Enminded Performance: Dancing with a Horse
This essay is published in a text by Lexington Books (2016) titled "Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human." Editors are Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter Lichtenfels. Pages 93-116.
© Nita Little, PhD
Simply by standing together, two people set into motion a dynamic “dance” of presence. They wrap together becoming one another’s spatial support, knit as a physical unit through their awareness of the one knowing the presence of the other. This happens even when their attentional purpose is elsewhere and even, if not especially, when they refuse to acknowledge one another. Touching, they may extend that knowing of presence into the other person’s body so that they each can feel when the other shifts weight from foot to foot. With space between them, individuals may extend a field of awareness that weaves them into a tactile configuration, a volatile form of togetherness. It is the dynamic weaving of our tactile presence, more than presence itself, which inspires this essay and which has been the subject of a dance research investigation that I began in the 1970s.
It is easy to notice the making of this form for yourself. Stand in a supermarket line, and you can feel when the presence of another starts to draw you out of your singularity. If it is uncomfortable, you step back (or forward) so that you don’t feel the tactile draw that is the disturbance of the presence of others inviting you to extend their way. They take a step closer to you and you feel pressed. The social space has physical repercussions you may not wish to engage. But if you reverse this potential it becomes an important relational aspect of a dancer’s presence. Add attention to the action and the physical disturbance of presence becomes intentionally meaningful. The influence of our presence on our environmental relations is a physical mental action this essay identifies as enminding. As we will explore, enminding is a tactile function of attention. And, importantly, it is directive and articulate.
This work distinguishes enminded actions from out of the breadth of embodied possibilities. It asserts that the physical dimension(s) of experience, specifically the feeling of tactile presence, is a fundamental aspect of mental attending. Its enaction results in an information exchange that emerges from the mindbody without emphasis on one over the other. An action of attention and not simply the phenomenon of awareness, enminding is important to the ways all living beings are informed and informing in their relationships. This reciprocal exchange suggests an increasing capacity for communication across beings of the same, or as instantiated in this essay, differing species.
To investigate this territory I have turned to a dance I had with a horse, Kate. Taking a first-person stance allows me to describe the particularities of a dancer’s attention, which is critical to the reader’s grasping an understanding of the notion of enminding. To do this, I will tell the story of the dance in reverse, describing and then examining the elements of one of its culminating moments first. Later, I will return to the beginning of the dance and draw the path of attentional choices that illuminate the significance of enminding in the making of relationships.
The desire to explore the details of relational experience in which mindbodies touch across obvious differences brought me to this dance. I wanted to investigate how the processes of enminding that are present in the subtle and intricate balance of relations between dancers might be present in a dance with a non-human being. The extreme disparity in the physicality of embodiments and their modalities of attention that governs relations between a human and a horse might guide me to a deeper understand of the differences between dancers who are always, under all conditions, in-equivalent, meaning not the same, and un-equal, meaning they work differently and with different results.
Conjoining
One of the two most sensitive places on a horse is the mouth (Parelli 85), which is why I feel the softest sensation when Kate puts her lips into my open hand and leaves them there. The sensation is alive with breath from her nostrils, little in-out snorts in my hand. But I can’t look down and to my left to see this because I am reaching upwardly, dancing a duet with her. My right arm and full face extend toward the roof of the riding barn we are in. Kate is “at liberty;” rider-less she is not restrained or controlled and is free to move at will. Since the start of this dance, I have sensed that she is attending not only to my behavior, but also to my attention as it shifts throughout my perceptual systems, primarily sight, sound, and the haptic reaches of touch. We are both in sensing mode—a state of volatile apprehension that requires our full bodies.
From its beginning, this dance was a practice of attention. Kate was attentionally engaged, which meant she was attending to my attention. So was I attentional, which is how I could articulate my presence in the levels of our meeting. Her attention, however subtle, began by prehending my actions of attention. Prehending, as described by Whitehead, is feeling that arises prior to apprehending or understanding, prior to cognition (248-326). In my dance with Kate, many of my sensory and movement decisions are based on information that does not get processed as cognitive thought. Rather, the decisions, while logical, have a physical and peripheral intelligence, coming from attention that was trained toward the edges of experience and extended into the spaces between things. The actions of my senses were, in this instance, decisively organized as active players in the making of the relationship with Kate. Although sight alone was significant, touch underscored every moment of our visual meeting.
When we enhance our visual sense with its synesthetic potentials (Abram, Sewall), sight combines with the tactile properties of our felt embodiment. Alva Noë speaks of touch as basic to all perceiving, since everything touches everything: “We should think of perceiving in terms of touching” (Noë, Varieties of Presence, 70; see also 64). This means, for example, that sight, which I experience to have a synesthetic quality of touch, was purposed as such within the dance. To see Kate, even through the corners of my eyes, was to touch her. Inversely, to be seen by Kate was to be touched by her. To the degree that our touch was physical, within our visual fields, we were in “physical” contact. So, it was easy to prehend her with my flesh, as well as with my eyes.
Being in contact with Kate means that we were physically conjoined. Touch has a logic built into it so that I don’t have to “think” about being cognitively in contact. If Kate moved, I was moved, the way two people standing together touching move one another. This availability to motion was an attentional choice on my part. By training my attention toward my prehension, I was asking myself to notice the “unnecessarily noticeable”—those aspects of experience that people usually rush through. Those aspects defined my availability and my relational choices. As choices, they were in continuous formation on what Erin Manning, building on Deleuze’s work, calls a “plane of immanence” (Relationscapes 28). They formed, not in the singular, a lonely point (like a single purpose), but rather multiple points, a plane of immediate and ever-changing possibilities. Manning understands this as “the multiplicity of virtual bodies that recompose along the plane of immanence of our sensing bodies in movement” (Relationscapes 28).
