Sensation
Erin Brannigan, Dance
In the case of dance, the object perceived, the creation presented, is the human body itself, a manifestation of sensation in the subject-object of the dancer. Sensations can achieve a directness in their form (or “deformation”) in the encounter between dancer and other in a unique way; the moving body can never be pure representation [figure] or pure abstraction. There is always direct recourse/resonance between the sensation we see in the body of the other, the unit of measure we use to perceive it, and the field of corporeal experience we bring to bear in the encounter. For this reason, dance could be considered the art of sensation, where the entire creative event - from practice to process, from production to reception - engages with corporeal sensation is all of its chaos and instability.
Mind-body work with corporeal sensations and intensities calls for a shift in the field of perception from being dominated by vision to becoming decentred, plurisensorial, responsive, mobile, and virtuosic. This model of perception is unchained from patterns of recognition and seeking the familiar, and is closer to attention as an open, dispersed, and non-assertive form of information-gathering mobilized by/mobilizing affect and sensation. Working in this way, the dancer can circumvent the dangers of speechlessness associated with affect and sensation by channelling incoming stimuli into a corporeal loop so that what is experienced through the body stays with corporeal modes of expression, movement, and exchange. What is it to stay in the zone of sensation, expanding and thickening the experiential field before recognition, using methods such as interruption, repetition, exhaustion, or constant variation? And how can we name this? Experiments with composition have allowed the art form to explore the sensations, intensities, and imagination of the mind-body as medium to produce choreographies that are self-reflexive, relational, expanded, and durational.
Anna Tregloan, Performance and Design
When I think of sensation, I imagine an exchange.
Warm bees wax, transferring its heat to my hands as I massage it to shape. Or perhaps, fabric -its drape and integrity, its age and history, its weight and scale – all tacitly informing how it might transform into a new iteration of itself. Or the beeswax again, imparting its shifting will and limitations as it stiffens. The layering of sensation might be exampled by the act of plunging your hands down to the root of a plant - to free it from a root bound constraint. To work with it, feeling out dampness, softness, arterial routes, loose dirt – discovering through touch, tension, texture and a shared tenacity what it is and isn’t agreeable to. Sensation in this way is attention, care and exchange. It is gathered in the interaction between the shaper and the shaped and in the multiple directions in which that relationship can occur.
Sensation, in the way I am thinking, is the core of material collaboration, of interfacing with what we often think of as inanimate (although, realistically, we are just operating in different time frames). It is the exchange in “making” something, of manipulating; but also, that of holding onto, or being upon a surface of. I understand it as an integration of motives, a path towards more complex ends.
I do wonder what happens to these sensations once the work is done. Say, in objects which go on to be viewed in a gallery, or placed on a stage, but not touched again? In one sense it transfers to the knowledge that allows us to see softness, to hear the brittle, to recognize the fake. But more particularly, in intermedial work, it might be experienced in the temporal dimensions of various sensation pathways – the present corporeal and aural, the attention in a completed gesture, the craft that made the instrument or the space – the then and the now, rubbing against each other to conjure dissonances, echoes and sympaticos.