Par Critical Essay Luettringhaus Almost Final Edit Final

PAR CRITICAL ESSAY Karola Lüttringhaus 2021
"Ich denke jedes Ding ist sehr wichtig....

... jedes Ding...
alles (ist ja) ne Sprache. ..
man kann eigentlich alles lesen,...
... wenn man in der Lage ist das zu lesen."
Pina Bausch (1)
"I think that every thing is significant...

... every thing...
... everything is a language...
.. actually, it's possible to read it all...
if one is capable of reading these things."
(1)
(quote translated by Karola Lüttringhaus)
"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

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FULL BODY GESTURE

EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS
EMERGENCE
HOW THIS ESSAY IS COMING ABOUT
The structure of this essay follows the structure of my choreographic process. It all begins with a
huge amount of information, ideas, images, and associations, gathered to have around me and
become 'the soup I swim in'. Slowly I work my way in to individual scenes. I edit, I add, I edit. There is
no forcing it, it has to come about on its own time. Some major topics appear and get pushed aside,
others persist or become more important. What remains now is a continuously dynamic network of
complex, intertwined, three-dimensional, and experiential elements. Together these create
something that was not there before and that lives on in our minds and bodies for an indeterminable
duration and in a multitude of ways.
All movements have their own emotional or narrative companions. For me, the movement and the
meaning can not be separated, and creativity and the body can not be separated. I liken the structure
of my pieces and creative process to the bio-tensegrity of the body, which is characterized by a visco-
elastic contiguous web of interconnected tension and compression elements, arranged in fractal
organization of larger and smaller connections. Movement in one area causes movement at all other
areas. Like hypertext this essay links forth and back and across into the other parts of the portfolio,
which I suggest you view before reading this text.
This essay is a representation of my way of working and it is also a piece. By 'piece' I mean the
structure that serves as the basis for the emergence that takes place when it is shared in a
performance. As you are reading and engaging with this essay, it is a performance, which is also part
of what makes a piece, that it has come into existence. A piece is an organism, more than the sum of
its parts.
WHY I ALWAYS WRITE SUCH SHORT PARAGRAPHS (for Lynette)

Headlines are like scene titles. They are broader gestures, that can linger for longer than the detailed
content of the little chapters they create, and hold their content in tangible ways in our memory
while reading. Headlines and smaller gestures then, together, orchestrate in the ways that the body
does as well. In complex, multi-directional waves, dealing with timing, interference patterns and
negotiating togetherness. The essay emerges from the play of its parts, which don't really exist as
separate parts, but do indeed have identities and a will of their own. As I write, I fill in the smaller
gestures, like cells and particles, that make up the more easily perceivable groupings, to reveal the

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endless complexity of the whole, which also doesn't stop at the skin, but includes you, as you read...
So we are dancing together across time.
Really short paragraphs also help me find my way in something complex. If I didn't have headlines, i
would get lost in all the little letters.
DISCOVERY AS WELL
Generally speaking, things show up for us as we are ready for them. By listening more closely to
specific moments in choreography we enable discovery, understanding, and emergence. Something
new is created that couldn't exist in this way before. It is made of parts that we discovered along the
way, of the energies that are released in the making and in the performance of it, and the personal
and interpersonal resonances it evokes long after the actual experience is over. The dancer dances a
dance with body parts and narratives that are components of a paradigm, a landscape, and
existence. But what they make together is new, manifests only for a brief instance, exists in its
becoming, and makes way to something else that wasn't there before and never will be there again.
And so life births itself.
LINEARITY, TIMING, TRUST & CHAOS

This emergence can not be done for everyone at the same pace within the same linear continuity.
Linearity can be a burden and skew the picture of the whole and how it functions. Yes, linearities do
exist, they are directional multiplicities, such as the many kinetic chains within the body: but while
being chains that react in a chronological fashion, they also interact and effect one another across
vectors, and form cross-undulations that present more of a picture of 'chaos'. I don't really like the
term chaos, because to me it expresses a sort of victimization in the face of events that are
beginning to push and pull us around and we become undone. Using the term chaos here is
misleading perhaps, but I will use it in the understanding that while over time we do become undone,
life is a series of agreements that resonate with one another in unpredictability that is entirely
trustworthy. The whole thing is trustworthy, all of life and death. But this is hard to grasp for
someone like me who has learned to resist reality at all cost. The above mentioned linear
multiplicities provoke a complexity beyond our conscious control. To fight this state would become
chaos, to emerge and flow with it, would be effortlessness. So, instead of reducing the magnitude,
and inhibiting the complexity, trust and abandon can be a method for flowing within.
Chaos is only that if the full picture is inaccessible to us in cognitive analysis and we insist on
understanding and dominating the events. The problem is a learned response of rejection of anything
that is not easily reducible to cognition. The complexity can only be grasped and aligned with in fully
embodied ways. Through experience. Through living.
A scene that we see in a dance performance resembles more a simultaneity than a linearity. It speaks
to us clearly and we struggle only to translate it into words, although we do not struggle to connect
to it in 'other' ways. I will leave this statement vague, as I have no explanation at the moment. But
these other ways are part of my interests in writing this essay. We struggle to recognize that there

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are other ways of connecting, feeling, knowing, because we have rationalized ourselves to one way
of knowing. To remain open to these other ways and to practice recognizing and living with and
operating through them is an inherent action of choreography. Intuition falls into this category. We
are the complexity. And we can trust that it is the method to achieve clarity and to walk, dance, or
live cohesively.
EXERCISES
Exercise (2) is the word for: bringing something out, stepping away from, physically manifesting
something from within into the outside, to carry something into effect. We step away from the page
and the writing continues in the doing. Not only I can write something here, you too, as you feel,
move, experience and engage, you bring your very own personal viewpoints into the story and it
becomes something unique to you.
As I am writing, I stop for walking, dancing, sensing verbal and physical articulations in my body. I
don't do this anywhere near often enough because I fall prey to the pressures of what I think I should
be doing, or achieving. By not taking breaks, I actually break the flow. By worrying about it, by having
deadlines and the pressure of proving success, I become stagnant. So I try to build movement and
embodiment into this essay, for us to experience, together, and to practice the holding of attention
and immersion that I am talking about in this essay.
The movement catalyses ideas, thoughts, and I can jump ahead into imagination and backward into
experience, or vice versa. I think that possibly, in movement exists a loss of time, that can be
perceived when fully engrossed in the presence of moving. A temporal displacement where time can
be stretched or sped up becomes part of the experience and again speaks to the interference
patterns I mentioned. I am searching for unexplored paths and ways of perceiving.
HOME
"I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use."
Pina Bausch (3)
I find it hard to see the new, to find the unknown and distill something out of the hardly perceptible,
out of the habitual, into a new piece of insight, into a realization of formerly unknown relationality.
How is something new, exactly? Am I telling the same story over and over again in my
choreographies and in my dancing? Am I succeeding in emergence? There is newness of form, of
pathways of actions, and there is newness in experience. Maybe newness in form is not as important.
as society makes us believe in its insatiableness for cutting edge work and arts - technology
collaborations and so on. What is more important perhaps is being fully, and responding fully, and
moving fully, which allows the habitual to be discovered in more refined ways which could lead to
discovering new pathways into new form. By refining the ability to immerse oneself into the other
ways of knowing one creates possibilities for such discovery.

