Moving Viewers: An Interview With Lisa Nelson | February 15-2008

Why are we here? I'm here in New York at the moment, kind of renovating, resurrecting a very long-term collaboration with another choreographer media artist named Kathy Weiss. I said I was going to America when I flew down from Vermont where I live. I was curious to do a little bit of teaching, which I don't do short workshops. It's not my way of doing myself, because I do have material I like to introduce to people. And I used to think I'm just giving some tools for a way of looking at dancing and looking at how we observe dancing. And I don't have great ambitions in this kind of workshop arena. I try not to have ambitions, but there's a lot of experiences and ways I would say more I organize ways of exploring, how symbiotic. So my motive in this workshops has been to entertain my appetite for a certain kind of looking into movement, because I like to dialogue about what we're seeing and what we're looking at. I love to create explorations that have a kind of a three-way interaction between my body and my thought and another body thought, another person.

Ongoing activity of you. I'm a perfect example all the time, anybody is really, of how I have to be tuning into what is stable and what is changing in my environment. And when something isn't changing sufficiently, how my body has to provoke change. And the tuning scores are both micro explorations about how I situate myself in an environment, like sitting in this chair and talking to you.

When you have a... myself to see. And I became very interested in that when I started to use a video camera, which was in the mid 70s, like 74, 73, 74, with those portable cameras that became available. And what was compelling, or the metaphor I would say, about using a camera and dancing, the act of performing dancing, was a very strong metaphor about how the dancer, because their bodies are their... activated, it means that you can stay, you can stabilize at any moment, just be the environment. You can both be in the environment, you know, you can, and one person might be or both people might be still at the same time. I'm F why I say it's a warm up is because I'm following my body's need at the moment. Still, I want to go into a little deeper tissue. I'll start not knowing who is the environment, who is, but I can sustain stillness.

And then I think I have a cultural body, I have an animal body, and they're often at odds. And if you add the stylistic expectations of art form that dance has been, few centuries only changing in the beginning of the 20th century with Isadora. Well, if you think about that, it's such an extreme distortion of human movement, such an extreme distortion. The model of what a dancing body should look like, it's very hard to think that it's possible to change that totally.

The camera let me see that the way I look at things when it was free to look with a camera, that my interest, my curiosity in watching movement was much more detailed than what I could imagine seeing on a stage in real time, in real life, in real scale. And I recognized that the effort to compose myself to be seen as a... differently, and that was the simple explanation. And you can see this in me too. I mean, in order to speak, I have to be moving all the time, so it's very hard for me to be still. And we even call that composure, you know. And I thought because speaking is so difficult, and I'm only speaking with my mouth, imagine from speaking with my body how difficult it is to both make it clear to the viewer and also be able to act, you know, create action. So that's a very complex way of... like when I'm talking, not listening to you.

The original experience was learning something new, which is taking an instrument like a video camera and starting to with awareness be able to see how I learned, how the feedback that I... what I could remember about that and where my attention was drawn by sound or by my own discomfort, what would move me from one focal point to another. That was an original, experiential kind of epiphany, that all of those levels of organization that came into attending to something. And simultaneously I discovered a book called The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems by J.J. Gibson, who I never know what to call him, but I know that he came from psychology.

To the survival needs of whatever the organism was. You know, cat attends visually in this way because he's a carnivore, so he's all set up this way, and the ears move like this, and dog is set up differently. And each creature, their behavior, their movement, their behavior is deeply tied into how they get information that they need to survive. And when was this that I... I probably was given that book. Someone gave it to Steve Paxton, who left it on the... really it was very deeply experiential, and he was making leaps of imagination, and because of that it had a kind of license. I would read a little bit about how the deoration of the body on objects in the environment gave equal information to the body of where down was than the vestibular system and the inner ear. So there were clues coming from eyes, from skin sensation, and from the inner ear vestibular system, and the other senses.

Eyes, rely your eyes. I want to offer one other person that I don't usually mention, who is a radical constructivist, Ernst von Glasersfeld, because he's my stepfather. And over time I started to see that the idea that we construct individually our world. And he's an anti-... the notion of affordances also, that's marvelous, that the outside world then is perceived in a way that allowed me to survive, right? So therefore the surfaces that are not receiving light look darker for us, you know, just because I needed to recognize as an object, and then he gave me opportunity of survival. And you know, tell B is kind of a fantastically fun concept when you look at all behavior anthropologically. And so Gibson's descriptions were I could translate into explorations.

