"As a soloist, I get to practice my relationship with all there is.”

On achieving reality: “It’s impossible but we are playing the question. The most important part of the question is: What if…”

“The seduction to be elsewhere in the performance is profound.”

These are the tid-bits of inspiration I'm playing with mentally at the moment...So, I’m due to finish the PhD this year and that means I will be making a new full-length choreographic work. I’ve increasingly become interested in improvisation to start to chip away at this mind-body problem…in order to begin to see the dancer as an individual…
I’ve recently made a 15 minute piece of work based on an improvised structure on the student dance company based at Roehampton University. Have a look at their website: www.3rdrow.co.uk. I’ll get some photos up of the work soon!