Sonic System: An Exploration of Limits, Boundaries, and Constant-Gaps

Rather than definitively proclaim anything I think is true about embodiment, I propose possibilities and ask the reader to consider them.  The root of the word “consider” is considerare, from the Latin meaning “to be with the stars”.

 - Bonnie Gintis, D.O., Engaging The Movement of Life: Exploring Health & Embodiment Through Osteopathy & Continuum

Listening Two

It was 8:00 PM on a bustling autumn night in New York City. The rustling soundscape, punctured with sirens and shrill voices, rumbled along with the undertones of tireless subway cars and the shuffling of a million worn-down shoes. Brianna Dixon and I, eager to translate fleshy inklings, were scheduled to meet at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts. The school, nestled comfortably above the decadent Chelsea restaurants, faces levels of open windows framed with the aging statements of long-gone popular architecture filled with the sleepy faces of caffeine-less young Manhattanites.

New Yorkers value space. The cost variance from apartment to apartment, room to room, level to level, speaks for itself. Space is low in supply and high in demand.  Space often serves as a status symbol.  Brianna Dixon and I were meeting in a different sort of space, a space made to be reimagined, a space we could fill with sound, a space where we could be filled with sound.

She came into the space and tracked in the buzz.  She took off her coat and scarf.  It wasn’t until she unzipped her boots and tossed them playfully to the side that I realized it was her shoes that seemed to carry the New York rumble.   Utterly aglow she urged, ‘What are we working on today?!’ I plugged in my iPhone and pressed play. The space began to grow.  It seemed to fade into comfort; it seemed to soften. We spent that first rehearsal with our bodies on the smooth ground like twin fetuses snuggled against the nurturing wall. The wooden floor pumped with the bass of a foreign yet familiar, droning ambience. These pulsating, ominous sounds resonated in our tissue and wafted into the spaces in between.  ‘What are we listening to?’ she urged after time had passed.  I knew not how much time, only that it must have passed.

Unable to digest the experience we instinctively took a marker and wrote. We wrote down anything that bubbled up: phrases, theoretical rants, colors, emotions; then, we listened again. We sat in the space, together, trying to listen. Perhaps we were trying to listen better? Maybe we were trying to listen harder? We were not quite sure what we were listening for at the time.  Perhaps we were not quite sure what we were listening with as well. We were captivated by sound as inspiration and began our exploration of sound-inspired movement.

Listening To

The recordings we were (and still are) intently listening to were gleaned from the Center for Neuroacoutsic Research.  In 1988 this center in Carlsbad, California was founded by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, D.C. who calls himself, ‘The world’s premier sound healing researcher, brainwave entertainment expert, and high-tech personal transformational pioneer, motivator, futurist with the use of sound and holistic modalities’ (Thompson 2015). 

Dr. Thompson has developed programs and provided consultations for companies including Cisco, Nike, and Mattel to utilize sound as a tool to boost productivity.  He is certified in physiotherapy, chiropractic radiography, Chinese meridian therapy, applied kinesiology, craniopathy, sacro-occipital technique, chiropractic manipulative reflex technique, nutritional counseling, bio-magnetic therapy, color therapy, and acupuncture meridian identification.

Of all his many interesting accolades I am particularly intrigued in his work with NASA specifically centered around Voyager I and II. In 1977 NASA launched these space probes and requested Dr. Thompson’s participation in the capturing of the plasma wave recordings from the outer planets.  According to Dr. Thompson he was, ‘invited to research the possible meaning and application of the use of these NASA Space Sound Recordings from the planets in healing and their possible beneficial effects on the subconscious mind’ (Thompson 2015).  These recordings of Jupiter, Io (Jupiter’s moon), Saturn, Saturn’s rings, Uranus, Uranus’ rings, Miranda (Uranus’ smallest moon), Neptune, and Earth are created through careful recording of their ionospheres[1] when interacting with solar wind[2].  NASA has labeled this sort of sound ‘Ion Acoustic Waves’.  Although we cannot physically hear these sounds, due to vacuous nature of Space[3] and our physical inability to be in an adequate proximity to the celestial bodies that emit these sounds, the resonance of these ions is exactly within the range of human hearing (20 – 20,000 Hz). Dr. Thompson likens the sounds of these recordings to his previous set of recordings titled “Primordial Sounds” and, in his research, has found that these NASA Space Sounds incite deep relaxation.

