To introduce the telepathic dance I always tell people how we constantly emit and receive. I tell them how the thickness of our flesh and the depth of our mind send out and pick up thoughts, emotions, images, sensations. How all impressions traverse and turn us into drumskins that echo and give them again into the world.

This is a simplification I have made to accommodate dancing. In fact, we make ourselves and each other, again and again and again. With every encounter, that which circulates does not exist before it moves across and among us. I believe that this is the process of being of the world. I make and I am made, by everyone and everything I meet, knowingly or unknowingly. My curiosities, attractions and fascinations intensify my making: “I” am made, also, by what I desire.

To explain the dance I say:

One person is moving, and one is watching. Both turn their attention to the fact that the watcher is sending the dance danced by the mover. The dance that is sent gains a form as it is being danced. Both partners are collaborating authors of the dance, and both are its spectators.

More than one person may act as the mover, and more than one person may act as the watcher.

‘Believing’ these things is the physical activity required by the score. Sending and receiving are what we physically commit to believing; they are the simplified description of being in the presence of each other that the score emphasizes.

And so we funnel our attention to the one vector of movement that goes from watchers to dancers. We discover, in wonder, the dance that is being sent, received and given out again. We sense how this dance comes from the watchers, who don't know what they send until they can see it. We believe that the dancers pick it up and dance it before they can know what it is. Watchers transmit the dance into the space by surrendering more than by directing. It is intimately theirs and immediately not theirs. They discover this intimate part of themselves because it moved out of themselves. Dancers are moved into the dance, lending themselves to it. It is an abandonment, a gift, a dedication and a joy. Throwing themselves, being thrown out of themselves, through someone else, towards a dancing that belongs to nobody but that depends on a shared commitment.

The watchers and movers expand each other until each “one” is dissolved into the fabric of the situation.

Once the simplified things are said, the more complicated facts of overlapping temporalities, individual histories, interpersonal affections, sedimented logics of movement and imagination can rejoin the narrative:

I have danced this dance, watching or moving, many times, through many persons. I have been diligent and curious in crafting the language and possibilites of what started as a very simple form. I called it the telepathic dance as a strategy to remove preoccupations with power and control. At first I used the word pupeteering, wanting to imagine an emancipatory form of class where students would not be instructed at all. Instead they would be looked at, with support and affirmation, by someone called “teacher”, whose function would be to occasion study rather than guiding it. When someone called “student” told me pupeteering evoked abuse for her, I borrowed Loïc Touzé's term. Telepathy suggests intimacy and cooperation, not manipulation and capture. It seemed more fitting.

From what I'd heard, Loïc had been practicing, sharing and teaching a dance called ’Telepathy’ for quite a while and which was built differently from what I was doing. Later though, reading an article about his work, I understood that the basic premise is in fact so similar that the experience of dancing in whichever version maintains this sense of commoning with an unknown.

Have I stolen his dance? Did I telepathically take it on? The telepathic dance as I know and tend it, wherever it comes from, provides an undoing of the imprisonment of authorship, yet this strange transmission brings it up again.

I have wanted very much to dance with Loïc, but it never happened. I might have reconstructed that dance that I had heard of, made it mine and gave myself to it, in order to dance with him somehow.

Alice Chauchat (with the frienship of Jennifer Lacey)

To introduce the telepathic dance I always tell people how we constantly emit and receive. I tell them how the thickness of our flesh and the depth of our mind send out and pick up thoughts, emotions, images, sensations. How all impressions traverse and turn us into drumskins that echo and give them again into the world.

This is a simplification I have made to accommodate dancing. In fact, we make ourselves and each other, again and again and again. With every encounter, that which circulates does not exist before it moves across and among us. I believe that this is the process of being of the world. I make and I am made, by everyone and everything I meet, knowingly or unknowingly. My curiosities, attractions and fascinations intensify my making: “I” am made, also, by what I desire.

To explain the dance I say:

One person is moving, and one is watching. Both turn their attention to the fact that the watcher is sending the dance danced by the mover. The dance that is sent gains a form as it is being danced. Both partners are collaborating authors of the dance, and both are its spectators.

More than one person may act as the mover, and more than one person may act as the watcher.

‘Believing’ these things is the physical activity required by the score. Sending and receiving are what we physically commit to believing; they are the simplified description of being in the presence of each other that the score emphasizes.

And so we funnel our attention to the one vector of movement that goes from watchers to dancers. We discover, in wonder, the dance that is being sent, received and given out again. We sense how this dance comes from the watchers, who don't know what they send until they can see it. We believe that the dancers pick it up and dance it before they can know what it is. Watchers transmit the dance into the space by surrendering more than by directing. It is intimately theirs and immediately not theirs. They discover this intimate part of themselves because it moved out of themselves. Dancers are moved into the dance, lending themselves to it. It is an abandonment, a gift, a dedication and a joy. Throwing themselves, being thrown out of themselves, through someone else, towards a dancing that belongs to nobody but that depends on a shared commitment.

The watchers and movers expand each other until each “one” is dissolved into the fabric of the situation.

Once the simplified things are said, the more complicated facts of overlapping temporalities, individual histories, interpersonal affections, sedimented logics of movement and imagination can rejoin the narrative:

I have danced this dance, watching or moving, many times, through many persons. I have been diligent and curious in crafting the language and possibilites of what started as a very simple form. I called it the telepathic dance as a strategy to remove preoccupations with power and control. At first I used the word pupeteering, wanting to imagine an emancipatory form of class where students would not be instructed at all. Instead they would be looked at, with support and affirmation, by someone called “teacher”, whose function would be to occasion study rather than guiding it. When someone called “student” told me pupeteering evoked abuse for her, I borrowed Loïc Touzé's term. Telepathy suggests intimacy and cooperation, not manipulation and capture. It seemed more fitting.

From what I'd heard, Loïc had been practicing, sharing and teaching a dance called ’Telepathy’ for quite a while and which was built differently from what I was doing. Later though, reading an article about his work, I understood that the basic premise is in fact so similar that the experience of dancing in whichever version maintains this sense of commoning with an unknown.

Have I stolen his dance? Did I telepathically take it on? The telepathic dance as I know and tend it, wherever it comes from, provides an undoing of the imprisonment of authorship, yet this strange transmission brings it up again.

I have wanted very much to dance with Loïc, but it never happened. I might have reconstructed that dance that I had heard of, made it mine and gave myself to it, in order to dance with him somehow.

Alice Chauchat (with the frienship of Jennifer Lacey)