First Steps

Movement as pressure. Something jams. Joint compression as a leg first lengthens searching into a ground that gives. Then finds a stopping point. Fixes. Condenses. There is a thickening. A fitting of composite sheathes that meld- invade one another. Act as one. Hardness of the leg, it's bendability gone.
The iron of a rod. Locking, smashing into the hip that allows for this wedging then dips down, falls fractionally. A slippage like tectonic plates but the falling the sliding is modulated, eased into near smoothness as the fractional jumps slot into one another crossing these intervals- of no-man's land. The jump in associative binding. The gulf in which portions of the body dislocate, fly into one another from out of a clear divide. Touchability stressed, stretched, coming apart and sewn back together in the certain speed of it all. That at any other rate- if slowed down- would be a catastrophic dissonance. The dissonance is there. It is not in fact resolved but it is taken up in the speed of the push and pull of this traction that juggles arrangements. This is the shock absorber, this going in. But the shock is still there. Used in the violent propulsion of the turn that without that traction would be a rebuttal; an escape.

This catching and letting go. It's articulated in a slight containment and pouting out of the fascia of the abdomen. A release and aeration between the ribs- a lengthening up the sides of the body. A lessening of resistance through the arms- a tendril lightness in the finger tips. A widening of the chest; of the space between the shoulder blades. Fleshinness in the flanks falling in on itself foreshortening. And the body turns on the pivot of the drill-like holding of the foot burrowing through the mat into the hardness below where directions stop one another, fix and bounce apart.

A step. Crease of the limb. The knee bending as the weight of the body goes down storing energy springlike; waiting.The extension interrupted as bounce or recoil that becomes this turn. This jiggling of levels as they are happening. Planes on any given  measure, along a certain sequence of understood gradations now disappearing, melding into one another, creasing the straight line into a curve, a swivel. The buckling crease-like pile of laundry that suddenly swerves to a point of interest. Propulsion automatic- a twinge or jolt just like that. So effortless. This widening and lightening  and flaying apart in the ribs, the chest, the head and arms. Expanding where the lower body contracts, stabilises, sets in as a continuation with the floor. Diagonally there is a cross streaming between ground and arm, foot and sky that pushes down and pulls up in one pulsation, drawing the knot tight from oppositional directions. These work in tandem.There's a consistency of torsion working out from them even as they seem to be struggling to come apart. Siblings with a common parentage despite the bickering. It's the bickering which is the energiser.

A boy who stands up suddenly, takes a step or two, becomes aware of what he is doing and falls. He is too sure of what is going to happen. There is no uncertainty to ply against. No counter-weight. The shock of it jolts his body into a thrusting forward. Chest is high reaching upwards, doubting the ground. Arms that flounder, hands grasping at anything that comes their way. They grab hold of your hand any hand, that becomes a clasp which is treated as a life saver so that the body is let off the hook, turning into liquid and slipping away. Only the constant yanking of the hand against this overhead anchor reinvigorates the clasp drawing up this toppling usurped counter that never goes so far as to press into the floor. Never reaches that jamming point of a locked position. Continues then to escalate forward so that the body never collects in such a way so as to thrust back. Never even touches back to feel the inflexion of its own resistance. The interest of the shock goes unloaded; an interest carried over past any possibility of its own accumulated weight. So that falling out of its own leverage the body mass is carried into the flight of constant advance. It becomes an angel with no shoes on. There is no stop-over on this flight. No landing point.

How to articulate a landing? a binding? The glue of an ad hoc form is to be made there on the spot by the streamlined additive of weight and counter weight. This forms pockets or holdings. Enclaves which are uni-directional settings, focusing the joint, making it bounce or pop out of this ready-made socket. It is a touch-base that builds through the constraint into an elastic recoil of its own tendency- a tendency to go on and on unmediated that now comes up against something in which it meets its' own match. It's there in the settlement of that lock. The usability of that frustration. It's the shock of a resistance that makes us stand. That out of the sheer inertia that must come sooner or later, makes us punch out of that standing into walking, near falling. Somewhere between flight and collision;somewhere between the two; catching and falling.


So to envisage working up this lock by forging it out of the meeting of body parts:

The boy is on a low swing. His foot is cradled in your hand that wraps around it like a tight sock that gives in places. With his knee now bent and relaxed you align yourself through the coursing that runs through his hips into the thigh so that the gradually unflexing knee becomes the propellant of the push of surface to surface where the pale of his foot extends further into the palm of your hands. The palm is set rigid- a point of resistance- a stand-in for the hardened point sought out through the floor. The knee held with the other hand is set now with ever greater precision as the push increases into a unit of alignment in which the line of the body as it outstretches, acts as one. So that with the continuing pressure it does not flay out to crease at the hip joint and dissipate the force into a collapsing and subsequent bending at the waist but summons up that pressure right through the foot push, into the lower back and abdomen that gather and hold and flourishing up through the chest to create a single coursing and lengthening through the body against a point of immovable resistance.To push he must search out this running thread pushing through this entire ligament that his body has become.

And so it happens. And as it happens and he does push, the swing goes back you following and keeping to this engagement to follow the contactability of foot into hand right up into the highest angle of the backwards tilting swing. His leg lengthening becomes one continuous thread with your hand, like a rod that you balance  between you by putting your bodies in synchronous alignment with one another. So even in the swaying tilting movement of the swing- indeed because of it- your bodies are tracking, probing searching and running into various creases and extensions out into the extremities of the room with the high up window, the tree outside, the music flowing over from the classroom next door.

Then as the momentum of the swing pulls him back down the knee automatically folds. Again on reaching that point of resistance in your hand, it pushes back out lengthening against this immovable stoppage, following that resistance back into the high tilting of the swing that you and the boy keep up there in that impossible placement. By constant modulation you together are lingering on the duration of that hold that keeps that intractable line through your body and his body jamming the swing up there into place until again it is let slip and the resistance folds with your hand following back through the swift bend of a knee and the downward tumult of the swing. Keeping hand to foot, foot to hand the glue bond is now thin like a stretched out transparency about to burst but maintained. But only just. And so the boy is walking.

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Later play with rocking. Falling forward and backwards together. A human seesaw, rocking machine. His back pressing into your front, then that being ejected and rolling forward as you both come up from this fall. This upwards, downwards seesaw that now begins to swivel too as it changes speed.

Then on a rolling sausage cushion, his stomach and chest rolling like dough over the cushion, his arms outstretched so that his hands collect into the running motion of the floor that he travels above than reverses over, taking his arms upwards and off the mat. As you help this rolling by shifting him forward at his hips he also times it by the impact of his hands on the mat; how they thump down to slow him, rise out to increase the speed. Now you lift his hips off from the rolling cushion altogether so that it is his chest pressing down and his hips are swivelling as you create gradations of lift and drop, gradually lengthening out and taking hold of his thighs, his legs his feet so that he is now swivelling, snake-like through his body over the cushion, driving and fine tuning it with his hands on the floor but creating the contactability through the body weight in his chest, trunk and hips.That will create a sense of lightness in the upper body that is reliant upon this downward weight of the hips and sacrum that keep an ongoing contact over the rolling cushion that gradually plies him forward and backward like a wave turning over itself.

When again he is on the swing pushing against your hands through one foot and then the other, the bend and thrust is strong coming from a strong centre that he is feeling and modulating against the restrictions that you play out. Constraint is the enclave for the torsion and traction right through bodies, surfaces, objects running through them like fault lines that are unstoppable; that are sketches that have a life of their own. We are combined through these fault lines, our bodies only taking shape, acquiring momentary solidity around these tendencies of direction, resistance and push-back that become irresistible. Out of which the very idea of doing and so of holding oneself erect whilst allowing oneself to partially fold in, arise. A composite is something evolving that cannot be taken apart.

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Therefore you do not work a pattern of movement by bending and lengthening a leg in order to practice the right motions necessary for walking. For walking is more than this. It is the specific local dealings with questions and difficulties of direction, stoppage, continuity and shock. You create an enclave of resistance, than wait for the impulse to counter that resistance in a lengthening that then patterns itself into a fold and bend in order to search back out that intrigue of lock and resistance.We are dealing then with conundrums that come out of and are dealt back through practical situations. Not holy or moral laws.

Bodies assemble and work into endless potentials of lengthening, foreshortening, and swivelling. They do that through intrigue, expectation, delay, disappointment, reconstitution, invasion, turn around. You do not work  on sequences that lead to preformed shapes and ideal patterns. You work on the shock points and fault lines that make one tendency reverse into another. Only that can build up patterns and feedback out of specific affects that lead to dilemmas that are only ever partially and momentarily resolved. Activation and rest becomes the pulsation that challenge nerve endings, bones, flesh and sinews, to compose on and off one another as stand ins for and in conjunction with objects, surfaces, textures of hardness and softness. It is the conditions for these affects that must be sought out and in novel ways, and bolted together in ad hoc but workable jointings. This is play. Quite different from the serious obligations of patterning advanced in regimes of body techniques and exercises tailored to deliver particular functions. That is more a form of body control and dictatorship and can never be generated out of the changing circumstances of our own modulating interest and attention that is co-dependant on everything that constitutes us and so keeps us reconstituting one another in a wider and more intensive admixture than is ever just you or me.