Listening Gaze

Having an understanding about how the sound moves from the celestial bodies to NASA’s instruments and then NASA’s instruments to our fleshy bodies is monumentally important.  By specifically focusing on the tools we use we can start to see how tools define limits that create a hierarchy of important and unimportant information.

In Birth of a Clinic Michel Foucault considers the stethoscope as a tool that shaped and reflected the clinical gaze.  The stethoscope, Foucault states, delineates a “moral distance” from doctor to patient.  This distance creates a space within which we can superimpose a structure and structures of relationship between the systems that lie within the invisible; within the girth of form. These superimposed systems beneath the surface are pegged around and based upon the signals we choose to dedicate attention to outside the surface.  These glances are functions of consuming and projecting information. ‘The `glance'’, he states,’ has become a complex organization with a view to a spatial assignation of the invisible’(Foucault 1973: 203).   

Measurement

Measurement is an action we do to establish relationship. This relationship allows us to conceptualize a scale of a unit of measurement. Measurement helps us formulate an abstract picture and creates a reference point between something understood and something not understood. Measurement creates an imagined structure that provides the ability to create a range within which we can imagine together. Measurement does not provide accuracy.  Accuracy is a perfect expression of an imagined possibility.  An imagined measurement can never be perfectly expressed and a true measurement can never be perfectly imagined.  Accuracy is unattainable.

Though measurement is a powerfully communicative tool a complete reliance on measurement yields its own blind spots. The issue with our obsession with measurement lies in our misconception of accuracy.  Measurement creates limits through units and narrows down qualities into spectrums creating inclusion and exclusion. What is left out when limits are created is not insignificant unless we place more significance in those spectrums we chose to devote our attention towards. There is a morality attached with the limits created through measurements.

Further, measurement is its tool[4]. We craft relational objects: catalytic middlemen between spectrum and measurement.  Every tool that measures is a relational object, created to serve as a marker. If we do not have the tool to measure the spectrum then the quality-scale is exiled to abstractions and the imagination. Thus a hierarchy is created between that which we can measure and that which we cannot even if there is inherent importance in the immeasurable.

Quantum Physics: Constant(ly) Changing

Quantum physics reimagines the Newtonian view of the physical realm and forces scientists to reimagine methods of measurement and experimentation. Like Newtonian physics, Quantum physics also is based on verifiable and repeatable experiments. However, Quantum physicists have been challenged to question constants and methodology. One notable experiment, the Double-Slit Experiment, explored duality never before seen in Newtonian physics. In this experiment photons are shot through a surface that has two parallel, vertical slits. After being shot through the slits these particles hit a second surface behind the first leaving the evidence of impact. Scientists found that when the photons were measured they would react as a particle. The measured photons would hit the observing screen directly behind both slits creating a pattern on the impact surface that mimicked the slits in the first surface they were shot through. However, unmeasured photons reacted like a wave. These photons hit the observing screen in an unanticipated pattern. Instead of mimicking the double-slits the pattern mimicked a wave interference pattern[5]. When the experiment was done with electrons, molecules, or even larger structures the result was the same.

The Double-Slit Experiment demonstrates the inherent nature of particles as both (and, at the same time neither) wave and particle. Further, it showed that measured particles would react like a classically understood particle and unmeasured particles would react like a wave. Once the particle made contact with the surface of the observing screen it was experienced and, thus, measured. However, before impact it reacted as a wave of probability. In this experiment the abstract concept of probability was actualized.  Furthermore, measurement and observation fundamentally altered the way the particle participated in the experiment.  The state of a particle was once considered a constant.  Careful observation and measurement were once considered constants.  Now science must reconsider how to restructure these elements so that experiments will maintain repeatability. 

Understanding the mystery of duality is inherent in an understanding of Quantum physics. In Theory of Interacting Quantum Fields Alekseĭ Lukich Rebenko writes, ‘This description is based on the hypothesis of wave–particle duality according to which the fields and particles are not two different types of objects but should be regarded as two different types of description used for the investigation of the same physical object’ (Rebenko 2012: 1). Thus, the experienced nature of a particle can be either wave or particle but the inherent nature is a wave-particle duality[6]. A particle exists as both wave and particle but is experienced as one.

