From choreo-singularity to choreo-anatomy: dancing the body-score of Becoming
Laure Potrovic
To Cite this Article
Potrovic, L. (2019). From choreo-singularity to choreo-anatomy: dancing the body-score of Becoming. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e, 5.
The first concept I want to base my paper on is Artaud’s concept of BwO (Body without Organs or the one that is being formless, unordered, transformative and always in a state of metamorphoses as opposed to the stratification and organization of static being). According to Artaud: “When you will have made him a body without organs / then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions / and restored him to his true freedom” (Artaud, 1976: 571). Through the concept of Body without Organs I want to explore the onto-hetero-genesis of performer’s body or its becoming of divergent entities. Drawing on Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of individuation, every individual body is immanent to the system of its own individuation. Therefore, the first step of this paper would be the re-conceptualisation of the moving body as a continuously self-individuating system, as opposed to the already individualised one. From that point of view, we can re-define an individual moving body, with its biological, anatomical and sensory structures, not as a pre-given performing entity but as only a phase in its continuous becoming.
Body without Organs is not defined in terms of forms, organs, or functions, but kinetically, in terms of an infinite number of particles in relations of motion and rest, and dynamically, in terms of the capacity for affecting and being affected, “as an intensive determination” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1983: 123–4). In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s s reading of Artaud, Body without Organs is that which involves the confrontation with the limit(s) of subjectivity, stratification, and the organism; that which unifies fragmented organs or parts of the body to produce an indeterminate organ or unactualized organs, rather than unifying those fragmented parts such that they form an organism with a predetermined functions. The result of an experimentation of the body that undoes the organic association that organs have with one another or with their predetermining functions is the condition for new physical associations and functions. More precisely, Body without Organs does not lack organs, it lacks the organism or the particular organization of the organs. It is defined by the indeterminate organs, whereas the organism is defined by determinate organs. Body without Organs follows the line of disengaging of the organs from the organism in favor of their indefinite or contingent determination as intensities. It is founded on an embryological conception of the body which recognizes only dynamic and kinetic, but not formal differences, as well as synthetic functioning of the organs or parts of a body such that they are appropriated to compose, relay, or direct flows that exceed or transverse the body itself. Body without Organs is (in) a state of quantitative and qualitative flux. Organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced – flows, thresholds, and gradients: “A stomach, an eye, a mouth: the indefinite article […] expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference (Deleuze; Guattari, 1983: 182, 164). The BwO is the egg. […] you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. You never reach the Body without organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1983: 166, 150). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Body without Organs is an intense and intensive body; as previosly mentioned, it does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Therefore, orientations, axes, speeds and rhythms become primary to the organization and structure of any body.
Throughout his writings, Deleuze returns frequently to a remark by Spinoza that we do not yet know “what a body can and cannot do”, and hence, we do not know the extent of the body’s capabilities. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Deleuze points out how Spinoza defines the body in two ways: in terms of relations of slowness and speed between an infinite number of particles; and in terms of a body’s capacities for affecting and being affected. By characterizing the body in terms of differential speeds, Spinoza emphasizes the body’s participation in a single plane of immanence, a dimension of rhythms, movements, pauses, accelerations and decelerations, in which each body’s form and function emerge as secondary products of kinetic relations among particles. By approaching the body in terms of its capacities of affecting and being affected, Spinoza imbues the plane of immanence with a pervasive affectivity generated through interactions among multiple forces: “In short, if we are Spinozists, we will define something neither by its shape, nor by its organs or its functions, neither as a substance nor as a subject. To borrow medieval terms, or geographical ones, we will define it by longitude and latitude. A body can be anything; it can be an animal, an acoustic body, a soul, or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity. We call longitude of any given body the ensemble of relations of speed and slowness, of rest and movement, between particles that constitute it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the ensemble of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force to exist, capacity to be affected). Thus we establish the cartography of a body. The ensemble of longitudes and latitudes constitutes Nature, the plane of immanence or of consistency, always variable and never ceasing to be altered, constituted, reconstituted, by individuals and collectivities” (Deleuze, 1988: 142). Performer’s body is a multitude of different modes of becoming the body itself on a plane of immanence. The plane of immanence constitutes itself within the plane of assembling rather than organizing. Instead of shape, organs or functions, we bodily experience the relations of speed and slowness in-between the smallest particles of unformed organs, as well as organisms. The plane of immanence of performer’s body constitutes itself between the dynamic affective charges of movement and stillness.
