Sinha Dance: the 'Performed' Reality of a 'Lived' Reality.

Benches. (1996).

Sinha Dance definition :

contemporary dance (mov'mt of torso, hips, leg, jumps, turns.) +

and indian mantra ("articulations" of the wrists, fingers and arms) =

Sinha Dance.

Summary of Piece:

THE CHOREOGRAPHY:

This choreography is based on the 'lived' meeting of two strangers on a bench in a park.

THE PIECE:

The dancers translate the gestural movement of two strangers meeting in the park into 'performed' movement. The bench in this dance is the common denominator between the two strangers. The two strangers' movement through their bodies is their form of communication with each other. The bench is also used as an extension of their bodies, for communication with each other. The story of their communication with each other is translated through this Sinha dance.

"Benches" is a reality which phenomenologically translates the human gestures that exist as another reality. "Benches" is a performative reality - a fantastical manifestation of the inner attitudes embedded in the body, projected through the bodily movement of life.

The meeting of two strangers in a park is real. The performed translation of the strangers' movement, in the piece "Benches" is also real, but a different real. The bodily movement of the strangers meeting in the park is different then the bodily movement of the dancers in the piece "Benches", even though both the meeting and the piece are about the two stranger's communication with each other. This is obvious.

What is also obvious is the 'performative' bench in "Benches" is not aesthetically dramatized the way the movement is. The bench in "Benches" is only modified to enhance the bodily movement, therefore it takes on a dual purpose; that to enhance the bodily movement in a 'performative' reality, and that to act as a common denominator between the two strangers in the 'lived' reality. This tells me that the bench exists only by the nature of its reality. The bench is a responsive environment in both realities: the 'performed' reality and the 'lived' reality. It also tells me that the translation from the 'lived' reality to the 'performed' reality is one dominated by a body in movement requiring an adaptable environment. The translation from realities lives in the movement of the body, not in the body in its material self. In the translation of 'lived' to 'performed', movement is variable, body is constant. The indication of a different reality is the shift in movement of body. The movement of the body, is one of transformation. This means bodies exist, untransformed, in one reality to another. E.i. In the 'lived' reality, the woman pretentiously blinks at the man reading a book on the bench. In the 'performed' reality the woman throws her body across the man reading a book. In both realities, the bench's purpose is constant, still adaptable to circumstance. The woman's body is constant. The man's body is constant. What changes is the bodily movement, of the woman, of the man and of the bench.

Bodily Movement and Realities

The body existing in a reality is defined by its movement, variable in nature. This leads me to emphazing the importance of movement, especially in the search of understanding architecture. Bodily movement, transformative in nature, has the power to exist in and define different realities.

When in movement, the body traces space. Rudolf Laban calls these tracings space-forms. Space-forms, as immaterial things, constantly transform, with the transformation of movement. Movement has infinite variation, and because movement traces space, space-forms have infinite variation.

So, bodily movement is a language. A living form of communication. Words in a language are made sense through sentenses. Space-forms are the sentenses in the words of movement. Laban studies this language, just as a mathematician studies numbers, and a linguist studies words.

Space-Forms

What is needed to perceive space-forms, is a memory. One needs a way of consciously knowing the happening moment before this present happening moment.

This 'memory' as we call it is used to perceive a sequence of still frames as animation. The mind 'fills in the space' between each still frame. Phenomenologically (without consciously realizing it) we see the sequence of still frames as a continual stream of movement. This unconscious phenomenon is perception. One's perception communicates to the conscious that it sees movement.

Similarly, when the body moves, ones perception communicates to the conscious that it sees space-forms. Does this mean, out of time-based human perception, bodily movement can only be still frames? I think it means bodily movement coexists with time-based human perception and is therefore coexistent with time. Laban explains that movement is space; and space does not exist without time, or perception.

Movement is space.

I am still trying to understand this. To find space-forms in the thermal dance I fragmented the piece into still frames. I froze time; I extracted myself out of the time frame of movement and saw things from the outside, in order to understand things in the inside. In doing so, however, what happens to that space (movement by Laban's word) 'filled' in by perception when I see things in motion? In between each still frame, there is a perception-fill-space. These fill spaces mean something. I sees the fill spaces as they do based on all types of things.

I make the bench. The bench must be made in the nature of its reality. For a performative reality, the bench is not make to dramatize the first lived reality, but is make to act, in addition, a function for the 'performative' body.

I do not aesthetize the environment as a material body in itself. The purpose of architecture is to environment the moving body in, out and of it. Architecture is of body and body is of architecture. When there is a reality shift, the architecture may or may not remain the same in form. But inherently, as the moving body translates the reality, the reality will change, independant from its initial physical form , dependant, completely, on the bodily movement defining it.

The environment I make will inspire a type of bodily movement. The movement by nature will be a manifestion of instinct, and inner attitude formed within one, based on the weave of heritage of the corporeal body (city), history housed in the singular body (citizen), and my influence in the project. There will exist two realities framed by my made environment: the lived reality and the performed reality. The realities will exist as separate entities, but at times will coher to each other until the lived environment is performative of the performed, and the performed is performative on the living-performated.