For Manning, “immanence” forms the plane of latent potentials that are present to us as multiple virtual movements within our prehension. We will see in this essay that these multiple possibilities constitute the specific moment of enminding. In my work with dancers I describe a “field of possibilities,” both future and present, that corresponds to Manning’s “plane of immanence.”
Dancing with Kate, being present with the “field of possibilities” allowed our contact to resonate with a delicate communication through a light, one could even say respectful, touch. This quality of touch mattered to me because our values are always present in our actions. For dancers, Daniel Lepkoff says, “Attention precedes perception” (40), by which he means that we attentively decide what is significant on the plane of immanence and move our senses in that direction, shifting the plane. It is these decisions that tell us about one another. I was acutely aware that the ways I sensed told Kate much about me.
I feel Kate nuzzle into the web of connective tissues that I am offering to her through my hand, not pulling backwards but softly reaching into me so that there is a quality of sensory coupling, particularly on the tactile level. I want to be attentionally available to her so that she can feel me as I have been feeling her, not in the same way, but through a similar modality of knowing. I am amplifying touch while limiting the easy dominance of sight, ”feeling” her out and sensing her relational possibilities. The materiality of the touch we were now enjoying began as a spatial engagement in the early stages of this dance, as actions of enminding.
As a dance experiment in enminding, my work seeks to understand what happens when the bodymind comes to know something new within the limits of its exteroceptive and interoceptive breadth. Its limits are the edges formed by the spatial extension of our attention when touch underlies all of the senses. I began this dance on the level of enminding (rather than on the level of behavior, for example) because the sense of touch amplifies change, giving it a “visceral” charge. I believed it had communicative importance since its depth of drive makes felt relations have the physical significance improvisational dancers can work with. I was thinking of Kate as a dancer, not a human dancer, but with the respect and influence on my actions that I would accord a human dancer. I needed enminding, as a tactile drive, to foreground our actional choices.
Relational Ecologies
I took the trip to NYC in the summer of 2011 because I was interested in traversing the grounds of physical, mental, and circumstantial difference within my research into dancer’s actions of attention. I wished to expose myself to the kind of relational dance practice that was beyond those I typically explore with my human cohorts in my San Francisco-based dance laboratory, Nita Little Dance Research (NLDR). Although the members of NLDR all practice the dance form Contact Improvisation, we vary widely in our other movement skills, which extend beyond a short list of contemporary, somatic, and aerial dance, as well as the martial arts and clowning. We research how attention is choreographic in that it influences the making of experience as a creative ecology of enminding.
Species difference seemed an interesting way to incorporate the full sum of my curiosity. JoAnna Mendl Shaw, Artistic Director of The Equus Projects, was teaching a weeklong dance “clinic” with horses. Interestingly, Shaw, by dancing with horses, had learned new ways to dance with humans (Shaw 19). The “clinic” was designed to guide dancers to think and move within the concerns that arise when one’s partner is non-human, feels and thinks differently, and significantly, when that partner actually doesn’t come to the meeting and making of a dance of its own accord. Not forgetting that horses are domesticated animals, bound by human intentions, I was aware that this dance practice would take place somewhere in the “tangled interface of animal psyche and human projections” (Muller-Paisner and Bradshaw 213).
The dance I am describing took place on the fourth day of the clinic, after much coaching from Shaw on such significant details as horsenalities (horse personalities à la the Parelli Natural Horsemanship training), leadership (alpha training), responsivity and respect, intentional action or “tasking,” and the penetrating realization that as species we meet across difference. To a horse, I am a predator and it is prey. All my actions when dancing with Kate needed to take these concerns into account—particularly this last one. The touch of a predator can be problematic for prey. Yet I came to the clinic knowing that I had investigated many ways of touching in my dancing with humans—one of them was the spatial extension of enminding. Would this touch be too subtle for Kate?
With her muzzle in my hand, I can feel how spatial extension is a part of Kate’s relational vocabulary. This felt like a powerful affirmation that Kate enminds me.
Manning calls the reach of spatial extension “relational shape shifting” (Relationscapes 14), a responsive dance of any size, scale, or topology. The “shape” is easy to understand if one were to have a visual concept of what Kate and I were doing tactilely. The “shift” resulted because the fabric of our extensions into one another through our connective tissue made our sensory boundaries blur as if to change our very shape. On the tactile level, we were growing into one another, shaping into a shared body.
Attention to shape shifting leads to what one could consider the “material” aspect of enminding since it engages the somatosensory and haptic senses. The body schema acting with its proprioceptive potential builds the neural architecture in the brain to reach and orient through objects, such as prostheses and tools, so that we easily feel and act spatially through these objects. Research neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, who explained phantom limb pain by researching how our brain maps our body image, remarks in conversation with Norman Doidge, M.D. that “Your own body is a phantom … one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience” (Doidge 188). This idea sheds light on what I suggest is a highly flexible sense of self, the bodymind’s environmental schema. This extended sense of self easily follows our touch sensing and, in dancing with Kate as with my company members, crosses beyond the boundaries of my flesh, temporarily accessing her body as my own and vice versa.
With Kate, I amplified the edges of my extended shapes while also moving the obviously material parts of me, dancing. Feeling my edges only, she was not vulnerable to the heavy impact of my full felt presence bearing down on her so that we could “speak” through the touching of attention and we could enmind one another—a more subtle interaction that I characterize as a “light touch.” This lighter meeting later enabled us to become more immersive and mutually “intra-active” (Barad, “Measure of Nothingness,” 8). Intra-actions change one in constitutive ways, so that the felt fabric of being present with one another was in energetic and compositional flux, presenting the flexibility of one another’s moving embodied attention. It was a dance in which we asked nothing of each other and so we were free to appreciate and play with one another’s simple presence.