The second concept I would like to discuss is the concept of a body-score. The body itself can be perceived and performed as a score, body-score, or that which sets up its own relational modes of becoming a body. The body organizes itself through moving and developing each of its organs as nonanthropomorphic, as well as polymorphic thinking tools, therefore, each organ becomes temporal, self-organizing tool-technique. Furthermore, body as a score is not a system of organs, but a system of relations (and relational becomings of organs, as well as the body itself). Therefore, body is a relational score – producing itself in and through moving. Performer’s body is not that which embodies a certain technique, but the body itself becomes its own singular tehnique; tehnique emerges through the exploration of an individual body, internally, and it is not imposed onto the body, externally. That is the moment when the body starts to direct, choreograph and perform itself – as Bodying. In Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience Erin Manning and Brian Massumi define bodying as “thinking in movement, most intensely and alive, through movement extracted from action: “Subtract” the action, Forsythe tells his dancers (2011, Nov. 17). “We start out with a process and try to collapse it,” he continues (2011, Nov. 23). Collapse movement back into itself. Subtract the general meaning from it. Undo it of its preestablished adaptations. Return it to its gestural nexus. Give it a more complex logic. Point-field it. Don’t chain positions, chain sensations. Return the making of movement to the immediacy of its feeling. In that feeling, a different, more intense, utterly singular thinking will occur. Where the body is most immediately thinking-movement is not in the unfolding of body schema. It is in its folding back into itself, back into the dynamic nexus of its native gestural element. Not unfolding, but infolding. A body is that which folds” (Forsythe 2008). Movement’s folding in on itself is not something the body does. It is what bodying is. Movement embodies only itself. Movement’s making is corporeogenic: becoming-body” (Manning; Massumi, 2014: 50). William Forsythe has developed an approach of using skin surface as an organ of proprioception. The dancers are asked to activate their bodies through their skin, making the skin what Deleuze would call the surface of recording of the event: “Put the activation into every part. Think about where the movement starts and stops. If you raise your arm, where does your skin stretch? Activate the skin. Get feedback from the skin. Go further if it tells you something. What you feel is what you know. Look for the chain of sensations rather than the chain of positions” (Manning; Massumi, 2014: 50). Through the act of chaining the sensations instead of positions it is possible to rethink the idea of the composition of a moving body. How can we think about the sensation as a new type of composition, composition-in-making? Sensing as simultaneous process of composing, decomposing and co-composing? How is sensing changing the anatomy of movement and how is moving changing the anatomy of sense? Is sense the nucleus, as well as the skin of movement? Within the idea of a body-score every organ is producing itself in sensing and moving its relational force-field of becoming.
According to Deleuze, a body can become anything as long as it is considered in terms of its set of relations and affects. The capacity to affect and to be affected is what constitutes the singularity of performer’s body. Affects are also closely related to the question of what a body can become and what a body is capable of. Affects are becomings. Singularity of performer’s body can be therefore understood as a capacity of the body to enter the relation, affect and be affected, move and be moved, a capacity to become. To become is to participate in movement, vibrations, thresholds; beings (mineral, vegetal, animal and human) are distinguished only by thresholds, vibrations: “there are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure – lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine – woman-becoming which is neither man nor woman, animal-becoming which is neither beast nor man, becomings are exactly that, producing the line and not the point. (Deleuze, Guattari, 1988: 26)”. Choreo-singularity is a singularity of the body which emerges from and in moving, a capacity of the becoming-body in movement, a capacity of bodying in movement. Dancing the body itself includes the relation towards organs as relational techniques, and it provides an exploration of performativity and possibility of developing new dancing organs through moving. Another step of this paper is to explore the experience-dependent transformation of organs and if a particular organ is being changed by the experience of moving and how. According to Diderot, the consciousness is the product of moving and anatomy is the product of consciousness. Choreo-anatomy as relational anatomy studies the possibility of dancing our own organs, instead of dancing with them, as well as dancing our entire body instead of dancing with it (for example, hand is not a hand, but a potential of a hand, moving is a process of exploring the potential of its becoming). Choreo-anatomy is also addressing the process of producing a new body through movement. Entering a body is entering a relation, therefore, anatomy becomes danced; body itself becomes danced in relation with the other too, as a body-with. According to Souriau, “modes of existence are always plural and relational; existence can be found not only in beings, but between them” (Souriau, 2009: 16). Following Souriau, modes of existence are intermodal. Bodying as a mode of existence is also intermodal or that which is not already constituted, but coming-to-existence through singular events as body-in-making. Anatomy is not only intermodal, it is also plural in relation to itself, containing the other as a compositional feature of its own becoming. Is it possible to think about the anatomy of a moving body as an ongoing knotting of intermodal vibrations? How do we distinguish an exterior anatomy of materials, an interior anatomy of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary anatomy of membranes and limits, and an annexed anatomy of energy sources and actions-perceptions? Is the notion of the anatomy unitary or does a body continually pass from one anatomy to another, do the anatomies pass into one another, as relational anatomies, bodying the line and not the point, and how?