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What Pina Bausch mentions in the above quote is something I have lived for the first then years of my
life as a choreographer. I wanted to be isolated, un-distracted by other opinions, to find something
true to my vision. To find what it was that came from deep inside me, my very own language and
things to say. Would this discovery be something new or something utterly familiar? This did not
exclude artists from bringing their creativity into my process, but it meant being very perceptive to
what these ideas were. I had a very strong sense of right or wrong during those times. Bausch hints at
this in a later quote when she says that she clearly and viscerally knows if something belongs or not. I
tried to leave as little up to improvisation as possible. And I made decisions about every little
element. I usually see the piece in its entirety, the lighting the space, the costumes, the sounds. I
know what's right for this piece, it is like I am searching for the puzzle piece it takes to make it come
to life.
Certainly, as a choreographer, this is where my specificity in choreography comes from. Even though
I am guided by intuition and the trust in its wisdom, I attach myself to that which emerges, hold it,
pass it on to dancers and we play with it. I have to be attentive to the sensation of whether
something belongs or doesn't. All of this takes place somewhere in a nowhere. A locality I can not
describe. But it feels like home.

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EXERCISE #1
Take note of your current position and location. Walk to the bathroom to open or close the door and
then come back to your starting place. Do this four or five times. ... and when you are done, scroll
down to the next page.
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Now, do another path to the bathroom and back, but only in your mind. Sensing, imagining what you
experienced. What body parts were you aware of, what did you register? What things did you see on
the way? What did you hear? How would you describe what you were doing? What was your goal,
what is behind this action? Draw this experience on a piece of paper. Map it out. Draw whatever
seems to be a part of the experience. This drawing is not a portrait, it is a translation of actions,
thoughts, feelings, things you saw, etc into lines, dots, shapes, scribbles, ... whatever, without
needing to put things into 'real' perspective or linearity. Whatever comes out in whichever order is
where it will be.
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Then walk back and forth a few times between the bathroom and the computer focusing on your
spine, what it feels like, where it is, and how it moves as you are taking one step after another. Do this
a few times and come back here. Then scroll to the next page.
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What is different between this and the first walk? Are you slower, faster, are you thinking about
different things? Are you still walking? What are you doing? Again, draw this experience on a piece of
paper. Allow perceptions and memory to flow into the pen and onto the paper.
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Imagine doing these same walks on a stage. Just the walking, not the opening or closing of the door.
A loop of the first walk and a loop of the second walk. What would people see. Would they be able to
tell the difference? What would they think you are doing in walk a or walk b? Would they pick up on
the difference and would they be able to tell what you might have been thinking about. How is
meaning created, embodied and transmitted in these two walk performances?
THOUGHTS ABOUT EXERCISE #1

The first walk is directional. It doesn't think much about how it is, but more about where it wants to
end. Yes, the walk is thinking. It is alive. It is goal driven, externalized. The walker thinks about the
door a lot, about the task to get there, and the action to do. The viewer sees a person going and
getting somewhere. In the second walk, the focus might be more drawn internalized, or perhaps
bored, or annoyed at having to do something "useless", the walk could also be slower and focused
more on itself, mindful. In any case, the quality would be different. And the viewer would see a person
focused on their walking, or their walking being affected by something that is taking place within
you.
If your walk had been urgent because you needed to stop the toilet from continuing to flush, or you
heard a noise in the bathroom that worried you. The body language of these two walks would have
been profoundly different. A walk is not a walk. How do timing, posture, emotion, intent, etc change
how a viewer can interpret the purpose of the walker? The performer keeps the walk alive. What
does it take to keep the walk alive?
To me these details are tremendously important in choreography. Everything done links back to why
it is done. As the why is what it expresses. Why shapes how and vice versa. Walking can be done in a
million different ways. And no walk can ever really be repeated. Close enough to tell a similar enough
story in order to engage with audiences around very specific topics. Gong to see the same
performance several times, or having different people dance the same choreography, such as Jerome
Bel in 'Le Derneire Spectacle' (4), might reveal an inexhaustible array of nuances and variations on
the story. The 'headlines' stay the same. How to make them stay the same and how to make them
specific is what I spend a lot of time on in my choreographic process.

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HYPOTHESIS: MOVEMENT HAS MEANING

"There is a language that does not use words."
Rumi (5)
My main inquiry in this portfolio orbits around the postulation that there is meaning embedded in
movement and that there can be great specificity in communicating intent or narrative. I compare
movement with language. As with any language, we have the capacity for expressing and
understanding body language embedded within us, but that we also have to learn it, that we can
continue to refine it, and that we can also lose it. I argue that there are unique as well as collective
ways of speaking with movement; that there are dialects within different sets of languages and some
amount of individuation. Just like the human physiology, we all share the same paradigm, but we are
all continuously improvising around the structures given to us in unique ways; we recognize one
another and we also distinguish from one another. I argue that movement is no more or less precise
at communicating than words, considering the many theories of communication and the prevalence
of misunderstanding.
Many of these ideas and theories are changing as I am writing about them, they are constantly in a
state of change and becoming. But the core belief that movement is instrumental in the
communication of meaning remains steady. I have always worked form this premise and it has been a
driving force for me to communicate very specific things through choreography and to discover and
find meaning through physical and creative engagement around specific ideas.
"When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as

expressing feelings. Though every piece is different, they are all trying to get
at certain things that are difficult to put into words."
Pina Bausch (6)
WAYS MOVEMENT HAS MEANING

LIFE
The walk I mentioned in the exercise is alive. And a piece, similarly, is a being that is born and kept
alive. Making this emergence happen is what my process is all about. In choreography I seek to find
lives, make lives and keep them alive, to follow and engage with them, to live with them, play and
grow with them.
RECOGNITION AND SYNTAX

As an essential part of my choreographic process I diligently recognize meaning in movements,
sometimes striving for audiences to understand clearly and at other times, fewer times, I am more
interested in inspiring free associations. Even in the latter case, there is always a likelihood that these
free associations are related to one another and a common signification might be discovered. Even

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contradicting ideas might have common roots. However, for the clarity of expression, and for clarity
in the rehearsal process, I am stringing movements together, as 'words', to form movement
sequences, 'sentences', 'chapters' and eventually 'books'. I argue that thinking takes place in many
forms and that the vocabulary of language and cognition applies to the languages of movement, ...
and art in general.
CHOREOGRAPHING
In an attempt to describe the particular process of choreographing as I mention it in the journal and
documentation part of this portfolio, a process which I experience as being initiated and facilitated by
my entering a particular state of mind, I resonate with Henri Bergson's (07) theories around intuition.
I am referring to the moment of working in the studio with Lena, both of us facing the mirror, me
channeling movements which I dance improvisationally and she observes and simultaneously learns
and memorizes. Together we hold that which emerged and also discuss verbally and kinetically the
meaning and the qualities of these movements. In Bergson's essay "Introduction to Metaphysics". He
describes intuition as a process, a piercing through the quantitative multiplicity of the rationally
cognitive, the deterministic, categorizing, analytical ways of thinking and seeing the world, to enter
into the qualitative multiplicity, an experiential complexity of being in the world, or more of: being
the world. Boundaries dissolve. Engaging with and becoming the multiplicities of durations
experienced through intuition, which stops the habitual ways of labeling and thereby reducing that
which we encounter, allows for a process of knowledge acquisition, of experiencing the world in all
the present complexity and seeming chaos, of glimpsing something and gaining insight.
I entrust my presence to a reciprocal process of intuitive emergence and analytical contemplation

