10 Such "collective corrections" are a part of many physical practices learned in groups. For a fascinating account of training in boxing, see Wacquant, *Body & Soul*, p. 104. In rehearsal with the San Francisco Ballet, for example, Forsythe instructed: "Show me everything you know about *port de bras*." "*Épaulement* is a conversation between your foot and your hands. So make a wonderful conversation." "You are the experts in the room. Show me." See Ross, *San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five*, p. 107. These comments however do not reflect the broader and changing modes of dialogue between Forsythe and his ensemble dancers, which varied extensively, based upon context (i.e., during a creation rehearsal, after a performance, outside of rehearsal, etc.). Further examples of how Forsythe spoke to *Duo* dancers are provided in sections 10.4 and 11.2.2.

11 See Vass-Rhee, "Schooling an Ensemble," p. 227. Here Vass-Rhee describes such scaffolded learning in her analysis of the devising process making Forsythe's piece *Whole in the Head* (2010).

12 Caspersen, "What *Épaulement* Also Is," p. 2. Forsythe, "Observing Motion," p. 24.

13 Supporting these claims, *Duo* dancer Allison Brown described: *"*I think it has to do with the sensing through them, through my arms. Like I'm always, like reaching through them. In my Balanchinedays I was like that(*she places her arms in fifth position, circling above her head*). And then more working with Bill I became more like that (*she changes pose, the stretch becomes more extreme and the quality emphasizes more awareness of the feeling of her body and the space around her*). […] When there's like a group I can tell which one is me just by how I'm holding my arms. So my arms have kind of always been my how I can find myself." Allison Brown, interview with the author, Bern, January 23, 2017. Forsythe also concurred about the ensemble style: "And we're very arm conscious. I think that's, for us, the key to our style. One *tendu* is perhaps someone else's *tendu*, but our *port de bras* is really indicative of what we do." Driver et al., "A Conversation with William Forsythe," p. 91.

upon relational practice. This is true in Forsythe's choreographies generally, providing further substantiation for why ballet practice was so central. *Épaulement* was a practice critical to making *Duo*, what Forsythe named as, "the crowning accomplishment of great ballet dancers."14

#### **6.2 Residual Movement**

In *showerhead*, the dancers intuit movement residue around the start of the image—the shower dial. Meaning, *showerhead* is not like the pedestrian motion of twisting a key into a lock, with a posture oriented on getting an action done, an object manipulated, a problem solved: door open! Rather, this movement brings the rest of the body into relation with the twisting of the hand. Forsythe's term for how this takes place is "residual coordination." It can be understood as a movement idea that has a residue that reverberates within one body.The residue is reflexive: a learned and perfected habit. Forsythe explains: "We use the reflexes that we've learned in classical ballet to maintain a kind of residual coordination, which allows the body to acquire elastic surfaces that bounce off one another. This elasticity is derived from the mechanics of torsion inherent in *épaulement*."15 In *showerhead*, Jill Johnson describes this sensation as "a series of diagonal or cantilevered alignments" smoothing the arm into the contrapuntal interplay of the body's reverb.16

Dancer Dana Caspersen calls this expertise not just coordination, but "residual response." With the term response, Caspersen highlights the feeling of the body responding to a proposal, such as the movement evoked in response to the image of a showerhead. Caspersen finds that in working with novices, there is often a "lack of coordinative reaction between the shoulders and the hips" as well as a "lack of shaped response in the upper arms."17 This is not to say that the idea comes first and the body responds, but rather that the body thinks through its reflexes. The complex skill of residual response accumulates with ample practice.

#### 6.2.1 Improvisation Technologies

Developing residual motion is a key aspect conveyed in Forsythe's CD-ROM *Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye* (1999), an educational tool now online and referred to worldwide.18 This collaboration with digital artist Paul Kaiser acted upon Forsythe's wish to consolidate the techniques that the Ballett Frankfurt had amassed in their choreographic projects, so that new dancers could catch up more

14 Forsythe in Kaiser, "Dance Geometry."

15 Ibid.

16 Jill Johnson, studio session while dancing in Boston on December 6, 2016.

17 Caspersen, "Methodologies."

18 The first version was produced in 1996 for use within Ballett Frankfurt, and titled *Improvisation Technologies (Self Meant to Govern*). See Vass-Rhee, "Schooling an Ensemble," p. 225, footnote 14. At the time of writing, many of the videos have been uploaded to the internet and are freely accessible. See the Online Artistic Resources section of the bibliography.

*Figure 19. Video still from William Forsythe's* Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye*.*

Photo © William Forsythe.

quickly.19 Though these operations were no longer used explicitly in the choreographic process of The Forsythe Company, and the CD-ROM was no longer present in the studio during rehearsals or brought out to train new dancers, I can testify that most new dancers had encountered the information before arriving—having purchased, borrowed or found the instructional videos online.

Kaiser and Forsythe's project explored the challenge of visualizing choreographic thinking with the aim to help dancers understand what Forsythe was imaging while he was improvising. Kaiser recalls:

I first met choreographer William Forsythe in his kitchen in Frankfurt in 1994. The first thing Bill did was to try to explain how he goes about creating new movements. He started drawing imaginary shapes in the air, and then running his limbs through this complicated and invisible geometry. As a non-dancer, I was completely lost.20

19 In practice, these techniques were called "procedures," "operations," and also "modalities." Discussing "operation" and "procedures," see Caspersen, "It Starts From Any Point," pp. 27–28; and Kaiser, "Dance Geometry," throughout. For references to "modalities," see Vass-Rhee, *Audio-Visual Stress*, p. 25.

20 Kaiser, "Dance Geometry."

To remedy this, they had the idea to animate lectures of Forsythe with white lines superimposed on the video, representing the imagery that was present in Forsythe's phantasmagoria as he improvised movement. The white lines made visible Forsythe's strategies of having ideas while moving. For example, Forsythe imagining a line in the space between his fingertips; extruding, bridging and matching lines with his arms; "writing" in space with every conceivable body part. Forsythe explained:

The CD-ROM is a short lesson in a kind of rigor. It teaches you how to form concrete goals that are geometrically inscriptive. And the reason they are geometrically inscriptive is that I work with ballet dancers. It was easy to represent things this way—thinking in circles and lines and planes and points. That's not so unusual for ballet dancers, this system is basically a manipulation of their existing knowledge.21

*Improvisation Technologies* not only developed ballet dancers' "existing knowledge" to imagine the geometries of their bodies. Forsythe was also teaching them strategies to change their *habitus* by enlarging the possible range and dynamics of their movements: to use all parts of their bodies and reach to any place in space and, in particular, to practice the awkward moves of going backwards and down. Unlike other styles of dance in which mimetic and mirroring processes are primary, the improvisation and compositional aspects of Forsythe's movement laboratory meant that dancers had to learn skills for developing their bodily tendencies. The procedures were not routines intended to be repeated verbatim, but rather as Forsythe's description suggested, *A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye*. Through training the dancers' analytic and creative competences, Forsythe advanced the speed and quality with which they could invent movement and opened up the tender territory between imagination, flesh and invention.

Residual response is a way of studying the physics of the body moving in the gravitational field and changing one's habits to maintain balance and equilibrium. An "authentic residual response," for Caspersen, allowed "the rest of the body to respond in an accurate way, i.e. with physical mechanics that are functional and not extraneous."22 Through the practice of residual response, the dialogue between voluntary and involuntary could be felt with increasing intensity. Residual response adds potential to movement following a choreographic design*. Showerhead* progresses through the enabling constraint of the image, and reverberates the potential of movement moving the imaginary.

21 Forsythe, "Observing Motion," p. 18. Forsythe also explained another aim: "If you're dancing, how do you actually say what happened? The technique is one way of taking mental note of what just happened to you while improvising." Ibid., p. 16.

22 Caspersen, "Methodologies." In addition to the word "authentic," I remember dancers also speaking of natural residual response. Thanks to my education in feminism and cultural studies, both these terms were irritating for me when I was a novice in Ballett Frankfurt. The natural for me was a constructed category. But through my practice in The Forsythe Company, I came to understand something about what my colleagues meant. One had to un-learn a lot of habits for holding the body up, to let the body fall and adjust in the gravitational field—in a residual way.

#### 6.2.2 Skills, Strategies and Potential

*Showerhead* is a complex curvilinear motion that relies on practical understanding—sensing movement as it progresses. The movement cultivates its own logic. Forsythe has observed the challenges in moving this way, noting generally: "I think the biggest difficulty in the kind of improvisation we practice is not consciously shaping your body, is actually letting your body fold and to develop a more reactive and a many timed body as opposed to a shaped body."23 Sparked by a potent initiation, willed and practiced, the dancers doing *showerhead* must follow the residual movement through their confidence in é*paulement*. In rehearsing, one then judges the passage, and repeats it again; one iterates trying and incorporating feedback into a series of repetitions. Mis-actions are controlled: the dancers remind me "don't hyperextend your right elbow" and "back your hips up more."24 Reflection is not omitted from practice, but interspersed within its pacing.

Though not a ballet movement of the *dance d'école*, the accomplishment of *showerhead* relies on mastery of many ballet skills. Using the affordances of balletic training, the pelvis twists accommodatingly, letting both legs rotate into a turned-out position. Rolling through the feet, the steps are quiet, and the weight transitions are smooth. Moving through a soft bend in the knees, or *plié*, the legs unfold with renewed potential to straighten. The right ankle and toes extend into a balletic stretch, or *tendu*. Dividing the body into multiple efforts, one leg provides support, while the other gestures; one arm reaches, while the other reverberates with residue. Stabilization and mobilization intertwine. *Épaulement* brings the spirals that pull throughout the body into balanced counterpoint. *Showerhead* is a proprioceptive panoply, supported by bodies trained in ballet. To perform this virtuosic movement, extensive ballet training is helpful.

Sensorimotor skills are dancers' muscle memory—the habits, good and bad, that influence their decisions. Yet in *showerhead* (as well as many other movements of *Duo*), the movement mechanics and style also diverge from ballet, and these divergences must be practiced. For example, take the usage of the "ass."25 The ass is rarely named and called upon in classical ballet technique, which focuses more demurely on the hips and the property of turning out. But generally, within the movement style of Ballett Frankfurt, dancers tried out and were encouraged to move their rumps, down and back, finding turn-out with new freedom to maneuver their tails. Pragmatically, this tendency afforded a means of shifting the center of mass away from a gesture.This brought dancers outside the habitual control of the familiar bodily center within ballet, into a realm for experimenting with new ballet tendencies and adaptions. One might call dropping the "ass" a strategy: an invention that cultivates disorientation.

23 Forsythe, "Observing Motion," p. 24.

24 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 23, 2016.

25 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 23, 2016. Notably, in my interview with Forsythe Company dancer Riley Watts, he described the "hips" and "pelvis" moving backwards-forwards. Riley Watts, studio session dancing in Bern, January 13, 2017. While dancers in both ensembles communicated using rich jargon specific to their knowledge, in The Forsythe Company there was less profanity and sexual slang.

Let's follow the motion again: you start to *showerhead*, unfurling a spiral forward, through the twist of your right hand. You simultaneously step back on the left leg, following the curvature started by your pointer finger. Stepping back gives space for your right arm to extend—letting the spiral develop into a longer arc. Moving backwardsforwards, and reaching the arm: "It's as if the skin of your right hand could stretch forward" one dancer reminds me.26 Not naturally, yet easily, the movement unfolds a logic from a cultivated thought.

In *showerhead*, the dancers begin the motion together and then readily bend their knees and softly retract their hips (that is, drop and move their pelvis backwards). Trying the movement with the dancers in the studio, I experience how this action becomes layered with more timings and trajectories—polycentric and polyrhythmic. This polysemy makes one center hard to define. The body dis-places. One singular thing is not happening, but rather multiple processes seem to take over the body. As I negotiate sensing and shifting my body weight, I gain losing control of what transpires—a gain that can be felt as a sort of play. Following the curvature of my arm unfolding its spiral, the ride of weight displacement takes my mind away from a concrete grip on what is happening. In *showerheading*, the dancers' astute skills of proprioception are challenged: proprioception as the marrow, skin, gush of organ and cellular sense of where a part of the body is in relation to the center or whole.27

Polyrhythmic and polycentric, the movement *showerhead* is not merely moving the hand forward, like the voluntary gesture of handing over your keys. It is a gesture involving the whole body—sensing the potential of the entire corpus. As a dancer becomes more experienced and fluent with the movement, control is enacted by sensing and following as shape unfolds. The dancer acts and re-acts, in the "in-act."28

Learning to drop the hips and move backwards are practiced strategies that enable residual movement and *showerheading*. These are strategies throughout Forsythe's repertoire, not only in *Duo*. In them, the dancers cultivate spatial attitude, neither direct nor indirect, but plural—progressing backward-forward.29 Recognizing how a contemporary culture of forward action (such as walking forward, driving forward, taking food from the table in front of you, and so on) has choreographed pedestrian action, Forsythe cultivated this backwardness strategically, motivating his dancers to unlearn

26 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 23, 2016.