In What the #$*! Do We Know?!, a 2004 documentary directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vincente, many notable scientists speak about the implications of Quantum physics in religion, government, psychology, daily life, philosophy, and innumerable other realms. In one interview Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., American writer, psychiatrist, physicist, and psychoanalyst states, ‘Heisenberg himself, co-discoverer of quantum physics said atoms are not things, they're only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things you have to think of possibilities. They're all possibilities of consciousness. You now can see in numerous labs around the United States objects that are large enough to be seen by the naked eye and they are in two places simultaneously. You can actually take a photograph of that’ (Arntz 2004). Probability, in Quantum physics, becomes actualized instead of simply conceptualized. So actualized, in fact, that we have photographic evidence. Scientists have successfully photographed a single object in two places at one instant.

Further, Rebenko writes, ‘In the quantum mechanics, every particle is associated with a wave function’ (Rebenko 2012: 16). Thus, not only does the particle have an inherent identity (physical, chemical, volume, mass, etc.) but the corresponding wave also has an inherent identity that corresponds to a mathematical wave function. Plainly, the particle has its own qualities and the wave has its own qualities but both particle and wave are one and the same.

In Quantum Field Theory and Its Macroscopic Manifestations: Boson Condensation, Ordered Patterns, and Topological Defects the authors write, ‘…quantum field dynamics is not confined to the microscopic world … macroscopic properties, accounted for by the order parameter field, cannot be explained without recourse to the underlying quantum dynamics’ (Blasone 2011: ix). An object cannot be discounted as a classical Newtonian object anymore. Every object embodies particle-wave duality. Every object as inherently Quantum because it is comprised of particles with quantum properties and these properties continue to be true and present in the bare, observable level. So, even the larger structures built with these smaller particles carry the inherent quantum qualities of their smallest parts.

Science is struggling to find the right questions to ask next within the frame of the scientific method. Finding a way to ask a question about duality requires constants that are no longer innate. Conceding to observation as a variable, rather than a tried and true constant within the structure of the scientific method, becomes inherently difficult.

Continuum Movement

In our attempt to craft a dance that allows sound to choreograph movement Brianna Dixon and I instinctively turned towards Continuum Movement[7].

Brianna Dixon and I first encountered Continuum in Hofstra University’s undergraduate dance program.  Robin Becker, one of our modern dance teachers, would sometimes guide the class through a Continuum dive.  We were instantly entranced by the quality of movement and, years later when we took her course purely devoted to Continuum, developed an awe for the intelligence the body holds that we so often quiet.

Robin Becker, a vivacious woman who trained at the Martha Graham School and was a principle dancer for Eleo Pomare Dance Company, now pursues her passion as the Artistic Director of Robin Becker Dance a company that she founded in 1987.  Becker’s worked is informed by and is developed in conjunction with her exploration of Continuum. 

Robin Becker is lusciously embodied.  She states in her artistic statement, ‘In all aspects of my work as a choreographer, dancer, and teacher, I rely on the body as source for creativity and communication’ (Becker 2015).  Becker sees her work as born from within her body.  She likens her process to an unfolding of a seed rather than the ownership of auteurship.  Becker states, ‘I sense a new work arriving, and feel my way into its path of becoming’ (Becker 2015).

Robin Becker considers Continuum an essential part of her process.  She states, ‘Continuum offers a process using breath and sounding that initiates exploration of biologically based movement.  It synthesizes movement, science, aesthetics, and an inclusive world view’9.  Continuum offers her dancers a way to access the fluid substances that make up the body.  These fluid systems, like all fluid systems, communicate through immediate communication or resonance with other fluid systems.  Robin Becker asks her dancers to harvest an awareness and a sense of responsibility for the resonant field their systems create.  The access and awareness of these fluids, ‘enables us to ‘speak’ a dance language with more volume of ourselves and with more presence’9.

Continuum also offers an awareness of space as, ‘an active participant in the dance’9.  Robin Becker utilizes the space, both positive and negative, to create the form and position of the body rather than posing the body within an unaddressed space.  This structuring of space heightens the awareness of the participation of the audience within the space creating a performance that invites the viewers to, ‘enter into an experience on stage, instead of having a message ‘delivered’ to them by the performance’9.

Currently, Becker is leading her company through an explorative work that looks closely at the ramifications of the Vietnam War particularly focusing on They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss.  Thrilled at the prospect of his text turned movement he writes, ‘Like most authors, I’ve occasionally imagined my books as movies, or documentaries, or plays, but until Robin Becker came along I had never through of one being transformed into dance.  Of all my works, They Marched Into Sunlight, with its themes of struggle, dissent, bravery, and overwhelming loss, is best suited for this art form, and I am absolutely thrilled by the prospect of seeing what a choreographer with Robin’s insight and emotional power will do with it.  Dance is a universal language, which is also the language in which I tried to write this book’ (Maraniss 2015).