that leads to a rearranging of choreographic material and the making and discovery of meaning
along the way. Intuiting is a very fulfilling act. I find it to be extremely important and intrinsic to who I
am.
Bergson writes on page 2: "...an absolute could only be given in an intuition whilst everything else
falls within the province of analysis. By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which
one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently
inexpressible." To me, this means that there is greater precision in intuition than in analysis. Our
'problem' perhaps might be that we are not fully aware of our intuition and that which happens in
that state. This is funny. Because it therefore renders my lifelong-desire to gain awareness and
knowledge as silly and I could just be doing life instead. Many people wait for some point in the future
where their lives will finally fall into place, or where there life will presumably start. People long for
something which often manifests as a vague feeling of incompleteness. The answer is sought outside
of the person, in achievement, relationships or other landmarks in their lives. Many philosophies try
to tell us that while we are seeking something of which we are not sure, we already have it. That
which gives us the feeling of unfulfillment is an inability to see that we don't need anything else, that
we have already arrived, that we are where and how we are and that that is beautiful. We spend more
time on changing ourselves than on learning about who we are; more time on where we should be or
want to be, than on where we actually are. What we long for really lies in the experience of life. In

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living. It's tragic, really. Choreography can be a tool for being where we are. As everything else, it can
be misunderstood, or used in many different ways. I believe though that it is a tool for self discovery,
for finding and creating meaning and for being in the moment. I have practiced all of these. But
largely I have been using it for the creation of alternate realities, of worlds, of stories that somehow
relate to my life experiences. Going forward, I will possibly attempt to use choreography specifically
for presencing, but that is not part of this essay, and more so finds manifestation in my work around
effortlessness.
ENTERING
I relate to Bergson's idea of placing oneself inside something in order to intuit, in order to engage, in
order to become and more fully, more complexly understand. The viewer will never have the same
experience of the dance, never know the meaning as fully as the dancer does. in order to
approximate the knowledge of the dancer one would need to take the place of the dancer, become a
participant in the performance, or in rehearsals in the process of making this life. The experience of
the viewer approximates the one of the dancer. I create pieces for both, the dancer and the viewer. I
need the viewer to tell me what they see. And I need the dancer to tell me what they experience. I
also become the dancer, and I also become the viewer. As choreographer/dancer I hold both
positions. But through this I never fully see what the audience sees. I have too much background
information. So I want their feedback and unique viewpoints. From this process I hope to gain the
knowledge I seek; some insight, some revelation, or catharsis.
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES - (NOT REAL) DETOURS

Even though both viewpoints are unique and important, I wanted the viewer to get more of the
experience of the piece and the topics explored. I felt that sitting audiences were too passive, too un-
involved, too un-affected. I wanted to make them face the issues I brought into the theatre. As
representatives of our society and our socialization mechanisms, I wanted to 'attack' them, because I
felt that by their position as spectators they were accomplices in the societal ills I was critiquing. We
all are. I wanted them to understand that I was not trying to entertain them, which is a dominant
view of the performing arts in North Carolina, USA where I was working most of the time. I felt used
by a sort of voyeurism and attitude of expectation.
Vita 5 does not include audience interaction, but I find it important to mention here because,
audience interaction, for me and my process, lies at the heart of what i am trying to achieve with
performances: critical exchange and discussions of the topics of my pieces. I think that the
'incomplete' spectator-only experience of the viewer is what ultimately brought me to interactive
performances. It took a really long time for me to get from choreographing everything out to the
tiniest detail, to improvisation, to audience interaction. By immersing them into the life we created I
wanted them to feel what it was like to be this life. I also wanted audiences to realize the impact that
their presence has on the moment and on the piece, no matter how much they are an active
participant or not. By becoming performers, they could perhaps empathize with the precarious
position of the performer that seeks a tangible relationship with the viewer. The degree of
unpredictability increased incrementally from choreography to improvisation to interaction. The

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degree of direct in-your-face connection increased, in order to sensitize them to the more 'delicate'
roles where they were just sitting, watching, and translating. However, by changing the level of
audience engagement, I realized the importance of the communicative parts of my work and the
discussion that I want it to evoke. This 'detour' sensitized me to the slowness of social change and it
helped me realize that I have to be patient and find multiple ways of facilitating a trust in audiences
to discuss that which they saw and experienced and to find ways to ignite an engagement with the
unfamiliar. Discussing body language and how movement has meaning is intrinsic to this desire.
Allowing audiences to alter the work by participating in these unpredictable ways was challenging,
because it sometimes upended my narrative. Working with interaction is a very different process and
the ways of achieving the goals of communicating specific messages is very different to me. It
ultimately amplifies my frustration around issues of being misunderstood or not understood in
general. I think that making pieces is an attempt on my part to be better understood and seen by
people.
ANALYSIS
I consistently experience choreography as an alternation between going inside something and
coming out of that something to analyze what I have found there. Bergson further writes: "Analysis,
on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to
elements common both to it and other objects. To analyze, therefore, is to express a thing as a
function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols,
a representation taken from successive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as
possible between the new object which we are studying and others which we believe we know
already. In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn,
analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always
incomplete representation, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always
imperfect translation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity. But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple
act."
He is clearly delineating two separate states or 'places'. What he is not touching on in this paragraph
is the possibility of both states or places belonging to one another and informing one another. There
is the possibility that reality consists of converging states, which describes a pulse, a moving
presence, that requires adaptability and flexibility on the part of the being. I am sure Bergson did not
write about dance improvisation or choreography, rather about everyday life and whatever was
important to him phenomenologically speaking. In art observing and art making, intuition becomes a
technique. In my process I am constantly 'swimming through' intuition and analysis.
I also question his statements about analysis consisting only of reducing the object to elements
already known. Analysis, the way I am exploring it, has something to do with the generation of new
information through the oscillatory process of intuiting and analysis. Even in analysis alone, I am
attempting to find new words, new definitions, and to describe the "new" in ways that allow for
empathy and creation.