27 Einav Katan, after British neurologist Charles Scott Sherrington, defines proprioception as "the sensual awareness of movement within the body. As a body sense it is responsible for feeling the relative positions of neighboring body parts, and how their strength and effort are engaged through motion." See Katan, *Embodied Philosophy in Dance,* p. 54, with relevant discussion pp. 57–59. See also Foster, *Choreographing Empathy*, p. 110.

28 The "in-act" of experience is a central component of Manning's activist philosophy, recognizing experience as in-movement and in-the-making: "variously commingling with the limits of the notyet and the will-have-been." See Manning, *The Minor Gesture*, p. 47. Her differentiation of act and in-act is made to emphasize the real processual, relational, ecological and virtual aspects of experience.

29 I take the terms "direct" and "indirect" from attitudes of Laban effort in space. See Maletic, *Dance Dynamics*, pp. 14–15.

their habits. The dancers frequently go-forward-while-going-backwards. In *Improvisation Technologies*, he reminded his dancers to move behind themselves and to have "fun" with this increased range of motion.30 In rehearsals, he asked dancers to sense the skin on their backs: back of their shoulders, back of their necks. All this is to open up the potential of movement, enabling the dancers to pay attention to kinesthetic response and repattern their habits.

In *showerhead*, the connection of the upper and lower body is also typical of the ensemble style. The body hinges. The fingertips stay nearly where they were in space; the lower body *retracts* back. By stretching the lower body backwards, the right arm is given room—unfolding and addressing the space in front of the body. In Labanotation, this fixation of the hand in space would be notated as a *space hold* if it were more precisely enforced and rigid.31 But in *Duo,* space is created and felt rather than held. It is addressed three-dimensionally, through a body that is responsively relaxed: subtly alert.

"Moving backwards" and "dropping the hips" are repeated efforts within Forsythe's movement apparatus, causing refraction of movement, already reverberating and multiple.32 To choreograph movement is thus to gain access to practices that enable perception of movement's nuance and micro-variations—to have more experiences at the conscious fringes of movement control. *Duo* dancer Riley Watts names "disorientation" as essential to his process of becoming a dancer in The Forsythe Company—that is, discovering his movement habits and finding new ways of movement by deliberately disorienting himself.33 While most of *Duo*'s movement is planned and repeated, this does not mean it is without variation, or even disorientation. Disorientation in *Duo* happens in three ways: First, through a sort of attunement to movement which displaces the subject, backgrounding them to movement taking place, emerging relationally. Secondly, the disorientation of following one's body, not knowing exactly how the movement will unfold. Thirdly, and more broadly in their practice, when the dancers invent and improvise movements, they may deliberately practice disorientation with the hope that this might enable them to find new movements.34

Inventing techniques for surpassing habits are part of the work of being a Forsythe dancer. This makes choreography an "entanglement" with organization, not only fixing

30 On the "back approach" Forsythe says: "So be careful not to limit any of these technologies of sliding and folding and all this to the front of your body, but practice this also moving towards the back. Let it move through the front, but towards the back. So that you get used to feeling what it's like to move towards these areas. If it is easier for you to move this way, practice moving this way. And dropping things towards the back. Moving towards the back. Very helpful. I think if you can practice that regularly, that the coordination will begin to spread itself out over the whole kinesphere. And you will have more fun." Forsythe*, "*Improvisation Technologies: Transcripts of the Forsythe Lectures," p. 59.

31 On "space hold" and "spot hold" see Guest, *Labanotation*, pp. 398–99.

32 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 20, 2016. Riley Watts, studio session dancing in Bern, January 13, 2017. Allison Brown and Cyril Baldy, studio session dancing in Bern, January 24, 2017.

33 Riley Watts, studio session dancing in Bern, January 13, 2017.

34 Forsythe is not alone in his choreographic study of habits and development of techniques to "perturb and disrupt" those. On choreographer Wayne McGregor's approach, see Leach and deLahunta, "Dance Becoming Knowledge," p. 462.

rules but developing potential. Philosopher Alva Noë expounds: "Choreography disorganizes. In doing so it sets the stage for letting us reorganize. Choreography, in this sense, is a reorganizational project."35 Approached in this way, we start to see how the dancers' expertise is *a process itself for learning about practice*, and how to go forward practicing. These remarks give insider clarity to what dance scholar Wibke Hartewig has found from her meticulous analysis of Ballett Frankfurt performances. She finds: "[Forsythe's] work is not geared towards the presentation of aesthetic elements, but places the process-related movement in the center of attention."36

Forsythe and the dancers' understanding of dance values the body's potential to learn and develop. We find striking evidence of this in Forsythe's own testimony. He comments:

At any given moment, you have to be able to say: what is the potential of this configuration of my body. And at one point, I guess a long way down the line, you know intuitively what it is. And then I would suggest you try the results of that which you don't know, move on from there, with no idea how it's going to turn out. For me, that would be a truly successful dance, because then the body would take over and dance at that point where you had no more idea. I see that as an idealized form of dancing: just not knowing and letting the body dance you around.37

The potential of one's body—of oneself—is developed through Forsythe's *Improvisation Technologies*. Between focusing on one's body, a dancer learns from and with *other* bodies, both live and mediated. Between letting the body "take over" during improvisation, a dancer discusses and analyzes movement with others. In my interviews, one dancer linked this approach to improvisation to his understanding of Buddhist philosophy, in which, free of expectations, movement could always be discovered—there was always something small, something new, something unexpected to find out.38

With time, the dancers' practice of *showerhead* becomes rich with the potential of micro-variations. The dancers' expertise enables nuance and sensitivity. This is how a movement can, to an outside eye, become consistent—while to the performers, it becomes rich with the potential to vary. Attunement to potentiality creates a rich set of micro-variations of and between bodies. These minute differences become rich and exciting for the dancers, keeping their practice evolving—a generative sort of doing.

35 Noë, "Newman's Note, Entanglement and the Demands of Choreography," p. 234, p. 230.

36 Translation by the author. Hartewig, *Kinästhetische Konfrontation*, p. 184.

37 Forsythe, "Observing Motion," pp. 24–26. When describing *Duo*, dancer Brigel Gjoka concurs: "I feel like I am in a position where I can go anywhere. When he [Forsythe] says: 'it starts from any point.' That is how I feel. Well, I can go from any point. And then, it can start any point, at the same time, and it can start any point, and it can arrive to any point." Brigel Gjoka, interview with the author, Bologna, October 25, 2017.

38 Riley Watts, interview with the author, Bologna, October 25, 2017.

#### **6.3 Cultivating Sensation**

Dancer Allison Brown took me under her wing in the dance studio to teach me about the practice of *Duo*'s movement. Standing next to me, she demonstrated how the dancers would practice the movement of *showerhead* to synchronize time and form. Sometimes they would stand nearly touching, almost hip to hip. In this close proximity, Brown recounts, they had time for comparing and contemplating, shifting the fingers so that your and your partner's hands look identical, "you looking at your hand and your partner's hand."39 This began to equate a kinesthetic sense of one's own body moving with the visual attention to another body: a feedback loop. I felt that my body and Brown's were being superimposed—not just imitation or mimicry, but a feeling of being fused. For Brown this is an unusual type of vision: "this seeing each other with other senses and other body parts than the eyes."40 Sensing fused with relation and kinesthesia.

#### 6.3.1 Sensation in *Showerhead*

Enacting *showerhead* in performance, one does not look directly upon the right hand, as if contemplating one's gesture.41 Rather *Duo* dancers typically keep the environment—the black of the stage space, the audience, and other dancers—in their visual field, placing their own body in the visual periphery. During *showerhead*, the vision is broad, the hand peripheral. Dancer Riley Watts explains that he has the wish to catch a glimpse of his partner in his peripheral vision—as the first movement is usually performed at a distance, with one's partner in indirect, rather than direct, sight. Given the absence of scenery in *Duo*, the black background provides little for the dancers to focus upon. Despite the audience members near the stage being visible to the performers, the audience is predominantly heard and felt. The dancers are not coached by Forsythe to visually address the audience with their eyes. Watts explains that he knows a performance is going well when he sees a video and he and his partner's heads are turning to watch one another. They do this, he explains, to stay in-sync.42

Thus far I have described the movement of *showerhead* holistically, as both a movement of the body and a movement of thought. Now I wish to add that the movement is also a way of awakening the senses—attuning to one's partner, one's body and the audience. Vision—"hawk-eyed" on one's partner—combines with listening for the sound of one's partner's breathing movement.43

The dancers described the richness of this experience: Combined with breath, one hears one's own and one's partner's body, inhaling and exhaling. One feels the heat of the stage lights, the texture of one's clothes or costume. One feels the temperature of the air. One sees one's own body peripherally and kinesthetically feels movement

39 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 20, 2016.

40 Allison Brown, interview with the author, Frankfurt, September 23, 2016.

41 In Forsythe's work generally, a dancer rarely looks at their own body moving, but keeps their focus externalized in space.

42 Riley Watts, interviews with the author, Bern, January 11–15, 2017. See also our co-authored publication: Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*."

43 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, June 28, 2018.

passing. Once the spiral of the right arm is nearly extended, the hand is not stared upon. Instead, one looks beyond one's hand, taking an external focus that includes the arm movement in peripheral vision. This panoply of sensation moves beyond the classic five-sense model by involving heat, skin, balance, breath and proprioception. Generally in *Duo*, sensations overlap and relay between modes, mixing into the feeling of moving and being moved.44

In *Duo* rehearsals, the visual appearance of the movement was not unimportant, as the dancers know that how they appear is critical for the spectators. Despite this, they cared for and nurtured the *experience* of movement, through the process of dancing the movement together and for an audience. The dancers remember rarely using the mirror in the studio, as is common for ballet dancers, to evaluate and correct their posture. Rather the vision of how the movement should appear was reinforced through seeing one's partner more than oneself. Later generation *Duo* dancer Riley Watts concurs: "the big thing was to understand, to appeal to what does this [movement] feel like, not only what does it look like."45 By the dancers employing comparisons of feeling and appearing, thus began the entanglement of bodies critical to *Duo*.

#### 6.3.2 The Hand and the Skin

Writing about Forsythe's work in the Ballett Frankfurt, Sabine Huschka has observed: "Instead of an intensified experience, Forsythe's choreographies seek to create a difference and to make perception perceptible."46 Such refinement, even "hypersensitivity," is cultivated throughout Forsythe's repertoire, requiring dancers to acquire perceptual acumen. Observing the interaction in a duet from Forsythe's *The Room As It Was* (2002), Hartewig observes interaction similar to that in *Duo*:

The partners do not exchange […] primarily through application of touch and force: communication takes place on a visual and acoustic level, through the same dynamic and rhythmic sensation and through a hypersensitive body perception, with which the other body can be felt even when it has disappeared from view.47

As in the example described by Hartewig, the relays of sensation in dancing *Duo* go beyond the five-sense model and entwine sensations of oneself and the other. How does this come about?

One answer is that the sensation of hands and skin are cultivated. Given the amount of nerve endings and dexterity of the hand, Forsythe believes that it is a keystone to train the whole body. For instructing ballet dancers, who have often laid more emphasis on training their feet than their hands, a Forsythe adage is "the shape of the foot is the

44 Caroline Potter, in her ethnographic research of a contemporary dance education institution in London, similarly finds the five-sense model inadequate for describing dancers' experience. See Potter, "Sense of Motion, Senses of Self."

