I will practice talking about practice and give myself a frame for this: I will try to take 2 minutes for one thought. So I’m moving towards having 10 thoughts, I will probably not manage but that is not the point (we’ll come to this). I also propose that you practice listening, for this I’ll give you a very simple score:

I propose that you practice listening without selecting – that you listen to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

that’s your score: to practice listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

The term practice, in the context of dance, became quite popular in the European, so-called ‘contemporary dance scene’ during the 2000’s. I speak from my perspective within this field. Coming from about a decade of interest in semiotics, text and the textuality of the body, its movement and its appearance, there was a shift towards practice based choreography. This was a shift away from representation and visual composition. Dancing, as an activity, had been assigned the purpose of serving representation – images, compositions – geared towards a spectatorship that would read what is happening. There was maybe a sort of functional inversion where activity became more central and supported by the structural and visual composition, foregrounding activity for the audience’s attention. So that where activity was supporting the elaboration of images, visual composition now supported attention to the activity itself.

Practice based choreography would mean structuring practices and give them to be seen. So people began inventing practices, with a lot of joy and creativity.

Another development that is still happening is the focus on individual practice; a tailor-made, personal practice, i.e a shift from studying pre-established techniques towards an ongoing physical, attentional, experiential set of activities that apparently emerge out of precariousness, from the need to develop some continuity in one’s own life. This might be a stabilizing function. My own interest lies not so much in stabilizing but destabilizing.

You’re still practicing listening without selecting – listening to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

As you can notice, in my understanding of practice there is an underlying notion which is the notion of a score. The practice I’m talking about is deliberately composed or constructed, there is a set of circumstances and an orientation of attention that will in turn orient the activity of the body (and vice versa, an orientation of the physical activity that in turn orients attention). At the same time, the score never prescribes how it is to be performed. There is an open-endedness and a directionality at the same time. When people speak about practices they often speak about scores, but the word practice also names the activity, i.e the engagement with the score (you practice a practice...)

Engagement is interesting. It’s open-ended, it does not aim for a particular result, at no moment is the practice accomplished. It is also self-reflexive, there is an attention and an observation of the activity (which itself might be an activity of attention) and there’s also repetition. It’s a repeated engagement with the set-up, for its own sake. That is to say, it is not a preparation, it is not the production of something other than itself.

In dance it is a mixed activity of perceiving and expressing.

And so you’re listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

In the context of dance, practice is an aesthetic practice. It is always the fabrication and the engagement with (attending to) poetic, sensorial, conceptual and imaginary hypotheses – an experiential situation which is constructed and surrendered to, or committed to. The set-up, or conditions of possibility for the practice in my work tends to be a score. The scores tend to be a concise text that is given to the dancers. It is often a paradoxical task, a task that challenges habits or assumptions about dancing with other people. In other words, practice for me is an open-ended commitment to investigate the problems posed by a score. Hypothesis and problem, in a way, are intimately connected.
The hypothesis is, for example: What if we could not select? And the problem is how to do it in spite of our perceptual, attentional habits and limitations. Practicing means figuring out how to do, and through this process of figuring out, it involves a lot of failing and touching the edges of what the task can be. It also involves discovering what is not said but implicitly engaged with by practicing the score. It’s a guided mindset that wants to discover which imaginary, physical and other possibilities the score opens.

Making up scores is a practice in itself: a continuous back and forth between testing a score and changing it. Practicing a score is also making up the score – coming up with ways to engage – and it’s also studying what it engages. In that sense the authorship of a practice is very vague. I said at the beginning it’s a volitional act, a decision about the direction or  orientation of one’s activity, but it’s also a constant abandonment of the drive to define, to prescribe what this could be.

... And you’re listening without selecting – listening to my words, and to the city, and to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

For dance as an art form, the question of the public arises. In my experience, practices have become more and more autonomous from the moment of performing in front of a public. The practices I’m engaged with and which most of you are engaged with are, de facto, collective.
They produce a public and they fabricate a quality of publicness. They are the invention of how to produce, how to engage, how to cultivate, how to challenge, how to inhabit a shared space or situation. A side effect of practice being a repetitive thing is another construction of collectives, by the fact of knowing each other and practicing together over and over again as well as developing a language together. The practice is told before doing it through the transmission of the score, and then it is described as an experience, as the practitioners tell and discuss their experience. There again, collective study happens as people discover together what their engagement with the score brought up. “What happened” is taken as essential information for the practice in this particular occurrence and what it is as an abstract frame, through the observation of recurring issues.

