3rd CONFERENCE ON ARTS-BASED RESEARCH AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

Sensorial Document:
An Embodied Practice in Dance and Philosophy

By
Ana Mira
Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Author Note

Ana Mira, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, New
University of Lisbon.
This research was part of the doctoral dissertation Silence, potency and gesture: a body in
dance, under guidance of Prof. Dr. José Gil, at the Department of Philosophy /Aesthetics,
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, New University of Lisbon and it was supported
by grant from Foundation of Science and Technology.
Correspondence concerning this article should be address to Ana Mira, E-mail:
anafonsecamira@gmail.com.

Abstract

How can writing translate sensations, small perceptions and images of our dance experience
into verbal language and conceptual thought? How can we engage in a dance and philosophy
methodology based on a “change of scale” from macro to micro perceptions (Gil, 2010, p.
49)? How do we move along at the liminal space-time between movement performance and
its philosophical reflections? How can we develop compromising art practices that understand
art as critical thought and embodied theory, not art or academia market (Gomez-Peña, 2013)?
As she supported my thoracic cage, one hand below each lung, I felt the movement, space and
separation of my lungs, side by side, supported by her hands. My movement was solely the
listening of the body as I was lying down experiencing this tectonic recomposition of my
thorax. This is a sensorial document written a few hours after a somatic and dance practice.
The sensorial document is a method to bridge and translate actions throughout a dance and
philosophy arts-based research – trusting that, like in Artaud, our practice is about “action-
word” or “action-gesture” (Gil, in press). “ – If you were a bird, you could fly”, says the
mother to the child (Dolto, 1992, p.21). And the child that cannot walk experiences the
sensation of flight. The child understands both her limits and force of flight: she captures the
force of the mother’s word and flies. In my own empirical experience in the field of dance
and philosophy, something transgresses the danced gesture, verbal language and conceptual
thought: force.

Keywords

Sensation, small perceptions, sensorial document, danced gesture, force

Introduction

To begin by questioning the definition of a danced gesture, brings movement to dance and its
philosophical reflection. A body that dances reveals its visible movement, but also an almost
imperceptible movement, subterraneous and continuous, that sustains the dance and its
gestures. In the book Art as language, Gil (2010) elaborates an experimental method in which
a “change of scale” comprehends the “two planes of movement” that define “danced gesture”
(2001, p.108), as well as the passage from the experience of the lived body to the
experimentation of the body of forces (2001, p.108) .
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

During the development of an art-based research in dance and philosophy, I rehearsed that
experimental method as a performer in dance collaboration with the London-based
choreographer Rosemary Butcher. Throughout that process, I developed a practice of
describing and mapping the sensations of a body that dances, through its own perspective and
about the condition of dancing itself. I called those writings: sensorial document. I find in the
sensorial document a map of an experimentation of the body in dance through writing. It aims
to reenact sensations, “small perceptions”1 and images of dance and translate them into verbal
language and conceptual thought (Gil, 2005, p.52). Through a listening body, I became able
to operate a “change of scale” from the visible movement of the body to its almost
imperceptible changes, both in dancing and writing (Gil, 2010, p.51). In this research, the
sensorial document appears in a poetic prose mode of witnessing dance through verbal
language and reflects upon the images of the experimentation of the body in dance that the
sensorial document translates through writing. The images included in this research are stills
of a filmed rehearsal of the dance piece After Kaprow: The silent room, by Rosemary Butcher
& Ana Mira (London, 2011).

At the edge of sensation, the sensorial document allows the articulation between dance and
philosophy. Through a relation of resonance between those two instances, I practice ways of
keeping their autonomy and, at the same time, articulate an experimentation of the body in
dance and its philosophical reflection, without confusion. I practice philosophy through dance
and dance through philosophy, where the force of vibration of a word or a gesture acts, with
no mediation, in listening bodies in dance and their critical enquiries.

The purpose of this paper is to transmit a testimony on an arts-based research, in the field of
Dance and Philosophy, its experimental method (change of scale), its means of articulation
between practice and theory (sensorial document), its images (some stills of danced gestures)
and its philosophical reflection (some thoughts on the concept of force).

Scale of forces: an experimental methodology

To approach dance through sensation raises the problematics of the difference between the
notion of “movement” and “gesture”, which is related to the definition of “danced gesture”
and its “two planes of movement”:

What is a danced gesture? (…) Its characteristic: the fact that it never goes to the
end of itself. In the movement that unfolds it, it is retained, returns and extends
itself in the following gesture. In this sense, gesture has no contour, it has only a
surrounding, evades its own limits, escapes itself (…). That gesture always
remains behind a limit signs the primacy of the movement that transports it in
relation to the movement that gesture transports. In fact, the danced gesture
supposes two planes of movement, one at the surface of the body, other that makes
the same path but sustaining the movements of the first plane. This later refers
only to the visible movements of the lived body; instead the second implicates and
crosses the whole body, its interior and its surface. If gesture always remains
behind its limit, it is due to its velocity: this is always inferior to the movement of
the second plane, subterraneous movement that only allows itself to be seen in this
uncanny evasion of gesture to its own limits (Gil, 2001, p.108).