45 Riley Watts, email correspondence with the author, February 25, 2015.

46 Translation by the author. See Huschka, "Verlöschen als ästhetischer Fluchtpunkt oder 'Du musst dich selbst wahrnehmend Machen'," p. 106.

47 Translation by the author. See Hartewig, *Kinästhetische Konfrontation*, p. 172, footnote 71.

shape of the hand."48 This instructs dancers to articulate their hands as if they had the same cultivated capacity of their highly trained feet. Forsythe encouraged the dancers: "*Épaulement* is a conversation between your foot and your hands. So make a wonderful conversation."49

In Forsythe's ensembles, the hand was studied not in isolation, but in relation: the hand in relation to the shoulder, moved from the back, reflected in the hip, and supported in the feet and knees. The hand was a keystone linking the body—a transducer of sensations. Though *showerhead* is explained as a movement initiated by the fingers of the right hand, the action is that of an arm in relation to the entire body; an energetic whole of sinews feeling twist, stretch, reach, and unfurling.

The integrated quality of movement was also developed through sensual attention to the borders of the body: through the skin. Sensitivity to skin is nurtured in Forsythe's choreography by directing attention to all the delicate surfaces of the hand and its relation to the stretch of the skin in the arms, neck, and back. This skin sensation produces an intensity of movement that differs from daily life, where such awareness is often not refined. *Duo* dancer Riley Watts described skin sensation as a way to register form.50 Feeling light, heat, temperature, tension and release, the skin also seems to register movement around the body, through a sensation of moving with and for others—a quality of excitement.

#### "The sensation of form." Email from Riley Watts to the author, March 3, 2013, RE: How did you learn *Duo*?

It's kind of hard to describe the sensation of form without showing it … In some moments we were told to use the sensation of "'hanging" by a single point in the elbow, to be light in our feet like crystal (in my own words, I chose this to mean sharp and slightly ahead of a comfortable, even, and heavy musicality), to use the curvature of the arms as extended descriptions of the rest of our bodies and potential space, but without being overly tense.

In the very beginning my partner and I were both doing it with quite a lot of muscle tension and we found it exhausting and musically predictable. We were told we were working too hard and that we needed to *plié* less and spend more time off the ground with the crystalline *ballon* I mentioned earlier.

The é*paulement* and torqueing of the spine can be uncomfortable and dangerous when done with too much muscle tension and we found it necessary to simply relax more while dancing. Another sensation we used was to pay attention to what Bill [Forsythe] describes as the stretching of the skin. When I am extending my arm behind me there is a particular sensation of the skin stretching across chest and down my arm to my

48 Forsythe, personal memory of the author of rehearsals in The Forsythe Company.

49 See Ross, *San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five*, p. 107. Caspersen also foregrounds teaching dancers' hands in her writing about dance practice. See Caspersen, "Methodologies."

50 Riley Watts, email to the author, March 3, 2018.

hand. I could show you this movement and you could copy it easily, but without you paying attention to the sensation of stretching that I described, we both would be experiencing something slightly different.

The email cited above, written during Watts' process of learning *Duo*, gives a first-hand account of many kinesthetic sensations, and catalogues the different images and feelings he encountered in his learning process. Watts, as a later generation *Duo* dancer, used the word *sensation*, describing *Duo* as "a process of attention to sensations that the dancers are experiencing simultaneously."51 Not only having sensations, but considering and comparing them, *Duo* dancers build a common reserve of understanding.

#### 6.3.3 Breathing-Movement in *Duo*

The last quality of sensation that I would like to focus on is the sensation of breath. Over the course of *showerhead*, the dancers phase through inhale and exhale—typically inhaling through the nose, with a light and long sniff, and exhaling through the chest, the mouth and lips slightly open. The more tired the dancers are from prior exertion, the more this might sound like a sigh. Unlike singers, who have extensive breathing training, the dancers breathe *implicitly* with their movement, learning by doing—without breathing concepts or training techniques. *Duo*'s breath is a logic of practice. It is a subtle and functional layer of the choreography, helping to create the right movement quality (delicate and precise) and sustain synchronization with one's partner. One dancer told me, "We synchronize breathing, not the steps."52 Forsythe concurred: "*Duo* is finally, for me, a breath score that has choreography that generates it."53

The names denoting this practice varied from: "breath score" to "breath opera," "breath song" or simply the breath.54 Neither Forsythe nor the dancers considered *Duo*'s "breath score" to be extraneous or outside the choreography—like the unprescribed sound of musicians' breath and motions, when playing classical music. Rather, it was part of the choreography of *Duo*. Forsythe agreed: "The breathing in *Duo* is so specific. It really is the common dimension on which everything operates."55

I have chosen to name this practice *breathing-movement*, to emphasize the way it is a hybrid medium of movement, sound and sensation. The dancers would typically use inhales as upbeats and rises in actions, and exhales for lowering actions and other forms of exertions (such as the end points of twists or swings). For example, in *showerhead*, following inhale and exhale, respectively, the weight of the body rises and descends. The dancers also used the breath communicatively, to signal timing via cues.56

51 Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*," p. 9.

52 Brigel Gjoka, interview with the author, Dresden, March 6, 2016.

53 William Forsythe, phone interview with the author, January, 30, 2019.

54 On Forsythe's term "breath score" see Vass-Rhee, *Audio-Visual Stress*, in particular pp. 232–56; on "breath opera" see Eckert, "Taking a Look at *Duo*"; on Riley Watts' term "breath song" see Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*," pp. 10–11.

55 William Forsythe, phone interview with the author, January 30, 2019.

56 For further discussion of these cues, see section 9.2.3 Counterpoint Model.

Ordinarily, breathing is an involuntary motion, intimately associated with the border between life and death. In *Duo*'s breathing-movement, the involuntary and voluntary become entangled. In this way, the prescribed choreographic organization of movements goes even deeper into the internal organs of the body and the neurological mechanisms for enacting movement. Biomechanically, the muscle of breath—the diaphragm—creates an inner unit with the pelvic floor, directly shaping the internal support of the motion around the organs, wrapped in the abdominals. Awareness of one's breathing, while listening to one's partner, also produces a feedback loop, tethering connection—visceral, communicative and meditative. Breathing-movement sutures the becoming as repeatable: becoming learned, becoming controlled with the becoming new, becoming present and becoming expressive. The intimate and subtle integration of breath in *Duo* changes action, from an "I do" state to a "being" state, a change in effort from "I act" to "I am with you."57

Though it is difficult to reconstruct the sounds of *Duo* from the archival videos because of the poor audio quality, by moving with the dancers I learned about breathingmovement. The practice extends across much of the repertoire in The Forsythe Company, which I myself had performed; works such as the first act of *Three Atmospheric Studies* (2005), *Decreation* (2003), *The Room As It Was* (2002) and *N.N.N.N.* (2002). In *Duo*, breathing-movement was cultivated implicitly through practice, with pairs finding their own style of communication. In the Ballett Frankfurt it was rarely explicitly worked on or acoustically directed. In The Forsythe Company however, Forsythe gave more directive and explicit feedback about breathing-movement—suggesting that he could hear the togetherness through how the dancers' breathed.58 After this feedback, one dancer noticed that he had to avoid making an effort to synchronize his breath (which sounded to him affected). Rather, he wished to find a way for the breath to operate functionally through sensitive attention to his partner. Listening, more than breathing, was the substance of alignment.

Breathing associated with a movement, or movement phrase, may change from performance to performance. *Duo* dancer Brigel Gjoka (Watt's partner) demonstrates this with me while dancing in his kitchen, vocalizing "eee-ahhh" or "and," changing pitch and tone melodically. His breath interlaces with his voice; this musical language defines a specific style of breathing-movement.59 Similarly, performer Regina van Berkel (who originated the role that Gjoka dances) also used her sonorous voice melodically in breathing-movement, though never forcing her breath or deliberately trying to sing.60 Her partner, Jill Johnson, used her nasal passages more than her throat, but was there to whisper words as needed: such as "new beginning" and "Almost there!"61

Late generation *Duo* dancers—male dancers Watts and Gjoka—breathed more loudly than early generation *Duo* dancers. Despite this, no *Duo* dancer viewed the breathing practice as gendered. Rather, the shift in practice of later generation *Duo*

57 Brigel Gjoka, interview with the author, Dresden, March 5–6, 2016.

58 Riley Watts, videoconference interview with the author and Bettina Bläsing, January 14, 2014.

59 Brigel Gjoka, interview with the author, Dresden, March 6, 2016.

60 Regina van Berkel, interview with the author, Frankfurt, April 22, 2017.

61 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, June 28, 2018.

dancers reflects the greater emphasis on acoustic elements in the work of The Forsythe Company, in parallel to Forsythe's increasingly explicit interest in the "exploration of the visuo-sonic affordances of movement and its presentation in performance."62 The breathing practice was never "ornamental" for the dancers.63 Their quality of breathingmovement was a sign of their relational bond.

The dancers remarked on the difficulty of teaching the breathing of *Duo* to students or to dancers in other companies. Dancers with considerable ballet training enforce that they silence their breath—dancing without making any noise at all. Such dancers had to cultivate the freedom to acoustically release this breathing-movement. Moreover, it was not an expressive line of one-voice, but a result of shared experience. Breathing together was produced through ample experience and practice together.*Duo*'s breathing-practice composed the dancers' subjectivity at a deep level, at the cusp where dancing meets music, communication and sociality.

#### 6.3.4 "Perceptual Performativity" of Forsythe's Ensembles: Freya Vass-Rhee

Dance scholar Freya Vass-Rhee, writing with insight as a dramaturg working with The Forsythe Company, identified "perceptual performativity" in Forsythe's oeuvre. By this, she draws attention to a chief aspect of Forsythe's aesthetic: the composition of the sensual proclivities of the dancers and spectators, comprising unusual degrees and combinations of sensation.64 Concurring with my own arguments, Vass-Rhee has described how the dancers distribute and scaffold learning cooperatively; she has also analyzed how teamwork extended co-perception between the dancers to the larger team that included Forsythe, the technicians and the musical performers.65 Building upon Vass-Rhee's writing, in which *Duo* has been analyzed only briefly in in terms of its sonic properties,66 here I contribute the dancers' own review of their sensual panoply, and analyze how such perception is *practiced*.

I find the term *practice* helps to show what Vass-Rhee has already emphasized with the word performativity: subjectivity shaped through perception, in the context of choreographic labor. In Vass-Rhee's words:

[…] the construction of the subject can also be illuminated by a different perspective on performance, one which addresses a more fundamental level: the subject as a *perceiving agent* immersed in and interacting with a world of sensory information which, in the case of performance, is composed in ways intended to elicit specific effects and affect.67

62 See Vass-Rhee, *Audio-Visual Stress,* p. 1.

63 Riley Watts, interview with the author, Bern, January 15, 2017.

64 See Vass-Rhee, *Audio-Visual Stress,* in particular pp. 120–61*.* Vass-Rhee frames her study within Hans Thies-Lehmann's diagnosis of the perceptual composition in postdramatic theatre; see ibid., pp. 129–34.

65 See Vass-Rhee, "Dancing Music"; "Distributed Dramaturgies"; "Schooling an Ensemble."

66 See Vass-Rhee, *Audio-Visual Stress,* pp. 240–44.

67 Ibid.*,* p. 128 (italics in the original).

*Duo* dancers' testimonies concur regarding the importance of constituted perception as a layer of *habitus*.The agency of *Duo* dancers is complexly immersed in an organizational array of activities—cooperatively constituted. Unlike approaches of movement analysis, which focus solely on form and first-person experience of one's body, co-movement merges sensation and action in complex feedback loops. Implicit attention to sensation by dancers in Ballett Frankfurt is made explicit in The Forsythe Company—reflecting Vass-Rhee's participation in shaping the discourse upon this layer of choreographic process.68 Further exploration of these matters will arc through this manuscript, illustrating how sensory perception is complexly instituted and choreographed, and how the practice of choreography retains multiple views and contours of emergence.

#### 6.3.4 Bodies

*Figure 20. Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) performing* Dialogue (DUO2015) *in 2018.*

Photo © Bill Cooper.

