Articulating Presence: Attention is Tactile
This essay is published in a text by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2020) titled “Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation: Philosophy, Pedagogy, Practice” Editor is Malaika Marco-Thomas. Pages 260-276.
Written by Nita Little & Joseph Dumit
Warm-up Score: Touch before touching
Warm your hands up in preparation for a simple handshake. You will need a partner for this. From a distance, move forward and shake hands. Now try doing it in slow motion. Stop the moment you feel contact has been made, the beginning of the handshake. Perhaps you got to skin on skin. Do it again, slower, and notice that before skin meets, you are already in contact. Touch is already active. As you gain confidence, you will discover this sensation begins sooner, and even further away – be sure to back up. And further. At some point you will discover a tactile relationship to your attention. Try it with others. Touch before touching gets even better when attention is organized by the intention to touch.
Introduction
We probably all agree that attention is critical in dance and dance pedagogy. But what do we mean by the term? Attention is claimed by researchers in phenomenology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, contemplative studies, Buddhism, athletic training, psychotherapy, and self-help. And everywhere there are teachers saying, “Pay Attention!” Some scholars have declared attention to be too ambiguous a term to use. But many of those who study attention also want to train it, to improve it, to help people do things with it. Yet attention is multifaceted and there are many disagreements over its nature and kinds. Looking across these literatures, we have come to the conclusion that perhaps everyone is right about the kind of attention they are studying, because attention is exceedingly malleable and specific. K.A. Ericsson proved that with the right kind of training, any person can learn how to attend to and remember an exceedingly long list of numbers, but it doesn’t improve their ability to remember other things (2003). A pro tennis player can learn to attend to and appear to presciently know where an opponent is going to hit the ball before the opponent does. Yet the same tennis player turns out to be average at reacting to a table-tennis shot (Syed 2010). A tracker can learn to attend to signs in the forest that no one else notices (Brown 1978), and a microphenomenologist learns to attend to past moments with experiential detail that they were not aware of when they were happening (Petitmengin 1999). It seems as if attention can be trained to do extraordinary things, precisely because the ordinary is defined by the existing forms of attention we have learned (Clark et al. 2015). This is intriguing because we do not know what attention can do, and that is the start of an adventure with consequences.
Attention is multifaceted and fascinating because no matter the form, it is bodymind. There is no way to think of it that does not involve bodily activity—sensory, muscular, orienting, readying—as well as subjective activity—an intention, object, focus, openness. The activity of attention can be heuristically separated by disciplines and lists, but doing so transforms the wholeness of attending into new pieces. One of the most common forms of attention, often called “focused attention,” comes with concentration – a bodymind word about narrowing attention to a specific object to the exclusion of others as well as a narrowing of the brow or other forms of muscular tension. For improvisational dancers, such focused attention is at odds with being open to what is happening around them (Manning 2016), yet they are not always trained to distinguish other forms of attention. In contact improvisation we often use “soft focus” or a distributed extension of awareness in order to catch the initiation of new action pathways within ourselves, our partners, or within a field of activity. And, too, it has become common to refer to various formulations of attention as “states” because the shifting of attentional practice and concerns alters our embodied experience. We propose therefore that expanding our vocabulary of attention can help us realize that attention can also be open, it can be creative, and it can be tactile (Myers & Dumit 2011).
In this essay, we investigate a form of tactile attention that Nita Little has developed in workshops and labs over the past 25 years. Joseph Dumit has spent the same time conducting ethnographic research into how cultural training in facts and knowing shapes how people engage with their bodies, illnesses, and technologies. Both are fascinated by how many kinds of attention and embodied inquiry there are in dance, science, and other forms of life. Attention, we suggest, can become felt presence within an ensemble of dancers spread out in space, and become the basis of improvisational creativity and learning together. Through improvisational dance, somatic practice, and performance research, Dumit and Little are interested in furthering the conversation about aspects of touch that contact improvisation (CI) dancers often engage in without having language with which to describe their experience beyond the familiar, but ungraspable “energy.” At issue is that these terms do not satisfy many of the conditions we seek to understand. For example, the touched/touching sensation is a proprioceptive spatial experience that is not limited to the familiar skin on skin flesh-based one we nurture in CI. Indeed, more familiar but no less significant, is the feeling of inter and intra personal touched/touching that happens deep within the boundaries of our flesh and not at all on our surfaces, while getting a massage, while dancing in tandem, but also when feeling someone point at us. These, we argue, are best thought through the language and practice of attention as tactile presence, and they can be learned.
