Horizontal Gravity Workshop
Post/Contact Improvising
Our visual field allows us to simulate touch beyond the borders of our skin. By means of extra-personal space, we are actually larger than our physical frame. Vision allows us to touch with our eyes. The visual elicits motor acts that are disguised as properties in the environment. This visual-tactility is not passive, but relational and engages the body with surrounding other bodies.
Horizontal Gravity is about the simultaneous approach and withdrawal of two bodies. A pulling toward and a pulling away. It is not limiting. It does not define or prescribe. It notices a relationship between two objects and the elements and forces between those objects are unique and even temporary, perhaps transient. The forces are intertwined and created with the other, yet also independent and possibly even measured or understood in different values.
Horizontal Gravity is about colliding micro organizations and harmonizing affective affordances. The practice is to expand the space between control and being controlled. A calling out of the body with movement. Being the physically called in body to another. The pulling, calling and approaching are terms for a fundamental way of experiencing horizontality. The multiplicity of interactions and decisions made with other bodies does not create something new like a third element; in the in-betweenness sense, it simply allows us to emerge and redefine ourselves. Like a ripple effect in both directions, we find as if the other person’s intentions inhabited our body, and our intentions inhabit theirs.
The workshop explores incorporating the visual field into our movement impetus, while divorcing touch from only function. Pulling from quantum physics, phenomenology and psychology, post/contact improvising practices seek a foundation of ambiguity — a certainty of many possibilities, — where the dance can encounter touch with or without skin.