68 Additionally, this could be an effect of dominant discourse seeping into rehearsal, as suggested by the research of Kleinschmidt. See Kleinschmidt, *Artistic Research als Wissensgefüge*, pp. 157–58. In my dialogues with the dancers, sensation was a pivotal concept to later generation (Forsythe Company) dancers' understanding of *Duo*. While it was described in my interviews with Ballett Frankfurt dancers, with vivid accounts of their sensorium, few dancers used the words sensation or perception. I believe Vass-Rhee is entirely correct that perception is an essential aspect of Forsythe's choreographic craft, and that this is true across Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company. The manner by which this became explicit in The Forsythe Company reflects Forsythe's, as well as wider discursive interest in this topic; from Vass-Rhee as well as visiting philosophers Alva Noë and Erin Manning.

One of the central notions within this chapter is the way dancing together emerges through bodies *individual-collective:*through bodies with individual histories and proclivities, who collectively fabricate and negotiate their choreographic project of *Duo*. 69 One final example from my fieldwork is intended to bring this argument into focus. What dancer Riley Watts described to me as one of the fundamental essences of *Duo* is a way that he senses himself reaching and twisting with his upper body. While shaped by the collective training in *épaulement*, this practice is also something that he adapts to fit his personal style of moving—going a bit beyond what dancers in *Duo* have done before him, due to his particular flexibility (see Fig. 20). Watts tells me these differences also reside in individual particularities of what bodies can do: "Part of that is just the way your body's built. My rib cage is just weird like that."70 Yet Watts also shared a picture with me that he had made (see Fig. 5), in which he had digitally superimposed his body onto an image of his partner's—telling me that this feeling of togetherness, of becoming one body, was central to *Duo.* Through Watts, and from other stories throughout this manuscript, we learn how intimately dancers come to define themselves by the knowledge and sensations of *their* bodies and *other* bodies. We also see how this is begotten by one's particular body aptitude, while also changing in accordance with the communities in which the dancers move and the dyad of their *Duo* partnership. In this, bodies are individual and collective: developing what they can do, with potential for extensive transformation.

The movement of *showerhead* opens up a world. Splashing the reader with this movement has been my strategy to introduce the dancers' *logic of practice*. By examining the dancers' testimonies and attempting to make sense of this movement using my own body, I have staged an encounter in writing that strives to animate the reader off his or her chair.

\*\*\*

The movement *showerhead* is a significant constitutive element of *Duo*. Working with the imagery of a shower dial, *showerhead* reverberates the dancers' bodies, holistically connecting body parts into an integrated whole. *Showerheading* undermines dualities of conscious/unconscious, voluntary/involuntary, body/mind, my/our, formal/informal and theory/practice. The choreographic movement is not representative, rule-based, normative and static; rather, it is built up, negotiated, individual-collective, with microvariations of complexity.

Most significantly, what *showerhead* has shown us is how a dance company's style of movement is honed through bodily techniques that are the "work of individual and collective practical reason."71 In this chapter, I have argued that we view choreographic movements like *showerhead* as the community achieving movement based upon the ensemble's history of practice*.* The dancers not only magnified and reverberated *Forsythe's* gestures, but also manufactured movement through exchanges with one another. The precise movement emerged through phases of doing and reflecting, rehearsing and

69 Compare to Wacquant, *Body & Soul*, pp. 17–18.

70 Riley Watts, studio session dancing in Bern, January 13, 2017.

71 Marcel Mauss cited in Wacquant, *Body & Soul*, p. 17, translation by Wacquant.

performing, observing and being observed. The bodily practice of *showerhead* thus combined "doings and sayings" and was based upon the dancers' shared investment in the *Duo* project and in one another.72

The terms that the dancers and Forsythe used to describe their movement, (I have highlighted é*paulement*, residual movement and sensation) and their strategies for doing so (going backwards-forwards, dropping the hips, breathing-movement) give insight into their process. This terminology helps as well to highlight how the movement practice of *showerhead* enmeshed different modes of intentionality (thinking, sensing, feeling) and phases of moving-thinking. When examined longitudinally, *showerhead*, like most of the movements in *Duo*, went cooperatively beyond one person—or even couple—rehearsing and practicing the piece—linking the dancers in recurring activity. In other words, the dancers' logic of *showerheading* relied heavily on individual coordination and sensorimotor skills, amassed through histories of relational interaction.73 Though each dancer's body was unique, through moving together, they fused.

*Showerhead* has given us an indication of *Duo*'s movement, but a limited one, based upon one movement. In the following chapters I will broaden this depiction, to decipher the arrangement and dynamic variance of movements within this choreography. In the next section I begin this by foregrounding the concepts of movement *material* and movement *relation*.

72 Schatzki, *The Site of the Social*, p. 73.

73 Tacitly, later generation *Duo* dancers profited from the research conducted by the ensemble prior to their arrival. Both Ballett Frankfurt dancers and Forsythe Company dancers shared the term *épaulement*. While the practice of residual motion was shared by all *Duo* dancers, the term *residual* was not: Ballett Frankfurt *Duo* dancers used this terminology, but Forsythe Company *Duo* dancers did not. Conversely, while all *Duo* dancers described the sensation of *Duo*'s movement richly, Forsythe Company *Duo* dancers used the term *sensation* whereas Ballett Frankfurt dancers did not.

### **Chapter 7: Movement Material & Relations**

#### **7.1 Movement "Material"**

My conversations with the dancers about the choreography of *Duo* often involved dialogue about the "material." As could be substantiated by the evidence of multiple field notes and interview transcripts, *material* is a common way that both Forsythe and the dancers described choreographed movement: that is, inventing material, learning material and performing that material as choreography. They also used the word to define, more broadly, the elements at the focus of their choreographic process—whether ideas, themes, physical objects or movement itself. At a later phase of my research process, I took notice of these remarks and began to study them systematically, trying to learn what the materialization of *Duo* had to do with dancers' labor and the reality of their practice.1

A key moment of my fieldwork helps to introduce this: While reviewing a performance video with a *Duo* dancer, I asked her a question about an instance in the choreography when the dancers, who were previously performing different movements, arrive strikingly in a synchronous pose. I wished to understand how the dancers gauged their time to arrive together so seamlessly. Part of the dancer's pragmatic answer was that they rely on their practice, knowing the length of the individual sequences in time. They do not demand that this time be perfectly equal, but equable. She explained that her partner, "always has more *material* there."2 Another dancer described the structure of *Duo* as an alternation of different phases—durations when one was occupied, fulfilling the movement, followed by phases when one had more availability to attune to one's

1 The word "material" occurred 178 times in my fieldwork notes and interview transcripts. Talking about movement material is not specific to *Duo*, but common in Forsythe's ensembles and across many contemporary dance practices. For example, considering the work of British choreographer Wayne McGregor, see Leach and deLahunta, "Dance Becoming Knowledge."

2 Allison Brown, videoconference interview with the author, May 8, 2016, emphasis mine. Because she knew her partner was busy with a longer sequence to perform, Brown could catch a glimpse, and pay extra attention to her, making the alignment work out. Her partner in that performance confirmed the same.

partner.3 Supporting this, a third described it as "coming together" to dance in unison and then "going apart" performing in counterpoint.4 This give and take of being busy and attuning, based on knowledge of the movement material and prior practice of performing together, makes *Duo* distinctive. Realizing the subtle way that movement materialized for the dancers—becoming concrete, lasting and real—helped me to better understand their sense of the choreographic.

By exchanging or concatenating the words movement and material, the dancers demonstrated movement to be the opposite of ephemeral. The movement material was not an ideal or consensus about the ideal of the choreography, nor was it the actual movement when the dancers enacted *Duo.* By saying *material*, or *movement material*, the dancers displayed their proficiency in gauging the duration of movement, based upon an abstract sense garnered from repetition and knowledge that the movement is precisely unique, in actuality. The material reflects this enmeshment, across labor, abstraction and actuality. When movement is described as material, it indicates the way the artists understand *how* they work with it, in a teleological activity of making and performing choreography. In this, movement is mutable, sharable, teachable, transmittable, edit-able, improvable, even lose-able. There are a "bundle" of practices associated with it.5

Movement material and bodily material are interweaving substances. Forsythe dancers often reference movement in association with a person—typically the person who invented or first performed the movement (for example, in *Duo*: "Jill's material" or "Allison's material").6 When the dancers had learned movement material well, they described it as "in my body" (singular) or "in our body" (plural).7 "In my body" meant memorized and danceable. To embody someone else's movement material, a dancer might incorporate aspects of the other person (their coordination, intention, rhythm, and so on). Yet in this transfer there were also gaps, which could allow for freedom

3 Roberta Mosca, videoconference interview with the author, April 27, 2018. See Chapter 9.

4 Riley Watts, see Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*," p. 8.

5 Schatzki, *The Site of the Social*, p. 71. Schatzki defines practice as a "bundle" of activities and "an organized nexus of actions," a view that considers activity and organization as two interdependent dimensions of practice. With the term "bundle" Schatzki recognizes that human practices are not coherent domains but are a "nexus" of activities (which he defines as "bodily doings and sayings") and organizations (i.e., an "organized constellation of actions"). Thus, while some scholars define practices as a domain of activity, Schatzki differentiates his view that these domains are subdivided: composed of "integral blocks" and "particular packages" which are "temporarily unfolding." In their unfolding, they are "open" to new actions. The bundles therein take different scale and scope, for example aggregating different activities within "tasks" or "projects." See ibid., pp. 71–73. My view takes Schatzki's metaphor of bundles more in a string-like direction, looking at how activities (as threads and chains) may interlace, tangle, untangle and separate, as they extend in time. For example, *showerheading*, é*paulement*, dancing *umpadump*, doing *Duo*, taking ballet class, and warming up, are all activities of different scope that interweave. By discussing movement material in this section, I explore how conceptualization and abstraction are part of the array of movement activities, often interlacing physical practice.

6 In setting the piece on dancers of CCN – Ballet de Lorraine, Cyril Baldy used these terms during rehearsals on April 21–22, 2015.

7 Regina van Berkel, interview with the author, Frankfurt, April 22, 2017.

of incorporation, especially when the bodies and persons were markedly different.8 When describing such a transfer between Francesca Harper and Dana Caspersen, one of the tallest to one of the smallest women in the company, Harper recounted:

He [Forsythe] was interested in seeing what chemistry each couple would propose. We learned [*Duo*] from Regina [van Berkel] and Allison [Brown], so we were very aware that it would be different. I was once second cast of Dana [Caspersen]. I remember we had to change a lot. (*laugh*) I know, exactly! I'm the complete opposite of Dana. He loved that experiment and he could trust me.

The dancers seem to possess movement, not in terms of ownership but in the sense of giving it life—through passage within and between changing bodies, building trust between dancers and with the choreographer.The dancers rarely spoke of *Duo*'s movement as Forsythe's. Instead, they commonly referenced their teacher or the previous pair's material. One dancer said poignantly, "the work itself emerges through the dancer, through their material; it is not imposed on them by the material."9

During the span of a dancer's professional career working in Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company, one would invent and learn many peoples' movement material. Reference to the *original* material described a returning to the origin of a dance—how the movement was performed in the early versions of the piece, before forgetting, adaptation and editing set in. The dancers admitted occasionally forgetting—being unable to recall material, months or years later, when a piece had been taken out of the repertory. Cognizant of this, dancers in the Ballett Frankfurt used personal notebooks to capture material so that there could be a reference for reconstruction. Rather than having a rehearsal director responsible for knowing all parts, each dancer held responsibility to preserve and remember the roles that they had invented and performed. Forsythe also employed an archivist who made rehearsal and performance videos for study.10

Accounts of movement material anticipate, or are spoken within, a choreographic process as a form of construction. The first phase was the making or gathering of material. Here dancers used the term *material* for not only movement but anything that came up: movement, ideas, textual sources, and so on. Forsythe did not have one recipe for making movement material.11 In the case of *Duo*, Forsythe improvised movement phrases that were recorded and reconstructed from video.12 Forsythe dancers believed that movement material withheld traces of the first people who danced it and the context and labor in which it was made. They also recognized that movement changed and carried traces from the passage of material between one dancer and another. These important aspects will be elaborated upon in subsequent chapters.13

8 Klein also highlights the importance of these gaps, naming them as processes of "translation." See Klein, *Pina Bausch's Dance Theater,* in particular pp. 148–49.

9 Dana Caspersen, videoconference interview with the author, December 19, 2018.

10 Nicholas Champion, see section 10.1, footnote 4.

11 For a comparable ethnographic study also considering movement material, see Leach and de-Lahunta, "Dance Becoming Knowledge."