Regarding the question of publicness and performance, I notice the development of much crafting and poetic interest in the making of and engaging with scores. It is for itself, a practice for the sake of the practice, and practicing is also an aesthetic experience. In that sense, dance practice can also be a medium a format of art, in which the audience is at once the practitioner and the maker.

My new, young and exciting experience with Stadterweitern is that, if you place your practice in a context where not everyone is engaged with it, your practice becomes an environment for other practices. It doesn’t display itself as spectacle but it offers itself as part of the context’s fabric.

And so you’re listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

Why is practice important to me? There’s an artistic interest and there’s a pedagogical interest. My work as an artist and as a teacher has merged into one another even though the structural context varies. One central interest of mine is that by practicing, we can suspend the sensation of knowing.

Assuming that one doesn’t know what it is or rather, that one does know what it is but this knowledge has to be brought out through a trick–of not taking things for granted, of not imagining that it is something to be mastered, grasped, understood but to be approached with curiosity (in German, Neugier means curiosity but etymologically refers to the excitement for what is new – not already known). There’s a trick here, because the more you practice, the easier or the more tempting it will be to possibly imagine that we’re accumulating knowledge. But the practice is to ask again, “What if I didn’t know?”. It means placing ourselves in a situation of not knowing, insisting on that which we don’t know, and mitigating the importance of what we do know.

... And you’re listening without selecting – listening to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

Suspending the sensation of knowing is an important agenda in educational contexts. It’s an anti-authoritarian posture, particularly regarding the position of the teacher. Practice in this sense dismantles the possibility of proof, of verification and of evaluation. Leaving these relationships between teacher and student behind, we are left to cultivate together our commitment and the sharing of our experience.

Even though most practices, when they are consistently practiced, will eventually lead to the development of specific techniques, it’s important to engage in them without attaching to a particular use they may have. This is how we can invent or find different usages.

Thank you for listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you.

I will practice talking about practice and give myself a frame for this: I will try to take 2 minutes for one thought. So I’m moving towards having 10 thoughts, I will probably not manage but that is not the point (we’ll come to this). I also propose that you practice listening, for this I’ll give you a very simple score:

I propose that you practice listening without selecting – that you listen to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

that’s your score: to practice listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

The term practice, in the context of dance, became quite popular in the European, so-called ‘contemporary dance scene’ during the 2000’s. I speak from my perspective within this field. Coming from about a decade of interest in semiotics, text and the textuality of the body, its movement and its appearance, there was a shift towards practice based choreography. This was a shift away from representation and visual composition. Dancing, as an activity, had been assigned the purpose of serving representation – images, compositions – geared towards a spectatorship that would read what is happening. There was maybe a sort of functional inversion where activity became more central and supported by the structural and visual composition, foregrounding activity for the audience’s attention. So that where activity was supporting the elaboration of images, visual composition now supported attention to the activity itself.

Practice based choreography would mean structuring practices and give them to be seen. So people began inventing practices, with a lot of joy and creativity.

Another development that is still happening is the focus on individual practice; a tailor-made, personal practice, i.e a shift from studying pre-established techniques towards an ongoing physical, attentional, experiential set of activities that apparently emerge out of precariousness, from the need to develop some continuity in one’s own life. This might be a stabilizing function. My own interest lies not so much in stabilizing but destabilizing.

You’re still practicing listening without selecting – listening to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

As you can notice, in my understanding of practice there is an underlying notion which is the notion of a score. The practice I’m talking about is deliberately composed or constructed, there is a set of circumstances and an orientation of attention that will in turn orient the activity of the body (and vice versa, an orientation of the physical activity that in turn orients attention). At the same time, the score never prescribes how it is to be performed. There is an open-endedness and a directionality at the same time. When people speak about practices they often speak about scores, but the word practice also names the activity, i.e the engagement with the score (you practice a practice...)

Engagement is interesting. It’s open-ended, it does not aim for a particular result, at no moment is the practice accomplished. It is also self-reflexive, there is an attention and an observation of the activity (which itself might be an activity of attention) and there’s also repetition. It’s a repeated engagement with the set-up, for its own sake. That is to say, it is not a preparation, it is not the production of something other than itself.