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I LOVE DETAILS
My work is very specific. I intend very particular ideas and goals and work very detail oriented with
my colleagues. Some practical things to be specific about are timing, gesture, posture, inner
dialogue, narrative, environment, lighting, clothing, movement quality, audience position,
musicality, sound, etc... Everything adds to the story. There are less tangible things to be specific
about as well.
Pina Bausch said (8):

"Ich weiss was ich suche. Aber ich weiss es eher mit meinem Gefühl ganz genau, als mit meinem
Kopf....... also, wenn ich diesen Moment erkenne, also diesen Moment treffe, weiss ich ganz
genau, ich weiss ganz genau: das gehoert dazu. Das ist ein ganz, ganz genaues Gefuehl."
"I know what I am searching for. But I know it more precisely with my feeling than with my
head.... therefore, when I come upon that moment, when i meet this specific moment, then I
know exactly and with certainty: that is part of it. This belongs. It is a very exact feeling."
Pina Bausch (9) also says

"Ich denke jedes Ding ist sehr wichtig....Cafe Mueller... in diesem Stueck habe ich ja auch
mitgetanzt...und es ist ein Stueck wo immer die Augen geschlossen sind. und denn irgendwann
ham wir wieder Cafe Mueller gemacht. Ich konnte mein Gefuehl nicht finden, also das, ... ein
ganz bestimmtes Gefuehl, was ich eigentlich... was fuer mich so wichtig war. Ich habe das
gefuehlt, aber trotzdem etwas ganz bestimmtes konnte ich nicht fuehlen, also nicht finden. Und
es lag nicht an der Musik oder an irgendetwas...ich hab probiert und ich konnte dieses Gefuehl
nicht wiederfinden, was fuer mich so wichtig (war)... das kann gar keiner sehen, es war fuer mich.
Und dann habe ich irgendwie auf einmal, das hat aber ne ganze Zeit gedauert, da habe ich dann
fetgestellt, dass es 'n grosser Unterschied ist ob ich meine Augen geschlossen habe, ob ich zum
Beispiel meine Augen, also hinter den so (points at her eye lids) ob ich nach unten gucke oder ob
ich so (gestures straight ahead) gucke. Und das war der ganze Unterschied. Also das Gefuehl
hatte ich total, auf einmal war's wieder richtig; nur weil meine Augen, also dieser Unterschied von
dem zu dem (points down and then straight ahead), eben dieses, das ist ja unglaublich nicht,
dass das so entscheidend ist. ja muss man erst mal finden nicht?, also ich meine, daran kann
man sehen wie wichtig... Also alle Kleinigkeiten sind ja wichtig. Jedes Ding... alles ne
Sprache...man kann eigentlich alles lesen, wenn man in der Lage ist es zu lesen, ne!"
Again, I am translating her words myself: "I think every thing is very important...Cafe
Mueller...in this piece I also danced... and it is a piece, yes, where the eyes are always closed. And
then some day we did Cafe Mueller again...and I couldn't find my feeling, well this... , a very
specific feeling... which I used to... which was so important for me. I felt it, but still something
very specific about it I couldn't feel, well, I couldn't find it. And it wasn't because of the music, or
anything...I tried and I couldn't find this feeling again that had been so important ...nobody could
see it, it was just for me... and then suddenly I realized, but it took a good while, that there is a
big difference, if, with my eyes closed, behind my (eyelids) if I look down or like this (she gestures
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straight ahead). And that was the whole difference; and I totally had that feeling again.
Suddenly it was right again; from this (points up) to this (points down) ... just this, isn't it
unbelievable, no?, you have to be able to find something like this, yes?!, I mean, this shows how
important,... all little details are important. Every thing ... it's a language ... one can read all of
it, if one is capable of reading it..."
She describes the difference between the straight ahead or downward positions of her eyeballs
behind closed eyelids, which allowed her to find the feeling that she was describing with her dance. I
can relate to this deeply. I can feel what she is talking about. We don't just dance steps, we dance
feelings, experiences, and thoughts, moments. These are linked to specific orchestrations of the
body's tissues and that is what the audience will also 'read', the orchestrated complexity, not the
movements per se, or the shapes. Although arguably, the difference in this example is minute and
probably, as she says herself, not detectable for the audience, ... who knows. Who knows on what
level we do register that difference. I believe that we empathize with the bodies we observe in a
performance. That we are able to feel what they are feeling, or at least we can approximate to the
observed experiences. The audience "reads" the movements, even the small details of where the eyes
are pointing behind closed eyelids. I do believe that we pick up on all of this. It is a matter of how well
someone is attuned to allowing these empathized feelings to register or becoming aware of the fact
that we do engage with the world in multiple ways of knowing beyond cognitive awareness and
lingual engagement. It is strange that we need to have a grounded rapport with this brain of ours that
likes to think so much and analyze so much. It can become a tyrant and rule our lives. Societally
speaking, I think we learn to think of art and especially dance as being vague and inacccessible. We
learn to look away, and to not empathize. We learn this by allowing it to happen, and by practicing,
by going to see dance more often and by dancing ourselves. We often would do well to allow the
other ways of knowing to stand equally among reasoning.
Pina Bausch rightly says: "Dance! Dance! otherwise we are lost."
EXERCISE #2
Take a chair and put it where you can walk around it without bumping into other things. Sit down.
Close your eyes. Rest for a moment. Sense your eyes.

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Leaving your eyes closed, look to the left corner of your eyes to eventually direct them at the seat of
your chair. With this movement of the eyeballs to the left initiate a walk around your chair towards
the left, while keeping your left hand on the chair, going slowly, and keeping your eyeballs on the
chair the entire time. How does it feel to go around the chair this way? Who or what is the chair in
relation to you? Who are you as you behave this way? Is your focus congruent with your actions? Why
would someone do this, and what is a potential story for this action? Make one rotation and sit back
down.
Rest a little bit, find a neutral position for your body and your eyes.
Then do the same walk around the chair with your left hand touching and guiding you, but this time,
move your eyeballs to the right corner of your eyes and keep looking to the right. Your face remains
toward the chair but your eyeballs look away from the chair. Going slowly again. How does it feel to
go around the chair this way? Is it different? What is different? Who or what is the chair in relation to
you? Who are you as you behave this way? Is your focus congruent with your actions? Why would
someone do this, and what is a potential story for this action? Make one rotation and sit back down.
Rest.
THOUGHTS ON EXERCISE #2
Only by doing this could i really relate to what Bausch was talking about. It is a profound difference. I
am disoriented in the second walk around, looking away from the chair. I feel almost paranoid,
unstable. I slowed down a lot.
TOOLS FOR FINETUNING: MOVE-THINKING

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"(es ist) Sowas praezises.... wir fuehlen's ja..."

Pina Bausch (10)
("(it is) Something precise... (I mean) we ARE feeling it....)
It is my goal to become more eloquent and expressive in 'move-thinking'. I use different tools for
refining my vocabulary and abilities, precision and my changing states of mind. As a dancer, I play
with movement: I explore playfully, improvisationally what my body can do, what it feels like to move
in certain ways, to find different ways of moving, different paths and how these affect me. For me,
practicing choreography, is about the swiftness, depth and duration of changing and remaining in
alternate states of mind, or entering other states of consciousness, other places of knowledge; other
places of emotion. It feels a bit like changing my state of aggregation (Aggregatzustand). It's a bit like
becoming more liquid, longer, reaching into smaller branches and alveoli, like adding sensory nerves
for other kinds of feeling and attending.
I also have to do. In order to feel something, assess if it is the right movement/the right expression: I
have to do it; like Pina, I need to sense into the feelings that my body produces with each nuanced
change in movement. She says that we know through feeling, and I agree.
MOVE-THINKING
How much do we really need verbal language and how much are we taught to rely on it? I feel that
we are learning to reduce, rather than refine and expand. Is language a process of reduction? it
shouldn't have to be. But if we ignore that meaning is held and communicated in the body then we
have to admit that words alone aren't the sole containers for meaning.
I don't want to postulate that either verbal or body language are better or more eloquent or more or
less precise than the other. Rather, I seek to sensitize us to the potential and importance that body
language holds in our lives. Fascia is a ubiquitous tissue that is instrumental in movement. It is only
now being recognized for its tremendous contributions. Similarly with movement and intuition.
Dance reaches beyond an alphabet, and just like an author, a choreographer/dancer seeks to tap into
the intuitive nature of life and channel something and evoke something that emerges in the reader
through words, and through which it exists beyond the words and beyond the mechanics of the
steps.
“To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something
other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born
from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be
contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.”
― Pina Bausch (11)