Stance

Old man in the middle of the lawn. Angling and twisiting himself around the crux of a stick in order to face front-ways the dog that scatters and barks and wines it's way this way and that around the pond, over the lawn, across paths, veering in towards other dogs, rebuffing out again and pouncing back in. The man is some way off from the dog- it's many enticements, meanderings, fabulations; it's antics. These are not for the old man to know or even care about. He simply tweaks his alignment this way and that way like twiddling the knob of a safe through his body composure so as to ensure safe and consistant passage from his open chest to the tail, belly or rump of the dog. They are mutually entwined in this way. Not so much an affect as an instantaneous torsion that spans the distance; the space in between as if each levered the other; a remote sensing that cuts out motivation, incentive, call and response and unstead operates a single device of atunement through which the resetting of a dial is met and in that attitude the park opens up, trails away and cradles them in it's pulsating  and reshaping pocket. The detailed precision of this chiming together, the resonance that sets the wind spiralling on this sunny late autunm day is compelling, never the same, on going, pre-figured anew out of each redistribution. People pass, stop, sit down, continue on their way, in the throes of this tuning device- an instrument  that is being updated as I speak. Made to work again in the silent rushes; the flows and seizures that become evident in each particular stance.

African drumming

African drumming. A cacophany of progressions. Nudging and pressing each other. Damming up letting a directive spin arond on itself, balloon off the interuption, deepen. Then let fly out again. I imagine air bubbles all bolstering up one another, pressed and josstling through the water that they press into. The seals of these bubbles do not know detachement- could not sense a free-floatingness of maybe this and maybe that directive. There is no choice. Only an acting out through these invasions and introversions held in check. They flatten and pulsate into one another demarcating in multiple cuts the area surface of contact. There is a many sidedness. Each breath and gasp becomes a pulsation that transpires through the miriad. All tiny unsettlements become at once accomodations or are pressed down upon remotely like something barely apprehended that influences and involves. Just the tail end, corner, wisp of something long gone.
The fractional details of each involvement at the interface sends out radars that are sent back simultaneously. There is this fit and match to every reapplication. There is no target to reach. There is no return to sender. But this slow emanation has the immediacy of something concieved.  In the intersperses affects take hold.
A slight angling or swivel- the grainniness of a sudden reversal that makes the smooth affinity of surfaces that almost share a membrane suddenly bristle, recoil become rampant for an instance- like an intense  impossible scratch dealt with from all sides by the many handedness of drumming inflections pooling as if into a single impossible point of attraction. Then again sliding back into transparency, invisibility. Wetness and dryness pervade one another suckering free rides or soumersaulting out of a sudden stuckness to launch and break into an excess speed. There is no movement from place to place. All the space is accounted for in the thick recursiveness of beating. Only these wave-like rolls that iradicate and smooth back down again one another like the whip-lash of a tail flaying at the end form its own constant use. There are inconvinenances, checkpoints, a running on the spot so as not to lose the memory of a pulse and be exhumed from it; thrown out and left derelict.It's important to keep the consistancy. Once it's gone the raggedness can never recoil. So that the idea of each fittingness begins to stretch and give. Bubble after bubble pops. The memory arisen out of  this co-existance thins and leaks like oil on the surface of water. Colours dissipate and are sliding over one another before becoming a feint impress glimmered in snatches of light on the way home. No, there in the midst of it a kind of leverage is forever gripping making something out of nothing as bubbles invade, press into a haphazard mesh that locks and bolts slowing the melt down to become this immaculate device of pulsation that conjointly sways. The dance. Something that could never be concieved but is felt and acted upon  in the immediacy of a many sidedness. The dip and rise become the fashioning at the seal where the air pushes out the water, the water hunkering down and presses back against this colony of air pockets.
It's there at the seal that minute inflections ricochet into an impact that is everywhere and nowhere. Because again and again it is replicated into this compound body, this compound eye, this compund ear. And out of the body of each unit reflective and doubling in and over one another there is this continuously morphing aspect; this shaping. It is this nudge and push in the thresholds of finer and finer discrepancies that has become an indicator of all that is felt. This feeling of following and investing is renewed out of this shifting of attentions. There are so many attentions that operate as one now coming apart and coming together again like the viscous fibres of a single muscle. This muscle is everything we are and everything we are not. The hard and the soft as it shapes and drains away.

critical twisting

Series of 9 pics on movements website

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Look under heading, Critical Twist

Disappearing boy

There’s a sense of him slipping away. Diminishing and recoiling back into a start point that is never reached. This cauterisation of every outer extremity. A tucking in the edges of all flaying parts. It is this incredible politeness that is killing him. The silence of unutterable lips. Coldness in the hands that writhe or lay discarded by the sides of his body but do not touch. Do not touch back. His chest is prominent a rising hill around a collapsing landscape. There are landslides in every direction. Only the sudden startle response and the pulling and torsion of the neck, ankles and wrists supplicate an antagonism to entropy. Otherwise this hermetically sealed package remains where it is. Providing no input and no reason to delay an errand or interrupt an on-going thought or procedure that the casual passer by may harbour. It is hard to look at such a reversal. Growth turned into a deforestation. A collecting into the essentials of shrinking inner organs. All else white skin- a mere covering, stretched in parts, blackened in places like under the eye. The brow of a young boy, wrinkled, the smooth new hair wispy and dry, floating over his face by the rustle of life that is all around.

There’s a sense of needing to literally plug in. To affect a fuselage connectivity not at the surface that is cold but at the next layer or the layer behind that delving through the rice-paper thinness of these multiple layers, questing for a fickle warmth that rumbles like a distant indigestion that is only the ghost of a meal recurring on itself. It’s important not to chase away this warmth- not to harden out the fickle movements that are the only internal combustion system to hand. It is incredibly delicate- at a knife edge of response and breakdown. How does such a body read touch? Is it invasion? An impossible speed of approach bearing down on the relative tranquillity in a body that is approaching stillness, approaching absolute balance. This touch needs to interpolate, warming into the next layer before fractionally moving there. There is this idea of contact that is sewn out through the atmosphere of a never complete arrival. A mimicking and gesturing into the folds of this stillness that seal the boy in the last barricade to complete dissolution. So touch also needs to dissolve and fix, then dissolve and fix again, melding the extremes of interface and projection beyond that stopping point.

What is a barrier? Only something felt as an inhibition where two planes swivel into an impasse. The parallel sheeting from a differently placed equation pivoted around itself. A point of very slight resistance. The very first breeze of a leverage. The heat of a response that is the involuntary gasp of one surface cleanly wrapped around another, spreading into the grooves and ripples of that front-line, then evicting itself-reconfiguring as if now propelled or distracted so that there is a rush of air, a vacuum suddenly acquiring proportions- the negative space of a vessel suddenly becoming apparent in the contrast of temperatures that a hand placed, lingering, remaining, deepening and then removed, brings. A very slight invigoration in this going down and coming back up. Still a gasp- a long way from being a grasp of any kind. Yet this pulse of a deposit- a slow inhabitation- even the virus contagion of a warmth that spreads from one unit of life to another gives into and creates through repetition, the beginnings of the harmonics of responsiveness. It is a gage in non-consciousness that becomes crowded with variables in moments of delay, anticipation, filling and emptying- the breath squeezed at one instance by the downward motion of the hand, then pushing back at another instance, ejecting that hand. The chest, the tummy, the feint pulse in the wrist, in the neck, under the knee at the Achilles tendon, at the lower back, between the shoulder blades, at the root of the cranium. The muscular ripple between the individual rib-bones that all begin to operate as feint points of leverage- of drawing in and pouting out again. The discordant nature of these multiple throbbings which is beginning to play into a cacophony and that dialogue spreading and darting over the entire surface of the body reaching out from the layers of fascia that are warming and cooling into on–going reliefs and shadows of one another. The circularity of a body begins to evolve-a spherical looping of affects that are the negative indications of a furthering into environment.


The interface of hand on body- almost like a hovercraft that hoovers up just above the area surface creating a warm buffer of air in-between that then invades the very restlessness of the body, warms and lets stay this body in its constant adjustment.

