External Events and Internal Processes

I’ve been collecting ideas for this blog over the past couple of weeks now but it seems to me that something that lies at the heart of this theme has been on my mind for quite a while.  Alanna writes in her blog about her teaching practices, and how she is finding her own practices (and her own identity maybe?) in the world of possibilities.  Ideas that hit me in her blog- ‘overlapping’, ‘multiple layers’, ‘non-linear’- could not take my attention away from the first idea of ‘the binary’.  This idea seems somehow a block for me and it returned me to my own blog.  We talked about external events and internal processes at the beginning of the month as almost being in a dialogue, as if they were two separate, clearly defined realities staring at each other across a physical boundary.  I find this way of seeing troubling, particularly so, because the longer I look at it, the stronger the image appears, even if my gut feeling is telling me that this is not how I experience the world.  And once again it appears because it is almost impossible for me to conceive of myself as anything other than separate and contained within the world I am experiencing.

For my inquiry I’m looking at the dancers’ experience of music in the dance studio.  I set out in my Module 2 proposal to explore it through the lens of the ‘intersubjective’, what we consider as ‘subjective’ experiences but that are formed out there in the world, through participation.  The personal and the collective forming as one whole, but encompassing multiple, overlapping experiences.  And all of these experiences are co-dependent.

We could see music and/or dance as being at one and the same time both an external event and an internal process with their origins not always clear.  We can question the extent to which we can see musicians as engaging in a complex and intimate dance, and dancers as creating moving images out of the many rhythms and melodies they hear within them.  A rhythm is most certainly an internal process as well as an external event and I would imagine most people can conjure in their memories the magical sensation of when these realities merge as one through dance.

These things are very difficult to talk about (as I have found through my interviewing) or write about as I am struggling now, but I feel they can been understood through other mediums, such as dance, which does not necessarily rely on a binary in order to define meaning.  Sometimes the eagerness to  define and understand can get in the way from me experiencing the overlapping realities of which I am apart of but nevertheless seem contradictory and confusing.