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MEANING, SIGNIFICATION, & SENSEMAKING

I use words in rehearsal. I connect words to movements to work with my dancers to arrive at some
specificity. I believe in investigating why a certain word, or movement, seems to be the right one to
express something. Meaning is a complicated, problematic word, but in so many ways I would like to
stick with it. Firstly because it is what most, non-academic, people will understand. And secondly,
Meaning is something that has "me" in it. The person understands a meaning to be something that
connects and deeply resonates with them, that they know something about this thing, or term, or
concept that they can relate to what it stands for. The meaning also carries something of me, the me
that wants to be recognized and not misunderstood.
Another important thing is that I believe that there are different forms of meaning, and one form is
created between people, through a series of verbal and somatic dances, gestures, and exchanges
that bring about a picture, an experience that carries with it a sensation of comprehension, of
alignment. Meaning, the mean between two things...is a powerful metaphor, in combination with the
"me". Both combine to create an effect that fuels a conversation or thought to go on. Without this
effect, an emotion, a thought, etc the process would stop. Lynette Hunter expressed in a
conversation with me that "the mean" is not the average, but a consensual point between two points.
Going back to the problems around the word meaning,she said that meaning leads to representation
and signification leads to a field of potential. The way I think of meaning relates to something
personal. I want us to think of the word meaning as something that can lead to potential, it is
undeniable. However, I use it because I am very determined to reach a specificity in my
choreography. I want to get very specific messages across, without disallowing the potential, or the
variation, or the complexity of interpretation by different people watching my dance. I have a
meaning for my dance, which I want them to pick up on, and I am aware that they have their own
meanings, which I am very interested in getting to discover. If the piece has an all around logic, then
the meaning should come through, despite the individuated interpretations. I would be able to get
individual viewpoints on the message I am putting out there, which is what I am after.
CLARITY
In my work I seek clarity. However outdated the idea might be, I seek meaning. I seek to understand.
Is it impossible to define the specific within the field of potential, just like the red blood cell has a
specific job in the field of potential that the body represents? The point resonates with the whole. If
the whole and all parts resonate with one another in agreement and response-ability, then
connection emerges.
SPECIFICITY & IMPROVISATION

When I choreograph I have a specific story in mind. Sometimes this story is planned, sometimes it
emerges, and sometimes parts remain unknown, but there are always specific landmarks that are
definite. I have a piece that I would like to translate into a book. I wrote elaborate maps and an essay
to accompany the performance. In each piece there are always very particular imagery, emotions,
motivations for moving or not moving. The process works in both ways, from thought to movement,
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or from movement to thought. Hence improvisation can help bring about specificity and specificity
can bring about improvisation. And I choreograph ideas that are channeled by methods of
improvisation and working within a state of not knowing. Improvisation is the tool to enter and
remain in the state of mind that allows for artistic flow.
THE PLACE OF NOT KNOWING

Lynette Hunter (5a) writes "...conventional interpretations of Western philosophy encourage us to
ignore the impossibility of fixed knowledge, and indeed work toward fixity as the modern definition
for truth." We want facts, absolutes, truths, but perhaps that is a futile attempt. And hence our
obsession with being precise keeps us from understanding and keeps us from listening.
The place of not knowing. It is a lovely place to be, in the beginning of rehearsals when I don't know
yet what will emerge, when I feel it coming to me and I can't name it yet. When it is obscure it is
beautiful. When it becomes known it is cathartic. It is in these moments that the working with the
other participants/players brings closeness. The intimacy between people who work creatively
together is unique from any other kind of intimacy. It is as if you are setting out on an expedition and
seeing landscapes together no-one else has seen before. This implies a journey into one another's
realities and perceptions.
The way I work with the unknown, sometimes, is by building a general intention and then
improvising to facilitate subconscious emergence of movements that hold meaning. This meaning is
evaluated and assessed, analyzed and discussed, refined or changed, and maintained as specific
parameter until the context of the piece requires it to change. I ask my body to speak and my body
does. I love listening.
INTRINSIC LANGUAGE & CONTEXT

Having worked from the clear motivation of discovering and portraying a specific meaning through
the specific combination of movements and the detailed focus on how these movements are
executed to affect their meaning, I believe that a movement language is intrinsic in each person. This
language lies deep within our beings beyond the realms of culturally and socially assigned
significations. I think that this language is subtle, that our emotions are intrinsically linked to the
ways we move, and the movement choices we make. I don't think that we learn to reach for
something we are interested in, we withdraw the hand when something is potentially scary. The way
we do these actions, the reaching and the withdrawing, will be effected by our thoughts and
emotions about the circumstances surrounding these actions. Are we trying to not be seen, are we
shy, do we feel guilty, overly joyous, angry, frustrated, hungry, etc... These states/circumstances will
affect how we execute these movements. I think that there isn't an intrinsic language in the sense of
a sign-language, but there are qualities that translate directly into the tone, speed, direction,
swiftness, hesitations, pathways, amount of energy used to produce the movement. And this
translates into meaning. I don't think we learn to love. I think we love. Love has movements that
express love and the need for love. I think of these qualities as seeds. The seeds are there, it depends
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on the environment whether the seed will grow and how strong it grows. If we discover in a
conversation that we are suddenly hesitant, or feel rejected or disheartened, we will have a physical
response in the body that is inevitable. An exhale, or a held breath, or a stepping back, a closing of
the heart, a tear emerges, eye movements that avoid and perhaps search aimlessly for just a split
second. I don't believe that we learn everything about these reactions. Our entire body reacts to what
we encounter, always. The body is intelligent and acts. The fact that we react is our language. The
fact that reactions differ is our language, that certain experiences come with gentle, slow, fast,
jarring, irratic, controlling, halted, expanding, or contracting movements. That's our language. We
read this language as we empathize and understand each moment to emerge uniquely. Just like a
verbal conversation. Meaning can emerge in (relatively) repeatable specificity of movement and can
be understood more or less universally. Meaning also always emerges in context. Slapping your wrist
in the direction of someone's face is not always aggressive. It can be funny, requested, done willingly
or unwillingly, I might be meant for someone else to see, etc... It depends on the context. So the
context is explored through dialect and language, personal experience, and the current moment and
situation. Dance picks up on these actions. This language is an emotional breathing of the body's
tissues. We can learn to ignore this language. Our brain can give us tools for neglecting these
responses. We can learn to change them to some degree. We can learn to be more sensitive to them
as well. Dance amplifies and makes visible. It evokes, provokes and challenges. It celebrates and it
connects us to ourselves and to the world around us. Dance communicates meaning. Choreography
sets the action into context. Everything has an impact on the meaning.
LANGUAGE & DIALECTS