The armour must be taken off. In the case of the boy this is a very literal armour; metal laced arm pads and leg straps that incarcerate his body, beetle-like into a mould of positionality roughly equivalent to the stable straightened aspect of a human body. Like this he is propped up to resemble the position of a standing boy and the folding, unfolding of his arms and legs are frozen into the lengthened bone structure of straightened and immobile limbs. The support, insect-like, is wrapped around his outer body as if all the jell of his inner disappearance were simply bypassed, boiled down to a regulated synchronous liquid substance and poured in this mould. But this was never going to work because this hermetically sealed boy could never feel nor anticipate the impending nature of an address that might call for a matched response and for the collecting and resistance of opposed forces that would call for a true stand.


At first the touch response is a dream. It is all the boy’s experience of the pulsating of organs against flesh. The liquid run and set of systems that keep percolating around one another; holding one another up in jams and enclaves then redistributing as the dam breaks. Yet this viscosity in the disappearing boy needs to be got going through the contactibility of body to body- of human to human. The boy learns to live with these interventions- to not immediately dispel them, throw them out as foreign matter- but to use them as a point of friction, of invigoration, of warmth. His body calls out of that warmth. So he uses whatever surface comes his way. The dialogue and minute adjustment ensues even as the boy receives them and engulfs them more as a part of his own internal organisation. Yet they are a series of affects, of internal perturbations and re-accommodations. That is the point.


In a walking, seeing child, every surface- the ground their feet press in and out of, the walls, the smooth-roughness of shelves, seats, carpet, cushions, wood, metal fixtures, the bounce of light off of reflective windows, the shimmer of it in-between leaves or its sudden displacement as figures approach mid-centre and play off in constant rebound upon the meshing faces of the child that learn to manoeuvre around this mobile flesh as a party game and a deep yielding into this eruptive compelling permanence. They learn to push off of bodies, lean into them, absorb and bounce out of various meetings. They learn to touch and touch back. And this is not only a perceptual thing that they do, not the social alone. It is shored up on the physical working of points of interface- of surfaces on surfaces at every level of their meeting. It is the warming of the body, the breath and circulation, the food intake and excretion. It is digestion and it is the mediating of what and how things are received and reattributed. The boy is disappearing because without this feedback he does not remember to take in another breath, to continue with the peristalsis of food breakdown, to push out all that is wastage from the anus. The body is a system of massaging parts that warm and invigorate one another resetting by way of their interruption with other organs, with other systems of travelling viscera that are embracing and coming apart all of the time.


The conversation with the boy is about insinuating into this level of visceral interface. The hand must become another organ, pulsating and jostling in the midst of what it is not- what it is constantly wrapped around. What it then, by way of affinity, becomes. In these folds, systems of affordance come into being, then dissipate only to take hold in other fleeting capacitates. So peristalsis ensues, ripple-like, and then one time out of the blue the boy maybe will or maybe will not, with only the slightest of indications- more a continuance of staying with a warmth than anything resembling a gesture- touch back, unless he already has done this, without our even noticing.


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Note* I have begun working with this boy as a Shiatsu Interaction therapist. I have never before worked with a child who appears so fragile and weak. It is important to add that I was so concerned about this child that I insisted on full medical transparency between all those involved in the boy's care.


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Following Unease

(Written after a Women's Eid Festival in Stoke Newington, London 16th Sept.
Many fast treatments- many people with physical pains.


Treatment- two handed Shiatsu. Inhabiting two disparate areas with contrasting feelings of going in, bouncing out. Residing there. Letting the affects of these differences mix as the hands stream back through the arms back into your one body. Even as they remain outstretched on the body of someone else. A momentary feeling of oppression. Like a tightness at the chest. Than a series of shifts that come to be felt as different qualities of emphasis. A continually re-grafted depth reading. Calibrated between two bodies.

An expansiveness in the chest and throat that travels out from the disruption in all directions whilst allowing one to stay put. The sense of driving or walking through a space so that the hands operate together as a push-me pull-you pressure and release. Honing in - like a remote probe or sensor- with one hand deepening and the other lessening off. Following the settlement /unsettlement of this breathing that becomes one in recipient and you. Their chest, your chest, rising and falling. Your hands slack off as the belly expands. Accomodating it. This breathing could be the body forwarding, turning, reversing, pausing as it has many times before and now even as it lies there it goes about these calibrations. Certainly they are of a temperament of a body in anguish, joy, fear, relief, contemplation, dreaming and waking. Interspersing one with the other to build into the fine nuances of expression, response. An engaged affect as an on-going state of changing.

Twist and torsion of your own body the steering wheel of fractional adjustments in your hands relating to the bulk of a body turning, aligning, aggregating with the redistributed circulation- of flows and stoppage. Utilizing these oppositions as the differentials of a moving system. Making this vehicle between you. That being operated in the slight pull and twist between chest, rib-cage and the flesh just below the umbilical. A slight resistance like the prizing apart of a too rigidly knitted form. Tenderizing it. The seperation and coming apart of the two hands in this slow twist and torsion of an opening. The dropping of stitches and the pulling of certain single threads that span the body and tighten at the mid-point as the body pulls away in two directions, to be a reinvigorated breath.

So the oppression  in the chest becomes the guide for a recalibration and a re-tunement of the way in which you configure your own body in relation to the recipient. The way their breathing alters. How this relates again to your placement. And so it goes on.This placement the tweaking of a dial which to begin with is the certain angling of your whole body in relation to the recipient. An opening like a valve is constructed - a gateway between a certain address that becomes a workable device- a way through. Until another seizure of pain or constriction; of all too sudden release or a thought about situation suddenly dawns and a reconfiguration is pending as another area becomes emotive like a sudden giveway point that then drains away and floods into another remote place. As the thing gets going the recipient becomes the active force, the breathing punching in and out your hand from which your whole body is attached. Recipient is a moment of reception not a fixed role, an actual person. It is the logging in the pulse of the blood, the holding together of flesh, the letting go of air, of a body's responsivenes. A spasm and flickering with each minute in-take and out-take of breath. Then firming into place certain exposures, certain pauses that put on hold, detour and make into an accumulated response, the drama. It is their body. Their drama. Their contours. But it is happening also in your body catching into it as the rapid darting of a messaging going back and forward. The messaging is not unwrapped. Can not be interpreted because it is building and breaking in upon itself on the spot. It is pure affect forcefully there and equally subverted on to something else shaping what it can be according to the responses held in the balance and tipped this way and that way over and over again by everyone present on the day.

Addressing the specific is a way to create these lines of association that run through from head to toe, from body to body. There's this compulsion in chasing the aggravation- like a mouse set loose and on the rampage- areas of pain, emergant bumps and dips that ripple over the body in order to course through admixtures where these assaults finally cancel one another out. The mouse is not destroyed it is brought into the light. It panics and darts for cover. But there is none. Then moments of calmness begin to build out of these very distractions and the rapid coursing back and forward of opposing tendencies at last begin to relate. So a dialogue that is sporadic and can not be kept in one place ensues. That dialogue being nothing more than this attention to unease spread out between the two or more bodies and conjoined at the interface and the multi-directional fine tuning it aggravates in order to ride that unease into various air-passages, parallel lines of reserve, a certain ease about and in the situation. That state exists right on the verge of a catastrophe that is touched in and out of and is tentatively let be. It is dramatized with remote but not disengaged attention. So the dialogue is about states of awareness that are arrived at through bodies constantly distilling out of each other's frissure. Another name for that could be environment.

Stretch Pic

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Look under Dislocate

An open question

Something about the tilt and pour of a gesturing body under inclination and going further. Somewhere in the mid-space into a set of patterns that are built into the grip and dissolution of muscle tone. A viscosity that is continuing on its way through the air we are entering. The shouting out into this mid-space, the throwing back into our apparent place. Where is it we are at? Never entirely of the body or out the body. A probable threshold that we are wavering through. On the brink, this tilt-point like an axle that grinds a bearing along a plum-line coursing down and simultaneously throws us into a near flight. Perception is that travelling. The surface to surface activation that acts like a springboard. The grit and gristle that gets the thing going. It is also our breathing, our digestion, our circulation.

So with the child in the therapy room- gripping my hands to pull himself up-that action can just as easily loop down into a reversal of those muscle groupings- that pressing down to go up winding to some degree back on itself - so that there is a lessening of pressure to go down- like a neutralization of the process. This double entendre is how we come to experience our selves enmeshed in a collective of activations that are all influencing and tweaking constantly the outcomes of a recipe of admixture. Patterns on patterns on patterns. We are compositions of and also in the process of composing through this constant involvement and that is how miniscully we hold together or come apart.

The leverage- point of leverage- becomes the play of outcomes- thrashing around one another and induced into predictions or the oppositions of those predictions. This becomes play- the beginnings of dialogue which is a viscous and tenable interlocking that is not a flat pack but keeps turning around one another- a multi-dimensional quest of surface on surfaces so that a turn, an angle a, holding, a falling and catching in begins to shore up upon one another and to forge point of impact, compression, affect and period of flow, travel- a vacuumm to which the potential of the body as dispersal is drawn . Form as movement follows.