12 This is substantiated in section 10.4 The Chronology of Making *Duo*.

13 See Chapter 11.

In one way, movement material changed movement into something common, sharable, repeatable, usable—that is, something for use within the choreographic realm of making performances. In another way, Forsythe's creative process set movement material in a contingency in which the dancers no longer could control what would take place. "Forget that—anyway forget that with Billy" one *Duo* dancer reminded me. After the first rehearsal of *Duo*, "the material had entered her, but there was no way to control how it would be developed."14

The practice of the movement of *Duo* is thus to be regarded as a special materialism. Movement material is produced through bodily exchange; movement is constituted along with concepts, theory and talk that shape it. To understand this materialism, I argue, does not warrant a phenomenological approach, valuing "bracketing or putting out of gear any and all preconceptions about whatever it is one is investigating such that one experiences the phenomenon as if for the first time."15 Rather, it requires participant observation of practice, trying to understand the interlacing ways that movement is called upon and put to work.

Movement material is distinguished from dance. It describes, to Forsythe dancers, what the dancing is made from: the choreographed steps, tasks or other anchors that enable the dancers to practice. Movement material is the 'thing' that the subjects work on, physically and cognitively, in phases that may foreground different modes between thought and perception. One can differentiate this, along the vectors of dance and choreography. The dance of movement is what resists its objectification; the choreography of movement material is what gives it potential to be reflected upon, manipulated, observed, constructed, planned, structured and organized. These observations about Forsythe dancers' movement practices concur with what Rudi Laermans has defined as choreography: "the virtual space in which in principle repeatable (series of) movements or non-movements are both recorded and rationalized."16

What I wish to convey within this section is that the dancers' enactment of movement in the context of *Duo* involved many sorts of practices, which were shaped by the labor of a choreographic workplace. While the dancers 'highest'—in the sense of the most respected and coveted—form of movement practice was the presence of performing *Duo*, many cognitive and teleological movement-related activities were vital for the constitution of choreography.17 We learn about movement when we consider its ability to transform in and out of a material useful within a choreographic workplace. Movement is not just a body changing position or an action with a preconceived goal. Nor is human movement experienced purely through the sense modality of kinesthesia, inarticulately and without theory. Rather, movements are processes—they are practices entwined with other practices. And as processes, they range from the ephemeral and singular (dance) to those resilient and enduring (choreography).

14 Regina van Berkel, interview with the author, Frankfurt, April 22, 2017.

15 Sheets-Johnstone, *The Phenomenology of Dance*, p. xxiv.

16 See Laermans, *Moving Together*, p. 29. Cf. Lepecki, "Choreography as Apparatus of Capture," p. 120.

17 This is not to say that choreography is purely a teleological project, or a means to a designed end. The dancers also described choreographic process as explorative, playful, wandering and openended.

As a choreographer interacts with dancers, proposing various methods to make movement, their bodies leave traces upon the process. Observing the working process of choreographer Wayne McGregor, social anthropologist James Leach and dance scholar Scott deLahunta observe: "What is *interesting* in that movement, the *substance* or material that emerges in the generation, has something to do with the quality of the body's relationality, its presence eliciting feeling response and movement in others."18 In the next section these relations and their impact on *Duo* will take focus.

#### **7.2 Erin Manning: "Relational Movement"**

The interaction that happens between dancers in *Duo* involves bodies that are not pregiven matters, producing a relation that does not change them, but is constituted through moving in relation—or so is my preliminary thesis. To further describe this, in this section I draw from Erin Manning's writing on bodies and *relational movement*. 19 Relations are becoming increasingly cited concepts within dance studies.20 This momentum may come from the impact of art critic Nicolas Bourriaud's pivotal book, *Relational Aesthetics* (1998)—a text written to grasp experimental visual art in the 1990s, in which artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Félix González-Torres foregrounded new sorts of material presences and participatory encounters with artistic spectators.21

18 See Leach and deLahunta, "Dance Becoming Knowledge," p. 465 (italics in the original).

19 For orientation see Manning, *Relationscapes*, Chapter 2, pp. 29–42. Erin Manning was philosopherin-residence in The Forsythe Company in fall 2010. This view of relation has aspects in common with Karen Barad's concept of "intra-actions"; see Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity," in particular p. 817.

20 Approaches within this vary. Pirkko Husemann, drawing initially from Nicolas Bourriaud, then further defining her concept of relationality through Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, examines how the choreographies of Xavier Le Roy and Thomas Lehmen handle such a view of relational art through "making their cultural field an object and simultaneously bringing producers and recipients closer to one another." Translation by the author, Husemann, *Choreographie als kritische Praxis,* p. 19. Petra Sabisch has also foregrounded the category of relation in her writings, drawing on a different approach influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of assemblage, as well as the radical empiricism of William James. The relations Sabisch foregrounds are those made during performance with the audience: "relations to objects, to music, to bodies, relations between bodies, relations of visibility, relations between forces, relations of movement and rest, etc." See Sabisch, *Choreographing Relations,* p. 7. OnWilliam Forsythe's later work, since 2003—developed with particular regard to relations within and between bodies and space—dance scholar Kirsten Maar draws together many theoretical sources (phenomenology, Deleuze, architectural and spatial theory), see Maar, *Entwürfe und Gefüge*. As a final example, anthropologist James Leach and dance scholar Scott deLahunta take an anthropological approach and focus on the work of choreographer Wayne McGregor. In doing so, they consider an interesting example: What it would take to manifest the sort of interaction between dancers and the choreographer in dance-making, through digital technology? Their solution: a body. See Leach and deLahunta, "Dance Becoming Knowledge."

21 Bourriaud's text, drawing from theorists such as Louis Althusser and Félix Guattari, places intersubjectivity at the center of artistic production: "an art form where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the 'encounter' between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning." Bourriaud, *Relational Aesthetics*, p. 15.

Noting the obvious contradiction between these projects and modern art, Bourriaud defined relational art as: "A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."22 While my intention here is not to categorize *Duo* as a work of relational art in Bourriaud's sense, a few further connections between relational art and shifts in Forsythe's aesthetic are worth clarifying.

Already in this manuscript (sections 2.3–2.4) I have shown that the change of Forsythe's working context from the Ballett Frankfurt to The Forsythe Company corresponded with performances foregrounding new proximities, materiality and sensory experiences by the performers and the audience. Additionally, after the closure of the Ballett Frankfurt, Forsythe increasingly produced and situated artworks within multiple markets: in the economies of dance (ballet and contemporary dance) as well as within visual art. Investigating Forsythe's performances, art objects, and installations two-fold in contexts of dance and visual art since 2003, dance scholar Kirsten Maar has designated relationality as a key aspect of Forsythe's aesthetic, observing a continuity between the relations of space and moving bodies between performers in the stage works, and what participants co-existing with one of Forsythe's "choreographic objects" might experience in a visual art context.23 In my view, relationality is not seeping into the stage works from Forsythe's foray into visual art; rather this relationality emerges from his history as a choreographer who works within a team and makes artworks perceived by a mass of spectators. In my view, choreography is a preeminent relational art because the sorts of movement and media organization it produces are socially implemented and anchored. By introducing the term *relation* at this point in my study, I hope to further clarify a concept that I believe helps to articulate the *Duo* dancers' experience of enacting *Duo*—though admittedly not perfectly. To do so, here I draw upon the relational philosophy of Erin Manning, in which she considers dancing together and the experience of bodies in relation.

As a process philosopher, Erin Manning doubts that individuals precede their relations. As an anti-nominalist, she also believes that collectivity "does not emerge from a group of individuals but precedes the very concept of individuality."24 Manning also doubts that the dancer's body is a natural or expressive matter, moved by the will and volition of a single subject or self. Rather, her philosophy is defined on a mobile concept of the body as a verb, as a process of bodying: "bodies-in-the-making" and a "becomingbody."25 Her philosophy also celebrates the blending of thought, sensation and movement as modes of articulation. By stressing the flux of a body, and the manner that bodies interweave, Manning softens the borders of *a* body and thereby challenges the western construct of the individual. Bodies, for Manning, are a matter of continual process or passage. They are also social and plural: "always more than one."26

22 Ibid., p. 113.

23 Maar, *Entwürfe und Gefüge*. On Forsythe's term"choreographic object," see Forsythe,"Choreographic Objects."

24 Manning, *Relationscapes,* p. 22.

25 Ibid., p. 6.

26 Ibid., p. 13; see also Manning, *Always More Than One*. Manning's concept of relational movement is, in my view, a culturally cultivated means of perceiving movement, other dancers and things. It is in-

One *Duo* dancer to whom I described the concept of bodies in relational movement (as best I could) wrinkled her eyebrows and responded that *her* body was *hers*. She found *Duo* was *personal*, not defined by a relation that backgrounded the personal or made her body less her own. She added that dance students need to learn how to use *their* bodies and love their bodies, because that was what they would work with over their entire career and life.27 But she also explained that *Duo* happened because of something that only her partner could 'do' to her, something that was brought out through their relationship—something through their bodies yet also beyond them. The agency they took in dancing was not control of one's flesh or another's flesh. Rather, it was a sort of merging and affecting and relating with the other. *Duo* is, I would tentatively suggest, both a choreography *produced by* persons and a choreography produc*ing* personhood—in the sense of a nexus of practices that organize and constitute dancing subjects, through making the intersubjective differently cared for than was common within their lived histories as western dancers. Because of the element of partnership, *Duo* relationships were also more intimate and co-dependent than in the other relational group works by Forsythe for his ensemble.

In *Relationscapes* (2009), Manning draws upon many examples of dance and art, including her own practice as a tango dancer, to illuminate relational movement. I wish to examine these to further appraise *Duo* dancers' description of partnering. Manning, who can both lead and follow in the tango writes: "I move not you but the interval out of which our movement emerges. We move time relationally as we create space: we move space as we create time."28 Rather than viewing a tango duet as the movement of two people who manipulate each other's bodies, Manning senses in tango a creative engagement in space and time in which a "we" emerges. This we moves without concern for their external image or form—foregrounding decision through experience. They improvise together, feeling the potential based upon their shared experience of codes of the practice. They linger in the elasticity and pleasure of inventing movement.

Tango, unlike *Duo,* is a dance with touch and physical contact. It is also improvised, rather than based on a prescribed sequence. Yet the co-movement in tango bears similarities to the way that the *Duo* dancers attune to one another to connect from step to step. In both, synchronizing movement is important. Dance scholar André Lepecki,

teresting that Manning does not cite anthropological literature about personhood. Summarizing this literature, Fowler explores how personhood can operate other than the western concept of individuality (as personal uniqueness and the constant sense of being "unitary, totalized and indivisible"), for example within the realm of *dividuals* and *dividuality* (in which "the person is recognized as composite and multiply-authored"). Relational movement is a way of *dividuation* in which people "are composed of social relations with others to the degree that they owe parts of themselves to others." Both Fowler and Manning's writing seek to recognize "features of personhood undervalued in the west." See Fowler, *The Archaeology of Personhood*, pp. 7–9, pp. 11–22; citations p. 8, p. 21. Published after *Relationscapes*, Manning's *Always More Than One,*takes the problem of individuation more head-on, drawing extensively from Simondon, Deleuze, Guattari and Whitehead.

27 Importantly, not all *Duo* dancers were confused by my attempts to link *Duo* and Manning's philosophy of relational movement. Two informants were eager to discuss this. They had read parts of Erin Manning's text, *The Minor Gesture*, after I left a pile of books in the studio, curious to see which texts the dancers would choose to read, without instruction or pressure.