What also matters is how an individual body is being composed, because composition is an act of entering the relation, as well as sensation. According to Deleuze, a body’s structure is the composition of its relations. What a body can do (and what it can become) corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected. Affects are not only transitions between states of the body, but also a passage or transitions between different bodies. In that context, we can explore performer’s body as a composition of capacities for affecting and being affected, as well as a composition of continual becomings that compose different (potential) bodies within one body, and different anatomies within one anatomy. This paper also puts into relation anatomy and dance, movement and molecular memory, in an attempt to investigate the molecular memory, not as a pattern, but as a score, score for dancing organs and body itself. How can we think about the molecules as scores for dancing the molecules themselves? Within the idea of choreo-anatomy moving itself becomes a score for the anatomy; moving is no longer conditioned by the anatomy, but moving itself creates performer’s new anatomy: “every part of the body is a knot of different potential stretches and retractions radiating from that point as “so many vectors” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). So many lines of movement, potentially passing through each point. Each starting point of movement holds these potential passings through in itself, together in their difference from each other. The move is less a point than a vectorial gestural nexus: a differential, dynamic knot of potential variations on itself. A milieu of movement potential synthetically including an infinity of disjunctions. The dancers are instructed to “take the movement as far as it will go. In Forsythe’s vocabulary: transport the line, curve the motion, reorient and follow until your movement reaches a point where it can no longer develop. Capture the intensity! Redirect it, or let it go. Field residual movement. Prolong it! Extrude it! Fold it! Feel how it populates the interval. Use torsion to reclaim this residual movement, create a multiplicity. Play with what’s left over, share it. (Manning; Massumi, 2014: 26, 35)”. Movement anatomy becomes performer’s second anatomy or anatomy in Becoming. Moving itself becomes the context for creating the conditions for all possible becomings: “becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming and through which one becomes” (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987: 272). Becoming indicates being in the zone of flow, it indicates the movement in which all particles are retracted when they enter the zone. More precisely, when two or more types of particles enter the zone of flow, singular relations of movement and stillness create a new body and its new anatomies. If every part of a body is a knot of dynamical and kinetic potentiality then the way we choose to dance the knot is also the way we are being danced by it.
Experiential Anatomy
Experiential anatomy is as an embodied approach to anatomy developed by dancers and movement specialists such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Experiential anatomy focuses on different aspects of our skeletal structure and through detailed anatomical exploration, touch and exercises, it makes dancers develop an embodied awareness of the intrinsic anatomy of an area to positively affect their use, functioning and mobility. Dancers are not portraying, but experiencing their corporal systems through the approach of experiential anatomy which is based on finding the free and effective flow of movement using the system embodiment.