Playing with the expectation of grasping to pull up which if it goes unmediated intensifies into a thrusting forward- a fast forwarding and explosiveness/ excitability of the chest, the breath, that sends the boy plummetting forward. So that unstead it is tempered by an inversion of the very usability of this grip. A lessening off so that the grip catches and then folds in on itself sending the body back down and through his own centre weight- through the sacrum and hips and the belly weight into the legs. So that there is a minute contraction of the muscles in the thigh, the leg, a small accommodation in the knee and ankle bones. A pulsing of the toes into the carpet- some kind of landing there where you are. The boy lingers. He wobbles. Then out of this letting go comes another stabilisation; a concretisation. Hardening into the grasp of the body; pushing down through the legs into the ground beyond its evident surface and pulsing up through that constraint. The arm jammed into place so that the bones of the wrist are set and configured for a moment- trapped- as the flat of the hand pushes against your palm- a driving force of right angles. A leverage. A levelling between falling down and pulling back up, the interuption into one another becoming a firm stand. So between the two fixed and unequivocal directives- of grasping and letting go, there is this balancing brink- this wavering lull of suspension that is a pause-gap - a hushed moment. A thought.

It becomes a holding together in this elastic space between getting somewhere and resting here that is neither completely one or the other. That is a kind of rapid and mediated coursing back and forward. A fast pulse that contains also within it, slowness. There's a moment of motionlessness. It is filled with potential because it is made up from so many counter-indications; emotive tendencies like colours that are never set into ultimate discrepancies but play on one another cancelling into white light.

That is the beginnings of dialogue. A dialogue with the environment- with the surface to surface of material and human interfaces. Interactions that compose out of one another. Conjoined phrases that become our living environments that are constantly flowing through one another- cautioning and letting pass impulses that are jointed and newly worked up even as we breath and think and present ourselves as varying images to one another. A continuing pronouncement through which we engage.

Instrument

Just before I write there is this buzzing of elements in the environment. Then they begin to slow and settle. To take on significance in relation to one another. The angle at which they are set becomes exacting, crucially binding them in an array that little by little can no longer be taken apart.

I go around tweaking corners off-setting the minute flecks of expression that make up this new tuning fork. For it is the circulation of light and shadows as they absorb and rebound. The filaments of dust, the morsels as they come and go. The tread and shuffle of itinerant animals, birds, strangers and passer-bys. The hurrying steps, the lulled recurrence of a back treading footstep. The side glances and taxied journeying of synchronised feet, dogs and insects. The worms burrowing. The wind seeking passage taking with it dirt and fluff, seeds, smells, germs, a cool breeze on the skin, weaving in and out of the heat of the sun, creating patches of hot and coolness that pass over one’s seated body or propel one into momentary wanderings- out into the middle of the grass, the wasteland, and back again- that makes this place useable.

It is the place for the recording of events. Events that would not happen unless all these preset signatures bound up against one another.

There is this rising and falling. This growing up and this crashing down that maybe should be in different passages, different time-frames, altogether different events. In stories that never meet. But here they do cascading into one another. Interlacing like fingers seeking out the backs of one another’s hands. But it is the same body somewhere down the line. At some further point less diversified, more integral to the root of the thing. A person walking on the land sitting on a bench. Passers by nodding or avoiding. A dog pre-empting the moves that are made, insulting or enticing.

I am looking out over the thicket and the waning yellow flowers mostly turned to bristle these days. The slip of wire from a telegraph pole looped from building to building then across one of those metal braces that rise like a lost child’s bracelet next to stations and works and other industrial developments. Superimposed over this are other poles; industrial stalagmites that push up through the vacancy of a toothless smile filling in here and there a small section of emptiness- aligning with the top-most loop of this empty cage, the rigid bracelet thrust over a portion of land.

Figures are weaving their way in and out of the thicket, secluded here and there by bushes, trees, unruly growth only to reappear through the covering zigzagging but remaining before my eyes like corn flowers that are growing and dying so that the progress is the progress of a genotype not of a single flower. I am the same fazing in and out of credibility. Swimming and sinking in amidst this buzzing landscape.

Yet there is the moment when these elements- the metal against metal- the wire drooping and ascending again like a script in the sky; that single scant yellow flower, that straw cemented growth. The beetle coloured luminance of a discarded blue beer can. When they all take hold and root firmly into one another. That is when I too become like a tattoo burnt into the bench where I sit.

When I look out across the area there is no distance to cover. Just this resounding thrill of significance interlocking and exposing one another glistening in the shock of a torsion. A bustling traction that runs through everything as the workability of a vibration comes through in the midst of staying put resting and flowing on the wind.
___


Someone walks past looking down. I am eating a banana. Nothing happens. There is a gradual coming into a smile somewhere in the mid-space between chewing and walking, where the rhythms merge.

A play of distance

Can you run the line and run past it too? What is a line? A delimitation. It does not appear to be forward thinking but maybe it is. A marker that you trip past. A catch in the road that becomes your propellant. Maybe in the run of things you would land on your face. Some kind of catastrophe or defacement in any case. But it never gets resolved- the arrow never reaches the target- your face stuck to the ground is never even forwarded as an idea. Because each trip and the fly it provides- the shove from behind is certainly a jolt but it is collected mid point and mid point to that at a point between a point, then let go of again- a kind of hammering of stop start drill. So that the convulsions it throws up are actually you walking. You on a good day. Tumbling down the street, using the slight incline to your advantage, to get somewhere you have never completely arrived at. Throwing yourself past the line is an act of defiance, an ideation. Because there is nothing concrete that you are heading at.

So in that moment of suspension- a strange regurgitation of breath as the intake and the outtake get mixed up, do you really know where you are going? You swing round on the principle of your own forgetting- levering off the line, the foot-hold, the obstacle- some kind of surface of resistance and flying out, expansive after that intensification through the impact- the squashing of areas into one another and the bolt out of the blue. This is happening through out your body that modulates, shudders and re-distributes in the space surrounding.You are gliding like a bat sending out cries in the dark that bounce back at you off the walls so that the empty space begins to configure and differentials of loud/ soft, hard/soft, drive and release begin to thump against each other. So becomes the line. An interface.

It is a marker. A start in the composition of something. Something that you move through. Those momentary locks and openings create a kind of traction of affect- you swing along in and out of resistant niches. Some kind of curvature between the two that is impossible to describe because the bearings are always changing.You are the departed, the returned, gliding between those holds that swivel orientation and it is that which you are thinking through, that your body is forming through, squinting through, reconstituting through which is all it ever is and is and can be. Not the fully formed residue of a day out, a body in full view; shock of the stature but the actual workability of it that is not available up front.  Only that you know, you feel it in the way your body works, this grasp, release, this jamming and setting free, this working up of thresholds that are used for locomotion or for agitation in one place or in more than one.

You are thinking these thresholds as you are doing it but it is in that split second- actually half a second- where there is a glitch in control. A mismatch between something caught on to, collided with and the repelling out from that. That double move so loaded with positive and negative on the social scale could be an embrace when looped into an on-going moveability that is so on-going that it appears still.- backed on to itself. An embrace that is never recognised or called as such in the social ( as a bracketted animal) though the social is really a derivative- a kind of on-going tincture- of all these mutual and dissonant levels of activation. Of this unsettlement. There are these whirls and shapings that glide ever onwards as one area is affirmed, another erased, a swing from tree to tree. From touch to touch.

And it is the idea of the passage that really gets us going- not the individual moves broken down into anatomical compartments, oiled and limbered into contortions as a still life that are then meant to equate with the up and running version. Yes every possible trajectory of the arm raising the knee bending the hip swivelling have been practised and gone over. The pieces must equate a running body- a walking body. Nothing is missing in the jigsaw.Except the mis-match. The fault of lines. The glitch in getting from here to there where there is a black out- where the body is sent on, through the thought of it, the idea of it. The interest to see what becomes if it. This could be called play. The implications for learning are very strong for where this mis-match is effectively closed, the lines brought together in a harmonic clasp that is too fully choreographed, more and more bodies will find themselves thrust outside of that charmed procedure of recapitulation and their flaying attempts to re-institute some kind  of innovative delay will be taken as malfunction or in any case perverse.