However, as I say, you don't have to change at all. Environment can still maintain itself, wait for the time that you feel like you want to, your body needs to change or needs to... both can be activated at the same time and active serving at the same time, open stabilized as you both can be stabilized at the same time.

Many different reasons, but it also allowed me to be able to see these patterns of behavior of exploring an environment, and how the shifting between knowing and not knowing, how the body knows how to explore the environment in order to get what it wants to know. And this has nothing to do with being right or wrong, because you can certainly construct the idea that there's a doorknob there and be wrong, but it might have certain recognizable features. So you might... I'm going to have to add another... Bonnie Cohen, Body-Mind Centering, experiential anatomy, and her way of exploring the body systems was very close, I felt it was very close to my way of exploring dancing. And I was not so much, I had very little anatomical training or physiology as a dancer. I missed all that, I missed it both on purpose and just by... so the happy accident when I was 28, 27 was meeting Bonnie Cohen and becoming interested in learning more about how the body systems dialogue with... was always the how, how to explore something. And so I would always take beginnings from people like Gibson, from Bonnie's work, but I always was more oriented towards making something and creating a dialogue with whatever I was making. And if it was performance oriented, with trying to look at sort of the underneath dialogue that existed between myself as a performer and not the audience, but the audience with their own body. And because I became more aware of that...

Of two more minutes. In the next two minutes, find an ending, a still point or an ending moment. Part to part disengage from your partner. Let yourself move for a few minutes by yourself. After contact, there were many ways I could limit... in many, many different ways. It's almost like the dancing, a whole body, it's a whole body, it's spherical. It accomplishes an idea about space that has stability and change. It's very far reaching, it reaches into space. I have this argument with people often, but I feel like the eyes are the first to know. It's the way humans use them. Probably for a dog, the nose is the first to know or to notice. And you know, other animals, the ears are the first to know. And they might say you can hear sooner than you can see, but we tend to see in a snapshot, decide what we need to know, where the door is, where the bathroom is, or whatever we want to know.

I because with a group of people, I'm just trying to make a learning environment. And some people can only learn in complexity, and some people can only learn in simplicity. So I always think, can I offer the exploration so that the person who wants to be very simple will just be able to have one simple attention, or the person who needs complexity in order to just... oh my God, more movement, more movement, more movement, right, to have more to attend to. It's a kind of... yeah, how do you even figure out? You know, someone tells you to be still, and you have an idea about that of course, but once you start doing it, there's a lot of difficulties you encounter along the way. So the point isn't to do it in spite of the difficulties, the point is to discover the patterns of your own difficulties as an improvisational performer, which I accepted as my way. I left it, I started as a child that understood why, but by the time I was 19, improvisation came back. Judith Dunn was someone who was improvising at that time, and so that permission returned. So from that point on, I never set my movement, let's just put it that way. That level of improvising, I started to realize that I was taking instruction from the environment. And I like the example from babies, that they know how to... less programmed to recognize certain shapes or forms, then little by little we know how to hold up a box, we know how to shape our hand to hold a thin thing. I mean, without seeing you, you don't know what you're going to lift, but really quickly you know how to hold a this shaped object, you know how to deal with its weight, you know you don't hold it too tight, you know how to do that. And then I felt like my body was in that state of taking instructions from space, space that I'm dancing in. Besides the obvious, the texture of the floor, of course all dancers know you have to adjust to that.

There's no such thing as an empty space. As soon as you're in it, it's totally filled with your imagination. Doesn't have to be visual first. Okay, so the pattern was of sending states in observing the space, and then first person who imagines themselves in there will, with the eyes closed, navigate body as close as they can. Then we watch again, really look at the whole space, and then it's the opportunity for the second entrance.

And we are watching, and when the action has completed, we measure how long it takes for it to arrive in our... and then someone will call in. I think we can do this already if you feel like you want to enter, but you know it's too early. I think it would be interesting to just raise your hand, and we may get a kind of pattern. It might be a lot of urges at the same time, just to feel.

Imagine what your memory has, and even if it's genetic memory, that you know coming in your DNA. So I became more and more aware that I was responding to local conditions, let's say, as well as you know his hysterical but local conditions. And my dancing then felt very boring to me as an improvisor. Boring in the sense that actually it wasn't boring, it was frustrating. It was not boring, a little bit boring, mostly frustrating, that I couldn't break out of certain patterns, no matter what kind of... constantly tuning to the local conditions and the little changes in the local conditions. So the local conditions include my body, like I had an itch. And mostly most of movement production has to do with inhibition. I mean that was a good example of that. I didn't have to itch my ear, I could have just said oh never mind, I do that. And in the active dancing, there's so much inhibiting so that you can get to something you don't know. So a lot of these experiences were kind of piling up together, and in the construction of making a dialogue with other people about the senses and moving or not.

