Feeling Subtle: A Practice-Based Study of How the Body Listens, Tunes in, and Becomes Present in Performance (and in COVID-Time)

This is an embodied research project that explores the subtle, unseeable, unhearable forces at work within performance. It uses a common improvisational duet as its anchor, the rules for which seem paradoxical: move in perfect unison and at the same time, but neither dancer can initiate movement, both must follow. Despite this, a choreography unfolds. The structure of this research project is an exploration of why this is so, and along the way uncovers applicable information to common, yet esoteric performance techniques: listening, tuning in, and becoming present. This project posits that the improvisation works because its slowness and focus allows for a magnification of the charged affect potential between the two dancers, referred to throughout as the "bloom space." The paradoxical task of mimicking a partner in real time, without initiating movement, is an attempt to stay in or stay with the bloom space. Even though neither dancer can initiate movement, the dancers begin to move because bodies and the moment are never still; they are teeming with affect, and affect moves. The dancers are able to mimic one another through the freneticism of affect potential and kinaesthesis. The research takes place over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, and is thus influenced by this unexpected context.