Moving on. Moving is an ideation and ideas come from the open-ended nature of the workable lives in which this roaming attention exists that only in the glitches describes the value which is unlocatable- somewhere between one point and another. This is another way of saying that preemptive representation is not always a means to an end but an impossible opaqueness that attracts flight like moths to a light sticking them there so that it does away with all movement in the instantaneous burn-out affect that that carnivorous attraction involves. Trying to grasp everything all at once in one plane of integrity-filling the body up with light- with impossible visibility-substancing it at every turn with all that is seen to be missing. Adding compulsively all this stuff even as it drains away. More icing on the cake. Doing away with the pauses, the glitches, the minuscule half seconds that indeed do add up in the collectivity of an action filled with holes. Each hole is a fractional delay in which a skewed bearing is the thrust of the conscious into the unconscious, of the unconscious into the conscious. Of the multiple flexing of an intelligent multi-bodied and variable bodied system. Doing away with all that is doing away with the traction that keeps distant things at play. Those holes that individually do seem dispensable one by one as the clearing away of symptoms of lost time could be the jolt in time- the trigger for a thought-movement; the sand particle around which the crystal is growing*.

Perhaps autistic people in some of the more populist behavioural "cure" programs of targeted functionality where reward and discouragement try to shape actions as a hand shaping the maleable body, overload for that reason. Actions without ideas can't sustain themsleves. A question.
A problem. Create a problem- a stoppage; activate an action. The body will begin to envisage itself around those actions, thickening by degrees like a tongue licking away at toffee, coating itself. Acumulating.

There is always the play of differentials between where we are and where we might get to. It is never resolved because it is a juncture of slowness performed where many possibilities of direction, of response, of bounce, of absorption come up against one another and for that indiscernible of time measures create a lull, a cancellation, an incredible slowness right in the speed of it all. It is out of that  that actions find a course sustained by the novel idea of that stillness at the heart of an on-going life. A life that is lived differently at every instance- that calls for split second choices faster than we could arrange our limbs, decide on what is appropriate. In the pause, the glimmer, the stand-off out of which actions run. For we are weaving designs in the virtual space beyond our moves as delimited acts, beyond our bodies as sealed entities, beyond our thoughts as scripts of definite authority. These occur in an interaction- in a wider depository-a shifting field of influences that are occurring simultaneously and recalibrating the choices we appear to be making even as the act is being carried out. That is our inter-relating impossible to trace except where it runs out on itself. Our positionality in and through everything we touch- everything we pass through. Everything that re-aranges us.

Awareness is this tension of ends that do not stack up. So that a problem is being continuously posited and the affects out of which that problem hold are re-distributed in the looseness between falling and holding. Something that catches in differently each time through that jolt of uncertainty that is coupled through and through with the certainties we hold so close to us and that plays on and off of these. A constant dialogue, a constant interest- an activation re-performed with the material that comes to bear in order to further the pattern. Our lives- our communicability- and the worry and wonder that wrap around one another- that fold in and out of one another- to make thought patterns with trajectories of flight and return. This uncatchable value that bleeds into all of life out of the moment just before landing impossible to inhibit, to delimit. Because it is not of any single habitable location. Not in a body. In no known dwelling. Bodies no longer move without that. Indetermination cannot be deleted. It is crucially already the missing factor.

____

This piece is written whilst being in the middle of reading Brian Massumis book, "Parables for the virtual"

 *This is a reference to Simondon's theory of Individuation where a problem or interuption in the running of something- whether organic or inorganic- is an excuse to recalibrate it within and out of that fault-line. That engagement in the midst of a problem of continuity is what furthers the uniqueness of a pattern as a spontaneous composition or becoming. It is upon that niche or fault-line that the recursiveness of an awareness takes hold.

Displacement of the centre of attention

20.3.2010 5.30pm



Best way to begin the question of feeling is to maybe look into the management of feeling states- so that they do not tip into overload-extinction. To look at how small displacements in the perceived and felt centre of gravity in the body can be made to work as an emerging pattern as a kind of shifting roaming re-allocation in a correlation to environmental encounters and as an ability to stay with that engagement. That begins to make a circulation system so that focus/attention does not build and build in one confined location and then explode but dissipates out of any one holding. These small shifts are a way to intuit the on-off pump of contact-release, movement-pause enacted through the physical body and its tactile sensibilities and taken into a kind of pressure valve of constriction-expansion that actually uses these same dynamic alignments yet uses the tension- release to hold in a frame of reference a perceptual-awareness as a felt experience whilst having already moved on to a different emphasis and point of comparison. So memory through a different kind of timing of attention and cut-out begins to work up into a pulsing order to create a spatial referencing system. Therefore multiple frames are popped open with none taking precedence so that they themselves begin to interact rather than consume attention. The conversation becomes multiple.

Working on this spatial perceptive field but actually feeling that as pressure-release in parts of the body becomes a way of organizing- i.e. displacing the centre from the head to the abdomen and then to the chest. Having the initial contact in any of these areas as a very condensed point of focus . Than releasing that and letting it dissipate across the chest to the throat, shoulders and ribs, or from the abdomen outwards across the flanks, or the head from the eyes to the ears and the back of the head. Then on into the extremities of limbs that are loose and spreading as the affect of this filtering system reaches them.

Perhaps these kinds of managements of states of affect through displacement and dissipation in the way one would experience touch as compression and spaciousness, can be internally engined as organs and muscle groupings press in on one another, than relax. That becomes a way of moving and of holding together- as if against the constriction of water that takes on the quality of a force. Using these states of self-induced constraint to move against is an exercise in consciousness and a means of staying for longer in the co-presence of others.

I’ve noticed that many autistic children have unusual patterns of holding and release with the breath, with food intake, excretion patterns. Also with stopping and starting movements, with sleep and wakefulness and with facial clenching and release of groups of muscles. Using physical interaction as a pacing practice this can be used for managing internally orchestrated rhythms of stop-start- engagement/letting go. It becomes a way for a child to notice the act of creating these devices of contrasting states of activation and relaxation and of widening the choices and possibilities of how they are played out and used so that rather than being played into critical extremes that resemble near death scenarios that become palpable in the extent of their discomfort, they are modulated and become a practice of synchronizing patterns into workable shapes and in so doing of utilizing affects.

_____



There are various other practices- BHUTO, WARAKU ( Both Japanese Practices) where states of possible trauma or overwhelming affect are re-distributed in cyclical and ritualistic physical practices. The states of mind they induce are a discipline of location and dislocation and as a way of staying in the positive and negative of a situation by following with interest the physical repercussions of those encounters. By letting the feeling state come and go and become an engageable point of physical impact and dissipation they play across the body as they might play across land.

26 Moves

*Note: This post relates to a twin blog wwwmovements.blogspot.com
also called 26 moves- of a series of drawings. Those in turn were activated by some of the work done in Daniel lepkoff's workshop in Frieburg, Physical Dialogues, between 31st July and 6th August 2010. ( The only way to get to the Movement blog is to click on the link in the blog roll).
R.
____


Bodies placate into one another. The outline absorbs, thickens, bends, absolves through the repercussions of something that keeps coming. Keeps bending.

There is nothing there when you look because you are hopelessly drawn into it too. Line for line. Echo for echo.

But there is a hesitant blink between the thought of it and the reaching for it. The blot of there/not thereness that is a jolt, a scurry, a scribbling and a scribbling out.

It is too terrible to look at these up close against one another like bodies in a morgue. Better that they fade in and out of one another recalibrating so that the multitude works as one.

The placement and demarcation of units of attention. With the yawning gaps where the lines run out into a bend in the paper there is a channelling into and out of invisibility. The blank pieces are a gulf at the limit that does not exist so that we stagger, hesitate, draw back into some kind of tottering brink that takes our body over the edge whilst remaining it where it is.

A wobble both drawn into gravity and propelled into light. The movement keeps running and running and is simultaneously seized, encapsulated, condensed. Called into blood and bones, muscles and sinews that implodes in that snap-shot.The blink of a flash-gun. The fall-out, the picture.

This tear in our livability that allows us to consider an act. That teeters on the verge of being toxic. A break in the on-goingness like a gasp invading the chest. A sudden revolt of that which we would swallow down. This neutralisation of the grit of surface to surface propulsion that gives each action a direction is a question. It is also a problem or a physical condition. Now a gut explosion quite impossible to contain. Then an inability to let go. In both a recursing on the tried and tested insensitivity of digestion, of elimination. It is a gasp of contradictory affects- of stop/start. A halt into the melting mutability of this shaping as it is lost and found. Something is fixing it- imagining it- recording it. Holding it up. That something is us.

In fragments of stasis thrown out of range that are many moves in excess of something collectible we organise and disorganise. A torsion sewing through the body and between bodies and things. Beyond the demarcation of  lines.
The impact of surface to surface on one another. These are felt impressions that are lingering so that skid marks in our affability- in the traces we leave- in the blotting and patching of an impossible light are sent around the office, altered re-constituted. An inefficient time consuming filtering system that brings up more than it is worth and is seen to exist in the very heart of life. Kept on despite its near continuous lapses. For the reading takes its impetus, runs its course beyond the material impressions that we ponder over. It gives our movement back even as it is almost vanquished, turned to white in the bleach of absolute matches- of absolute reproduction, in the impossibility of this double encounter. Point for point it is eating itself.