28 Manning, *Relationscapes,* p. 17.

drawing from his reading of Manning, calls the manner of moving without a prescribed leader and follower "leadingfollowing."29 This involves the dancers' cooperative attunement to one another and to time, sharing responsibility for the progress of the dance. When people dance in this way, Manning suggests that the "I" and "other" dissolve as individual subjects. The movement does not emerge from the leader and get communicated to the follower, but comes from the *betweenness* captured in her concept of the "interval." Manning specifies that while the interval is imperceptible in itself, it becomes perceptible in the actual step getting made. In tango, this might be the feeling of a step finishing or landing on the ground. Manning presents the interval as the linking that enables experience: "The interval is the metastable quality through which the relation is felt."30

With her concept of relational movement, Manning describes not one body moving another body, but sensing the relational unfolding between bodies in the movement—writing theory that draws strongly from Deleuze and Guattari, Whitehead and Bergson. Bodies become: "This becoming-body (connecting, always) becomes-toward, always with."31 Manning insists on examining movement as incipiency, rather than displacement towards a position, placing emphasis on the "preacceleration*"* of movement, rather than the ending.32 Becoming and changing, movement is always on the "verge of expression."33

Relational movement is movement with a highly generative virtual component. The virtual is felt as intensity burgeoning in movement—in which movement is creative. It is an intensity that is real. For Manning, it is typically ineffable because it is a process of gesture or expression coming to the fore, not finalizing.34 For Forsythe dancers experienced in improvisation and the negotiation of various procedures of planning movement as choreography, they become masters in feeling the different ways that relations unfold. These experienced dancers follow *becoming*, feeling movement rich with micro-tendencies that bring it in and out of the habitual.

The virtual component of movement is hard to identify (from the outside) through studying a photograph or a movement-still. It is perceived most easily in its felt effects—felt by the dancers and (I suggest) many spectators. As a dancer-scholar studying *Duo*, I attempted to learn about this sort of sensing in two ways: first, by dancing with the dancers and second, by taking a longitudinal view and observing how movement shifts with potential, from night to night, in the performances of *Duo* documented on archival video. This topographic view of the choreography shifting (see section 9.2), convinced me of the plasticity of this practice, in part because of coveting potential.

Not all movement is relational; nor is all relational movement dance. Without stressing the distinction, Manning clarifies that relational movement is different from cus-

29 Drawing from Manning, see Lepecki, "From Partaking to Initiating," p. 34.

30 Manning, *Relationscapes,* p. 17; see discussion pp. 16–19.

31 Ibid.*,* p. 17.

32 "Preacceleration: a movement of the not-yet that composes the more-than-one that is my body: Call it incipient action." Ibid.*,* p. 13.

33 Ibid.*,* p. 14.

34 Ibid., in particular p. 42.

tomary motions in daily life (such as office work, or walking, or cooking) in which one moves, without awareness, through habit. For Manning, relational movement is a sort of dance—a dance that does not emphasize form and position. When dance is relational movement, virtual components become active, affective factors. But, for Manning, not all choreographed movements are relational. In cases of reproduction of movement, she observes the relational qualities prove challenging: "Relation must be reinvented. To dance relationally is not to *represent* movement but to *create* it."35 When choreography engenders relational movement, that involves: "bringing to expression the patterning of incipient activity toward the definition of a movement event."36 Choreography for Manning is not an organization of bodies in space and time—as the knowing ahead and prescriptive disciplining of outcomes and rules—but the speculation and activism that dynamically fields incipient movement, potentializing action.

What is the experience of relational movement like? Tango dancers, embraced on the cusp between movement-making and perishing, may feel the potential of movement being made. They feel the "elasticity" of movement becoming. Manning writes: "To remain in the elasticity for as long as possible is the goal—but remaining on the edge of virtuality is a challenging task."37 Outside of the tango, she adds: "Even a simple walk can feel elastic when the movement carries us, when the goal is not the first thing on our mind." Manning concludes: "What relational movement can do is make this elasticity felt, actualize it in an almost-form that takes shape in its incipient deformation."38 *Duo* dancer Riley Watts had described *Duo* similarly as comprising stretching of time: an exploration "of moving together in its many permutations, performing the art of *elastic* temporal integrity."39 In *Duo*, elasticity is found in the choreography plastically shifting with the dancers' attunement. It stretches through the reverberation of residual response, the pliancy of breathing-movement, the feeling of being "Almost there!"40 Rhythms shift dynamically between sections as cues well up with intensity, as the dancers feel themselves coming and going in alignment. A dance of relation, in which the two partners invest extensive time to learn how to co-navigate the motion, *Duo* builds movement potential cooperatively.

When bodies are understood to be always in-process and movement regarded not as that which is produced by singular bodies but kinesthetically elicited through and between bodies, bodily-movement is more readily understood as a singular-plural process. Relational movement joins bodies in processes that are individual-collective. Indeed, singular bodies do linger; they are enduring, as the *Duo* dancers know. But with

35 Ibid.*,* p. 26 (italics in the original).

36 Manning, *Always More Than One*, p. 76.

37 Manning, *Relationscapes,* p. 37.

38 Ibid.*,* p. 41. Manning's use of the term "elasticity" to describe the pliancy of the moment, draws from Leibniz and Deleuze to express the curving potential of matter. Not intellectual, elasticity is a quality of relation not always expressed, but always possible. Manning places elasticity in the plane of the ineffable—the plane of coming to articulation, gesturing, being in movement—the plane of emergent modes of meaning. She writes: "Moving the relation is a striving toward the ineffable experience of the elasticity of the almost." Ibid., p. 42.

39 Riley Watts cited in Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*," p. 8, emphasis mine.

40 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, June 28, 2018.

the concept of relational movement, Manning wishes to point out a collectivity that is different from the western norm. She writes: "When articulation becomes collective, a politics is made palpable whereby what is produced is the potential for divergent series of movements."41 This focus on movement, not as a representational medium but rather as a creative one, suggests for Manning its political force. Relational movement creates potential for change. It is experienced through collective attunement to this potentiality, feeling the edges—the elasticity—of movement invention.

In her entire oeuvre, Manning writes critically about identity politics and theories that stake the individual as sacrosanct.42 Manning shares with practice scholars the view that the human body is a central locus of politics, and that acts are complexly shared socially and constituted historically. Her theories acknowledge that movement composes through the finite variation of what has been, through historicized becoming. Manning's expansive writing desists from locating or bounding the singular body, "de-centering the subject" like many practice theorists.43 Without prioritizing the human or theorizing identity, form or social order, Manning's theories however differ from Bourdieu's emphasis on positioning, limitations and competition, and the scarcity of values defined as forms of capital; instead Manning emphasizes movement, relation and creative surplus. Her theories also do not juxtapose with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, foregrounding the force of norms and the processes of iterative rehearsal, where change occurs through "a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style." 44 Instead of iteration and foregrounding the power of speech acts, Manning examines process and the diverse kinesthetic-sensory modes of coming to articulation. While concerned with the disciplinary and the discursive, Manning's writing is less a critique and analysis of power than an activist advocacy for new powers (celebrating the autist, the artist, the animal, etc.).

Manning's emphasis on process and relational movement makes creativity one of the central issues of her philosophy. This is what I will take forward in part III, when

43 Translation by the author. Reckwitz cited in Kleinschmidt, *Artistic Research als Wissensgefüge*, p. 96.

41 Manning, *Relationscapes,* p. 27.

42 See in particular ibid., pp. 10–11, p. 27; cf. Manning, *Always More Than One*. Through her fluid concept of the body and its obfuscation of subject-object constructs, Manning writes identity into a process at odds with relational movement. Identity's temporality is fleeting and ephemeral, like movement. If anything, identity is a process of collective becoming, as "concrescence" (Whitehead) and "infra-individuation." Manning, *Relationscapes,* pp. 22–28.

44 See Butler, "Performative Acts and Gendered Constitution," p. 524. In her introduction to *Bodies That Matter*, she writes: "It is not a simple fact or static condition of the body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never really complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law." Butler, *Bodies That Matter*, p. xii. A closer account of these similarities is beyond my scope here. This could involve the discussion of practice and performance theory in Klein and Göbel, *Performance und Praxis* and then bridge to close readings from Bourdieu, *Outline of a Theory of Practice;* Butler, *Performative Acts and Gendered Constitution*; Butler, *Bodies That Matter;* Foucault, *The Subject and Power.*

I examine *creation* in *Duo*. The sphere of politics for Manning is relational—that is, ontogenetic and creative, through bringing diverse people into contact. It is this sense of relationality as political and creative that I believe is insightful for understanding *Duo:* a concept of togetherness based on mutual negotiation of the virtual. *Duo* dancers submit themselves to a relational *togethering* that lets them feel power as a sort of creative potential in becoming rather than as discipline. They find a manner of thinking through their bodies together, which not only is limited to their bodies but to their connection to the presence of the audience. This almost superhuman *togethering* is a peaceful and sensitive alternative, a fluid substitute to the styles of subjectivity that were learned in their competitive dance training. For Manning: "This is what dance makes clear: it is not the displacement as such that makes the difference, but the quality of becoming of the micromovements and microperceptions that pass through not just the composing body but also the vibrating space of thought."45 In the next chapter, I will turn to these micromovements and microperceptions concretely, offering another term for *Duo* dancers' *relational movement.*

\*\*\*

Chapter 7 has explored *Duo*'s movement with regard to the concepts of *material* and *relation*. Section 7.1 analyzed my fieldwork activities in view of the dancers' special materialism, in which movement material is produced by bodily exchange, as well as through concepts, representations and medial capture. This has informed us about the way *Duo* dancers understand *how* they work with movement, in a teleological activity of making and performing choreography. Movement is illustrated to be mutable, sharable, teachable, transmittable, edit-able, improvable, even lose-able.There is a "bundle" of practices associated with it.46 Rather than epitomizing the ephemeral presence of movement, I have argued that looking across the array of movement-oriented activities helps us to better understand the relevance of movement as a constructive potential for human subjects.

Section 7.2 has considered the growing literature concerning relationality written by dance scholars, engaging in close reading of artist-philosopher Erin Manning's writing on *relational movement*. By observing the convergences between Manning's theory and the dancers' experience of relation, and problematizing divergences, I critically explored the experiences (plural) of identity and subjectivity brought out in *Duo*. I also addressed a paradox: that the dancers were both western individuals experiencing their unique body and pairs relationally constituted. Overall, im/materiality and relationality are demonstrated to be entwining aspects of the reality of *Duo*.

45 Manning, *Always More Than One*, p. 15.

46 Schatzki, *The Site of the Social*, p. 71.

### **Chapter 8: Entrainment**

The "dissonance, the dephasing, the complementarity of the between" is made palpable during an exercise at a workshop for dance scholars with *Duo* dancer Allison Brown.1 I have invited Brown to teach us something from her practice of *Duo*, something without virtuosic movement so that my fellow scholars can join in. Brown asks us to find a partner. She gives the small group of dancers and scholars the task: "You go, I go, we go." Without music, she asks us to improvise movement together accordingly, while moving from one side of the room to another. She lets us negotiate the transitions, some speaking, others sensing.2

The instructions render aspects of dancing William Forsythe's duet *Duo* palpable to those outside it and inexperienced in moving with others. True to the experience conveyed by Brown's assignment, *Duo* is a choreography that foregrounds the interplay of commitment to synchrony—not of timing mandated by an outside force but timing negotiated between people. In an interview with me, Brown described her memories of dancing *Duo* onstage as a continual interactional stream: "meeting, arising and coming to each other and being in unison and being out of unison, in aligning and dis-aligning but staying together, and this seeing each other with other senses and other body parts than the eyes."3 This process of sensing betweenness and passing in and out of phase is the focus of this chapter, which explores how this practice is cultivated and asks how it produces subjects in relation. The concept given to name and explore this is *entrainment*: "the process that occurs when two or more people become engaged in each other's rhythms, when they synchronize."4

1 Manning, *The Minor Gesture*, p. 61.

2 Allison Brown, workshop at the *Dancing Together* conference at the University of Bern, October 25, 2018.

3 Allison Brown, studio session dancing in Frankfurt, September 23, 2016.

4 William Condon, referenced in Hall, *The Dance of Life*, p. 177; see also Spier, "Engendering and Composing Movement," pp. 142–43. Most dance and music are forms of entrainment. Entrainment may also feature in spectators' expectations of dance and lead to frustration when this is not met. For a discussion of the reception of *Jérôme Bel* (1995), see Lepecki, *Exhausting Dance*, p. 2.

Steven Spier has named *entrainment* as one of four factors important to Forsythe's work: "counterpoint, proprioception, entrainment, and authenticity."5 For Forsythe, proprioception is about experiencing oneself, whereas entrainment is about experiencing relation, a sort of empathetic kinesis of one's own and another's body. My aim in this chapter is to analyze my fieldwork studies for accounts of entrainment and to use these to reflect on how dancers experience time and order in choreographic process.

