Sunday, February 14, 2016


Beginning Module 2:  Threads of interest appearing


Module 1 was a wonderful challenge for me especially as I was inundated with work and travel.  I am looking forward to spending time exploring as I begin module 2, and especially reconnecting with everyone on MAPP DTP because I have felt quite absent. 

These are things that have preoccupied me over the past few weeks that may or may not be connected but that could never the less be interesting to some of the themes that the beginnings of module 2 seem to be touching on.  I have also included links - possibly interesting.  I would love to hear from some of you. 

In the interim of study I had time to once more engage with literature, and aspects of culture that always interested or engaged me but with once again fresh eyes.  I love the variety of resources to be found on youtube.  The flavour of January were definitely Sam Harris’s videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0

The break was an enjoyable relief especially from the final pressure of compiling my portfolio for module 1.  Now that I am moving on to the next module, it is lovely to be able to find themes within it that may provide a feeling of continuity not just with personal interests but my work as a dancer, performer and teacher. 

I decided having read the Handbook to take on what seems like quite a challenge of starting to formulate my own ideas surrounding dualism/monism, embodiment and perhaps look at Task 1.  I took a look at my book shelf and found Nietzsches’ ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ and felt these were the entry points for me to then engage with some of the set texts.  I am currently finding ‘Nietzsche's dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the revaluation of Christian Values’ (Kimerer L. LaMothe, 2006) very helpful for drawing relationships between the beginnings of phenomenology and early modern dance.  It's giving me an opportunity to look further afield – maybe this will help for finding a theme to research (although I have some ideas).  It flows beautifully on from my January’s work as I was involved as a performer in a dance-theatre production of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus’:

 
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1062718510445100.1073741854.161113363938957&type=3

Oedipus, through solving the riddle of the sphinx and so breaking the curse, is the infinitely wise (unsurpassable in logical reasoning) saviour, and as a consequence, king, of the plague stricken city of Thebes.  The tragedy follows his journey, from blindness to full realization of his true nature, that he is the murderer of his father and husband to his mother.  His final enlightenment is symbolized when, at his own hands as an act of self-revulsion and despair, he is physically blinded (and thus absolved into the world of the unseen/unknown, Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian abysses’ p89, 1967), and his banishment from the city of Thebes, and subsequent journey back into communion with nature.  Nietzsche talks of connection with nature as knowing reality, with this achieved through the figure of the Dionysian satyr (‘..the image of nature and its strongest urges...and at the same time the proclaimer of her wisdom and art – musician, poet, dancer and seer of spirits all in one person’ (1967, p65-66)).  Nietzsche writes passionately of the unity of all living things and primordial nature as reality, with experience of these coming not through critical reasoning and understanding but through experiencing transformative art.  In critique Nietzsche  writes of the ‘divine’ Plato that he ‘only speaks ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as it is not conscious insight, and places it on par with the gift of the soothsayer and the dream-interpreter: the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of understanding’ (1967, p85-86).  To me Nietzsche implies that understanding once translated into conscious thought, into knowledge gained through reason acts merely as an illusion to the reality of the world experienced through artistic impulse.  He writes:

‘The idyllic shepherd of modern man is merely the counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that are allegedly nature; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their most forceful form and see himself changed, as by magic into a satyr’.  1967, p62
 
 
Nietzsche’s description of the satyr is of a being absorbed in their sensory reality.  For the central figure of Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, a tree in a city park, experienced from the perspective of his embodied self, one immersed within the sensory world, comes to represent to him the reality of existence in its entirety.  In the presence of the lived reality, the word ‘tree’ becomes absurd in it meaninglessness (‘I was thinking without words, about things with things....I am struggling against words’ (1965, p185)).  The distance between words, the symbol of the thing and the reality, creates an unsettled disturbing sensation (like Nietzsche’s contrast between the image of the idyllic shepherd in common culture and the reality of one directly experiencing nature).  In this state the inanimate world becomes to him unstable, filled with movement (the tree ‘floats’, ‘shrivels’, ‘crumples’, ‘penetrates’ (1965, p191)), consciousness through the subjective experience becomes everything, and ‘knowledge’ of the world slips away, ‘...neither ignorance or knowledge had any importance, the world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence.’ (1965, p185).  Interestingly, whilst explaining what seems to be an understanding of life through an embodied awareness, a sensory consciousness, Sartre nevertheless still posits knowledge as separate, as belonging to the mind, and like Nietzsche, the realm of logic and the written word.  If what the embodied self experiences and understands (intuitively, instinctively or by some other process) cannot be rendered in words without something of its essence being lost or distorted, what do we mean when we say that the body can be a site of knowledge?  Perhaps we could see knowledge simply as a way of experiencing/understanding the world that can be passed on/communicated to someone else.  Dance therefore becomes a means of transference from individual to individual.  The dancing of a contact improvisation jam for example immediately comes to mind as a direct non-verbal form of communicating understanding.
‘The Triangular Clock’, Salvador Dali from:Penguin Surrealism http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/04/28/penguin-surrealism/
 
 
 
This has been the starting point for me to think about how I relate to embodiment, knowledge and dance and I am really inspired to develop this further.  Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Phenomenology of perception’ would be interesting as well as most books on the reading list although as a distance learner I am concentrating on resources that I can access online first. 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
I am currently thinking about the possible need for ‘entry points’ into the sensory world and the consciousness of our moving reality.  That entry point may be a movement motif in itself, touch or physical contact with something or someone, a rhythm.  For the protagonist in ‘Nausea’ it is the image and feeling of the tree.  The smell of coffee in the morning enlivens and awakens me into dynamic movement.  Memories are awakened – an image used in a piece of choreography or technique class can evoke memories of past sensations, emotions and ideas, which in turn work to intensify the present experience.  Sartre’s protagonist sees the black colour of the tree as ‘...melted into the smell of wet earth, of warm moist wood, into a black smell spread like varnish over that sinewy wood, into a sweet, pulped fibre’ (1965, p187).  I am currently thinking about ideas for research surrounding the relationship between music and dance but from a personal, individual perspective.
Thank you for taking the time out.
References
Nietzche, F., (1967), The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, Toronto: Random House.
Sartre, J.P., (1965), Nausea, Middlesex: Penguin Books


 


















 
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Great thoughts getting back into study Sam and thanks for sharing your references. The notion of 'transaction' rather than translation or transmission, I think really helps in grappling with how we acknowledge and articulate our lived (embodied) experiences.

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