Body-Mind Centering (BMC) is an approach to experiencing the living anatomy and a specific method of movement analysis. It is based on bodying the anatomical and developmental movement principles. BMC explores early developmental movement states and their relationship to the inner support and movement of the breath, organs and skeleton, as well as movement of the body’s fluid systems (blood, cerebrospinal, interstitial, synovial, lymph, cellular) to access new specificity in movement qualities and expressions. By applying the BMC principles it is possible to retrain not only the body-mind system, but also the proprioceptive neuromuscular perception, as well as the movement schemes finding new sources of research of the movement. Here is an example of how Body-Mind Centering practicioners work: “let’s start with an arterial rhythm, feel the weight of the blood in your peripheries connecting to the earth, follow the pulse … now add some venous flow, find the rebound, the cyclic return of the blood to the heart … now drop the arterial and add some csf (cerebrospinal fluid) to the venous, your mass is becoming more diffuse, sensing the environment, your nerves are being magnetized, suspended in time and space … and let’s take out the venous… and add some lymph for more spatial tension, specificity and detail, where are your boundaries? … and drop the csf (cerebrospinal fluid) now and let’s bring in some synovial, fluid of the skeletal system, find the spaces between the bones, freedom, jiggle it, throw it away … and now shift to interstitial, that juicy sponginess in your muscles and fascia, thick ocean connecting all the cells … and let’s come back to simply rest and breathe in the cellular fluid, just being present as you are”. That was an example of dancing through the fluids, but also the fluids themselves, because experiencing the fluid, reimagining it physically, is also an act or moving, transforming and reorganizing it. BMC focuses on bodying the line of experience of different body systems and therefore creating the experiential anatomy. Experience first occurs on the cellular level. The nervous system records the experience and organizes it into patterns. Following the given experience it modifies the pattern by integrating it with the patterns of other experiences. Once knowing the experience, the nervous system becomes a primary controlling system of the body. The questions that raises here is how to repattern the cellular level of an experience, as well as the experiential anatomy, through moving? What is physicallity of imagination doing to the physicallity of a moving body? Where does the physicality of imagination end and the physicality of a body begin? When is functional anatomy being changed by the experiential anatomy and how?
Body-Mind Centering approach to creating the experiential anatomy consists of:
– embodying the nervous system with a focus on: the somatic nervous system; the autonomic nervous system; sitting in the synapase, nerve reversal and healing; front, middle, and back bodies; releasing the brachial plexus and lumbosacral plexes; and embryology of the nervous system;
– embodying the organ system with a focus on: explorations of the organs; releasing adhesions between organs; initiating breath, voice, movement and touch from the organs; analyzing imbalances in individual organs; techniques to balance the organs; and the embryological development of the organs;
– embodying the fluid system with a focus on: cellular fluid, transitional fluid, extracellular fluid; fluid – membrane balance; blood; cerebrospinal fluid (CSF); synovial fluid; periorgan fluid; lymph; interstitial and cellular fluids; bone marrow; exploring the immune system through the fluids; fascia; fat; and ground fluid;
– embodying the bones and joints of the upper limbs from the hands to the shoulder girdle and ribs, with a focus on the bones of the hands, ulnar disk, radius and ulna, elbow, humerus, windmill action of the scapula, freeing the rubs, finger relationships to shoulder girdle and ribs and working with the layers of bone;
– embodying the bones and joints of the axial skeleton (central core): the spine and skull, with a focus on the six curves of the spine, the skull, hyoid bone, thoracic and pelvic diaphragms, relationship of the pelvic halves and legs, the embryological development of the axial skeleton;
– embodying the bones and joints of the lower limbs from the feet to the pelvic halves, with a focus on the foot, ankle, foreleg, knee, femur, hip, pelvic half and the embryological development of the lower limbs;
– embodying the ligamentous system with a focus on: explorations of the ligaments; finding the spiraling action of ligaments; ligaments of the hands, forearms, and elbows; ligaments of the shoulders and shoulder girdles; ligaments of the ribs and spine; ligaments of the pelvis and hips; ligaments of the knees, forelegs, and feet; differentiating flesh and bone; and the embryological development of the ligaments;
– embodying the endocrine system with a focus on: initiating breath, voice, movement and touch from the glands; relationship of the glands to the skeletal structures, reflex points and spinal energy centers; and techniques for integrating and balancing the gland, including the perineal body, coccygeal body, gonads, adrenals, pancreas, thoracobody, heart body, thymus, thyroid, parathyroids, carotid bodies, pineal, mamillary bodies and pituitary.
How does it feel to enter the relation of bodying the line of our own bones and joints in order to discover their features that redetermine our movements? How does a thinking body react when it gets to the deeper experience of the skeletal system? How many skeletal systems does a thinking-feeling body have? Where does a functional skeletal system end and an experiential one begin? Which is the effect that the reorganization of our bones, thoughts, and skeletal system has on our body? What are our points of entry? When are we “in” and when are we “out”? What are the boudaries of our body; where does our body begin and where does it end? How many bodies; how many anatomies does a performer have?
Anatomy of Attunement
Anatomy of attunement is as an embodied approach to anatomy developed by dance and movement specialists such as Moshé Feldenkrais and Lisa Nelson. Moshé Feldenkrais is the founder of the Feldenkrais Method and Lisa Nelson is the founder of the Tuning Scores, an approach to spontaneous composition and performance.