#### **8.1 Synchronizing the First Step of** *Duo*

The first movement of *Duo*, the movement called *showerhead*, is a delicate threshold in which synchronization takes place. The dancers begin the piece by performing this movement in unison. To do so, in the shift from backstage to onstage, the dancers increase their sensitivity to their bodies, time and their awareness of one another. They rely on their "spidey sense," dancer Jill Johnson joked with me, referring to the superhero Spider-Man's endurance, agility and the power to sense incoming motion and react before his body comes in harm's way. Another term for this, Johnson proposes, is *entrainment*, which she describes as a rhythmical acuity, based on longstanding practice, interaction and care.6

During the minutes before *Duo* begins, the dancers are separated backstage in the wings, waiting on either side of the stage.7 After the first piece on the program, the dancers would receive a signal from the stage manager, waving her flashlight to tell them to enter the stage and start. In the blackout, they would walk quietly through the darkness onstage to their starting position. Then the stage manager would cue the technicians to turn the fluorescent stage lights on. Cut: the lights come up and the audience sees the two dancers standing at the front of an empty stage, their arms resting at their sides. The women wait, with neutral expressions, focusing straight ahead. They listen. Since they face the same oblique angle and are separated by more than half the width of the stage, they cannot see each other's faces. They have to rely on other senses than their eyes in order to start the first movement together. After a consequent pause they inhale and begin the motion *showerhead*.

*Duo* starts by tuning into the virtual: the potential to synchronize, the process of *entrainment*. Listening, the sound of the dancers' mutual inhale pulls them into action. Aside from this little breath, there is no external musical cue to start.They entrain to one another, while also tuning into the audience: waiting for the audience to adjust to the new lighting conditions and become hushed. *Duo* dancer Allison Brown remembered this vividly:

[I remember] going out on stage in the dark. Trying to find your glow-in-the-dark mark on the floor and hoping that it's good, that we're in good alignment and we're ready. And the audience taking us in and us taking the audience in and this first moment,

5 Spier, "Engendering and Composing Movement," p. 135.

6 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, October 21, 2016.

7 I speak here of the Ballett Frankfurt version of *Duo* (1996–2004), not *DUO2015*.

standing naked there basically. And yeah, I remember the whole thing actually, in lots of different places, and lots of different times, and in lots of different bodies.8

Bodies on the move and changing, fragile to others through their visibility. Brown gets in a rhythmic narrative groove remembering the multiplicity of enacting *Duo*, nakedly, across bodies and time.

Movement complicates the triad of volition, intentionality and agency, writes philosopher and dancer Erin Manning. She proposes: "experience cannot be reduced to individual volition. It is collective—ecological—at its very core."9 *Showerheading* demonstrates that the dancers' sensitivity to the audience was enacted through their first decision: when and how to start moving. How was this decision made and by whom? Studying different video records of this history of beginnings, I watch variations: more or less synchronous starting movements, bigger and smaller stages, more or less light, quieter versus more animated audiences. In my interviews with the dancers, I learn that some pairs planned which dancer would initiate. Others did not designate a leader; instead the togetherness was intuitively mutual. Some told of an unspoken hierarchy of letting the more experienced dancer take initiative, and the insecurity involved in working to get things right. In just a few seconds, in a moment of pregnant anticipation, togetherness was already at issue.

#### 8.1.1 Stretching Moments

The audience's attention *precipitates* the dancers' delicate motion. The dancers' testimony, such as Johnson's below, illustrates that even when one dancer was designated to start, the process was collective and ecological (that is, tuning into the space of performing and the signs of the audience's mutual attention). Drawing upon the terminology of performance scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, *Duo* dancers sense the audience as a resonator of attention, as "co-presence." The spectators' sounds and motions provide a "feedback loop" to the envelope of interaction on stage.10 In *Duo*, these reactions are amplified because the environment is so quiet. Like the tiny sounds in the middle of the night, the audience's little shifts in their chairs and vocalizations (sniffs, coughs, whispers with a neighbor) are very audible.11 Though the spectators do not share the longstanding history of the co-performers in *Duo*, they may still become caught up in the time-making sensitivity and the intensity of motion anticipation, entraining with them. They may participate, with their breath, their focus, and attention. They might also decide to participate *differently* than the artists. Catcalls, the dancers remember, also occurred, voicing male spectators' response to women in "diaphanous" costumes,

8 Allison Brown, interview with the author, Frankfurt, September 23, 2016.

9 Manning, *The Minor Gesture*, p.117.

10 Fischer-Lichte provides a historic overview of how these practices of participation have shifted in western theater, from the deliberate suppression of spectators' response in the late 18th and 19th century, to experiments in the early 20th century seeking to organize and compose this "feedback loop." See Fischer-Lichte,*The Transformative Power of Performance,* in particular pp. 38–41.

11 Music scholar Ian Biddle's study of tiny sounds shows that they are a rich and politically strong realm of affectation. See Biddle, "Quiet Sounds and Intimate Listening," in particular pp. 206–7.

#### 174 Processing Choreography

showing much of their bodies, including their breasts.12 This was part of the risk each night and the dancers' vulnerability. The attunement of entrainment made this tangible from the first second of the dance. Entrainment as the tuning into the emergence of organization in time.

#### "I gave that cue." Videoconference interview with *Duo* Dancer Jill Johnson, June 28, 2018.

LIZ: When you are on stage and about to begin motion. Was there a cue for that?

JILL: I gave that cue. And it was to spend some real time—in other words, not choreographed time, not the two of us getting to our first places and waiting for two [musical] eights, before we started. It was … we waited for the audience: for the two of us to settle and kind of feel each other. But also, there was always a response from the audience, in part because we were so close to them, and they weren't necessarily expecting that. There was always a bit of like (*she vocalizes, similar to a sigh*) "ahm." In Frankfurt, with our home audience, they were like "oh, ok." And it settled pretty quickly. In Orange County [Los Angeles, a tour in 2003] for example, where we were (*pause*) restricted because there was quote "nudity"—it was a conservative bubble … there was all kind of (*she vocalizes*) "flaahflahflahhh" and we had a heckler, you know? So it varied, with where we were. But a time when we could really feel that it settled. And then a borderline, not pushing the audience, but let's see how far we can (*pause*) have this moment be … just being with each other (*she inhales, starting showerhead*) and then start. […] You would feel the audience finally in real time settle, and then you take a real long second or five and then start.

*Duo* dancer Jill Johnson's stunningly detailed reflection upon cueing the start of *Duo* shows how pregnant one moment can be. Like a conductor, Johnson describes her role modulating communal attention. The process involves acuity in listening to the audience's settling, and then an extra nudge—a trust in prolonging that time. Johnson's perception illustrates that time is in this way "real" and shared at the beginning, in search of a sort of "being."13 Her mastery of negotiating time intimately, through detailed somatic attention, shows the way that time in *Duo* is much more than just skill or discipline. Rather, it is a way of negotiating expectations and intimacies of sharing time with the audience and then modulating these intensities and qualities. Johnson also describes how this varies on tour, suggesting it is based to some degree on shared experience and history. The "home" audience of Frankfurt could more quickly settle

12 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, October 21, 2016. Allison Brown, video elicitation in Frankfurt, September 23, 2016. Johnson reflected further: "To my mind, a see-through, black, fine-mesh top is different than being bare-breasted. It could be said that the issue at hand here is that the diaphanous costumes which showed much of our bodies (including breasts, torso, arms and legs) were often seen through a sexist focus on breasts and the shock/offense/sexualization of women's breasts." Johnson, email to the author, September 14, 2020.

13 Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, June 28, 2018.

with them; conversely, it was more difficult when the audience became uncomfortable because of their closeness and nakedness.

Some dancers found the first moments of *Duo* challenging: the neon lights were harsh and at times one's heart was fluttering in anticipation of performance.14 The bare costume might make one feel vulnerable. Also, one is very far away from one's partner (over ten meters), a separation at odds with the intimacy of the piece. In his first few performances dancing*Duo*,Watts—who inherited Johnson's role and took responsibility for initiating the first cue—focused more on his partner than the audience. He explains his approach:

I know Brigel [Gjoka, my partner] is listening to my cue, and from a distance I have to feel that he is ready to begin. It is our job to imagine the connection between us, and sometimes I would imagine a phantom limb connecting us between our shoulders. I try to imagine, what does [he] feel like right now? What does his body look like? Can I feel what his body feels like? Only when I feel that we are sufficiently connected do I audibly exhale and begin the first movement.15

In our interviews, Watts used the terms entrainment, connection and rhythmic connection interchangeably. Once he spoke about "telepathy"—entrainment as the "superpower" to communicate at a distance, as if they could read what one another were thinking, another term for Johnson's "spidey sense."16

While Watts learned the Ballett Frankfurt version of *Duo*, which begins by synchronizing *showerhead*, the version of *Duo* that the dancers toured extensively (*DUO201*5) was modified with a new beginning. Instead of starting *showerhead* together out of silence and stillness, they began by building connection through an open improvisation.17 The curtain rose in the middle of this process, showing the dancers already moving without music. Though their improvisation varied from performance to performance, they generally moved with light gestures, predominantly of the upper body and arms. They performed side-to-side, sometimes while walking or shifting place—playing with similar rhythmical movements of their arms, precise directions of gaze (on 'my' body, on 'your' body, in the space forward, below, up and back), as if grooving together on common themes and sharing some common music. This window of improvisation progressed for a few minutes until a commonly designated alignment, precipitating unison. The game, a way into the material through their rhythmical connection in play, was also a practice of *entrainment*.

In my conversations with the *Duo* dancers I asked: What enabled them to entrain? When did their synchronization begin? And what supported or harmed it? Jill Johnson

14 Regina van Berkel, interview with the author, Frankfurt, April 22, 2017.

15 Riley Watts, videoconference interview with the author and Bettina Bläsing, January 14, 2014.

16 Riley Watts, interview with the author, Bologna, October 25, 2017. Jill Johnson, videoconference interview with the author, October 21, 2016.

17 This is described in the opening passage of my Introduction. By open improvisation I mean an improvisation without a defined task. Forsythe initially asked the dancers to mark the movement, meaning to perform the movement at a smaller scale, with less force and energy. While Forsythe occasionally gives open improvisations to his dancers, in my experience as a dancer, the majority were task or proposal based.

explained to me that, in her view, the opening movement in *showerhead* was not the start of entrainment. Rather: "The entire trajectory of the piece [*Duo*] stems from the intimacy and entrainment between the dancers from preparations prior to the piece, to the moment we would walk on stage in the dark, dance the piece together and even beyond the bows and finishing the piece."18 What this suggests is that the entrainment of movement is based on more longstanding shared experiences—histories of practice and shared understanding.

#### **8.2 The Scientific Discourse of Entrainment**

Entrainment in music frequently involves play, groove and pleasure—although few musicians use the scientific term of entrainment. Musicologist and jazz scholar Charles Keil writes of musicians: "We use this word/concept 'groove' because it is used in common parlance to name the broad range of phenomena we want to understand well enough to foster. 'Entrainment' is a technical term from physics favored by some ethnomusicologists who may be uncomfortable using African American slang, but why burden an organic life process with a physical mechanical model?"19

The gap between the theory and practice of human entrainment is a large one. The phenomenon is studied across a wide range of fields, reflecting a history of the concept migrating from physics to the biological sciences, systems theory and most recently sociology and ethnomusicology.20 Entrainment has come to name the phenomenon whereby independent, coupled rhythmical oscillators interact and stabilize—producing synchronized or rhythmically related activity.21 Beyond the groove of jazz musicians or dancers, entrainment is taking place, for example, when humans synchronize their biological clocks to day and night, when fireflies blink simultaneously and cicadas pulsate rhythmically; even, intriguingly, when pendulums, hanging from a common beam, synchronize their swing.22 The common element here is order and organization, perceived by a human.23 Entrainment is not one common mechanism, especially one occurring

18 Jill Johnson, email to the author, June 28, 2017.

19 Keil, "Defining 'Groove'," p. 1.

20 Reviewing this literature across disciplines, including the limited literature on entrainment in dance, see my writing in Waterhouse, "In-Sync." The verb 'to entrain,' from the French *entrainer* (16th century), means to drag away from oneself, or to draw as an accompaniment or consequence. In the late 19th century, the word was used colloquially to describe entering a railway train. Source: *The Oxford English Dictionary of English Etymology*, p. 317 and *The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary*, p. 303. Today, in contemporary French, the word *entrainment* means to train oneself, such as the movements that one might perform in the gym.