Here but inconsistently fading. Flailing under examination. That is why every change of attention is a get-away car- a chance for a new life- an ability to remain alive for an extended amount of time.To remain conscious. Because in the constant light it is failing bit by bit under our eyes. Memories are erased, eroded from certain areas of ground that give way or embrace bodies repealing an event, disallowing the possibility of it ever completing- changing the nature of what it is as it becomes swollen with counter-indications.

It may appear lurching from here to there picked up on one radar or another. Reinventing itself like a rope uncoiling. It is hard to track. There are lines of  attraction and instances of revulsion scoring into one another and cross-hatching all of our interests, all of our senses. This is the only way to describe the body.

That kinetic buzz in the ears is muffled and cossetted in the here and now. Yet it expands beyond our bearings. Can we follow it? If we can only isolate a wish for even a fraction of a second.

It is doubtful.We cannot even read it in stillness. We sometimes leap into these bare bones of brokennness that are all that remains in order to cancel out the violence of the gesture itself- walk right through them like cob-webs that become our new glistening skin, layer upon layer. That is as far as anyone can take it in this backwash tide of trying to deal with what is there.

There's an accumulation of affectivities- of sensitivities -that score our bodies through and through. Yet our aggravation creates relevance like mimetic folds through which we make up on the spot expressions on our faces. A reachability far beyond touch yet that is bantered back and forth over the surfaces of our entire bodies into the felt vibrations of our organs in atunement with one another. There's a mutuality- a resonance so that even as we stand here quite unenthused amid gestures that are lingering beyond the execution of any single origin -a twitch, an unresolved falling, an unassociated laugh that comes over us in a flash- the push and a pull begins to build on something- to make something of it.

There's an on-going torsion that pulsates. We are sent this way and that way through filaments of attention that are cut out beyond the immediate impact of our senses; of our ability or wish to respond. This listless- even bored and distracted listening, keeps our attention in many places at once. Our unique listening skills onmany occasions save us from traffic we could never see.

These influences that are real qualities of leverage and vacuum rather than a wish list for affinity infiltrate slowly or rapidly because we stay around for long enough for that to happen. We absorb movements- a movabilty- before we even get around to knowing the moves. These become our value systems. Impossible to describe but activated and sent onwards by everything we touch or set eyes upon or even smell and that disturbs or compels certain mannerisms out of any fixture while bodily we remain where we are.

That is what staying in one place is about. (That is the release technique?) A tolerance for an affectivity that is not immediately absorbed into another or that calls impatiently- out of social, moral, functional obligations-for a stringent meaning or set of outcomes. It plays off of a resistance, a mis-match, a hesitant delay on the back of experience. There's an on-going taste for habits that have been procured and twisted endlessly and have increased our attention for discernment whilst not particularly having to do anything about it.

That may allow us to fidget in a public place. Play with our hair ends next to a stranger. Spit on the pavement and follow the course of that evolution from wetness to dryness. Twist an object in our hands or twist our bodies around that object.To turn towards and away from a distant figure one will never speak to coherently. To create a pattern that lives on somewhere between. That we care for without  knowing how or why. Without possessing because there is no way to return or to loop it back around into an obviously recurrent theme. Or even to close a gap equally from all sides as one does when closing a hand.

Notes for loose connections

(After Moving Performer Course)


Could you make a loose structure where the bond was held and let out in the act?

A situation-event in the rise and drop of an expression?

_____

One that plays with the obviousness of set patterns; of holding-coming undone.

One that rearranges the consequences of social exposure/privacy.

That extends and lets flow, different junctures. Knots that tie and flow out intermittently over and through one another.

Concepts out of the act of doing

-Notes 2009-
(Garden and beyond*)



1. Filling and emptying

2. Reciprocity as presence

3. Reciprocity not as social but as composition



Cascading panels, Slight mismatch

=design

Context/ground for reciprocity: Culture

___

Too exact reciprocity = invisibility: fallen in a hole into underground burrow.

Unseen



Autism could be condition of too exact reciprocity.

Pedagogy for autism = training for mismatch

The art of sliding



Spaciousness between panels = living space

Co-habitation

Responsiveness- emotion



Slightly skewed so as to hold open a shared frame of reference.

Basis of memory is on this re-angling.

Creating different intervals between acts of repetition



Turned inside out

Truncated

Extended

Slanted

One surface against another



Consciousness is the activation which comes between expectation of a repetition and its scuppering or re-application.



Any one sequence whether conventional or not, functional or not is insignificant on its own.

It is its angling up against other “takes” held through other orientations of other lived out habits that create the ground for a habitus.



That traction comes out of the act of putting out and infolding back in between the one and the two and the many. It accumulates as a cross-stitching over and over again into something both dense and gaseous.



These points of traction and release give rise to all affects.

One cannot speak of proximity/distance. Only of a continuously evolving experimentation with different degrees of tension and release.

That traction occurs at every level both within a single body and between bodies and in every aspect of evolving form-making and its continual and simultaneous disintegration.

The two bearings of completion and dissipation occur simultaneously meshing through one another.



This is the Cat’s Cradle traction between all states

_____________

Stretching

19.5.10



Stretching out past the tendrils and nerve endings, the adjunct buds and finger pads. How to elongate, testing out give way points and the snapping shut and rebound. The knot of our bodies triangulated and folded and tied. Can we follow the thread? Leaning back in counter weight to the rope-end of a sinewy arm? A chest heaving. A belly tightening and softening under the impulse. An impulse sent through at the extremity- tied and loosened. Pressure is the same- never in and of itself as a localized affair- presence –absence a padding pulsation- on-off that opens the escape route, feeds back through- a remote probing through a tilt and swivel so that a two-handed treatment is always a making of gages- the playing out of intervals- impact and absence that occupies and vacates portions of space so that there is a conjoint spasm of filling and emptying in counterpoint. A push-me-pull-you making of accounts across distance- in the time it takes to respond.

So many people lie down on the mat. They are coming from down the hallway out of the main crèche area where mothers and toddlers fill a play-space. They have stories- half told- about racist neighbours, car-accidents, sudden jolts to the system that whiplash like lightening a certain disposition, a certain strain that does not go away. It is incarcerated in their bodies. They work around this stream-line. Shirk the contactability of this fault line that wobbles and stutters and rearticulates the body- a broken body. There is pain- soreness and angled jilted heads. Breath is high up in the chest. The solar plexus is hard like a drum. Ankles are in a state of continual torsion. Toes are hardened piercing the floor. There are others whose backs are smouldering with snake lines that harden, only to be deposited with more dust. Abdomens beat in, retracting into a disappearing centre. Necks are full, pulsing under the responsibility of carrying the head in a constant state of alert. Others who have bodies like war heroes- militarily primed for battle- worked up and worked out in the prediction of every kind of contingency. They want to know the meaning of the contact I am giving. Why it is like that and what it will achieve. I can’t tell from that point of questioning. But as the treatment goes on, an area of evasion comes to light. The body perfected around an isolated point of fear- of irritability – stubbornly refusing to melt into the suppleness of the idealised body. There is an absentee counterweight diagonally distanced yet joined like a conjoined twin around the perfect body and meeting at the centre of that the twinge of pain – of irritability that is a form of consciousness that is a human concern. It is all that is left to hold onto.

How to work in the intervals of opposing qualities?-a gage of spaciousness where one extreme begins to affect, inform and so pose questions to the other. In that dialogue issues come to the surface played out though the body and the pulsation of quivering muscles caught between sustainment and collapse, of breathing patterns caught between a fullness and a lapse, that begin to redistribute one another.

There is a third element a missing link between those extremes. Something that cannot be named outside of that interaction that has its own time-scale. A needling double- edged concern and repulsion as an environmental factor, coalesced into the figure of a certain person- an irritant and strong motivator- a person not known to me but to them left unnamed in this written medley.

Afterwards I sit in the park waiting for the rush-hour to drift away. On the way to the station my body is slowed down, quivering, vacant. My coordination is woven outside the texture of any immediate task. I am needy-hungry, but indecisive about what to eat. Restless but tired. Aware but streaming every action without being able to meet it wholly through my bodily response. The gage I suppose is wide – through the treatment process- so that I am waiting for affects that otherwise would be closed in perceptual or action based nuggets of information all sewed back up together. A man descends the stairway of the station carrying a see-through bag with rubbish. I see through to the items both as separate and as combined – how together they jostle and squeeze against one another punching out the sides of the bag. The bag in scrunched at the top by the hand of the man. He heaves one hip up slightly above the other as he descends the stairs so as to yank on the weight a little and clear it from the step.