Although subtle, this form of attending as sensing/touching may be key to a lot of communication that happens between dancing partners within contact improvisation (CI) duets and also within ensemble dance actions: somatic communication. We consider the foundation of this communication to be actions of embodied attention. We speak of mind and body without the conjunction “and” separating each as distinct functions in order to make the point that they are inseparable in their actions. Saying mindbody, or bodymind recognizes that all actions are emergent phenomenon formed through their entangled, irreducible, and inextricable engagement.
Nita Little is one of the co-founders of contact improvisation, working with Steve Paxton in winter 1972 and learning from him an approach that led them to CI as a rigorous practice-as-research investigation of the bodymind as virtual: as open to what it can be capable of (cf. Deleuze 1990, Manning 2013). Akin to Deleuze’s gloss on Spinoza’s claim that “We do not know what a body can do,” CI was a series of laboratories of joint improvisation – experimenting with what was possible for two or more bodyminds together (Deleuze 1992; Joufflineau & Bachrach 2016). Whereas Paxton used a vocabulary of reflexivity and consciousness, aiming at “full consciousness” of moments, Little developed her CI as a vocabulary of attention (Paxton 2003, 2015). By the 1990s, she had created a series of companies/research teams for intensive study of contact improvisation and ensemble work, and a series of workshops to research practical forms of attention: diffuse vs focused attention; geometries of attention (places, pathways, surfaces, volumes); peripheral (whole body) attention; speed of attention and the ability to move at the speed of one’s partner’s attention; and later feral or reWilding attention (Little 2010, 2014a, 2014b).
The notion of attention as tactile became teachable in a series of classes in the mid-1990s with company members of Smith Grade Construction Company, one of Little’s research teams composed of contact improvising ensemble dancers. Kaya Nati was a member who Little had often singled out as exquisitely good at making visible the movement of his physical attention. He was stunningly clear in his embodied presence, the actions of his attention. Once pointed out, people realized that they too, could see attention. However, not everyone was as visible as Nati. One could see his attention move with great specificity throughout his body. His physicalmental clarity, the motion of his mind moving from deep within his body all the way to its surfaces and beyond, was so detailed, so fully felt, that a whole community of dancers was easily and joyfully moved by him. He spatially touched them and pressed them into movement through his attentive motion.
During one laboratory, Little asked the participants to propose scores – a set of propositions or instructions that would serves as a shared provocation to move together. Nati proposed a score in which one person is a paper and the other a pen. Little elaborated this score into the following:
Score: Pen & Paper
Find a partner. One of you will begin as the pen and the other paper. The pen is “writing” a meaningful letter on and toward the paper, for someone not present on the dance floor. Writing includes thinking, recalling, sketching, drafting, and connecting. The pen does not have to touch the paper for these to occur, and the paper is also moving to help the letter better emerge as significant.
In being the paper, you need to know exactly what the pen is doing. Little calls this “knowing the pen’s intention”, which is not the same thing as knowing its goal. Intention is not about what is going to happen, but being absolutely clear about what is being done moment to moment by attention (bodymind). For the pen, you are “present” in your intention, you are attending exactly to what you are doing, and to how you are influencing the paper. You are attending to the attention of the paper.