21 The first recorded observation of this phenomenon is traced to Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), who described this in a letter to the Royal Society of London (1665) as the "odd kind of sympathy" between two pendulums suspended on the same beam. Huygens, cited in Czolczynski et al., "Huygens' odd sympathy experiment revisited," p. 1.

22 Clayton, "What Is Entrainment?," p. 49.

23 Massumi and Manning consider a spectrum of experience between entrainment and entertainment, advocating respect for neurodiversity. They associate entrainment with Whitehead's "causal efficacy" noting how neurotypical western persons can target affordances and punctually use,

ideally in humans; rather, it designates a suite of things that humans find similar across biological and mechanical systems: when coupled systems appear to sync up.24 It is a term that we use to name what we describe as "coordinated rhythmic movement."25

Occasionally, experimental research into human entrainment has disregarded factors of history and culture—identifying the social as just what passes between people, as lacking its complexity of formation, context and material. Frequently this coincides with valiant though constraining empirical methodology, intended to measure events of synchronization for the purpose of refining a hypothesis. By contrast, within the pioneering work in ethnomusicology, the term has helped to differentiate approaches to timing in music across genres and cultures.26 Some of this work has been notably interdisciplinary,27 overcoming the tendency to think about sociality and bodies as rhythmic signals and receivers, involving power plays of *Zeitgeber* (time-givers) controlling timeperceivers.

My fieldwork examining *Duo* has taught me that entrainment, as distinct from the apparent perfection of being co-timed, is a thick maelstrom of living bodies—bodies that are processual, with ambiguities of inside and outside, and betweenness—all aspects central in dance science and the humanities. Thus, rather than trying to further enter and build upon the entrainment literature, as I attempted in previous publications,28 in this chapter I venture a fresh approach, studying entrainment inductively by investigating the dancers' testimonies. In doing so, I think of entrainment as "an ecology of practices," to borrow a concept from philosopher Isabelle Stengers. This implies:

mount and speak. Entertainment they understand through Whitehead's "presentational immediacy" which is relational in its inframodal dreaming:"the relational quality of a welling environment that dynamically appears in a jointness of experience." Manning and Massumi, "Coming Alive in a World of Texture," pp. 7–8; see also ibid., footnote 12 pp. 155–56. My understanding of entrainment in *Duo* considers it as a fusion of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, so that relational components come to the fore.

24 Clayton specifies that entrainment is a process in which independent rhythmical systems interact and stabilize. Their interaction occurs through coupling (i.e., a material connection or perception causing a feedback loop). When entrained systems are perturbed they return to rhythmical relation. The mathematics of systems theory models this definition. Clayton, "What Is Entrainment?," p. 49.

25 Phillips-Silver et al., "The Ecology of Entrainment," p. 3.

26 See Clayton et al., "In Time with the Music."

27 Wonderful examples using blended methodology are: Doffman's study of jazz musicians' experience of groove, hybridizing ethnographic and psychologically informed empiricism; Clayton's critical exploration of scientific methods of timing measurement and ethnography; Hahn and Jordan's research, which also blends ethnographic methods and cognitive neuroscience to propose a multi-scale view of entrainment within Japanese dance pedagogy; lastly Ancona and Waller's ethnographic study of software teams' working activities as a dance of rhythmical enmeshment to shifting pacers of different sorts. See Doffman, *Feeling the Groove*; Clayton, "Entrainment, Ethnography and Musical Interaction"; Hahn and Jordan, "Anticipation and Embodied Knowledge"; and Ancona and Waller, "The Dance of Entrainment."

28 Waterhouse, "In-Sync"; Waterhouse, "Entrainment und das zeitgenössische Ballett von William Forsythe"; Waterhouse et al., "Doing *Duo*."

[…] the demand that no practice be defined as 'like any other', just as no living species is like any other. Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is, feeling its borders, experimenting with the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing insulting questions that would lead them to mobilise and transform the border into a defence against their outside.29

To explore these layers, I now clarify how the *Duo* dancers' practice of entrainment is situated in the ecology of the dancers' activities and histories with ballet.

### **8.3 The Conventions of Entrainment in Ballet**

In the studio, western dancers use the term *unison* to describe dancing the same movements at the same time, usually to music supporting that synchrony.30 Ballet dancers regularly perform in unison while facing the same direction, at times with symmetric variations (as a group, some dancers facing right and some to the left, etc.); they strive for exactness in this practice, which is achieved through rehearsal and is supported by listening to the music.

Ballet dancers master dancing in unison. Balletic unison is part of the performance aesthetic, featuring spatial formations of dancers performing as one body, as well as a pedagogical strategy lingering in the daily technique of training (that is, exercises perfected all together in groups). The spatial patterns of dancers in ballet choreographies are derived from European court dances. The co-joining of bodies in harmonious movements and symmetric formations was later named the *corps de ballet*, literally the body of the ballet, like the *corps d'armée* (from the 16th century). As a dance form produced through the body-politic of French king Louis XIV, his staging of ballets required the participation of his court. To rectify the imperfections of courtiers and gain control over competition, in 1662 Louis XIV established a Royal Academy of Dancing. Dance scholar Mark Franko describes this as when ballet was established a "discipline," what Michel Foucault defines as methods making "possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility."31 Not only did the institution, according to Franko, "strike at unwanted or offensive movement potentials," but through the schooling of ballet, dancers formed themselves into useful, masterful and obedient movers.32 Ballet was thereby linked with the power to rule, and the power to define what was proper and improper—and to make this visible in performance. Aesthetic perfection and discipline were entwined. Synchronization *subjected* bodies.

29 Stengers, "Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices," p. 184.

30 The word presumably has been adapted from the field of music, with origins in the Middle French *unisson* (16th century) or Medieval Latin *unisonus*: "of the same sound as something else." *The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary*, p. 75.

31 Franko, "Archaeological Choreographic Practices," p. 98; Foucault, *Discipline and Punish*, p. 137; see also Franko, *Dance as Text,* pp. 108–12.

32 Franko, *Dance as Text*, p. 111.

Over 300 years later, one might question the extent to which such history is relevant to dancers in *Duo*—how it comes to be passed down, in techniques of training and performance, now distant from their historic origins. It is my thesis that the heritage of balletic synchronicity and its alignment with discipline and the hierarchy of imperial rule remained important, both to the aesthetic appearance of synchronization in Forsythe's choreographies, and the dancers' real lives in this work. To develop my argument, I will now consider an example: the well-known ballet *Swan Lake*.

#### 8.3.1 Entrainment in *Swan Lake*

Classical ballets manifest virtuosic patterns of coordinated grace, inspiring what William Forsythe has called, "the joy of the evident."33 The quintessential example of *Swan Lake* is a staple of ballet companies internationally.34 Performing this ballet involves contributions from dancers partitioned by rank—the *corps de ballet* dancing mostly in unison and the stars shown as individuals and partners. The female *corps de ballet* of the swans has become integral to the aesthetic look and training of ballet, in which female dancers wear identical white tutus and perform movements in unison—also holding long poses. All the dancers entrain to the music, their movement a visual manifestation of the rhythmic patterns it contains. The protagonists of the ballet, Princess Odette (transformed into a swan) and Prince Siegfried who falls in love with her, frequently stand out in relief against this mobile landscape of women—a constellation that echoes and frames the soloists' action. They also explore their partnership, dancing the *pas de deux*. Touching one another, the man assists the women to bend, float and rise off the ground.35 The female villain, a black swan Odile (performed by the same dancer who plays Odette), moves—unlike the harmony of the graceful swans—with dynamism, rhythm and vigor. Here the fable is quite clearly narrated through entrainment modes: defining casts of animals, persons and royalty, dynamics of male and female, and morals of good and evil. Intertwining cultural codes, beauty is constructed by entrainment of dance to music and a highly ordered cosmos of participants.

Contemporary European dance, including the work of Ballett Frankfurt, has taken issue with norms of dancers courteously synchronizing to choreography and music, staging many experiments with choreographic form and presentation. Across Forsythe's repertoire there is investigation of and through entrainment. Forsythe has taken the sensorimotor proclivities of dancers who have learned to entrain in their ballet education, together with the conventions of entrainment in classical ballet, and staged a new and critical range of synchronizing and de-synchronizing dynamics. These become a compositional field: entrainment varies in scale (within the one body,

33 Forsythe speaking in Figgis, *Just Dancing Around*, 10:55–11:05.

34 With choreography usually referring back to the imperial version of 1885, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanovich Ivanov, which was performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

35 A short synopsis of this "sexual division of labor," which Novack rightly categorizes as guiding, supporting, carrying and manipulating the women, is found in Novack, *Sharing the Dance*, pp. 125–32; citation p. 128.

dyadic, group or between groups), rhythmic complexity (unison rhythms versus hierarchical or polyrhythmic relations, symmetric versus asymmetric), synchronizing mediums (sound, light, movement), and ranges from planned to improvised.36 I agree with dance scholar Heidi Gilpin: "Rather than retrieving and reproducing classical balletic forms that are fixed entries in the roster of movement, Forsythe bursts open these forms so that previously hidden moments in balletic movements are made plainly visible. In doing so, not only are movement and form given a new life and a new set of possibilities, but so is ballet in general."37

#### 8.3.2 Individualization in the Hierarchy of Ballet

Ballett Frankfurt's repertoire explored a range, or ecology, of synchronizing and desynchronizing. This involved many links of cooperation: relations between dancers, between dancers and musicians, between the dancers and moving elements of the set, between dancers and changing lights, and between all of these and the audience. The dancers entrained through touching, listening, watching, breathing-sounding, speaking and moving rhythmically. Entrainment congealed alignments between movement, light, material and sound—producing "relationscapes" of emergent experience.38 The entire team working on the performance had to synchronize their efforts to modulate light, sound and space *together*.The audience attuned to this vacillating field of emergent organization, perceiving rhythmically, expectantly with the unfolding performance.

Entrainment in these works is an aesthetic *process*—not only producing artistic works but a manner of being artful and explorative, with unusual bundles of perception, signs, communication and sense. Entrainment *may* be beautiful; but such tastes are complex and culturally constructed, based upon much common understanding about their meaning. What the scientific literature has largely missed is how entrainment is a spectrum of manifestations of force and power. Forsythe's choreographies recognize and stage this critically.

Working with harmony and causing chaos, Forsythe has been accused of ruining or critiquing the norms of classical ballet—including the notion that pleasing harmony or synchrony is beautiful and good and should thus be visible, whereas chaos and irregularity are vulgar and should be hidden.39 The Ballett Frankfurt's work also decentered ballet, from the symmetry and axis of organization controlled by one person, to or-

36 For further exploration of this argument via a consideration of dancers' experiences of entrainment in Forsythe's choreographies *Artifact* and *Eidos:Telos*, see Waterhouse, "Entrainment und das zeitgenössische Ballett von William Forsythe," pp. 199–200. On these categories of entrainment, see Clayton, "What Is Entrainment?," pp. 50–52; Phillips-Silver and Keller, "Searching for Roots of Entrainment and Joint Action in Early Music Interactions*,"* p. 3; see also Waterhouse, "In-Sync," pp. 66–67.

37 Gilpin, "Aberrations of Gravity," p. 122.

38 I take the term "relationscapes" from Erin Manning, which she uses when exploring various ways that movement, material, sensation, thought and dreaming enmesh. See Manning, *Relationscapes*, pp. 153–83.

39 Cf. Nugent, "Seeking Order and Finding Chaos in the Choreography of William Forsythe."

ganization produced with many personal and spatial centers, through collaboration.40 By doing this, Forsythe's team explicitly critiqued the hierarchical framework of the classical ballet ensemble and the entire promotion system framed around de-synchronization in the form of soloist parts. In contrast, their work revealed dancers in complex constellations of interaction, and often in mutual partnerships, as in *Duo*. Forsythe has described the last decade of his projects as work that "tries to make the audience aware of its own attention."41 Instead of entertainment, as the "the joy of the evident,"42 the audience is included or provoked into the process of deciphering: what is going on here? In this way, Forsythe's choreographies reinvent their own heritage, exploring the potential of entrainment as *relation*.