The Feldenkrais Method is a neuromuscular re-education approach, and Tuning Scores are a set of compositional and improvisational structures. Even though the two approaches differ in function, they share essential traits. Feldenkrais and Tuning Scores both use perceptual research to help practitioners learn about their own physical tendencies through movement. They both show the ways practicioners compose experience through the action of tuning. By practicing these two approaches, one develops tools to recognize the details of physicality and the structures that underlie it. Both Feldenkrais Method and Tuning Scores offer skills and a context to invoke a permeable state of attunement. Permeability is a specific physical state, referring to an interaction through surfaces or fields. The phenomenon of permeability defines an engagement between the whole sense of self and the environment within which a body is situated. When being permeable, a moving body is being available to the current situation, rather than being fixed in habitual patterns of action; it is in the state of attunement as well as its anatomical structure, composition and organization. Furthermore, Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores address the question of how we compose perception through action; in other words, we learn how what we see is inextricably linked to how we see it, through our multisensorial layers of observation. Tuning Scores explore the composition of the body through the organization of its biological matter (skin, bones, muscles, eyes, brain, water) and its experience. Does the framework of Tuning Scores offer the possibility to study experiential organs as well as experience-dependent transformation of organs; is the action of tuning also the action of creating the shared body, as well as shared organs? Does the action of tuning create new sets of organs?
Some of the entry points of an exploration of the anatomy of attunement are:
– tuning practices as maps to follow with feedback systems to help one observe one’s patterns, processes, and strategies for becoming physicalized, present and available to move;
– tuning practices as tools for creating ongoing, spontaneous composition and co-composition;
– tuning practices as tools for studying how a body composition arises and how one intentionally and attentionally tunes into it;
– tuning practices as tools for sensorial texturing and tuning into the experiential anatomy.
Lisa Nelson considers a body as the container, as well as the environment of the imagination, therefore, Tuning Scores become tools for exploring the physical base of imagination of a moving body: “The Tuning Scores provoke spontaneous compositions that make evident how we sense and make sense of movement, exposing our opinions about space, time, action, and desire, and provide a framework for communication and feedback amongst the players. The scores draw from genetic and acquired skills of survival: how we look at things, what we “need to know,” the perceptual process of editing spontaneously in order to make meaning out of any moment. With the scores, we play with our desire to compose experience, to make our imaginations visible, to develop a sense of ensemble, and to transform our movement into dancing” (Nelson, http://sarma.be/docs/3280). Except playing with their desire to compose experience, moving bodies are also composing themselves as an experience: “For Stern affective attunement is key to interpersonal becoming. Affective attunement is another mode of immanent relation where the relation radically precedes the purported unity of the self. Attunement is a merging-with, it is not a feeling-of, but a feeling-with. In affective attunement, a relational merging occurs that creates a dephasing of vitality affects around new affective contours. This dephasing is as much a shift in process as shift in level” (Manning, 2012: 46). This experience evokes what Simondon calls a transduction, a redistribution of processes in the making, irreducible to the poles of the event. It emerges in the interval of two (or more) moving bodies, leading towards the creation of a body-with. The interval creates an opening through which a body-with emerges: “Then your body would take over and dance at that point where you had no more idea. I see that as an idealized form of dancing: just not knowing and letting the body dance you around” (Forsythe, 2003: 26). 21 Letting our body “dance us around” is letting the body dance itself, in and as the phase of the line of bodying. If we consider movement as a force that precedes an organized body, bodying becomes a line of compressing movements in physical entities. How is it possible to think about the bodying as a technique that is not technical, but temporal, sensing, becoming?
Dancing Fascia
Fascia is the body-wide network of connective tissue that forms pockets, tubes, slings and straps that contain all the other body tissues. The large proportion of fascia is a type of liquid crystal, a water, so when we move in specific ways, water is squeezed back into the tissues. Fascia is nowadays understood as a major player in the capacity for body awareness. It is a sensory organ because the elasticity of fascia gives it the capacity to store and rebound kinetic energy (like a rubber band). Invented by Ida Rolf, rolfing or Structural Integration is a form of deep-tissue bodywork that reorganizes the connective tissues through release and realignment. This improves the range of motion, flexibility, posture and bone structure. Rolfing helps break down calcification in the connective tissue and fascia. The main goal of rolfing is to organize a person’s body structure in relation to gravity. According to Rolf: “Fascia is the organ of posture. Nobody ever says this; all the talk is about muscles. Yet this is a very important concept and because this is so important, as we must understand both the anatomy and physiology, but especially the anatomy of fascia. The body is a web of fascia. We can trace the lines of that web to get an understanding of how what we see in the body works. For example, why, when we work with the superficial fascia does this change the tone of the fascia as a whole?” (Rolf, http://rolfresearchfoundation.org/about – Accessed March 28, 2016).