He walks past me along the platform, then passes again still with the bag which is bulging ever more. He looks and half smiles but because my face does not respond immediately he grimaces, then let’s go that grimace before it completes and simply walks by. I cannot totally believe that it would have been better for me to have smiled back within the time frame allowed for that response. It is just the way that it is on that day.

I have a long journey home on the tube but at least I have missed the rush-hour having let pass several trains already.

Buckling

17.5.10



Buckling- coming out of something melded or burnt into place. Collision with no set point of impact. Not a crash. Pervasiveness. Rinsing through. Affective. A temperature rising through this fusion. This moving through the limits in touching. Temperature increase in the thickness of this wedging down and through one another. Interlocking, than as it takes effect, a heat intensity, a gripping hold as one. Blasting of impact giving way to smoothness- the rippling effect of metal raised in temperature to liquid. Ease of passage. An opening of options. But before the effusion is complete- irreconcilably mixed as one, there is a cooling. – an arching back out, a splintering apart, a buckling.


Torsion of the spine, rebound of a quivering resonance. Harmony and disharmony, symmetry and asymmetry, parallel lying and vertical right angle, gravity and impetus, descent and recoil, attraction and repulsion. These play out in the temperature gages that work through a process of intensification and a lessening off.


Forms manifest and die away in that timed release. Opposites abound as heat and fusion gives way to cooling and separation. Yet these two moves are not procedural- they are enwrapped and evolving out of one another, interpolated, gnoring in and extinguishing one another, minutely over and over again, here and there.

I saw a program about the Blitz. A piece of shrapnel blasted, twisted, contorted, spun around itself, melded and shot apart out from the main body of the projectile form. Embedding itself into the brickwork of a terraced house punching it outwards as it too detonated.

The man holds this piece of dusty shocked shrapnel and holds it up against the smooth surface of a complete missile, glossy and smooth with green paintwork- trying to find the place where it may have fitted. It is guesswork. A hypothetical non-starter. The piece of shrapnel has been forever altered. What it has gone through has constituted it in a different way. Its intimacies and points of contact in the contained intensity of a blast sent its exterior into new forgeries, different paths of action and possibility. It twisted like a living growth in its withering away in the heat and chill of its own detonation. As affected as the building it implanted itself in.


That word -buckling- that piece of shrapnel, dusty and bleached from the heat of a certain moment of detonation. The smell of it, the touch of it- rough smouldering, dry, parched, dusty. This buckling now abstracted from the reactions that made it so. And yet I take that word- the sensations of affect from out of which that word in turn has been exhumed and play it out in the two practices in which I am familiar with at the moment- Contact Dance and Drumming ensembles. It plays out equally in the drama and process of both. It enlivens and brings into a bearing, opposed manifestations of closeness and separation, affinity and rebuff. It works these, according to the workings of a temperature gage, into diverse affects, divergent formations that are time-bound within this process that has its own internal agenda.



To set up the conditions for these temperature gages through speed and refrain, pressure gages and their continual miniscule alteration and the loud-soft, hard-soft temperance that these then imply, pops out all the manifestations of performance like the flip side of a certain season or climatic encounter of wind direction, humidity count, uninhibited light source, cloud coverage. It is the embedded precursor to a weather report. The implications play out, a Shakespearian drama that unfolds from a core set of oppositions. The drama and suspense comes in tweaking those low lying imperceptible circumstances- the temperature gages and forecasting dials that create out of that composition, certain moments of fusing and buckling.


I am working with the image of this buckling- an image wrought from an entirely different scenario- a World War Two missile explosion over Shoreditch, London which, sixty years later, is being dug up by local school children and residents who still remember the vibration of the blast in a park as proof of a moment of devastation- of the transformation of matter into gas, jnto liquid and then into aa reconstituted matter. That interval between the seizure which is an event and the evidence of that event can be used as a creative image that holds and patterns other creative processes- puts them into a sequence of attention, waiting and witnessing as the emergence of disparate states comes to rise.

The dance and the drumming ensemble can evolve out of that process of dramatic fusion and separation- even whilst the medium and the results end up being of a different material. A third or outside metaphor- the buckled piece of steel- can act as an organiser for grasping the shockwaves and speed of such occurrences. It can hold in an extended stillness a configuration whereby moments set apart play into one another through repetition and change and come apart differently on and on over time. It provides a moment for pause and hesitation – even in the midst of an on-going rush of colliding events. It creates a spaciousness of reckoning in and through the run of things.

Can we hold ourselves separately any more? like a piece of shrapnel up against the smooth body of an ideal form- to try and imagine a time before trauma, before relatedness. Aren’t we all inextricably blasted, melded and buckled around one another- dispersed and reconstituted on every lean or intention that gradually takes hold? Isn’t it purely hypothetical to speak of these perfect bodies, before the moment of impact? Yet so much in therapeutic programs tries to return people to this paradise of unity and self-sufficiency. Is it probable, desirable? Is it healthy to seek for that by the use of outside readymade models of desirable attributes? Like the body of a missile that will never be launched and that will never undergo transformation?


People are inextricably altered by the circumstances of their birth, by the circumstances of their parenting, their upbringing, their neighbourhoods. Yet even before this the cellular composition of every aspect of the body is an inextricable alteration of cells meeting, combining and splaying apart. Melding and buckling goes all the way through- at every level of grasping and holding together there is the propensity and inclination towards splitting apart and separation. One can scarcely talk of the one without the other. They are twinned through and through.


The body is the intertwined acting out of these oppositional tendencies. The interrelatedness of people in practices considered to be cultural, educational, therapeutic, political (as the recent coalition government in great Britain has shown) and considered to hold together certain integrities-certain ideals, is only the continuation of this on-going process of mixing up and continual reconstitution. It’s important to trace through the formations that seem in any era to be integral and substantial within an ideal or an ideal form, into this undercurrent of perpetual movement. They are pauses- specific time-related solutions to this traction between redistribution and formal recognition. Individualities continuously are made and unmade through those gages of multiple focus.

Shock-waves into movement

16.5.20



In the Contact Dance class I am struck by the body organising on contact, living out a possibility or curtailing it in prohibition and a confrontational impasse.

The psychology of either state comes in after the event of that process, acting and redistributing minutely. The on-going procedure thumps out a tuning- an accord or discord in this hit and miss- a conceding to a quality of impact and a leading it out from there or else its holding and stiffening.


When we got going early on with a whole sequence of things to be done one after another in order to tumble into place something resembling acrobatics the crushing impasse set in. I could not place the first incline the right way and all else fell away. I had no memory of the procedure to be done and in that blankness I could not even talk and fumbled my words trying to explain to a newcomer what it was we were to do. I was caught in an entrapment of looking at the procedure as a second hand demo done by the tutor and another participant and could not re-enter into the feel of the thing- find the niche where the thing flickers open like a multi-facetted pocket knife. Rather all the selection of different blades was apportioned in a regimented order of appearance and I could not make that happen. I landed rather awkwardly on the shoulder of my partner who backed away in pain.

Contact Dance seems to me to be about going into the point of abrupt contact and where the natural inclination is to tighten and set up a clear boundary, to instead receive that impact and take it further into a continued conjoint movement- In other words to learn from the impact about a sense of speed, volition, texturing and to enact and pattern those impulses arrived at within a charge of other impulses and to sweep them up into the formation of a process under way. A kind of hoovering up and reformulating a consistent paste out of the sweat and particles of a generalised direction. A rough sketching that gets to a gist of the thing- an atmosphere or temperament that is built upon portion by portion. Not the bricks to a house but the depth of land mass that cakes together and amounts to something of its own.

So there cannot be an outer authorship or only a very crude and make-believe level before the atmosphere of the piece breaks through and carries the movements into this smooth pasting.


With each different partnering, different capabilities and different set-backs break to the surface and become the visible psychology – the relief and stutter of the occasion. Characterisations are grasped – an invitation carried over- tweaked and aggravated into response then rested with. How can this animation and body organisation rear up like a beast on the slightest of touches? - a known responsiveness at the filiations of skin to skin which is more than this- it is the flesh tenderising or not, pulping into one another or cutting and hardening as bone on bone- then a sentiment coming through out of this testing into some kind of anguish and hope – between tiredness and invigoration- lethargy and exuberance- anger and tenderness- sympathy and doubt. These terms are not

Stand-alones. They are dealt through the paste of this mixing and the factory of becoming that certain cuts, certain engagements, rebuttals and back-spins- like churning one way and then threading backwards into a verticality reaching its limits and swamping back down again. It’s a drama acted out knowing itself at each point of contact. Yet contact is always mixed up with deflection- deferment- a breaking off- a gasp for air in the watery substance of this embrace.

