Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore

Introduction:

In the Underscore there is the possibility of bringing into reflection a practise as we are doing it. It is a movement meditation; a practise of non-attachment to every state whether perceived as favourable or un-favourable. It becomes the movement of states rather than a pre-figured ideal state that drives the dance as it cares for the dancers. This enquiry that is non-localised and takes on different positions of enfoldment and expansiveness as a streaming consciousness, generates the life-force that flows so naturally in Contact Improvisation.

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Last night we danced Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore. We did not enter it as a guided road map talked through in advance. Rather we created our own focused attention within the possibilities of the score which we shared in quick thoughts beforehand and then in the practise itself. There is the part lying on the ground where time seems to slow down and there is both this vacancy/absence and the beginnings of a possible opening. This is not given in the immediate mirrored responses of others but is more a melting through that seems suddenly, as if entering a certain current, to stretch out indefinitely. The room itself begins to animate that elastic quality and vision follows the minutiae of fall and lift like the fine-tune balancing of sound experienced in the inner ear as differences in pressure gradient that fluctuate and equalise.

The body is not made up completely on its own; there are gaps in the contour. Nor is vision thrown out beyond a self-made body like a hook flung out on the end of a rope. In the underscore perception is taken apart back into its living state and thread by thread unravelled into the space. The body becomes movement; the movement of fleeting ideas and the movement of the body beyond any fixed state.

The first touch connection can feel strange after the slow and quiet investigation with the floor. It can be a shock after lying there on the ground in the skinesphere to suddenly be formulated and called into response by another. So there begins a practise of modulation about how we form on one another's incompletion and the shifts this implies. This changes the focus away from dutiful obligation or knowing the rules of the dance to simply turning up in each moment. The hospitality is the open space. There is a silence here that can sometimes feel like being thrown onto the wide sea as a kind of loneliness. But in time this becomes the practise itself. It is an open invitation to manifest in many different ways over and over again. In this careful or cared-for attention an open gauge can be many things at once. The dance space is part of the "care" which allows for right touch at the right time.

At first it is enough to feel the quality of warmth from the flesh that is not self generating but comes from another body. But soon this idea of self and other is non-applicable within the practise. There is a steaming through so that the heat gradually equalises and seems to emanate from no particular direction or source but to spread with a life of its own. This needs open availability without codifying this back into the familiar resoluteness of the dance with its supposed moves tumbling out of each other like a pack of cards. Rather there is staying with the contact without bringing it too completely into movement and remaining with that movement through the space without formulating it into a meeting with beginning middle and end. The elastic stretching yawn encounter becomes a contagion between many bodies that are formulating and reformulating at the threshold of exposure. There is a temperature gradient like a light shift or the disassembly out of a vertigo spin suddenly caught and reorganised. There is the heaviness of imploding organs suddenly released. The interface is everywhere within and between bodies in these overlapping kinespheres. Wherever there is a quality shift in experience and in the perception of experience there is the rush of contrast that becomes the continuance of the dance. The small dance and the greater dance are one pervading gesture lending themselves to one another.

There is a circulation that links floor to wall to window to body through a tumbling reorientation of contact and into a new compass point which explodes back out into the space. This is the geometry of the felt space. Movement runs its course out of a build up of heat that suddenly frees itself out into the dissolving space. There is that running and opening through the chest, arms spread out to what before had been a near implosion where impact literally took the breath away. A trapped shape born from repetition resolves itself and finds the simplest escape routes. Lines and curves cut through the air propelled out of a questioning ground. Forms cannot help it; they must flip inside out on the briefest of touches living and dying, riding and shaping off of their own limits.

The tempo is not immediately given. It builds out of the bodily sensations that build and escalate as shape on shape, layer on layer. Staying with these long enough allows an open frame of attention to be set. Micro and gross levels of change can be witnessed and modulated simultaneously as they are performed out of this open frame. There is an investigation or probing into levels of detailed focus and then an interest and staying with the distractions which are spin-offs from this. There's a planting down into a stable and unwavering mind from out of which the body can be flung this way and that acting through each connotation and the lived implications of this.  There are these run-ins with excess activity and then a deepening stillness where the tempo remains held delicately in active but quiet suspension. There is a pulsation that is felt like the blood rushing through the body; a precision in the heightened attention to every mode of amplification or diminshment. In this there is the endless re-versioning until the compact and absolute boundedness of bodies begins to melt in the practise of bodies coursing through one another. What was impossible becomes possible. Certain flights of the body and the rolling and tumbling shaping and sounding in the tenderness of contact contradict pre-set personalities. The rigid choreography of our set social standings breaks apart in the dance, whatever may happen later in the day.

We are swiftly drawn markers running across an absent space and intoning it into substance. We have evoked make-believe surfaces in order to play. The hard line which can be used as a point of bounce is a moment later coming apart. The dissolving line still captures our attention like a feint echo. Held loosely we begin to ride on the waves of sound/not sound and to link into this quality of engagement continually perpetuated on the edge of movement in parallel dances.

The diagram of pulsation is sometimes manifesting violently and with force or delicately as a tender embrace. The movement that catches against hard contact is openly softening into a wider sense of spaciousness against the on-off piercing of a brass clarinet that fades out into the catatonic silence we still inhabit. In this torsion there is a double move; both pushing into and spreading apart. This two-way traction courses through ligaments and muscles, veins and sinews, air cavities deep in the diaphragm and the glutinous texture of our digestive liquids. There is the melodious flow of blood coursing through arteries and veins running into and out of the heart and lung. These organs are shaped and re-formed out of the passing of substances that are never stable. The body is the nodal point that opens back through the spherical space of the dance. It continues to flow out into the sounds and colloidal lights of the city that are streaming through the air and that carry on through us into our day to day gestures and the consequences of life. 
   
We are in the particularity of this one moment at this one time in this one dance and yet meshed into this interweaving of tendencies that reach a breaking point on the cusp of every encounter. There are no independent dancers because at every awakening idea of a movement or gesturing into a learnt engagement, there is this interruption that breaks like a wave into a new dance.

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