Kate and my intra-action is clearly obvious to me when she reaches into my connective tissues, enminding me through the web of physical organization that ties my hand to my viscera so that I feel her presence in my fascia, to my organs, and through to the opposite hand that is reaching skyward. With her vitality in my hand and mine in her lips, we reach toward the other through the physicality of our interest, each action of attention a new knowing; each action making physical shifts within us.
It may now be clear that enminding is ecological in ways that are supported by the work of J. J. Gibson and his exploration of actions of perception. His notions of perceptual ecology have been taken further by researchers working in many directions, including philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë, dancer Lisa Nelson, ecopsychologist Laura Sewell, sociopolitical artist and philosopher Erin Manning, and philosopher Brian Massumi to name only a few. Describing actions of sensing, they each are speaking uniquely about relations that arise through practices of attention. The impact of how we sense, its ecological dimensions, knits the world in motion together with a fine thread that moves within the physicality of our mental experiencing. How fine the thread is that one can experience is determinative of one’s skillful engagements. Far more than mere theorizing, the practical applications of attentional skills become progressively more meaningful as we choose to be response-able to the seamless interoceptive and exteroceptive world that forms our ecology.
Awareness and Attention
Moments of relational meetings between dancers are embodied in the articulation of their experience. I challenge my company dancers to relate to one another through the moment-by-moment apprehension of their embodied experience. While the concept of embodiment may be so broadly defined in dance literature that the variations in its practice are open to ongoing redefinition, for this discussion we will use the term simply to mean a vitally detailed somatic sensibility of physical/mental experiencing. Drawing on theorists such as Massumi, Manning, Leder and Noë, and practitioners such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, David Abram and Lisa Nelson, we can think of embodiment as synesthetically blended with all of the interoceptive and exteroceptive senses contributing to an ecology of experience that forms its moment-by-moment sensory complexion. Not simply a broad sweep of perceptual impressions, embodied moments are organized in their making of experience through specific actions of attention and it is this that forms the focus of our concern in this essay. Embodiment is active, it is motion, so that if we are embodied within our dancing we are actively “listening” into our experience and into our participation with a dynamic world (Abram, Sewall, de Spain, Welton). We are aware of our particular perceptual attunements and their limits (Leder, Noë)—or at least to dance well we require this breadth of physical mental engagement. Perception here is not simply sensation. Rather, as J.J. Gibson explains, “Perceiving is an act, not a response, an act of attention, not a triggered impression, an achievement, not a reflex” (149).
Keyed toward my attention, Kate is meeting me in territories of engagement unknown to me, the product of the inequality in our attentional potentials. We are drawing one another into precious moments of meeting.
The ways that attention was critical to the making of this dance, its attentional articulation, reveals why this study is important for larger notions of dancing. At some point in dancing with Kate, I could no longer track the actual physical material of our engagement—what happened and when—because the complexities of my attentional style took me beyond an interest in noticing the specific material results (in this case, who did what). I preferred to step into an interplay of motion that arises in the boundary shifting practices that happen when one enminds, that is, when the ecology of relations becomes more significant than bodies acting singularly.
Enminding is what moves us in prehension—which is to say that when something enminds us through drawing our attention, we are changed. That change may have been initiated through our awareness, but it becomes significant within our attention. Kent de Spain makes the following distinction between dancing attention and dancing awareness:
Attention is an intentional focus on a specific “thing,” or closely observing the relationship and interaction of more than one “thing.” Awareness is a state of being open to stimuli, of being receptive to what comes your way. Attention is yang to the yin of awareness. (168)
The distinction between attention and awareness as forms of engagement is useful because it helps us say that while embodiment requires awareness, it is through attention that it is organized. Through attention, the physical mental embodied form enminds and is brought forth into action.
The distinction between attention and awareness features strongly when dancing in states that enmind. For this discussion we need to change de Spain’s object orientation of “things” to amplify a relational orientation of actions as the subject of attention. This shift means that the concern of attention is motion, change, relationalities, and the trajectories that arise in the forming of spaces (Massey) as well as the settling actions that can be felt in located places. The difference in orientation makes a profound shift in how we understand relationships and our possibilities for functionally vital communication. The dancer Frey Faust, the developer of Axis Syllabus, touched on this topic in a 2013 interview I conducted with him for Contact Quarterly. Faust suggests the need to favor relationalities over object orientation (giving preference to “action” over “form”) when considering bodies in motion. His concern is functionally significant since he examines physical action in dialogue with the forces of physics through an environmentally immersive “study of complexity, study of relationship.” Not stopped by form, he follows the communication of force as it travels through the various tissue structures that compose the “whirling matrix” of our bodies in motion, achieving amazing movement capacity through all the planes and orientations of space.
All of our structures, both mental and physical, are keyed toward dialogue in our relational articulations. When we no longer interrupt our attention to motion because of the apparent boundaries of form, we become alert to the varieties of actions that exceed any one structure. This fluid access to motion, across form, enhances the boundaries we embody and thus the breadth of our abilities to enmind and be enminded. We become relationally moved through a broad spatial reach, one that travels beyond our flesh to the breadth of our tactile reach, so that enminding becomes a significant aspect of the dance that is prehension.
The dance with Kate begins as I walk into a circle of dancers who are holding a single bungee cord to form a 20’-diameter round pen. She isn’t looking at me, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t alert to my presence. That doesn’t mean she isn’t feeling herself and this world change with my every action.
With training to the actions of relationship, attention heeds to the “plane of immanence” whereby we sense virtual possibilities within the actual experience of each moment of action (Manning, Massumi). The significance of the virtual is that the information perceptual attention gleans “creates the potential for an immanent organization that activates the body’s coming to be this or that and its de-forming into a field of relation, an ecology of a body-becoming” (Manning and Massumi 20). This plane was important right from the beginning of the dance with Kate, as I needed to understand the conditions of the relationship I was entering.