This intrinsic language will be affected by cultural and regional habits and interpretations, and our
ability to 'read' and communicate through this language will be effected by culture and societal
priorities. I argue that, generally, foundationally, we move to express, that by moving we inevitably
express, and that others inevitable analyze and 'read' us, and last but not least, that movement
makes diverse and refined expression possible. With movement here I mean body-language and this
can contain large gestures, and movements that translate substantially from one place to another, as
well as minute muscle changes in posture or face.
Communication is possible across cultures, but as with any language, there can be
miscommunication even among speakers of the same language and dialects.
Noam Chomsky (5) asks: "Why are there languages at all, why are there so many? How did they
suddenly emerge in the evolutionary framework? ... The apparent diversity (among languages) is pretty
superficial... (rather there is) fundamental(ly) one language with minor deviations..." Of course,
Chomsky is talking about verbal languages. What he calls deviations, languages, I here call dialects.
For now I draw comparisons between body language and spoken language, because of the obvious
common goal to communicate and express. I might find along the way that the structures of body
language and spoken language are quite different and that my metaphors do not hold up. This would
then probably evolve around how the language emerges from our bodies, how it is learned or not,

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and how it is processed. The mechanisms for processing might be very different, might take place in
other areas of the body, or follow different chains of action, etc. But I work with language in
rehearsal. Movements are given words, sentences and vocalizations. So language remains inherent in
my work with movement.
I presume that body language, since it originates in the same system, the human being, is in many
ways similar to verbal language, a physical manifestation of something to be expressed in a manner
more or less universal and shared by all human beings; of course, also across species. It depends here
on our ability to go to these roots of communication and allow for listening at a level beyond our
superficially acquired, biased understanding of particular roles and rules. Grunts and breaths are just
as important as silences, enunciation, melody, syntax and choice of words.
ACCESSING
I can see what a dancer is thinking, or, ... well.... , I can see what kind of narrative they are engaged in.
If they are not engaged with the narrative of the dance it is as if my conversation partner is looking at
her phone while I am talking to her. If a movement is danced differently, it means something
different. If the attention is on something else, the meaning of the entire piece is changed. If the
context or the music, the environment changes then the body language might still mean the same,
but the piece carries a different meaning. Context and dance play with one another. I always
choreograph with the context in mind and I always have the audience's potential viewpoint in mind.
As in gesture, thinking and doing are intuitively entwined. A perceptive audience member will know if
the dancers that dance the piece know what the meaning is or not. Genuine focused engagement is
important to me. Disingenuous engagement could fall under the category of 'over-acting' for
example. Saying things unnecessarily often to make sure the viewer gets it is static, things don't flow;
I, as the audience member, often get nervous, or eager at that point to leave the performance.
EXERCISE #3
Close your eyes. Think of a memory from your earlier years. Stay with it. Allow your body to trace the
movements of your body in your memory. Mime the event. Slowly feeling what everything felt like.
Continue moving through the memory. Repeat and allow your body to play with the movements,
whatever comes to mind is part of the exercise. Feel free to take this as abstract and embellished as
you like. Feel free to stay small and slow.

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THOUGHTS ON EXERCISE #3
It was scary. Although the memory was simple, I walked up to our front gate to open it, to go to the
mailbox, look inside through the thin flap, go back to close the door and walk back down the
driveway. I felt like entering a dream state. I felt that at any moment something could jump out at me
as suddenly real, or that I could get sucked back into the past. I felt the cold, shiny texture of the PVC
pipe my dad had installed as a new railing. I saw the texture of the stones on the ground, the metal
bar that stabilized the right part of the gate. The trash can that had received the dead bodies of the
baby bunnies that were born and died in the basement at some point. The apples on the ground, the
stone edge of the walkway. The millions of snails I have tried to rescue off the path. The grass that
grew between the pavement rocks that my grandmother cut with little tiny scissors. The long
walkway to our house. The walnut trees. The dark basement. The ghost I had seen years later. All
these memories came up only because of my physical enactment of one part, many others re-
emerged.
GESTURE & FULL-BODY GESTURE: EMBODIED KNOWING
“I'm not so interested in how they move as in what moves them.”
Pina Bausch

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I think of dance as 'full-bodied' gesture. Gesture is a participant in the game of communication. Like a
member of the bio-tensegrity structure of the human body it is part and parcel of the whole body.
Essential for holding meaning.
Dance is an amplifier of gesture. According to Geoffrey Beattie (6) researchers have distinguished
different categories of gestures. The qualities of the movements are indicative and directly
proportional to the quality of the desired response movement.
The gestures I am referring to, and am comparing dance to, are the gesticulations that our body
makes without asking for permission or without questioning what we are doing while we are talking,
or when reacting to something. This happens almost constantly in a fascinating immediacy. We are
doing those movements to express ourselves, and to communicate all that which we want to
communicate and all of who we are at that moment. Much of the message exists only in the gesture.
Movements of lightness are intrinsically linked to feeling light, to seeing something light. Heaviness
is immediately understood when gestured. Within the contexts used they become tools for
expression of very specific, nuanced, states of experience and qualities. There is always a direct
connection. The two are deeply linked. By this we can access meaning through movement. As an
improvising choreographer, in the studio, with my colleague Lena, I am trying to open the channels
and allow for the flow and the connections to happen. I am trying to channel thought, situation and
emotion into movements. These are amplified, or, if the body is able and willing to move more fully,
as dancers are training to do, the movement can grow naturally. Like a poet or a writer, gaining
eloquence of expression, new, additional, different states of being and emotion can emerge, through
the dancer's ability to allow the emotion to travel further into the body, to dance inside the body and
play with the body.
To remain within a movement language such as Ballet or Graham Technique is a tremendous

reduction in expressive potential. For Martha Graham, these movements were what came from her
body/mind. They were her, and she began to structure and categorize them to make a warm-up and
training technique to help her dancers express what she wanted to express in her pieces. She neede
them to move in very specific ways to 'move-speak' of the things she wanted to express. But one
language doesn't transfer to everything and everyone. The completeness of expression can suffer
when sticking to a set of signs. To some extent I think of the ballet language as an emblematic
language that can be jotted down in a 'connect the dots' sort of fashion. The expression of emotion
and narrative is told through everything else that goes on in the bodies of the ballet dancers while
going from dot to dot, from passé to arabesque to fouetté and so on. Like the child first unsing
isolated words, then adding connectors and descriptors, then metaphors, etc. What tells the story is
the ability of the dancer to channel the energies of emotion into the body through facial and full
bodied gestures that gently augment the dance, through texture, timing, delay, direction and
positioning in space in order to make the message come to life. Most of the movements are rigid
forms through which the dancers move and perform in ways that carry the meaning as much as
possible. Ballet, for example, is a highly stylized and abstracted, encoded, way of moving. Also,
within this, as a whole, it tells a story about who dances ballet, for who, why, and where.

