Dance studies
Martin Givors, Researcher, Dance and Anthropology, FNRS, Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium
As a researcher in dance, I tend to consider my own body as the first site of inquiry for the questions that I find most stimulating. Within the study of corporal practices in dance and circus, the notion of attention offers a privileged entry point to address the subjective experience of the performer during a performance. More specifically, it seems to me that analysis of the artist’s attentions might contribute to our understanding of gestural morphogenesis (i.e., the process of their performance). Every movement, every bodily state, every choreographic style could, in this sense, be associated with a form of corporeal, spatial, and rhythmic consciousness, both singular and dynamic, like a sensory landscape from which they continually emerge.
Attentional activity is, of course, too complex and stratified for us to be described exhaustively, just as the attentional architectures available to a researcher will never be more than mere sketches. However, the fact remains that the learning of a movement or a bodily state often takes place through the transmission of some kind of subjective attentional mapping that can be recorded – what psychologist James Gibson would call an "attentional education". As such, inspired by his stay among Shaolin monks in China, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui incites his performers to “dance while looking at their bodies from the back of their head” [1] – the occipital regard being a meditation movement technique used in Chinese martial arts – in order to develop a corporality that he describes as “reptilian”[2]. Likewise, during the creation of a trampoline quartet, circus artist Yoann Bourgeois insists upon the necessity of paying attention to the pressure of gravitational force on the body in order to fall in tune with this thrust – a movement which allows these forces to play out, rather than an act of solitary and autonomous volition. Here, attention is a key constituent in the physics of the gesture: paying attention to the presence of gravity constitutes, for Yoann Bourgeois, a means of granting it full agency in the emergence of the gesture. Attention thus becomes a tool in the distribution of power, in the sense that ‘pay attention to’ might really signify ‘accept being affected by,’ and thus ‘work with.’ As the anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us, attentional intelligence is inseparable from the artist’s technical virtuosity. In a sense, attention is constantly mapping out the sensory landscapes from which qualities and gestural writings emerge, which are expressions of responses to the textures of the perceived world.
In addition to situations of transmission, the concept of attention also sheds light on the uniquely hermeneutic dimension of corporal practices. If sharing a gesture is achieved through sharing an attentional cartography, training and improvisation are processes during which gestures, often repeated, bring out new, unpremeditated attentions. As a practitioner and researcher, this process seems to be at the heart of my practice-led research work. In the scope of “The Invisible at Play” workshop series that I co-directed with Claire Besuelle between 2017 and 2018, our research methodology thus consisted in working and reworking a repertoire of techniques put forth by a body of artists over the course of a full year, rerunning them again and again in a variety of contexts in pursuit of an “an attempt at exhaustion” –[3] of these same repeated gestures. Through their repetition and reappropriation, we were able to examine what was gradually revealed to us about the so-called "energetic" processes in theatrical and choreographic work. Captured repeatedly over a long period of time, the gestures became triggers of attention, and the sensible worlds that they invited us to explore informed the very substance of our research.
[1] Notes de terrain issues de l'observation des répétitions du spectacle Fractus V, Barcelone, juin 2015.
[2] Ibid
[3] Which adopts George’s Perec well known publication Attempt at exhausting a place in Paris, 1975
Cite this item: Martin Givors, “Participant observation”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177593