The round pen creates a large enclosed space in which Kate and I can both be alert to the actions of a human enminding a horse and vice versa. I notice how I am changing the space of her awareness and her actions of attention by the actions of my presence; I am tuned toward the plane of immanence on which I can sense any shift in the boundaries of awareness that form each of our senses of self, the horse’s and mine.
The boundaries of our enminded attention formed an edge where Kate and I could share physical (spatially tactile) knowledge of one another—although at the beginning we both were behaving like isolated planets in our own orbits. This boundary was neither mine, nor hers, but existed in the space between us, the space of our in-equivalence.
Lateral Thinking: Topologies of the Sensing Self
It is important to understand that I was not interested in doing a solo dance with a horse in it—the horse functioning as a prop or scenery. She was not to form the context of “my” dance. Nor did I want her to be the subject or the object of the dance. My source of curiosity was whether I could have the kind of collaborative process with Kate that I have with NLDR and what I might learn about collaborative meaning making. But because Kate was not human I could not set up the same agreements I have with my dancers. Dancers share an entire history and language that is familiar and researched. We have agreements about who we are as dancers, what our intentions are, what areas of the dance we are investigating, who we are to one another, and what kinds of physicality is meaningful. With an equine partner, I do not share any of these agreements.
Horses are herd animals. In a kinetic partnership they look for an alpha, an effective leader. Leaders can communicate through domination—a tactic several dancers in our clinic had already tried. I did not wish to use domination as the basis of my relationship with Kate—it would drive our communication by setting behavioral limits on our engagement. I diligently wanted to investigate whether I could establish a kinetic partnership through enminding.
To do an attentional dance with Kate, I need to communicate in motion. I need her to feel me being enminded by her, feel how she changes me. By being enminded by her I will be setting the stage for her to feel the reciprocal––me feeling into her. This requires extreme delicacy because at the slightest provocation Kate’s fall-back behavior appears to be what Parelli training calls introversion and that I easily anthropomorphize as indifference. What I see is that she disengages, preferring to attend to the dust of the round pen rather than to the dancers. I watch other dancers unsuccessfully attempt to engage her by approaching her straight on with “direct-line thinking,” as a predator would (Parelli 83). This strategy seems only to distance her.
The other dancers have tried to engage Kate with attentional fixity on and at her. However, horses meet the world horizontally and as herd animals their approach to relationships is through what Parelli calls “lateral thinking” (83). They feel/see/hear/smell spatial presence and are comfortable with the indirect exposure of multiples of presence in motion. My response to this was to heighten the significance of the space to my sides and attempt to sense multiple concurrent experiences. I softened my ideas as they touched my awareness. I strove to move with clarity while maintaining an openness to new influences.
I take my eyes off of her and decide to simply “play” my attention on the edges of our mutual knowledge of the other’s presence. My attention moves across her with no more pressure than the way fingers fondle the edge of a page while reading a book.
Presence is spatial. We “feel” presence in the way we feel a dance. With Kate, I needed my presence to be strong, but indirect, so that she would relate to me through the tactile inquiry that is the physicality of her spatial experience—the level that enminds. To feel the details of presence, as with the details of a dance, it helps to have a lack of spatial pressure so that one can spread attention out with diffuse awareness. This is what Kate did. By being indirect, with her but not at her, she had the mental/physical “space” to inquire about my presence, and by inquiring, “feel” me. This action enabled her presence to come forward toward me, also indirectly. When the space of attention is easy, not forced and not influenced by another’s strong demanding focus, one can feel the spatiality of another’s presence in motion.
Presence has vitality. When we feel for it, we are feeling into the liveliness, the vital force, of one another’s attention. This vitality forms the foundation of our experience and is a ground for meeting one another. Daniel Stern studied experience with an eye toward vitality. Vitality, as Stern defined it, was “the gestalt” that determined the whole experience constituted by “movement, force, time, space and intention” (5). Attention shapes our vitality as it shapes our meeting. With a horse, this shaping is “lateral.” They feel beyond and to the sides with their eyes and with the length of their horizontal torsos. These factors allow the diffusion of spatial intention that supports the shape of presence to be significantly felt. It potentiates the possibility that horses are easily enminded, easily made aware of the vitality of presence.
Vitality is how Stern understood the mind and body functioning in sync. “Attention,” in his terms, moves as a micro-shift, together with vigilance and engagement as actions of “the mind.” In NLDR we don’t parse the mind from the body because we are interested in experiencing those flows that are structured as seeking inwardly and outwardly through each movement moment. Embodiment requires this flow, and attention is experienced as always both mind and body. When we compose and perform these actions attentionally, it is impossible not to notice how our vitality is constructive of our presence. We modulate the tone of our vitality through our presence in the making of an action or a relationship. In my dance with Kate, I connect with her, speaking through tones of vitality shaped by attention. Modulating the tone of my vitality was a dance skill that allowed me to find and meet her presence.
Extending attentional tactility was another skill set. With Kate, I engaged my tactile embodied sense of my self—what Massumi calls the topology of the body’s “lived abstractness” (177, my emphasis) and what I would call my self-sensing. This topology includes the tactile field of awareness empowered by my vitality. As Manning suggests, experience itself forms the coordinates of my topology as a sense of self. When I am dancing, my extended topology forms the boundaries of my felt presence—my lived presence as I know and experience it spatially and temporally. I know my felt presence through knowing the shape-based actions of my exteroceptively sensed self. This self is synesthetically influenced by the other senses. If I hear horse hooves behind me, my tactile intelligence extends immediately to that sound. This backspace expansion of myself-as-a-sensing action gets large and ready. It gets dense with attention, thickening the space between the horse and myself, so that details become highlighted. My sensory awareness acts like a hand at my back, pressing “me” out of the way even before I engage my visual field and turn around to see what’s coming. I am not a bound form. In this instance I am a backspace shape. The capacity to be aware of one’s reception and extension of enminding is synonymous with a practice of attentional self-sensing since both ways of understanding experience are defined by their limits. These limits can easily be employed to form the tactile edge of attention.