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MATCHING
What I attempt in choreography is to channel movements that are true to the person expressing the
narrative. The movements have to match the person. Unless I want to depict an inner struggle, then I
might deliberately explore movements that the dancer struggles to execute. The question is often
"How can I get you to experience what I am hoping to bring onto the stage? So that the audience
member observing you can get the feeling I was after, not the movement I created."
Geoffrey Beattie (6) highlights: " The traditional assumption in both the academic and the popular
literature is that they (non-verbal communication and speech) are separate systems of
communication. But when you study people closely, you can see immediately that the two systems
are very closely connected..... ".
The gesture alters the meaning of what is said. The word alters the gesture as well. The two inter-
exist, and inter-are.
According to Beattie, emblem-type gestures are repeatable. The iconic/metaphoric gestures I am

talking about have no absolute standard form of lexicon, although there are underlying rules, as I
described earlier in the text. In talking, hand gestures are complex. They are generated
spontaneously. And they change. They are unconsciously produced. They have different phases,
preparation phases where meaning is sought, and then expressive phases where they support or ad
meaning to that which is verbalized. Beattie says that these gestures will tell us a lot about whether a
person is genuinely verbally aligning with what they are thinking about. Because there is this
underlying intrinsic language, contradictions can be detected. This concept has become very popular
on TV with shows such as "Lie to me" and others.
These gestures are not just an evolutionary relic of pre-language times, they are part and parcel of
our communication system, and they often connect to something like 'truth' more directly than
language does, perhaps because they are more intrinsically embodied. Language, because we spend
a lot more time with it, has perhaps become more rehearsed, more planned, crafted, and learned,
used as a social tool. Gesture is more immediate. There are attempts by differnet people throughout
history to harness the communicative power of gesture in rhetoric, politics, etc. Books are written on
how to convince your audience of your honesty and reliability, and how to make people do what you
want from them. But the craftedness and artificiality of rehearsed gestures can be very offensive, as
this shows dishonesty. Just like in a dance performance, people will pick up on the messages to
varying degrees, which connects to their training and ability to intuit connection to the body
language. This is where I think dance, and theatre, inserts. The actor/dancer learns to "repeat"
gestures in such honest ways that we believe their story. It is therefore in my process important that
the dancer be involved with the narrative, with the emotions and the experience of the message
while dancing the movements, otherwise the incongruities will become visible.

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Dance, the way I dance, taps into amplifying gestures, into exaggerating, embellishing, furthering
and elaborating on the messages. Dance allows the entire body to gesture. It can provoke language
and it can express things not captured in language and it can work with or against language to tell
specific stories.
READING GESTURE - FEELING GESTURE: an example

As an experiment, and as part of the process for writing this essay, Lena and I picked out videos of
people talking about something. Anything. We picked videos that lent themselves to learning the
gestures, and body position. meaning that people had to be gesturing and that we could see their
heads and arms at least. We each performed the gestures to one another. The task for the other
person was to try to guess what kinds of content was connected to the gestures, and what kind of
person they were. Maybe even who they were. We could fairly accurately guess what the talks were
about, what kinds of people the speakers were.
I also find that when I learn someone's gestures, when i move with them as they talk, copy their
gestures, I believe that I can better understand what they are talking about. And also what they are
not talking about, but feeling, move-thinking, leaving out or contradicting in their speech.
Movement is instantaneous. Speaking comes about slower. In an instant I have a gesture to express
my feeling, my thought, my opinion. My body has already responded, my language and my cognitive
realization of this response is much slower.
In our experiment, I picked out Donna Haraway (6a) in an interview on the 'humanimal'. I picked her
because she is an extremely vivid gesturer. Her gestures are beautiful and bold, wild, all over the
place, intriguing to watch. There is an intensity in her gesturing that comes through in this interview.
She talks about the merging of words and species but her hands are clashing, literally. I think that it is
difficult for her to fully believe herself that we are one, that the humanimal is possible the way her
intellectual mind wishes it could be, and arguably needs to be. Or perhaps she illustrates how difficult
it is for humans to want to merge with the animal. Her forceful moving is perhaps also reflecting on
the force she uses to make the merging happen. She thinks that they have to come together, but
really, they almost repel one another. The merging she gestures is not a gentle meeting, it is almost a
war, almost an artificially provoked genetic experiment. When she talks about the humanimal as 'a
hybrid word' she turns her fists outward, smashing the medial sides of the fists together, like
slamming your fist on a table, but edge of hand to edge of hand. Two fists gesture two hard, enclosed
entities and she makes them meet end to end. Her thumbs are facing outward, away from one
another. No facing one another, no gentle melting and shaking hands. She doesn't attempt much of a
physical connection to the interviewer. She remains in her world although responding and talking.
Her whole body tenses up when the species finally merge, the backs of the hands are smashed
together, fingers facing her, all in the same direction; They are stuck to one another and look rather
awkward in this new togetherness. When she speaks of linguistics she softens a bit and her fingers

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are allowed to flow with the directionality of her breath towards the interviewer, which, to me, feels
like she can assist the difficulty of the merging by writing and speaking of these topics. Much of her
gestures, including those where she talks about history and the making of history, are gestures of
holding, and supporting. But her hands also, whatever they would hold, could only hold for a short
while as the contents would run through her opened fingers. She gestures about sensitivity,
fingertips touching, hands missing one another. She also enforces her gestures, raising her
ideas/gestures and voice as a wall between her and the interviewer, in a moment where she wishes
not to be interrupted in her thought. I feel that she intensely identifies with her work with her
theories. I could write about her movements in this 2 minute long interview for a long time. And
these gestures could serve as inspiration for a dance to embody the emotions and thoughts that
evoked them in her.
The process of sensing meaning is a process of observing, registering, and describing. The actual
doing of the movements provides depth of information, as we can experience what the movements
feel like.
PRESENCING
Alva Noe (7) says in a talk on Action in Perception that..."Presence is fragile.... Misunderstanding each
other, failing to understand what the other means, re- articulating what was actually meant, offering
definitions, correcting usage, those are all things we do within language. Linguistic mistakes,
linguistic misunderstanding, linguistic conflicts don't force us to step outside of language... In other
words, it is part of our very practice, that the practice itself is vulnerable to slippage and to mistake. ..
Achievement of presence is always an ongoing work in progress. it's always something we're doing.
And the possibility of it's failure is part of the project itself not something which forces the project to
end. ..."
Noe compares communicating with achieving presence, which resonates with my experience of
dancing. Dancing is an acute practice of presencing. The practice of choreographing I am describing
is not necessarily presencing in the same way. By channeling a feeling or a narrative I am trying to
bring it into presence. The choreographing does not stop in the studio, it goes on into the
performance. Performance is an integral part of choreography and the rehearsal process for me, and
no piece is ever really done. All pieces are constantly in a state of becoming. In the act of dancing
something again, it is a matter of bringing the same narratives of feelings into presence again. Not
repeating, but re-presencing.
"Words, too, can't do more than just evoke things. That's where dance comes in again."
Pina Bausch (18)

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Bausch speaks of the complementarity of dance and spoken word. And of the equal ability to hint,
evoke, and emote. She also speaks of the potential abilities of dance and words to help each other
out in the task of communicating meaning.
TRANSLATION
Translation is the act, process or ability to take a thing defined by one set of parameters into another
whilst maintaining the essence and atmosphere, the feeling and the signification/meaning of the
original. It is not just a way of putting one thing into a different framework for people to engage with
in their own way but sometimes a literal translation, a change in form, in order to make a narrative
convey the same message. Translation is a process of creation where the original thing has to be
reinvented in another set of parameters. Translation is never perhaps entirely possible and it is an
approximation. In that sense it is, according to Lynette Hunter, a mode of communication and
generation.
At first I thought of what I do as a choreographer as translation. But, am I translating movements into

words, and vice versa? Yes, but I am also finding the matching, complimentary pairs. In rehearsal
when I give my dancers narratives to work with, I am not just translating the movement, it would be
too complex. I am giving them the words that are the partners of the movements. The movements
evoke words, the words evoke movements. By finding the pairs, I am helping the dancer express the
story I am after.
NOT JUST ONE ROAD?