In dance it is a mixed activity of perceiving and expressing.

And so you’re listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

In the context of dance, practice is an aesthetic practice. It is always the fabrication and the engagement with (attending to) poetic, sensorial, conceptual and imaginary hypotheses – an experiential situation which is constructed and surrendered to, or committed to. The set-up, or conditions of possibility for the practice in my work tends to be a score. The scores tend to be a concise text that is given to the dancers. It is often a paradoxical task, a task that challenges habits or assumptions about dancing with other people. In other words, practice for me is an open-ended commitment to investigate the problems posed by a score. Hypothesis and problem, in a way, are intimately connected.
The hypothesis is, for example: What if we could not select? And the problem is how to do it in spite of our perceptual, attentional habits and limitations. Practicing means figuring out how to do, and through this process of figuring out, it involves a lot of failing and touching the edges of what the task can be. It also involves discovering what is not said but implicitly engaged with by practicing the score. It’s a guided mindset that wants to discover which imaginary, physical and other possibilities the score opens.

Making up scores is a practice in itself: a continuous back and forth between testing a score and changing it. Practicing a score is also making up the score – coming up with ways to engage – and it’s also studying what it engages. In that sense the authorship of a practice is very vague. I said at the beginning it’s a volitional act, a decision about the direction or  orientation of one’s activity, but it’s also a constant abandonment of the drive to define, to prescribe what this could be.

... And you’re listening without selecting – listening to my words, and to the city, and to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

For dance as an art form, the question of the public arises. In my experience, practices have become more and more autonomous from the moment of performing in front of a public. The practices I’m engaged with and which most of you are engaged with are, de facto, collective.
They produce a public and they fabricate a quality of publicness. They are the invention of how to produce, how to engage, how to cultivate, how to challenge, how to inhabit a shared space or situation. A side effect of practice being a repetitive thing is another construction of collectives, by the fact of knowing each other and practicing together over and over again as well as developing a language together. The practice is told before doing it through the transmission of the score, and then it is described as an experience, as the practitioners tell and discuss their experience. There again, collective study happens as people discover together what their engagement with the score brought up. “What happened” is taken as essential information for the practice in this particular occurrence and what it is as an abstract frame, through the observation of recurring issues.

Regarding the question of publicness and performance, I notice the development of much crafting and poetic interest in the making of and engaging with scores. It is for itself, a practice for the sake of the practice, and practicing is also an aesthetic experience. In that sense, dance practice can also be a medium a format of art, in which the audience is at once the practitioner and the maker.

My new, young and exciting experience with Stadterweitern is that, if you place your practice in a context where not everyone is engaged with it, your practice becomes an environment for other practices. It doesn’t display itself as spectacle but it offers itself as part of the context’s fabric.

And so you’re listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

Why is practice important to me? There’s an artistic interest and there’s a pedagogical interest. My work as an artist and as a teacher has merged into one another even though the structural context varies. One central interest of mine is that by practicing, we can suspend the sensation of knowing.

Assuming that one doesn’t know what it is or rather, that one does know what it is but this knowledge has to be brought out through a trick–of not taking things for granted, of not imagining that it is something to be mastered, grasped, understood but to be approached with curiosity (in German, Neugier means curiosity but etymologically refers to the excitement for what is new – not already known). There’s a trick here, because the more you practice, the easier or the more tempting it will be to possibly imagine that we’re accumulating knowledge. But the practice is to ask again, “What if I didn’t know?”. It means placing ourselves in a situation of not knowing, insisting on that which we don’t know, and mitigating the importance of what we do know.

... And you’re listening without selecting – listening to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you

Suspending the sensation of knowing is an important agenda in educational contexts. It’s an anti-authoritarian posture, particularly regarding the position of the teacher. Practice in this sense dismantles the possibility of proof, of verification and of evaluation. Leaving these relationships between teacher and student behind, we are left to cultivate together our commitment and the sharing of our experience.

Even though most practices, when they are consistently practiced, will eventually lead to the development of specific techniques, it’s important to engage in them without attaching to a particular use they may have. This is how we can invent or find different usages.

Thank you for listening without selecting – to my words, to the city, to the movements of your breath and to the movements around you.