Nancy Stark Smith, one of my fellow developers of the dance form Contact Improvisation (CI) and editor of the Contact Quarterly, refers to one set of spatial coordinates as the kinesphere—the space around our material form that, when dancing, we attend to because anything within that space is also within our physical reach. Not only a safety measure, the kinesphere can define a person’s personal space. If we attend to this boundary, it will form one phase of our attentional edge. However, our topology is far more mutable in its shape, size and composition than this bodily organized understanding of space. Attention easily exceeds the kinesphere, because it shifts with our relational ecologies.
Seeking
Kate and I are alone since I am the only human not bound by forming the bungee cord round pen. That makes us important to one another. I stop walking. Her head is down and she sniffs the dusty footing, seeking something that might interest her.
Temple Grandin identifies the significance of the “seeking” impulse in her discussion of animals, after the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp. As an emotional platform, seeking is pleasurable. Given the chance, an animal will choose to seek as Kate had initially with her nose in the dust of the pen. Humans share this emotional drive when they have curiosity, interest, and good feeling (6-7).
I was seeking, as well. I entered into a similar state and began to dance.
Broadly put, dance generally emphasizes personal expression and the conveyance of ideas to an audience, often through gestural forms. The dance of seeking is different. Primed by curiosity, a “seeking dance” may travel within as well as beyond the flesh. It grazes on experience by defining moments as they are found, not before they are found. It inquires of them. It is defined by a refusal to predetermine where or how each moment moves, even while immersed in its discovery, compelled and even propelled by its trajectory. This dance is radically open, moved as much by wonder as by circumstances. Immensely responsive, it roots in improvisation. It luxuriates in the uncertainty that is countered by the vitalizing need to know where each moment leads. There is craft in this balance between seeking and making. Revealing and finding, wondering and discovering all are words improvisers use to describe their process. Great dancing holds this improvisational “seeking” potential, whether tightly choreographed or not.
I was “seeking” when I heightened my awareness to the tactile boundaries of my attention. Seeking can be understood as an extension of the deeper and relentless drive of what Spinoza identifies as the “conatus,” a concept further defined by Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd as “the endeavour to persist in being” (3). That “endeavour to persist” requires that we ongoingly seek to know the world of which we are a part and in which we are immersed. On all levels, conscious and not, our very survival depends upon our knowing the world in a very immediate sense; its actuality includes the virtual possibilities that exist on its multiple planes of immanence. People fall out of chairs, step off of cliffs, or get kicked by horses when they lose their sense of conatus. Attention that recognizes its own force articulates its inquiry and its enminding. It is a process: the persistent need to know calls us to be alert so that as we are present to (and as) the world, it is present within us (we are enminded by the world).
Kate’s presence looms large to my tactile senses, so she is easy to feel. I am alert. Even my gut knows my conatus is in play. Can I find Kate’s conatus without triggering her fear? Can I invite her into seeking to know a larger field of interest that includes me? If so, can we meet on levels of attentional curiosity and do a horizontal dance articulating our presences? Can she attend to attention? Will she deform her spatiality to engage with me relationally becoming topologically vital as self-sensing? I need to find her attentional edge. I extend my tactility.
To remain sensitive to the ethics at play in the making of relations with Kate, I met her sentient in-equivalence with my own sentient difference, understanding there was no “normal” or equivalent embodied state of being in the world. I used three key ways of enminding attention that I had previously explored with NLDR. These were pathways to think and move through engaging with Kate.
Triggered, Intended, and Entangled Enminding
Attention leads to enminding in ways that awareness (as de Spain describes it) never can—although through awareness we can be brought into attention. Consider these three modes of enminding that operate in our dance: triggered, intended, and entangled. The first happens when attention is triggered through an instance of awareness—a leaf falls and we are enminded of the tree above us. Our attention is “caught” by the leaf. Or, the horse turns her head toward us and we become alert to her interest. The second, intended enminding, comes from attentional seeking. When we shape and are shaped by the spaces of our haptic perceptions while dancing, we are making the choice to perceive the physicality of space. We lift an arm and our face to the roof of a riding barn and feel the structure’s presence above a channel of space within which we are present. We are enminding the space above and are enminded by the roof as our awareness has travelled to meet it. The roof interrupts and forms our spatiality. Enminding happens both by us and to us.
Lastly, we may be entangled through responsive engagements with another dancer. Our moment-by-moment movement potentials or experience may be changed by the relational durations that compose an ecological event of meeting—as happened later in this dance when Kate put her muzzle in my hand. Reaching into me, while I reached into her, Kate and I formed a web of attention. This meant that what I would and could do was determined by our meeting. My actions were not only informed but also formed by the tactile tones present in her extension to me and by the intervals of her action of feeling into me—her durations became my durations. I was also reaching with attentional feeling into her, forming a circuit of attention. Kate enminded me by changing how I knew those moments and even how I knew myself to be in those moments. Vitally engaged, we were enmeshed. This was not a simple connection; this was the enminding relational action of entangling arrived at through a linking of attentional intention.
I stop and stand in a position about fifteen to twenty feet from her, facing opposite the direction she faces and just within her range of sight, looking outwardly beyond our enclosure. Beginning to move, my actions seek the shapes of the space forming and thickening with my attention to it—arms carving arcs that resolved into bound spaces that I “feel into” to know their “weight.” Kate’s dance seeks the play of dust at her feet, looking and smelling for interest. I have no idea what interest dust holds. I align with her by moving in a similar “intending” mode. Seeking rapport, I build our attentional relationship by finding agreement in our enminding modes. Sharing rapport I am less likely to disrupt or disturb her. I can then seek her attentional edge. Her edge is the boundary defined by where her attention becomes disturbed.