The pen and paper score helps train a form of attention that is creative and tactile, it draws the attention of others toward its clear intention. Through intending toward the paper, the pen’s moment by moment action, bodymind, is clarified. While not literal in its verbal emphasis, the pen dancer still has the sense of ongoing meaning-making that reaches toward the paper with that meaning. The pen scores the surface of the paper – even if spatially distant since the distance from the paper changes. Like memories, some thought/actions require distance to get down. Others are up close and moving flesh on flesh, a CI like moment. The paper is a surface that is open to being touched, receptive and available. Sometimes it is scrunched up, rolling away and has to be opened again, or it wanders off as thoughts need time to collect. But it, too, is meant to be intending toward the pen in that it is available to collect words and thoughts, a strong but active observer. The ensuing duets are a play between spatial and skin based touch via creative attention. Ruth Zaporah similarly described this form of attention as “creativity” in Action Theatre: The Improvisation of Presence:
We can find [being creative] by quieting down, relaxing, letting go of the future and simplifying our actions. What's the least you need to do to communicate exactly what you mean? Clear, spontaneous expression is not the result of how much you do, but rather, the quality of attention you give. Thus we ask the student to intentionally do very little and discover fullness in that smallness. Slow down their mind and pay attention to each moment of change. Adding more action won't compensate for lack of attention. Simplify. Bare the bone. Don't build with more action, build with more attention. Then, you'll be "creative." (1995, 41)
As an observer and as a participant in both roles, Little realized the pen and paper score was a valuable practice for dancers in articulating presence. Beyond its creative results, it offered them the possibility of extending the boundaries of their felt sensing together because both dancers needed to engage their intentional spatial extension – tactile extension, no matter what spatial configuration they might be in. It asked of the pen, that it reach the paper upon which it was writing; which meant they had to extend touch into space. Likewise, the “paper” had to “cast” or extend, a tactile surface, sometimes their body’s flesh form, sometimes their spatial form, upon which the pen would write. Somewhere between the pen and the paper, they touched attentionally, bodyminds were in contact. In offering this score it quickly became apparent that dancers differed greatly in how they extended touch. Nati was at one limit, visible in his attention and with tactile detail scribing marks upon the space and the surface of his partners, and drawing them into somatic communication. Others, those whose attentional practices began and ended at their skin, were gesturing to scribe, making the form of the actions “as if writing,” but without the actuality of extension and felt feedback. Nati was proprioceptively present to each moment, in relation to his paper/partners, actively seeking to know what was coming next, no longer the master of his timing. Others made gestures toward touch, which carries the spectacle of appearance; their force was limited to interpretation. Nati was actually extending his touch–seeking to know the environment being touched, carrying force and direct information. His potential is physical attunement and feedback.
As wonderful as the pen and paper score was, it was only a beginning. It defined a connection, but it remained semiotic – the idea of the “letter” dominated the notion of communication and it was haunted by a sense of perfect communication, “getting it right.” It remains crucial for training a sense of attentional clarity and spatial touch in the pen, and while the paper was drawn into action, the score privileged the role of the pen.
Touching touch. Casting Attention: Canvas & Paintbrush
Attending is tactile in receiving as well as extending. The present clarity a dancer articulates through intending what they are doing is also possible for a “listener” to comprehend, again as a whole bodymind activity. One can learn to extend attention outward in a variety of geometries: it can hold a single point (focused attention), or it can open to a pathway or trajectory, a plane or manifold, and it can reach toward an entire volume. To open it, one must learn to diffuse and soften further so that it can reach in tactile attendance. A simple exercise to experience attentional volume is to rub one’s hands vigorously together and then hold them apart from each other and bring them slowly closer as if squeezing a ball of energy. One can play with the extent to which attention concentrates the volume versus being open to the rest of the room. The larger the volume, the greater the diffusion, so that a ball in the hand is quite easy to attend to as a volume, but then adding attention to the whole space of one’s body gets tricky. The space of three people is much harder, and a whole room requires much practice to not just jump from focused attention on one thing, to focused attention on another. Nonetheless, attention to a volume clarifies the relationships of things, and when things change within this volume they are more easily noticed.
Varela, Rosch & Thompson (2017, 9) point out that with attending “over and over again to the details of our embodied situation, awareness of what happens becomes more and more spontaneous.” Attending presently to a room, or part of a room, or a partner involves becoming somatically engaged with them. It means “casting” one’s attention into/as the volume, like casting a net or a spider web that is exquisitely sensitive to anything that happens within it (Sokol 2017). To train in this form of attention, Little devised another score, “Canvas and Paintbrush.”
Score: Canvas and Paintbrush
In pairs, one begins as a canvas, the other as a paintbrush. Both start by standing, feeling into the subtle experiences of their attentional bodymind, especially to micro-movements that appear to be emerging through gravity and balance as well as the fixation and flightiness of thoughts that shift throughout their standing and take them into and out of the same movements.