Robin Becker’s utilization of Continuum in her dance-making practice inspired Brianna Dixon and I to pursue the use of Continuum as a method of movement in Sonic System.

Emilie Conrad, the mother of Continuum Movement, developed the practice in the early 1960’s.  Continuum invites bodies to access their inherent fluidity and offers the body, through breath, attentiveness, and refined listening, an opportunity to express that fluidity. According to Bonnie Gintis, D.O., ‘Continuum … addresses our ability to change. Form follows function, and function alters form; they are interrelated throughout life, from the embryonic phase until death. We can always enter the realm of potential, the primordial state that allows us to cultivate the ability to fluently shift our context and thus promote Health’ (Gintis 2007: 2).  Continuum does not seek a repeatable structure of movement but invites the body to open to constant fluidity and change. 

Gintis goes on to say, ‘Vibration coupled with breath can change the focus of attention and can have a direct effect on many aspects of the body and its function’14. Herein lies one of the major appeals for utilizing Continuum in Sonic System.  Sound is vibration.  By opening Dixon’s body through Continuum perhaps we can hope to learn more about the sounds of these celestial bodies through the movement of Dixon’s body.

Continuum offers an embodied, involved, cyclical conversation between the dancer and space.  By filling the space with vibration we hope to evoke an undistracted call and response between the NASA space sounds and the soloist.

Emilie Conrad writes in Life on Land:

What I see as “body” is the movement of creative flux, waves of fertility.  The cosmic play that we carry into this atmosphere still intrinsically pulsates.  We can be seen as a fluid unfolding of an innate intelligence.  It is the same intelligence that is guiding the sperm and egg, the same intelligence that created the membrane of the first cell, the intelligence that moves galaxies and iguanas.  We inhabit a sea of intelligent life beckoning us to enter (Conrad-Da’oud 2007: 292).

Continuum sees the body as in constant flux and sees this flux as a playful folding and unfolding of an innate, prolific, vivacious intelligence.  This intelligence, Conrad writes, that resonates through all levels of life through not only composition[8] but through movement.

Crafting the Gaze

Foucault defines the gaze as ‘the act of seeing’ (Foucault 1973: x).  To begin to understand seeing we must understand what is seen. Seeing becomes a matter of translation between the qualities of that which is seen and the hierarchy of importance by which the information is gleaned and processed.  Though a body or object itself is made of infinities we can only comprehend and converse through specificities.  Thus, the wash of information becomes decipherable only through a way of seeing; a diligent, non-passive act. This act of seeing is not isolated.  It follows a particular way of seeing and saying that follows specific principles either formulated out of the hierarchy of importance or based upon a leaned gaze.

Experimentation, then, arises out of a particular gaze.  ‘The bredth of experiment seems to be identified with the domain of the careful gaze,’ Foucault states, ‘and of an empirical vigilance receptive only to the evidence of visible contents’ (Foucault 1973: xv).  So, clinical experimentation relies on this keenly particular receptivity tuned for empiricism. 

However, this gaze does not dismiss a whole as the sum of its parts.  Rather, it seeks quality and a way to convey this quality.  ‘The gaze is no longer reductive’ he states, ‘it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality.  And thus it becomes possible to organize a rational language around it’[9].  So, in a gaze’s particularity and vigilance it seeks not to tirelessly reduce and define but it searches for the purest translation of body or object into language.

So, too, does a carefully crafted performance.  A performance uses various boundaries and tendencies to coax an audience into a shared, or at least similar, gaze.  Perhaps performances invite seeing rather than ask to be seen.

This performance’s goal was to ask the audience to see sound.  This piece Brianna Dixon and I are crafting asks Dixon to be sound through movement. Our goal was to find limits within which to embody sound and hopefully seek an honest, open conversation between the porous limits of skin and the soundscape NASA provided.

The gaze arises out of a structure of seeing.  Within science the structure of seeing exists within the methodology of the Scientific Method.  Though empiricism has been stressed and valued by many civilizations many cite the birth of the Scientific Method as having arisen in the 13th century within the work of Roger Bacon.

