MEMORY RELEASE

Choreographic principles

“Nobody has the faintest idea of how the mind is related to the body. The vast majority of our behaviour is not conscious” Rupert Sheldrake

(from process notes and public talk transcript)

The choreographic principles for Memory Release started with the mapping of the body into different emotional centres. Yet our research into both motion capture technology and the nature of memory changed our initial course.

It became obvious that in order to gain as much subtlety as possible from the incoming data of the moving body, we needed to work with the system as it had been designed: allocating the sensors in correspondence with muscle groups and articulations. That determined their placement.

Our investigation into memory, its aesthetic, levels of intensity and duration opened up an exploration into human states of consciousness. As we will see later on, this relates to the ways in which we encode experiences. Our visual perception and the way we construct meaning will be different in for instance as state of full consciousness to in a state of half sleep. The anti-gravity body lends itself beautifully to the exploration of changing states of consciousness.
(see definition of anti-gravity)

The dramatic score of Memory Release was drawn from the evolution of consciousness throughout human life. Camila and I conducted a series of improvisations in search for a correspondence between body movement, gesture and state.

Do different parts of our body (head, arms, chest, feet) belong or relate to chosen states?

Are we able to choreograph to achieve the effect of involuntary movement?

Can we fully get away from the experience of the trained body and use that training to go back to the “primitive” or untrained body, so as to achieve authenticity of gesture without dance connotation?

These and other questions lead our physical aesthetic and the construction of the choreography, to then correspond with states and memories evoked by the triggered footage. A detailed archive of video documentation and notation was built over the research process. This closely follows the dramatic progression of the work over its several research threads.

Our ceative inquiry centred on the following human states: conscious (yet alone, so excluding self-consciouness), sub- conscious, unconscious and pre-conscious. The moments of trigger were placed during the transitions between one state and the other (such as between sleep and wakefulness, neither one nor the other, yet both).

Perhaps the most extreme journey from one state (conscious) to another (unconscious) is found in fainting. Fainting affords no transition or gradation – it is an accident of consciousness – present one moment, absent the next. No warning, no explanation, no memory.

The nervous system

While researching into neurobiology we came across Francisco Varela’s description of the moment of innervation (the birth of the central nervous system – the brain, and its connection with the body). When talking about the forming foetus he says:

“Around week 6, the first motility, the first movement of the embryo begins to occur. This movement is purely muscular. The embryo has no nervous system yet: it has a beginning nervous system which is not connected to the muscle. So the muscle is spontaneously active, and the embryo shows little twitches or discharges. At approximately 7.5 weeks, the nerves reach the muscle and this twitching stops. The muscle becomes quiet, subdued, when it receives this innervation, and from then on the muscle does not move unless the nerve stimulates it”.
(From 'Gentle Bridges', a dialogue between Varela and the Dalai Lama, neurobiology and budhism).

This passage stimulated our own reflections on body movement and consciouness and formed the basis for choreographic improvisation and the mapping  of interrelations between states of consciousness and the body, looking at rhythm, movement quality, pace and physical state.