The Canvas then faces an area of the room the Paintbrush is standing in, and opens their attention outward into it, with open, soft eyes, casting a receptive field of touch. They begin by feeling themselves as expanding larger than their skin size, filling the area with sensitivity so that they become sensitized to disturbances in the space, noticing how everything that changes in the space is a disturbance – something that they feel. The canvas may do one of two things with these disturbances. They may choose to simply be “present” to them, not responding but feeling it nevertheless – a kind of meditative practice of “holding” space. Or, they may allow themselves to be sent into motion by the disturbances. Should this be the case, it is critical that they move but not get lost in the dynamic of their own action. Rather, they can move and hold space at the same time, facing doesn’t matter. This is a skill. They remain large, stay vulnerable to being touched, and by being touched, they can be moved.
The Paintbrush now becomes aware of the Canvas as “canvas”, as sensitized to the space they are part of, and begins a shape-shifting dance within this sensitivity. Shape-shifting means experiencing embodiment as a spatial action of touch acting in space – at times focusing on a place in bodyspace, as pathways of motion, as surfaces that are textured with multiple actions, and as whole volumes that compose forms. The paintbrush’s job is to disturb space clearly, attentionally composing each moment as it arises, without predetermination, yet with spatial specificity. Disturbance is creative for the paintbrush.
As the paintbrush moves, they disturb the space of the canvas. The canvas is therefore moved by the brush, but must simultaneous be moved and continue to cast a field of touchability, inviting further disturbance, and further movement. It becomes a dance. Part of being present in the space is that each is sensitive to the attention of the other. They must not just move at the speed of their own attention, but move at the speed of their partner’s attention. The space of presence is then clearly composed, emergent between attentions, in somatic communication.
After a while, they switch roles. And then they are allowed to change roles at will, and non-verbally until the roles become unnecessary because both dancers can feel themselves disturb the space of the other, with clear tactile definition, and they are both receiving the felt sense of being moved by the shape-shifting bodymind (tactile) attention of the other.
The Canvas and Paintbrush score follows a similar shaping to the Pen and Paper exercise only with some important changes. Now, we are making art actions. The brush is no longer bound to one kind of action, the linear practice of scribing. It can produce a painting, but it can also be a wad of clay, sheet metal, fabric and create sculptures, mixed media, the imagination is the limit, and hopefully it is not actually moving through a literal engagement with form. We are working on the disturbance of presence: a geometry of disturbances in endless forms. The paintbrush is free to be any size, any shape, any density, composition, or distance. Its speed is conditioned by its own and its partner’s attentional ability, while its temporal shape and texturing is its own. But the paintbrush needs a canvas upon which to work. The canvas, on the other hand, is a spatial form within which the “brush” acts. A canvas is typically a place upon which a painting is enacted. In contemporary times it is typically gessoed white, so that whatever marks are made upon it show up. Our canvas is a 3D space for just the same purpose. It is a space left empty of action but ready for touching because the possibility of touch is already present. We gesso the space of our canvases with touchability.
The Canvas and Paintbrush score allows dancers’ sense-ability to be finely tuned on the tactile, they can feel easily moved by shifts of bodymind attention, both located within their own flesh, and non-locally, outside that form. If we think in terms of proxemics, expanding bodymind sensitivity to cast attention into a volume is first experienced as an expansion of personal space, or “the physical space immediately surrounding someone, into which any encroachment feels threatening to or uncomfortable for them,” but then they take it much further. They begin to inhabit that space such that it becomes part of their intimate space and they are moved by whatever is happening (cf Hall 1966). This is akin to what cognitive scientists and ethologists call extended and embodied cognition wherein spiders move and respond to movements in their web without having to “process it” (Sokol 2017). But “embodied cognition” keeps us split between mind and body. We prefer to start from attention’s web and think of this as extended touch.