Moving well. In this one, like a movement moved through your body and then it appeared like it kind of disappeared somewhere, and then when it finally caught up with your body, it was so interesting the way it moved into your body. Yeah, just to make it simple, okay, that's because it's the mistakes that are what makes things happen also. Feeling, noticing to feel.

To turn back into seeing what's on our plate. The tuning score is a feedback system, and it affords the players that are working in the score a way to get direct feedback, almost as if it was videoed, direct feedback from the observers, the other players who are observing about their action, let's say feedback from their action. And it also allows each participant to start to... simple stillness, how desires arise when you're looking at dance or looking at human beings. And those you might call them irritations, desires, needs, and how do you survive your own looking. And that's just an overall description. And all of the players in the tuning score are both actors and observers, so it creates a kind of enfolded eyeball, where there's really no outside and no inside. Decisions are... somebody back to waiting longer between the two and measuring how long it really takes. Think it takes everybody to look or for anybody to see the whole, and for the imagination to rise. I just wanted to say about the tuning score, it can be about anything. I mean, you can make it an exploratory tool. The body really is, I mean what kind of body you have is... compose themselves, it's particular, and it can be... you can start to watch how decisions are made in anybody's body. So the vocabulary of reflection, because there's a tremendous amount of playback, instead of using a camera to show what you see or what happened, we use our bodies.

And a lot of the words for the tuning score, for operating the kind of operative terminology, I suggested from the... reverse was not in that. I mean reverse really came from my own appetite of working with video, where I could reverse image and look at causality in a different way. But when the human being is reversed, of course it doesn't have that kind of accuracy. So the tuning score allowed us to not be measuring for accuracy. It was always shit happens, there's always accidents, and there's always the viewer. And I've had people ask me after the performance say, I never could, I could never do what you did because I... thought that we were accurate. And if you looked, if you ever looked on there was no accuracy. It's just that the observer as well as the doer, your sense of what just happened are completely constructed. It plays a lot with memory, and the creative part, the aesthetic, like what is opinion made of, and where do you get your aesthetic, how does your aesthetic build? Well, it's very plain to see how the body is implicated in your aesthetic, how you see what you're looking for. All of these things are well known.

And forth from being an actor in action to being in an observation, and sharing the responsibility. I used to feel like improvisation that there was kind of a buzz phrase, you know, everybody has responsibility, and that was very difficult for me because it felt like nobody had accountability but everybody had responsibility, so no matter what happened it didn't matter, because there was just this idea that nobody was really in control and things could happen. But I wasn't interested in that. I was really interested in making something... interested in was both at the same time. So this is the illusion I carry with me all over the practice, is that it does matter what I think is beautiful. It's kind of anti-age, and also I think I felt like there was a point which it really was important to have an opinion, you know, about shit going on in the world and about the environment, and that it was just important to say that this is ugly, this is ugly, and what can I do about it. And in the practice... conversation, I'm looking for a way back into a more innocent place. I'm looking, I'm going back to dancing. I'm trying the act of dancing. I'm going to see because I feel like I worked in this kind of reverse engineering of my composition and how composition arises. And I haven't been, I got very sedentary even though in this practice I got sedentary for various reasons, but I got more sedentary and... laboratories now for well almost 20 years, this particular area of working with these tuning scores mostly in Europe. And I'm noticing now the younger people I'm working with, they have a kind of understanding, it's sort of there, there's some ground there. And I don't care what they do with it, but I'm starting to feel like I don't have to do that anymore.

A real time media, certainly video has been integrated into the action. I'm in where the videographer... it just pushes the body right off the stage. So I'm still not, I'm not so excited by that mix. Yeah, and actually for years I taught video. For those years I was exploring video, I taught video, I did a lot with video in performance only with television, so only with televisions, a lot with my collaborator Kathy Weiss, but not with outsized media. I just think that the body has not been explored nearly enough. If the media helps facilitate... with the technology, I would like to see that from the beginning. I would like to watch the change of organization of the human being in the dialogue with the technology, because I find that so fascinating, the morph ability of the human.