The Scientific Method consists of six steps: question, hypothesize, experiment, observe and record, analyze, and share results. The beginning step requires the scientist to ask a question. This step requires some imagination or awareness outside of what is known or proven. The second step requires even more imagination. To hypothesize is to come up with an untested, probable reason or answer to the question. The third step sets up an experiment. An experiment essential creates a set of limits and constants that ensures that the process will either prove or disprove your hypothesis. This experiment is a machine whose output it only changed if the singular input is changed. Then, the scientist observes and records the output and analyzes it against the input and the hypothesis. If the experiment is repeated by multiple scientists in multiple laboratories under the same conditions the experiment dictates then the scientist must share their results and formulate a theory.

Communication is required in the Scientific Method. Communicating in a concise, effective, meaningful format is what furthers the field. Thus, scientists have to have sharp, unwavering definitions that avoid affective responses. This, too, is a form of measurement.

This emphasis on empiricism and measurement, however, is an unachievable goal.  Measurements do not convey accuracy but boundaries within which to communicate through.

Perhaps the best way to view how these boundaries communicate is to visualize artistic experimentation as a partially completed colored pencil assembly line.  At the first station hundreds of wooden sticks are inspected for certain qualifications: height, width, etc.  If they meet the qualifications, they are suitable for the next phase.  Here, the metal eraser clamps are inspected.  If they meet standards, they pass to the next phase.  Then, the erasers are checked and if all three elements are worthy they are assembled together and are sent to be filled with a color.  At this station we can imagine that the color-selecting machine is hooked up to a true random number generator.  Any color can be chosen to fill any standardized pencil with the wax-based substance.

In this example the constant-gaps[10] are the qualifications and standards the pencil must pass to get to the color-choosing machine.  The pencils are not completely identical.  But, they are identical enough to be profitable and function like a pencil.  The color-choosing machine creates a boundary.  The pencils can be filled with any color.  The pencils can only be filled with a wax-based substance.  The only extreme variant from pencil to pencil is color.  Color has been isolated.

This creates an attentiveness to the variation in the color from pencil to pencil.  Unless brought to our attention we do not notice the slight variation of wood color or length of the clamp or width of the eraser.  We are drawn to the color because the color has been isolated as the variant.  This gaze allows us to ignore the slight variations in pencil and imagine them as identical.

So, too, do the choices of a choreographer, for example, seek to set up a hierarchy of attentiveness based upon what that choreographer wills to communicate.  By setting up a structure of limits and constant-gaps a choreographer structures the gaze.  No two dancers, or performances, or costumes, are the same.  But if we see clearly the choices the choreographer made we assume uniformity.

Limits and Constants

As stated previously the crafting a performance is the crafting of a gaze.  To craft this gaze is similar to crafting an experiment specifically through the utilization of limits and constants.  A limit sets up a space within which swim a pool of choices.  Constants set up a structure so that these choices consistently produce meaningful information directly related to fulfilling the goals set forth in the performance. 

No performance is performed the same way twice.  I concede that constants are really narrow gaps between two stricter limits.  However, scientific constants function in a similar manner.  For example, were an experiment to delineate a constant in the way of the room temperature it would delineate a measurement.  Let us imagine this measurement is 72 degrees Fahrenheit.  This measurement cannot be achieved exactly as any measurement repetition cannot be repeated exactly but always strives to achieve ‘close enough’.  So, repetitions of the experiment may have a room temperature of 72.0001, 72.00003, and 72.0002 degrees Farenheit and still yield valid, useful results.  Similarly, setting up a choreographic structure utilizes a similar margin of error.  A dance is never performed the same way twice.  I will thus forth refer to constants as constant-gaps.

In “Sonic System”, for example, certain choreographic choices set up constant-gaps.  For example, I chose specific spatial, formational choreography. I wanted the soloist to move in a manner that mimicked the planets whose sound she strived to embody.  To isolate the sound as the strongest provider of information and inspiration we created a constant-gap delineating a formational pathway pattern taken directly from the pathway of the planets around the sun. This pathway is simple in that it does not restrict any movement that might bubble up from the input of sound.  Further, it structures the mindset of the audience to see her body as the celestial body.

Another constant-gap we set up was structure of awareness.  I decided that while the soloist was improvising in the aforementioned pathway that they should diligently listen for opportunities to repeat material without forcing the repetition.  This allows for certain movement whims to express a variation in time.  By exploring in this manner I allow for the examination of these whims to continue for longer and achieve a deeper attentiveness.  Further, it asks for a certain type of listening and sensitivity from the dancer.  The soloist cannot grip newness nor can they completely let go and get lost within it.  The soloist must be open and permeable to the living/dying sound. 