Extending touch through casting attention as a canvas in a room is a practice as research experiment that uses attention to learn about attention. We have found that soft eyes are essential as they help generate an open, diffuse attention that does not fixate on one thing after another. Carl Ginsburg, a Feldenkrais practitioner, found that:
Attention involves a considerable muscular component that is directed through the eye muscles but actually involves the rest of the body and the breathing. Therefore, changing attention patterns involves letting go of the narrow attention by allowing the softening of the eye muscles. The breathing will change as well as the general tonus of the rest of yourself… The experience of softening the eyes has also the effect of softening the tension in the rest of yourself. (2010, 235-237)
Ginsburg discusses how this open attention enables one to learn new forms of bodymind movement with others. Key to this form of attention is what philosopher and mystic Simone Weil described as joyful attention, the right kind of attention, “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty… waiting, not seeking anything… and ready to be penetrated by the object.” She also opposed it to attention accompanied by the muscular effort of contracting brows, holding breath and stiffening muscles: “paying attention” (Weil 2009, 109-112). What these practical researchers are describing is how the way we are taught to think and train our attention shapes the kind of attention we are able to imagine and practice. This is what yet other bodymind practitioners call “ideokinesis”: the ways in which we imagine our anatomy affect the way we are able to use it. Images are inside of our capacities – enabling and limiting them; but importantly, we can learn new ways of imagining and practicing our bodyminds that give us new capacities. In this way we do not know what our attention and our bodyminds can do, but we can experiment to find out!
Attuning to Each Other’s Attention: Ensemble Work
In playing leading and following, or canvas and paintbrush, people tend to have a preference for one role or the other, active, touching, or passive, being touched. But, these are false categories since the action of casting is anything but passive. In this instance, it is a form of seeking, inviting. But, so too, the action of painting is highly dependent upon feeling one’s partner’s tactile attention. That position also requires a form of seeking while in action, “How is my partner being disturbed?”, “How do they understand that disturbance?” So, we work together to be touched and touching in one moment. When dancers do both roles they are both shape-shifting while also being responsible for the tactile field. Within that field, the immediacy of the present connection condenses the attentional space of both dancers and their dance. As dance artist and scholar Malaika Sarco-Thomas says, of even our engagement with the non-human, “Extending the mind offers an example of coordination through attention: as our mind ‘extends’ toward that tree on the horizon, our sensory body becomes implicated within a larger web of relating, and thus becomes unbreakable in its coordination” (2016). Similarly, theorist Jane Bennett suggests that “What is also needed is a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body” (2010, xiv). In a world in which sentience and embodiment transcends the human, this makes attentional sense. Now we have new possibilities. We can begin to build attentional webs.
The Canvas and Paintbrush score resolves into both partners playing both roles all the time for each other. Each is casting an attentive canvas in which the other is moving, and being moved by that other, and each is aware that in being moved, they are the paintbrush for the other’s canvas. This may sound complicated, but it is the basic practice of attunement.
Attuning Score: Ensemble Web Building
Start again with Canvas and Paintbrush in a group now of four to six people. Each begins by standing with soft eyes and casting a canvas of attention in collective space. They are open to being disturbed and are moved in micro or macro ways by what is happening with their canvas. They are also attending to how their movements (even stillness) are affecting the attentional movement of the others, and this is not solely visual.
Intend and notice how your presence changes the canvas, not only for you but for others. Now begin to move – not too fast, discipline yourself to move, not at the rate of your embodied attention, but at a rate that others with whom you are dancing can attend to the disturbance of your presence. Don’t move into this too quickly. Your assumptions will make you blind to the skill needed and involved in this practice. Allowing yourself to be disturbed is a major skill. Casting that availability is a further skill. Noticing and shaping one’s disturbance is to realize one’s spatial actions and to be present to how they influence the other dancer who is him/herself creating the space of being that you both co-habit. It is an action of co-habitation, co-creation with touch (syneasthetically together with visual and auditory sensing) being the dominant communicative means for knowing one another. Let the touch of embodied attention be what produces change in your dance. Now you have created a web of touch, and each of you is supported by that web. It allows freedom to move into skin contact and spatial contact without breaking the web.
Opening attention to attunement in a moving bodymind can feel like a paradoxical endeavor. One is always already being moved, even as one is softly attending to a busy volume of space and others. It is peaceful and playful at the same time. What it doesn’t involve is self-consciousness, “should I act?” because you already acting and attending to how you are already shaping the attention of the others. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described it as life and motion at “peace”:
Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest—at the width where the 'self', has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. (1967, 285)
Peace is not the absence of movement and certainly not the absence of play! Rather it is like being in a hot-air balloon, moving with the wind with such attunement that the air feels still, even as the balloon is of course also affecting the wind. Those little effects, the noticing of how your attentive movement has affected another’s attentional bodymind, noticing how you have been affected by another’s bodymind in motion (even within a pause, a glance, a flicker of a finger), these are intentional communications.