Yes, the ways in which the same story is told, the form in which it presents itself kinaesthetically,
could be significantly different from person to person. It might become necessary to alter the
choreography in order to tell the story. For example my dancer Andrea was leaving the company to
have a child. Her role in the piece "Lena's Bath" needed to be danced by another dancer. This new
dancer, Dawn, even happened to look a lot like Andrea. Dawn learned the part from a video I gave
her. When I watched her first rehearsal in the studio I was stunned by how wrong it felt, while she
looked just like Andrea. It was bizarre. We talked about this and I discovered that she learned
everything off the video, the postures, the timing, the placements, the facial expressions. What she
didn't know was what the dance was about, and didn't think about this in her learning of the
movement. She didn't wonder what Andrea was thinking or what her motivations might have been
for doing the things she did. Dawn only learned the movement. It was a bit like when the audio and
the video are not in sync. We talked about the narrative for a long time and established that the
timing of her reactions for example were not just in response to the music, but also in response to
her inner dialogue and the physical conversations with the other dancers. She needed to improvise
within the framework of the music, the props, the space, the others and her inner narrative, goals
and desires. The piece quickly fell into place. Because the two were so similar to one another the
meaning of the piece did not change much. At a later point in time another change in cast had to take
place and a new dancer entered the cast that was much more up-beat in personality than Dawn or
27
Andrea, she was much more humorous. Slight changes of her personality changed the piece
drastically. Perhaps it was an inability on her part to find the emotions and the role that the piece was
originally founded upon, or an inability on my part to work on this, to define what was going on that
made it so different. The dancer has to understand and be able to dance all of these aspects of the
character, not just the movements. Seeing the piece in this manifestation felt very strange and I was
uneasy about people seeing it that way. With more time, and money, we would have explored ways
to get this dancer to find the character, which probably would have been possible even within the
light-heartedness. Chasing meaning can be very tedious.
CONCLUSION
So, does dance have the power to bring clarity from some intuited beyond into the presence of the
experience.? Perhaps like coming up for air while swimming. Or like the memories from years past
that are like little tiny dense nodes of imagery, sensation, emotion, and smell or touch. Defining a
conclusion would take as long as the process of finding the character in a dance. There is also the role
of the audience and all of our shared histories and current moments. Our body's language is, like
fascia, a significant part of the complexity of our inter-being.
"Sometimes, we can only clarify something by confronting ourselves, with what

we don’t know. And sometimes the questions we have bring us back to
experiences which are much older, which not only come from our
culture and not only deal with the here and now.
It is, as if a certain knowledge returns to us, which we
indeed always had, but which is not conscious and present.
It reminds us of something, which we all have in common.
This gives us great strength."
Pina Bausch (9)
BIBLIOGRAPHY

28
(1) Bausch, Pina, quotes from and interview with Bausch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=f04Tk1pqQok&feature=youtu.be) @26:06
(2) exercise, definition etymological definition of the word exercise, from

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exercise#:~:text=%22exercise%2C%20execution%20of
%20power%3B,exercise%3B%20practice%2C%20follow%3B%20carry
(3) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.azquotes.com/quote/698272
(4) Jerome Bel in 'Le Dernier Spectacle', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aVhozKZDks ,

exampels @ 08:23, 13:00, 17:51 all 3 dancers dancing a section originally choreographed by Susanne
Linke
(5) Rumi, 13th century Persian poet Rumi
(6) Bausch, Pina, quote from: https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-pina-bausch/when-i-first-began-

choreographing-i-never-thought-of-it-as-choreography-but-as-e
(7) Bergson, Henri, "Introduction to Metaphysics", page 2: (http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-

meta.pdf)
(8) Bausch, Pina, interview on the balcony, youtubevideo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06:
(9) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06: about Cafe Mueller
(10) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s;
(11) quote by Pina Bausch from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/478344-to-understand-what-i-

am-saying-you-have-to-believe#:~:text=%E2%80%9CTo%20understand%20what%20I%20am
%20saying%2C%20you%20have%20to%20believe,not%20existing%20forms%20of%20dance.
%E2%80%9D
(12) Hunter, Lynette, "Ways of knowing and Ways of Being Known: An Introduction"
(13) Chomsky, Noam, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1bHzBoggk

"Noam Chomsky Language's great Mysteries" @00:30
(14) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)
(15) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)
(16) Haraway, Donna Haraway, video, talk about the 'humanimal', https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BUA_hRJU8J4

29
(17) Noe, Alva, talk, https://youtu.be/HOt4vcBV_fk
(18) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7640514-there-are-situations-of-

course-that-leave-you-utterly-speechless#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere%20are%20situations%20of
%20course%20that%20leave%20you%20utterly%20speechless,where%20dance%20comes%20in
%20again.%E2%80%9D
(19) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.pinabausch.org/en/pina/what-moves-me

30

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PAR CRITICAL ESSAY Karola Lüttringhaus 2021

"Ich denke jedes Ding ist sehr wichtig....

Pina Bausch (1)

"I think that every thing is significant...

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

FULL BODY GESTURE

WHY I ALWAYS WRITE SUCH SHORT PARAGRAPHS (for Lynette)

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

LINEARITY, TIMING, TRUST & CHAOS

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

THOUGHTS ABOUT EXERCISE #1

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

HYPOTHESIS: MOVEMENT HAS MEANING

"When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as

WAYS MOVEMENT HAS MEANING

RECOGNITION AND SYNTAX

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

I entrust my presence to a reciprocal process of intuitive emergence and analytical contemplation

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES - (NOT REAL) DETOURS

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

Pina Bausch said (8):

Pina Bausch (9) also says

Pina Bausch rightly says: "Dance! Dance! otherwise we are lost."

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

TOOLS FOR FINETUNING: MOVE-THINKING

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"(es ist) Sowas praezises.... wir fuehlen's ja..."

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

MEANING, SIGNIFICATION, & SENSEMAKING

SPECIFICITY & IMPROVISATION

THE PLACE OF NOT KNOWING

INTRINSIC LANGUAGE & CONTEXT

LANGUAGE & DIALECTS

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

To remain within a movement language such as Ballet or Graham Technique is a tremendous

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

According to Beattie, emblem-type gestures are repeatable. The iconic/metaphoric gestures I am

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

READING GESTURE - FEELING GESTURE: an example

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

Pina Bausch (18)

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

At first I thought of what I do as a choreographer as translation. But, am I translating movements into

NOT JUST ONE ROAD?

"Sometimes, we can only clarify something by confronting ourselves, with what

Pina Bausch (9)

"FULL BODY GESTURE: EMERGENCE AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PROCESS"

(2) exercise, definition etymological definition of the word exercise, from

(3) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.azquotes.com/quote/698272

(4) Jerome Bel in 'Le Dernier Spectacle', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aVhozKZDks ,

(5) Rumi, 13th century Persian poet Rumi

(6) Bausch, Pina, quote from: https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-pina-bausch/when-i-first-began-

(7) Bergson, Henri, "Introduction to Metaphysics", page 2: (http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-

(8) Bausch, Pina, interview on the balcony, youtubevideo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

(9) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

(10) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?