We do not know how exactly improvisation is inspired.  There is not a direct pathway between inspiration and improvisation.  However, little by little, through interaction with improvisation we start to learn how to listen and how to let go.

Brianna Dixon and I did not want to perform each celestial body (Jupiter, Saturn, Io, etc.) every performance.  Instead, we decided to assign each recording a number assigned alphabetically.  Then, we derived random numbers from Random.org.  Based on the first digit of the derived number (and throwing out any repeat digits) we assigned a performance order.

In this piece we utilize chance, or a true random to delineate which celestial bodies will be performed and what order they will be performed in.  To achieve true random I went to a website built by Dr. Mads Haahr, professor at Trinity College’s School of Computer Science and Statistics in Dublin, Ireland, in 1998.  This website was Random.org.

The homepage of Random.org delineates the difference between true random and pseudo-random.  This difference differentiates their generated numbers from that of other algorithms.  Random.org states that pseudo-random number generators generate numbers, ‘in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you're used to dice rolls and lottery drawings’ (Home 1998).  Random.org does not use an algorithm but bases its number choices on atmospheric noise.

By using true random we attempt to avoid unnecessary habit-making thereby avoiding movement habits reliant on ordering and ensuring that the dancer is not accustomed to performing a certain celestial body in relation to any other celestial body.  The audience is not unnecessarily accustomed to seeing any celestial body’s section in relation to the other sections.  The portrayal of sound changes based on the atmospheric noise of our own home planet.  Again, the piece relies on sound so much so that the ordering and selection of what is seen and what remains unseen rests on input from atmospheric noise.

A struggle we faced in crafting this piece was the representation of the sun.  This piece is structured around sound so I did not want the centerpiece to be an unaffected, stagnant, decorative light source.  So, after some consideration I incorporated the sun’s attributes as a light source but crafted it so that this ‘sun’ was highly affected by the sonic input.  I chose to purchase a light organ to serve as the sun.  A light organ is a series of lights that respond to sonic input and reflect that input by turning on or off.  One common way light organs are used today can be seen in the YouTube videos where the Christmas lights on houses dance to music.  In doing so I will structure the waves of light to translate the sound waves. So, my sun will be a light box hooked up to central, multi-directional lights. 

Opening the gaze

In his 1988 book Foucault Gilles Deleuze writes: 

Knowledge is not science and cannot be separated from the various thresholds in which it is caught up, including even the experience of perception, the values of the imagination, the prevailing ideas or commonly held beliefs. Knowledge is the unity of stratum which is distributed throughout the different thresholds, the stratum itself existing only as the stacking-up of these thresholds beneath different orientations, of which science is only one. There are only practices, or positivities, which are constitutive of knowledge: the discursive practices of statements, or the non-discursive practices of visibilities. But these practices still exist beneath archaeological thresholds whose shifting points of demarcation constitute the historical differences between strata.

Science participates in thresholds.  It is not entirely isolated or empirical.  Knowledge, Gilles Deleuze argues, comes from a stacking up of thresholds then viewing these thresholds under different structures of seeing, like science. 

“Sonic System” is both a tool and an experiment.  The dance is a tool because information is gauged.  The dance is an experiment because it is fashioned to be repeated and these repetitions are assumed to further prove or deny a theory.  This dance is a stacking of thresholds under an orientation.  This dance orients strata and thresholds.

The sort of knowledge gleaned through movement is vitally important and opens our gaze to a useful and profound sensitivity.  This sensitivity enables a validation of a personal experience, both as a mover and an observer.  This sensitivity opens a door for humility and self-confidence in the personal.

When we imagine measurement as the ability to converse and create with absolute accuracy we establish a sort of conquering.  It serves as an assurance of understanding.  But measurement should serves as a translation.  Measurement serves as a way of building. 

Perhaps all tools are extensions of the innate capability of the body.  Perhaps tools are an expression of insecurity and a seeking of a definity we will never access but must believe we can work hard enough to access.  Perhaps this is the mystery Foucault delineates in Birth of a Clinic; the unsolvable mystery we struggle tirelessly to solve.  Or perhaps this access ties in with Derrida’s posit that representation finds its origin in life (or I would substitute movement) which is innately nonrepresentable.