This score was the starting point for the development of a series of practices and skill building techniques developed to activate and enhance tactile spatial articulations that are not only enactive (Varela et al. 2017, Nöe 2002), or world-forming as well as informing, but in dance actions are a form of communication. Intending to communicate is a touch that is touched as it touches; it is both a mouth and an ear in one moment. To accomplish mouth/ear practices requires attentionality: attention to attention (Little 2014a).
With attentionality comes skill that shapes how we move. Melinda Buckwalter describes “ensemble awareness” as emerging from practicing the “skill of being present and adaptable while dancing with a group” (2010, 17). Moving the physical bodymind in ways that support attentional inquiry within any given circumstance requires an ability to act responsively and responsibly, because we are ecologically interactive as a world, which becomes clear particularly when other people are involved.
To hear and speak in one moment requires delicacy. Like a highly sensitive seismograph, the variations we register are tiny, but their presence, when attended to opens up our abilities. Learning to not just listen, but speak on these scales unfolds whole new territories of communication. Highly tuned to change, we can hold our own physicality lightly, ready to hear the disturbances our presence enacts upon the eco-systems of which we are a part. We can feel our presence as it moves inside the other members of our dance. The more sensitive to change we are, the more the whole system becomes smarter: response-ability (Haraway, Barad) makes us smarter. It is also more playful: in the language of Hustak and Myers, it is an “involutionary mode of attention” (2012, 77). Opposed to the calculating economy of evolution which reduces practices including attention to maximizing fitness or another parameter, a more symbiotic, collaborative approach to world building begins with experiencing the topology of encounters as “an affective ecology shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental propositions” (2012, 77-78). Their paper on “Involutionary Momentum” follows Darwin’s engagement with orchids as an experimental multisensory partnership of excitable tissues – Darwin’s and the orchids’. Responding to tiny thoughts, on the level of micro-phenomenon, those micro-behaviors that comprise our identifiable behaviors, with tiny responses in kind, makes us environmentally and circumstantially smarter. We become smartest when we are aware that the mere presence of our attention changes things and so can clearly intend our presence. (Little 2014b)
Sending and Receiving Geometric Communication: Close Contact
Now it is time to talk about skin. The main reason why, in a chapter (and book) on touch, we are only now talking about skin-to-skin contact and communication, is that most of us are actually better at somatic communication at a distance than in close contact. We think we know how to touch skin to skin. This may seem odd, but if we focus on communicating then we need to bring the tactile attention we learn in space (as in the Canvas and Paintbrush), to and through our skin. We want this form of touching to also, always, be listening and speaking: clearly feeling into and through our partner’s geometric organization and intention, while clearly sharing our geometric organization and intention. Geometry here draws attention to:
The spatial dimensions of movement that are also forms:
points, pathways, surfaces, volumes, speeds and accelerations;
The forms of bodies that move, whether organized as:
body parts like a limb, head, or nose;
“levels” like skin, fascia, muscle, tendon, bone;
states like solid, viscous, liquid, gas;
orientations like left side, top half, floorward;
tones including tension, relaxing, supporting, listening, high-contrast;
transformations like anchoring, reaching, expanding;
any of the other imaginative and experiential anatomies of body-mind centering, somatics, etc.
The Pen and Paper, and Canvas and Paintbrush scores offer attunement, but through a limited geometry. The pen marks the paper in pathways of script. It is writing that punctuates, but remains moving only on a two-dimensional plane. It lacks depth and width. Like choreography that is insistent upon one pathway after another, it moves as if all that matters is getting somewhere. Its lack of depth meant that the pen never entered the paper, never became paper so to speak, so the dancers could never actually satisfy a full-on Contact Improvisation duet, which requires other dimensions of touch.