There is another practice exploring the liquidity of fascia, so called fascial remodelling. A unique characteristic of fascia as a connective tissue is its adaptability: when regularly put under increasing physiological strain, it changes its architectural properties to meet the demand. For example, through our everyday biped locomotion the fascia on the lateral side of the thigh develops a palpable firmness. If we were to instead spend that same amount of time with our legs straddling a horse, then the opposite would happen, after a few months the fascia on the inner side of the legs would become more developed and strong. How do we become aware of the web of fascia throughout our bodies and how do we dance through our perceptual systems? Is it possible to think about the fascia as a body diagram or a diagrammatic map? In Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, diagram is a mode of transmission or distribution of singularities. It is determined by its infinite movements or infinite modes of actualization. Diagrammatic nature of fascia reveals itself through its infinite modes of spatialization. Fascial remodelling is opening up a diagrammatic space of possibilities that defines what a body is capable of. Following its topology of potential, how is it possible to think about the diagrammatic anatomy of fascia? If we think about the fascia as our environment – we dance from it, we dance it, and it dances us; we become through it and it becomes through us. We are active constructors of our anatomy. Our body is out integrated tool-technique of dancing our own anatomy.
Dancing the Body Fluids
Within this paper I would also like to explore the idea of a body-flow at the micro level. To be more precise, I am planning to explore the fluidity of different types of body material, such as blood, saliva and skin. Within that research, I would be interested in discovering how a particular body material (blood, saliva or skin) is being changed over the course of time in terms of its movement and composition. Experience-dependent, as well as time-dependent transformation of body material is a potential source for rediscovering the perceptible, as well as imperceptible fluidity of a human body. Making the imperceptible levels of a body-flow perceptible is also opening the question of bodying, body-in-making and multiplicity.
Furthermore, I would like to explore the subject of body tissues and their dynamic fluidity. One of the most interesting body fluids, as well as body fluid compartments, are membranes. In physics and chemistry of colloids, a membrane is considered as a fluid. A colloid is a fluid dispersed in a fluid and that which has various properties and structures. Semi-permeable, as well as permeable membranes have a liquid structure that is reorganizing all the time. Membranes are heterogeneous and have more or less rapidly moving regions. At the cell level, membranes are very fast, moving all the time. In the article Dancing through the Transitional Fluid Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen addresses the question of membranes, as well as the distinction between yielding and collapse: “everyone has a different fluid-membrane balance (in the cells) – a basic constitutional preference that also varies from day to day. Many people don’t know how to maintain balance. Balancing involves flow toward the earth and/or space, flow coming back to self, and transitional fluid: flowing in or out. Flowing in gives the sense of more fullness of self; flowing out gives the sense of a release into gravity or space. Distinguish between collapsing – letting go of the membrane so there’s flow only in one direction, toward gravity – and yielding, where there is reciprocity of fluids flowing into and out of the cells. Collapsing, you give up your weight to gravity, surrendering totally. Yielding involves release into gravity with rebound and resilience” (Cohen, quoted in Olsen, 2014: 119). What does it mean to dance through the transitional fluid? Is a transitional fluid a transitional field; is a membrane a transitional fluid-field? What does it mean to let go of the membranes? What is the act of letting go of the membranes doing to the structure and organization of a moving body? How does a moving body become through that act? How does a body flow with or without membranes? How do we alternate between spontaneous transition into movement: “yielding toward earth (gravity), yielding toward heaven (space) and flowing toward stillness (self), feeling the relationship and rebound” (Cohen, quoted in Olsen, 2014: 119)? How do we notice and capture the fleeting moment that precedes change – while moving, transitioning or being still; how do we allow that moment to dance our body? corps.
Image 1 – microscopic image of outer ear skin
Image 2 – microscopic image of inner nose fluid
Image 3 – microscopic image of inner ear skin
Image 4, 5, 6 – microscopic images of saliva, 1st, 5th and 7th day (transformation in time)
Image 7 – exploring the micro-movements, an attempt of body transformation and reorganization (Somagram – experimental corpography lab)
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