Sharing an attentional edge with another dancer is invigorating. Like hands touching, it awakens us to possibilities for motion. I was heightening my attentional edge while not asking Kate to foreground me; I wanted her to know where I was, but still feel safe.
I don’t want to be inconsequential to Kate so I maintain strength and vitality on the outer edge of my awareness. This intentional action offers both of us the opportunity to “feel” one another out without the power issues that exist when the force of our attentional presences collide or overlap.
I was happy simply to be within her context, not the object of primary concern. I mirrored her state by keeping her on my visual periphery. I wanted to receive information about her (through my awareness) without imposing on her. I hoped she would keep seeking until, through a growing interest, she would reach for me, seek me out, and intend to know me. Engaging in this mode of enminding would mean we could eventually become entangled with one another by forming an attentional web. I preferred that to triggering her attention. Triggering her would be a failure of the rapport required to dance with her.
Concerned that I might trigger her into alert, I slowly thicken my edge, heightening my attention to it. I want her attention to soften with relaxation when she meets me. I want her to make the call for her boundaries to expand and to bring me into her periphery, if not her foreground. I do not want to demand it of her … rather, I prefer to let her consider me. I am asking for her to enmind me.
Standing there, I completely absorb myself in a spatial activity … holding a volume of space (the size of a human) in my arms. I move it to certify my grasp of it. Then, I open it up and extend it out into a larger expanse (the size of a horse), which I also hold. I want the horse to know that I am a spatially attentive dancer—that for me, space is tactile and in that sense, material. I want to be interesting to Kate so that she gives me her attention. I am not altogether sure what I might do with it, but think that perhaps I will know once I have it. For now, I am happy as her attention merely expands so that we touch one another’s edges.
In a passage from the Politics of Touch, Manning says
If my body is touch, and both touch and movement signal a displacement toward an other, I can begin to conceive of my body as that which produces the spaces for its movements of desire. My body spatializes space insofar as my body remains alive to touch. The space inhabited by my body becomes the space of my body. When I touch you, I not only incite you to reciprocity, I create space with you. (Politics of Touch 58)
Spatializing my body of touch, I was inviting Kate to enmind me with her body of touch. I was inviting her to move me with her desire, if not her need, to know me.
I attend to my dance, not to Kate, not pressing outwardly. Yet I am as alert to Kate’s presence as she is to mine. If I were to put words to what my attention says, “I am involved in knowing you are there. I will not control you, harm you, or be rude to you either by being dismissive of your presence or demanding of your attention. Although this is not a formal meeting, you are within my radar.” I am now in a heightened state of embodiment—not a hair moves that I do not note. I am dancing. My actions are strong, complete, and intentional. I am enminding a space that she has come to, that she has touched with her attention. Her head is moving up. And while I don’t retreat from her attentional touch, I maintain my distance, letting her enmind me, allowing her attention to touch my attentional boundaries without pressing her into an actual meeting. I feel her feeling me. Meanwhile, I remain the most interesting event happening in the space—far more interesting than dust.
Edge to edge, through touch, Kate is creating spatial flesh with me—a contiguous edge of “between” that connects us in a mutual space of knowing. Being in a shared space means I can enmind her further. Allowing her to feel the shifts and changes as my physical attention shifts aspects of my physicality. Since she is touching me as a shared space, each shift in my dance is another event of enminding. I have her “peripheral attention”—she has not yet foregrounded me—but this is changing as she seeks me further. I draw the edge in closer to me, inviting her to expand hers.
Investing in the limits of attention isn’t quite the same as investing in the limits of awareness. With awareness, I took in Kate’s whereabouts as spatially significant. With awareness, I could be enminded. With attention, I could enmind.
I am aware of the potential for a duet with Kate, while continuing to do a solo. I mark the edge of my attention as I shift so that she will be able to find it and follow it as it moves. I narrow down within my bodymind, moving the attentional edge inwardly. I draw in the feeling of her touching me and shrink momentarily into my body’s flesh. My awareness remains gently open but not dominant. Awareness ensures my well-being while I keep my attentional edges spatially well formed, able to be enminded.
Remaining open while receding is a complex configuration of attentional tones. While concentrated and thick attentionally, my awareness was thin so that my full spatial presence had a light touch and was not disturbing. This allowed her attention to penetrate through my awareness so that she could track me without feeling pressure. Her attention traveled into and within my flesh as I dove inwardly, somatically. I travelled through my skeletal form downwardly, giving my body weight into the earth. I didn’t relax, I directed my attention. Down was something Kate could easily feel. I invited her to feel me feeling downward.
The Viscosity of Space: the Geometry of Attention
Dancers can concentrate their physical presences into different shapes, sizes, and consistencies. This practice seems critical while dancing with a horse, not only because it helps to balance out the differences size and shape make within the relationship, but also because it potentiates a spatial conversation. Watching Shaw work with horses presented an excellent example of a dancer expanding her spatial size while shifting its consistency. Shaw is a tiny person, smaller than I am by a head. When she engages with a horse, she becomes huge, dense, grounded, and elastic in her bodily/spatial presentation. Moving beyond her kinesphere, she announces her actions with a powerful physical voice, carving the space around her, drawing in and pressing upon a horse as though there were a lead line between them when there is not one—all are enminding actions. So petite that she walks under a small horse’s throat barely ducking, Shaw’s courage and ability to move with a free horse is what encouraged me forward into explorations of possibilities that fall within my own area of research so that I could further explore how the physicality of attention and actions of enminding form the basis for conversations across in-equivalence.