The form of attention that is present to the whole architecture of a bodily form in one moment is both given through touch, and is a skill to be practiced and extended. It isn’t a mode of traveling along points, it is rather the grasping of an entirety as you pass through or propose it. It isn’t just saying “I’m here”, it is being very clear about my geometries and my intention. if I touch you attending to your surface, you will not be prepared to take my weight. If I touch you and inquire into your volume, or direct my tactile attention as it channels through your bony structure and your fascial form, you will know I am finding access to your support system; you will know I am considering giving you my weight. I’m casting my attention including your whole bodymind and you are casting yours to include mine. To do this we both need to be attuning our attention tactilely. In the process, we not only communicate, we become a new ensemble, and we learn.
To begin, we introduce a score that first prepares one to attend to one’s own geometry as biotensegrity, as a system of tones and tensions in the small dance of balancing and listening (Dumit & O’Connor 2016, 35-54.). It then opens up to a series of encounters in which the initiation of contact is attended to for the communication it engenders. This contact dance is organized to allow the tactility of attention to form and deform the whole structure of the dance.
Communication Score: Sending and Receiving Geometric Attention
To understand how intending tactile attention changes our relationships in skin-on-skin contact, we need to once again begin in a bodymind state in which your geometry itself is the base for our communication. Prepare for a contact improvisation duet, with two partners standing near each other, relaxed but not passive, eyes soft. Both dancers release into a somatic body that is loose but supported and ready to move and be moved. We can think of this state as developing a contrast between parts of our physical mental form that allow us to stand, rising and expanding with a delicate balance while also allowing parts unnecessary to that rising to simply hang, releasing earthward. Both the rising and the hanging are significant to gaining the valuable features of a tensegrity structure, especially the easy and immediate communication of local forces through the whole structure. Not all parts are involved in rising, and not all parts are hanging. Feel into this contrast. Notice that the places where rising changes to hanging are places to discover extension, so that the joints are supported and the weight of hanging further engages the whole form in its biotensegrity. Breathe effortlessly in all directions, allowing everything to move and be moved in micro-movements of agreement … moving “with.” Notice that the hanging parts are easily moved, and be sure that the endpoint of the out-breath allows your ribs to hang.
Attention is subtle information, and the bodymind state we have just acquired is capable of listening to its subtle messages. Quiet the actions of thought in order to be a receptive field, able to notice change. In this physical mental state, the dancers are casting attention on and through their own lived form as a part of the total field of sensory availability. Notice, it is the parts that are not involved in movement that will become the necessary means for attentional communication. The parts that are engaged in moving, supporting, articulating each dancer’s physical form, are informing the dancer about their own inner landscape, involved in extension and the actions of reaching to touch. The other parts are casting availability while also engaging in their hanging relationship with the earth and the environments of movement.
One of the dancers will be the “sender” and the other is the “receiver”, and they will be engaging in short encounters of meeting and leaving physical contact. To begin, both dancers are moving and separate. The dancers move while moment by moment they communicate through embodied actions the particularities of their attention. Each moment the dancer’s physical possibility changes, yet as they move, they intend attentional clarity in how they spatially touch their partner’s attention (canvas), how they are already moving their partner.
When, at some point the sender enters into contact with their partner, they continue to communicate their somatic readiness, as a particular geometry of possibility as well as conditions of that geometry. For example, the sender enters into contact with their forearm on their partner’s forearm, and the touch proposes the possibility of a pathway, because the tactile reach into and through the point of contact actually reaches into the partner’s chest, suggesting rotation. Alternatively, the sender sends a communication that is simply a place of contact. This invites the receiver to meet in that single point, and both allow the point to develop into something – like a Ouija board. The receiver acts on what they feel, and movement emerges until that event is over and partners separate but continue moving. The dance proceeds with another contact until it is time to change roles.
Now the new sender engages in contact, intending their touch to be informative, delimiting the possibilities for the next encounter. Let’s imagine the sender also reaches to the arm, but this time reaches through it and into their partner’s whole form, touching the arm, but attentionally feeling into their partner’s whole body. The receiver feels this reach and knows the sender is listening (while speaking) into their whole geometry (this is a touch that experiences the receiver’s weighted form, their relationship to the floor, backside, frontside, their total fullness). The receiver could do any number of things… weight backwards into a counterbalance, roll to the floor bringing the sender with them, redirect and fly into the air onto the sender’s shoulders… after all, the invitation was to the whole body. Or, perhaps this touch actually also conveys a condition that the sender’s weight is following that touch. The receiver prepares for and takes the weight of the sender, or choosing a different path, redirects their attentional possibility and responds by sloughing them off to the floor. Together they continue moving, separate, and change roles.