Measurement is not the precise accurate truth but it does drive us closer and closer to that unachievable perfect measurement.  I am thinking of the parabolic approach to a limit.  Particularly, I am interested in functions that approach limits.  I am interested in the infinitesimal closeness that restrains touching.

The image below (Figure 1) is a parabolic approach to a limit.  Essentially, the two parabolas (in green) are created out of a function (in this case, f(x)).  So, if we see a function as a machine with which data is reorganized into points on a graph then this parabola is a tracking of where those points would lie. 

The dotted red line is a limit.  A limit is the function that the graphed function constantly approaches but never touches (in this case the function of the line is f(x) = 4 so all points that lie on the x axis at 4 cannot be a part of the graphed function).

What is this limit? Is this limit a great lie? Is the parabolic function creating the limit or is the limit creating the parabolic function? Is a dance a complicated function?  If so, rather than setting up limits to create a dance can we create a dance that sets up limits?

To imagine a dance as a function we would need to imagine a graph with infinite axes.  These axes would represent the various spectrums of choice.  Within these infinite axes would lie a limit, a perfect performance of that dance.  Each performance and re-performance occurs in relation to that perfect performance.  Each performance and re-performance falls short but, hopefully, gets infinitely close to the perfect performance.

What is a dance towards infinity?  Perhaps that would be the dance of the everyday that attempts fills up every axis and speckles the graph like an ant infestation growing busier and busier until infinity is challenged, though never conquered, through saturation.

Infinity is never challenged.

Imagining we would even see a speck on the infinite axes is exaggerating the little we would cover in an infinite graph.  Consider a line.  Take time to imagine a line.  A line, as we are told in Geometry, is the distance between two points.  You’re probably imagining two little black dots with a thinner black line spanning the gap.  This is a misrepresentation.  A dot estimates a point we cannot depict.  That dot has a width and therefor is not a point but a shape with a small width and a large length.  The line has a width and is therefor a rectangle.  To ever have an opportunity to communicate a line we have to give in to these structures of representation.  You have never seen a line.

Bibliography

Becker, Robin. Artistic Statement. 25 March 2015 <www.robinbeckerdance.org/html/ArtisticStatement.html>.

Blasone, Massimo, Giuseppe Vitiello, Petr Jizba. Quantum Field Theory and Its Macroscopic Manifestations : Boson Condensation, Ordered Patterns, and Topological Defects. London: Imperial College Press, 2011. ix

Conrad-Da'oud, Emilie, and Valerie Hunt.  Life on Land: The Story of Continuum, the World Renowned Self-discovery, and Movement Method.  Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2007. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 18 April 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon, 1973. Print.

Gintis, Bonnie. Engaging the Movement of Life: Exploring Health and Embodiment through Osteopathy and Continuum. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2007. Print.

Home. 1998. 2 March 2015 <https://www.random.org/>.

Maraniss, David. Press Kit. 25 March 2015 <www.robinbeckerdance.org/RBD%20press%20packet.pdf>.

Rebenko, Alekseĭ Lukich. Theory of Interacting Quantum Fields. Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. 1

Thompson,  Dr. Jeffrey D.C. NASA Space Sounds. 1 April 2015 <www.neuroacoustic.com/nasa.html#NASA_more-info>.

—. The Scientific Sound Healing. 1 April 2015 <www.neuroacoustic.com>.

What the #$*! Do We Know?! Dir. Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente William Arntz. 2004.

[1] FOOTNOTE: An ionosphere is a region of charged particles within a celestial body’s atmosphere.

[2] FOOTNOTE: Solar wind is the plasma that has been ejected from the sun’s surface.

[3] FOOTNOTE: Celestial bodies rest in the vacuum of space.  A vacuum is devoid of matter and therefor does not contain a medium for sound to travel through.

[4] FOOTNOTE: Consider an inch measured in relation to a ruler or time in relation to celestial bodies.

[5] FOOTNOTE: A wave interference pattern is a pattern that occurs when two or more waves meet and affect each other.

[6] FOOTNOTE: Continuum texts, practitioners, and teachers often describe a sensation of physical participation within the Quantum field and wave-particle duality.

[7] FOOTNOTE: Continuum Movement is often simply referred to as Continuum

[8] FOOTNOTE:  I highlight composition because Emilie Conrad often speaks of being made of stardust.

[9] See Foucault, xvii

[10] FOOTNOTE: I am defining a constant-gap as the area of forgiveness that occurs in a measurement in order to achieve “accuracy”.