Collective Experience

Thank you to those of you who came out to experience Fixtures this weekend and to the City of Santa Monica for this unprecedented opportunity. It has been an intensive period of development and I want to express my gratitude for this time, space, and support.

It is only the morning after these performances so my reflections are fresh and lacking distance but I do want to acknowledge something that we shared this weekend. One guest in a post performance talk observed that in viewing Fixtures she was not only aware of the performers but she was noticing the rest of the audience and those people who were recreationally on site but whose heads turned as Samantha and I traversed the sand; children who responded openly and at times drastically joining in our crawl as well as overheard comments and surprising interactions from passersby. It is uncommon in other contexts for viewing dance that we might be privy to the reactions of our fellow viewers and even less to the reactions of a public whose presence and experience of the performance is often more spontaneous and at times confrontational. This particular reflection resonates with my experience working on site in a perpetual mode of exposing my process to a public and perhaps more importantly this speaks to the implications of public performance and site responsive dance. When the body is presented in unfamiliar or vulnerable ways in public, how do we respond? How do we support each other? What do we notice of ourselves, amongst each other and in our physical environment?

photo by Samara Kaplan

On perception and how the brain makes meaning in the physical world:
http://motionographer.com/2015/09/18/understanding-perception-how-we-experience-the-meaning-we-create/


Thank you again and goodbye for now.