Encounters can grow in their duration, as long as the clarity of intention to communicate sends messages that are received and receivable. Both parties continue until changing roles becomes superfluous.
In this Sending and Receiving score, communication becomes foregrounded even when not in contact, rather than just doing movement without it. It is important to understand that this is not a speak and respond situation, even though to teach it the actions are slowed down and they appear to be responsive. Rather, the fact of communication into and through both partners’ felt geometry connects both forms into one, and the communication of attention is immediate. The attentional physicality allows them to be simultaneously interchangeable in their vulnerability to receive, and their intention to send. The trust that occurs speeds the course of action to where both are senders and receivers with particularity. This is co-communication; communion.
Attunement through communicative touch allows us to act as more than one to the enhancement of both. It means we can dance not only together in duets, but as whole ensembles, making sense and learning together. It is the basis for an astounding “we” that, while working within agreements, is not limited by them, but exceeds them. This attentional communion changes the conditions under which movement decisions are made; they are no longer limited by the durations of “action and response.” Rather, the ensemble becomes a type of tensegrity form in which a shift in any part changes the relation of all the other parts without delay. This shift thus changes the totality of the ensemble and thus the actions are no longer limited by individual decisions, individual agreements. Actions arise through a unique order or scale of being: the particular ensemble–including the environment.
This becoming more than one in attunement and communication is often talked about within bodywork. Ginsburg quotes Feldenkrais as saying of the Functional Integration process,
Through touch, two persons, the toucher and the touched, can become a new ensemble: two bodies when connected by two arms and hands are a new entity. These hands sense at the same time as they direct. Both the touched and the toucher feel what they sense through the connecting hands, even if they do not understand and do not know what is being done. (Feldenkrais 1981, 3-4)
Ginsburg caps this quote by saying, “Learning is the essential outcome” (Ginsburg 2010, 267). In dancing, attention communicates geometric action in our tactile extensions and organizes our bodymind communication, which are our proposals for action and interaction. Recognizing the geometrical cues develops new means of communication as well as new tools in the making of experience. These levels of touch are micro-behavioral and micro–phenomenological, and are key to somatic communication (Kimmel et al. 2014). They are the touch of attention that conveys information that changes what we know, what we say, and how we say it.
Tactile Attention
“The question of the type of attention that is due in each case is a question for which there is no conceptual shortcut” writes Isabelle Stengers in Thinking with Whitehead (2014, 107). We began this paper proposing that all research definitions attention is could be correct, since different forms of attention forms can be learned. Therefore, the question is not “What is attention?” but rather “What could attention be? What forms of attention would we like to have, and how can we train to get them?” We want dance, especially contact and improvisational dance, to not only be playful and tactile, but to be an ongoing experimental practice of attentional communication and learning.
Erin Manning suggests that with a different form of attention (to movement and thinking as bodymind), we could revision reason and open up to new forms of thinking, starting with early schooling.
Reason is aligned with keeping the body still. What if instead we invested in movement-moving, asking children not to stop moving but to become increasingly aware of the share of creativity in the incipient directions of the movements that move them? What if we taught them that the ideal posture for learning or listening or “paying attention” was not standing still (or sitting still), but attuning to cues active in the field of relation? What if we directly allied the movement of thought to movement-moving? […] What else could learning (and listening and attending) become? (Manning 2016, 122)
The way we talk, train, learn, and move shapes ourselves and our worlds, including the way we talk, train, learn, and move (Clark et al. 2015). Different dance teachers and theorists experimentally develop and describe different forms of attention, forms appropriate to their practice and disciplines and to the kinds of thought-movement they are interested in producing. We hope that our scores inspire new forms of attentional inquiry. Dancers are researchers! With Stengers and Whitehead, we know that if we pay due attention to nature (bodyminds, ensembles, environments, relations), we will find more in it than we observe at first glance. Dancers are perhaps best positioned to investigate forms of co-attention and communication, and to discover how we communicate somatically and improvise together, and how we can do so better.
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