Where my relational work emphasizes seeking, which I expand into a practice of inquiry, curiosity, and communication that works on the level of the conatus, Shaw’s relational work emphasizes tasking and purposeful action. Her work anchors in her dancer’s ability to direct a horse by being the alpha guide so that communication is made clear by establishing roles. Without roles, my work explores the making of in-equivalent meaning for establishing the grounds of meeting. As research artists we both incur risk. While my work risks meandering and insignificance, her work risks irrelevance. Despite differences in the content of risk, we both need the ability to shift the viscosity of space, guided by our ability to articulate attention.
Improvisational dance pioneer and Buddhist movement philosopher Barbara Dilley speaks of her spatial (attentional) actions similarly.
I’ve learned to corral [space], and recognize it, and move into it, and have it illuminate the form. You know, like negative space, the visual arts understanding of it, and the power of a certain kind of awareness, making space become dense or heavy, as being a sign of a tremendous amount of presence happening, so that space can really take on a feeling of fresh lightness or it can become thick and heavy like cream, you know, when there’s a lot of attention and focus going on. (de Spain 110)
Dancing with Kate, I had been spatially and attentionally locating, holding and moving thickened volumes of space. I had also thinned it out. How I attended to space shifted it, and me.
I drive my spatial concentration deep inside myself as an action of attention. No longer forming an externalized volume of space, I was engaging in an ongoing felt river of weight forming a path of action deep within my core, down my legs, through my feet and into the soil of the earth. The boundaries of my attention became the “banks” of this river.
Geometric actions are a relational language. If I touch a dancer’s arm, intending action on their surface, they immediately understand the virtual potentials of the next action differently than if I touch their arm as a volume. Touching a surface, I may slide across it, I may feel its texture, I may notice its contours. Touching a volume, I may move the arm itself this way or that. As volumes, my touch passes into and through a variety of structures, becoming fascia, muscles, bone. Shifts in the shape of our attention, the shape-shifting of our relational attention, “means” (in the sense of communicates) uniquely. It is through this geometry that I have been touching Kate, which is why I can allow my physicality to become more complex.
When I allow my body to shift in its consistency, what I call changing my “material properties,” I charge the horse’s interest in what I am doing.
Changing my material properties meant that although I may have looked the same on the outside, I was not the same on the inside and the pathways and dynamics of my action reflected that change. Some parts of my body were moving like fluid, other parts were intentionally firm, like wood, which responds differently to the forces at play in the physics of action. I, and my movement, required closer examination because I was making changes on a subtle level that influenced the gross. These were actions of embodiment that allowed each dance action to have unique qualities, giving them the addition of flesh-level meaning. What I was speaking on a bodymind level, the level of knowledge I share with a horse, was, “I am not ever the same … you have to pay attention to know me and what I might do.” I was engaging the horse’s conatus. With this action, I was “front and center” in her attention.
I suddenly reverse my attentional presence and grow outwardly. Starting from the earth beneath my feet, I expand my space into a path of action that takes my whole extended body and moves it across an invisible surface between Kate and me. I am moving fast, driven first by the dynamic of momentum optimized by the shift in my material properties; I allow my fluid weight to fling to the outside of a spiral turn. With a series of tossed leaps, each one also a spin, I cross a third of the pen heading away from and behind Kate. I stop. I definitely have her attention now and she is on the move coming toward me. She stops, closer to me than before. She is facing me. Touching her with my spatial attention (not my eyes or my physical body), I have brought her with me! She is curious. I think to repeat the actions I did initially—establishing stillness first, then holding a volume of space with my arms—I become once again consistent and therefore, from her perspective I imagine, somewhat more safe. This time though, I take the geometric volume of space I am concentrating and raise it and my face into the sky. My vision touches the ceiling and beyond. Concentrating on the energized space above me with one arm reaching high through and into it, I open the other arm in Kate’s direction, forming an inclusive arc as I lower it to the side of my body. Palm outward. My attention, while full within my whole body is drawn up and above us both. I hold us, my body first and with it the horse’s attention, in an energetic enminding of the prepositional meaning “aboveness.”
I was including her in this playing ground of prepositions, relationships to things, one another and the world, a field of play we have both lived our lives in. I knew she would understand and be interested by my absorption and discovery, my extension into another plane of action.
I leave my body vulnerable and open; my lowered hand inclusive of her in the other hand’s vertical reach.
I do this by heightening my awareness of, and adding to, the fascial stretch between my opposing arms in forming an arc. This is a reaching action that doesn’t stop at my hands but rather penetrates the space of the arc, like forming an encompassing web.
Webs of Attention: Entangled Action
A practice of enminding asks us to clarify the flows of attention as they travel interoceptively and exteroceptively: from the inner sources of bodily felt sense and thought to their outward forming actions, and from our outwardly felt topology to the inner motions of sensation that bind the world into one experience. In my work with NLDR, we cast these as actions of curiosity. Building a circuit of attention we track our embodied actions, exposing their limits, their concentrations, and their changing consistencies. As an ensemble, we notice how attention matters: how it touches, engages, and incites response across the expanses of space, or the boundaries of flesh. Actively inquiring of attentional experience, we understand enminding as forming a field of experimentation in which “how” we understand supersedes “what” we understand.
The emphasis on “how” we enmind allows us to build webs of attention. Webs are significant in the making of communication because they knit all participants into a shared structure through which information can flow. Attentional webs are fascia-like spatial structures. They knit dancers to dancers in a volatile but shared space of knowing. They appear when one dancer attends reciprocally to his partner’s attention as it reflects back on his own presence. This happens if you ask two dancers to notice their partner noticing them. To notice noticing is a full attentional step beyond simply observing one’s partner. The tactile aspect of attention appears so that this reciprocal action is reflected in a felt acknowledgement or accord—which is why we call it a web. When we attend to “how” we notice change, how we are being enminded, and if our partners notice when and how they are being enminded, then the web builds, and the dancers become entangled. A web can entangle multiple partners and their physical parts simultaneously. It creates a safe space of heightened inclusion of one another in a felt “field of knowing.”