The music too soon may jar with the technicalities of sequences and body mechanics, of waiting and falling. An awkwardness- the motion played into a formula too soon. Later it catches into the catchments of the small spaces between meeting and bouncing apart. It percolates and furthers this rinsing through and so is open to affect as another discrepancy or extension- another angle of configuration- of slowness and speeding.


So bodies begin to organize around these pulsations and there is an open questioning where the thing is held over- the rudeness of a wake-up call. Exhaustion –tendrils stretching out- ligaments on the ground – tapped and perturbed by another body. The habit of recoil out on hold and a going into this adjunction –internalising it into a movement- configuring against an invitation to extend than the limitation of a counter force- two bodies pushing and pulling –levitating and levering off of one another and a collapsing into the ground until weight is taken up in to continued momentum- then a catching in and a jamming into a locked anchorage- a hinge. Gradually the two bodies move in the body-as-one, the breathing capacity redistributed over this doubling of systems that become simply an intensification. A jointing working itself into signatures then unravelling and extending as if they would escape such capture in obliviation and at the last moment, the tendrils pulling back through into the body mass feeling a passage through in the filaments of conjoined trunks, conjoined bellies, bordering, arching and twisting back off of one another. The dance makes itself. Before formulation again sets in and learned responses kill this entwined receptivity. The comic ridiculously takes over from a passion of energy and tenderness that is unsustainable.- yet not adequately discharged this time.

The dancing raises an emotional threshold. That once in place allows for easy conversation- off from this tangible bar-level built up in the folds or minute distances of co-relational responses across bodies. Only after it has evolved can it talk about itself and spin off of those levels to talk about other situations- historical, psychological, immediate, environmentally related. For the ground has literally arrived out of which all other considerations- all other measurements unfold. But try to inject words, dialogue, narrative too soon before this level threshold has become attainable-tangible and all slips and slides off of one another. Nothing is held in place for long enough to provide a secure foothold in which to place anything else. Everything dislodges off the back of everything else. There can be no presence or permanence. In that state language absolves- It become non-verbal -goes back on itself. Words that are spoken by others lack legitimacy. Their traction of dialogue breaks apart.


After the dance was made, there is a resting in the relief of these contrasts- they continue to play out like an after-glow. Words slip out in a jovial-seriousness of that state of conjoint consideration- an intimacy- attention that is rooted in the physical, mental, emotioning jointing of this occasion. Words formulate as the last thing to position patterns, juxtapositions, impulses, momentums, resting places that are anyway already worked into gear. The words are affirmations of an idea already got going in physical propensities enticed and disinclined. The body is the outcome of this imagination let loose in the dance. Affinity- empathy- emotional relationship is worked into a pitch of resonance from multiple angles according to small local gauges of mediation- through touch, speed, sound, smell- sticking and letting loose again- intervals continually shifting. That is the building of an emotional landscape- the intensity of that landscape gears into presence the animate body, the animate thought process- the shared interlinked imaginative landscape- an enchantment of convivial living. Words like sweat come out of that .


It is not the acrobatics- the physical dexterity of a body as a separate unit catching a ride on another- it is this temperament of co-ordinated affect- the continual way bodies reorganize in the pitch of that moment around one another- redistributing the way the flesh falls and folds; the passage off and on the floor – through the space that is popped into significance out of these holdings and their momentary escapes.

Tightening and release. That is not about the image of the body- its weight or age or even its flexibility- its habitual living or eating patterns- the way it proceeds in the morning or at night, the clothing or hair coverage- the composure of the skin- the sweat glands or breath tincture. It is this quality and capacity for enfoldment and redesign on the verge of every meeting- the giving way at the very point of a resistance- the recalibration of the shock response to contact resisting habitual separation and the ideal of individual perfection to a more dis-eased state of intoxication- yet whilst also remaining lucid and coherent. The dance is the emotioning of this state of an idea of collapse and reformulation. It is engagement- taking something and doing something with it. A grasping by opening up the entire surface of the body as interface- the operation of intelligence calibrated and brought into actuality on each touch whether that is up against the surface of skin or as an interval affect through sympathetic rearrangement or enfoldment of a rhythm of movements and a way of being on the threshold of consciousness, on the periphery of what is usually let in as relevant. Experience then opens to the inclusion and the double entendre at the edge of every “normal” limit. Capacity for listening grows. The organs of reception splay out beyond their visceral reach- lingering in a conjoint atmosphere. It’s an idea- an emotion made into a tangible experience. An occasion for all.


To realise something keep doing it, through the faults and wide range deficit to either side of the supposed mark. Broaden the appeal and let it linger in that spaciousness.

Over this continued rough grafting, something of an atmosphere of what is to be got at will emerge- the lines will grow more stable- an establishment will become asserted in this arrangement and joint consideration that over time comes to gradually right itself – cohering into something that just feels right, through this continual trial and error.

Niche

To find a niche- not the limitation of a category of interest that one cannot go beyond. I mean an actual physical niche- something to work off- a foothold- a sticking point- some kind of jamming device- a choking reflex to the smooth run of affairs.


Autistic recursiveness is a kind of pondering around a selection of physical affects that begin to animate one another and so to redistribute the run of the affect. Like playing a riff on a guitar over and over again- that two bar section of a nursery rhyme- madness- infuriating.


To look in at that- of course it is self-referential going nowhere. But then there is a fault, a sticking point- a lull and pause for breath- a catchment in the fingering- the logical playing out of the rhythm is fractionally delayed- the conclusion obviated in the looped return.


A wavering. The notes pile up. Flavours that churn- salt and sugar. Jam mixed into porridge. The voicing samples itself as an imposition on the order of things. A glancing around. This sabotage. This is sabotage. But the tuning sticks, gathers weight- the lapsed return must work around that now. It catches and swirls, changing the river bed gradually, ponderously grinding into this groove, this catchment, making it so.


That is a making out of intensity that builds on its own limited affects at each turn, burrowing downwards to seize the ground- bouncing up out of that as a reflex spasm that is a shocked performance into the daylight and is then held there by the audience, the expectations, the collective focus, levitated and impossibly sustained. It is buoyed up by all surrounding. Its life is a triangulation of filaments holding it in place, making it perceptible- to be commended- “in spite of it all”, “the difficulties” “the disabilities”. But it is this riveting of attention on to a catchment that really gets it going. The disability a workable tool levering against behavioural consistency.



Innovation, the accident accounted for in the blanks of the program. The to-ing and fro-ing, the swaying and pondering, the walkabout and abrupt exits. The returns, the re-runs, the re-trials and a gearing back into the movement that was let up on. This is the engine that gets going with no point in mind- nothing to reach, except the limitation of its own perfect return again and again until something comes down- something is plonked in the lap of a “half-wit”. The inconsistency is made to count. A Message? No, a mistake.


We think and articulate around an infinity of such mistakes. No island of genius in a sea of limitation- the limitation is the catchment around which an idea- an idea of recursively thinking back to the idea of this warping event becomes useable rather than obviated. A point of stoppage around which something builds- congestion becomes rampant.


The public interest in autism of late is because in uncertain times we are all trying to work out this strange embrace between regularity and the jolting into innovation that we very nearly dump out with the rubbish- at least this has been the habit of certain ways of life for years. I hope the TV shows can get beyond magpie picking performance like a curatorial investor whilst leaving the repetition- the day to day living arrangements of these autistic “entertainers” as the separate conundrums of a freak show which the public stares at but never identifies with.


The performability organizes the gestures and repetitious manoeuvres which are continual. They are the backdrop, the context, the playable surface, the wealth of humus to be gone into. The regularity labyrinth of beat, melody, line, colour are the differential tools that begin to organize a flappable body- containing it in feedback that informs further output. Making the flap an extension – a kind of winged expanse- making the containment a useable energy source. Together enhancing the beat and working on and off that regularity, into a melody in counter point- a voicing that is channelled through these searing corridors, sharp bends and cuts. A tonifier in the body exuberance.


Facilitated communication can make the flapping work against a counter-point. Contact Dance can create body ligaments and jointing out of the wavering extremity of going outwards in an unstoppable motion or inwards into a turreted screw-driver drill. By linking opposites in bodily affects- physical points of hit, absorption, rebound- a vocabulary starts to evolve. A languaging is born on the brief of these opposed soundings. A change of direction mid-sentence is factored in. The factoring in of this point of traction that uses that feeling by continually seeking it out- becoming sensitive to that possibility as a working point of concern- something around which awareness takes hold-a fungus, a virus, a crystal formation- it evolves in the process not out of a mind set apart- set in advance. It could never know itself outside of the traction of its own felt moment of birth. Outside of its own arrival of immanence that keeps in mind that possibility- that space- at all times without knowing or trying to know the exact whereabouts or timed formula of how it will play out.