The desire to notice is an action of attentional extension, an attentional reach. By reaching we come to know not what the other is doing so much as what the other knows—the attentional worlding by which his/her doing unfolds. When the field of enminding is entangled, then all members of the field are moved by any other member of the field. It is a state that is both free and supported. Reaching through the touch of attention, I have been seeking to know what Kate knows—hoping to become entangled with her. Hoping for that freedom of communication.
Kate puts her muzzle in the palm of my hand!—a simple moment, physical touch. Although she may be looking for a carrot, I think not. The feeling of her soft lips heavily touch the inside curvature of my palm. The way she holds touch as she moves into it, the feeling of reach into my body tells me she is entering me, speaking to me, engaged in seeking rather than finding. She pauses there, just feeling the connection.
For long instants, I don’t move … and neither does she—further proof this is not about a carrot. We are agreed then that we are dancing together, allowing attention itself to be meaningful between us. In this action, she is connecting into me, participating in my extension upward … me, taking her into a dimension she cannot easily go, vertically up. I move slightly back and forth on my balance to help her feel the upward spirals of my body. Through our “fascial reach,” our entangled connection, I become not her master but her prosthesis, her sensory addition, which is my offering. I offer her the sky. She takes it through the palm of my hand. She offers me the connection of horizontality, roots and grounded entanglements: together, beside, between, and within one another.
The vigilance of attentive enminding moves with the strength of care. The ethics of enminding that forms a web enable each participant in an entanglement to act separately, yet we are each easily moved both as individuals and as whole forms. We become a shared vitality, enacted through the mutuality of our care. And, as with the body’s fascia, these attentional spaces build webs of fractal chaos, with no obvious organization. Yet this chaos is not without intelligence and responsiveness (see Dumit and O’Connor in this volume). Supportive while also freeing, they allow for instances of synchronicity, of shared bodyminds across expanses of space. This made each action in my dance with Kate an ethical choice in which I was capable of acting as a field of touched attention. In this sense, I found myself discovering a horizontality of knowing in an ethical practice that lived within the deeper meaning of a herd, a flock, a school.
Experiencing another’s attention allows us to recognize how we are irrevocably intra-active with one another (Barad, Haraway). The world beyond our flesh boundaries conjoins through touch as eyes, skin and imagination send tactile vectors, planes and volumes of attention into the world. And because we have not merely our perceptual knowing, but also our conceptual complexities within that knowing, we are readily able to exert force, texture, and tonal details through that attentional touch. We draw and press upon one another as Shaw does with horses and as Kate and I do to one another as we find our ways to know one another across our dissimilar topologies of being. As within our flesh, the fascia enwraps all our structures in webs that give our skin and our bone, through our attention, a tissue continuum. We engage spatially with one another, forming webs of proprioception that act through spaces of all consistencies, the density of earth, bone, and flesh, as well as the lightness of air. That means we have an ability to take bodily-recognized experiences and conceptually employ them for other uses.
Non-Parallel Meaning
The more dancers are attentionally attuned to the actions of enminding, the more they feel the subtler nuances and shifts in tactile amplitude. I find myself asking dancers to dial up the sensitivity on their very finely modulated embodied seismographs so that the slightest shift in the tone or timbre of a space will register for them. To accomplish this practice means that we cannot ask these shifts to register cognitively as thought. As dancer and theorist Kent de Spain notes, cognitive functions are “cumbersome” within the actions of improvising. Too slow in its processing for many of our actions and intra-actions and too limited to contain the breadth and depth of perceptual experience, cognition works well after the fact but will hinder the moment (de Spain). Attention is radically fast. Cognition doesn’t function well within the milliseconds in which actions of enminding ripen. I think of the speed of a caught fall, when one dancer appears out of nowhere blending into a mutual form, the one caught by the other in an action that seems impossibly synchronous. What I see are bodyminds enminding one another through the entangled fascia of their attention. When this happens while two dancers are touching physically, I understand they are acting as one body of attention, skin meeting skin as connective tissues meld the way Kate’s lips fuse with my hand. When I see them do this through expanded space, I also see them acting as one body of attention, one in which interwoven proprioceptive webs of attention and fascia have been built that bind them together in actions of knowing, actions of enminding.
The speed with which entangled attention enminds suggests that peripheral awareness is moving the whole, extending form before cognitive thinking kicks in. Since there are actions based on this awareness, it is attentive, and we may call it peripheral “thinking” or peripheral intelligence. When ensemble dancing coordinates us into fields of entanglement, peripheral intelligence coordinates with this environment in a way that is responsive across material forms, humans, non-humans, things and spaces.
I do not remember specifically what happened next. I do remember that now the dance held mutual but non-parallel meaning. Kate was additive to my understanding of each action. Entangled, I could feel her thicken the space between us with her concentration and she did not back off when I did the same. She deepened me by intending toward me.
Shared meaning doesn’t mean that our thoughts are parallel. We don’t think alike or even experience similarly on most attentional levels. Furthermore, “there is no stable identity that emerges once and for all” in any of us (Manning, Always More, 4). This is the instability that we dance as we move into ecologically dynamic enminding. And yet, we share the circumstance of bodies, of space, and of relatedness. Dancing with Kate was the making of non-parallel meaning shared through a field of entanglement. In dance, even within a single species, meanings are never parallel, “states of mind” vary, locatedness in space differs, bodyminds differ, the structures they make relate uniquely and this in turn influences the ways actions are made. Sharing non-parallel meaning with a horse is not greatly different in this matter. Attending to the enminding actions of attention moves us through the disparity of uniqueness to where we discover what is there to be known differently, together.
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