To dance is to listen to the body in motion. In the visible movement of my lived body (“first
plane of movement”), I listen and become aware of minute movements that may occur in a
microscopic plane of sensation, which forms the subterraneous “second plane of movement”
(Gil, 2001, p.108). The danced gesture emerges from the listening of my body that dances to
the movement that “crosses the whole body, its interior and its surface” and sustains its
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

“visible movement” (Gil, 2001, p.108). To intensify a listening body that dances, I invoke
stillness as repose within movement or distillation of sensation in a dance. Danced gestures
appear in the act of dancing with its own reconfigurations of space and time, report to
themselves and their existence relies upon the immanent movement when a danced gesture
becomes an “event”2 (Gil, 1998, p.71). The danced gesture has “its own logic, its own
triggering elements, its orientation” and its meaning is the meaning of movement itself (Gil,
2001, p.42).

During a practice of dance, its documentation and philosophical reflection, I rehearsed an

experimental method inclusive of the “two planes of movement” of danced gesture, following
Gil’s philosophical aesthetics of a body of forces (Gil, 2010, p.48). This experimental method
consists of a “change of scale”, that is, an immediate passage from a macro, or molar, to a
micro, or molecular, level (Gil, 2010, p.51). What is at stake here is the passage from the
experience of the lived body to the experimentation of a body of forces, in dance.

In Gil’s (2010) experimental method “the occurrence of a change of scale is equivalent to a

change of method, and the analysis, and analysis-becoming, that a change of method supposes
includes the macrophenomenological description” (p.51). In the context of my dance and
philosophy practice, to write the sensorial document from the perspective of a body that
dances and about the condition of dancing itself, the experimental method of a “change of
scale” led me to the elaboration of a description of the passage from a macro to a micro level
of sensorial phenomena (Gil, 2010, p.51). I began with a description of the sensations of a
dance practice, phenomenologically, by reenacting a sensorial and lived experience of the
body in dance. Although, the body that dances transforms, it enters in series of
metamorphosis, more or less perceptible as the condition of dance itself: sensations unfold,
forces are captured, provoking a series of “becoming-other”3, and a space of the body is
formed with its own reconfiguration and timing (Gil, 2005, p.294). Then, in order to continue
the description of the passage from a macro to a micro level of sensorial phenomena in dance,
I had to consider “a series of movements that take place in a microscopic plane, insensible
and non-conscious” and, therefore, no longer solely phenomenological (Gil, 2010, p.49). By
this turn, concepts that exceed phenomenology are needed for the writing memory of the path
of a body that dances, for example “force”. Such as in dance, through writing the
amplification of the “non-conscious” movements of “microscopic scale” transformed the
“macro scale itself” (Gil, 2010:52). In the passage from the macro scale to “another level of
description in another scale”, I continued the phenomenological description of the sensations
in the microscopic plane, which means that, in a state of awareness of the body I mapped
space and time through intensities (Gil, 2010, p.50).

If a “change of scale” occurs in the body that dances and its sensorial document, then the
intentionality of consciousness transforms, that is, it becomes intensive by awareness of the
body: “it projects itself in a becoming something made possible through mapping the world”
(Gil, 2010, p.51). When the body that dances listens, through awareness of the body and,
consequently, amplification and intensification of sensations, small perceptions and images, it
listens to forces that emanate from other bodies, the body that dances’ surroundings and
connected (in)corporeal atmospheres. According to Gil, this process of “becoming-object
(becoming-animal, becoming-vegetal, becoming-thing) is equivalent to a mirroring of forces”
(Gil, 2010, p.56). Furthermore, for this author, the experience beyond the ordinary
phenomena, subject, space and time engenders the creation of a plane of immanence: “To
dance is to create immanence through movement: that is why there is no meaning outside the
plane of immanence neither outside the dancer’s actions” (Gil, 2002, p.125).

In sum, the experimental method of a “change of scale” in Gil (2010) philosophy aesthetics of
a body of forces, comprehends the passage from the experience of a phenomenological lived
body (macro) to the experimentation of body of forces in dance (micro) as it includes the
“two planes of movement” of “danced gesture” and, consequently, the way the visible
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

movement of a body that dances becomes charged, expressively, with other presences at the
scale of “small perceptions”. The method, described above, brought more potential to an
experienced experimentation of a body that dances, the elaboration of its sensorial document
and philosophical reflection.

Sensorial document: an embodied practice

I feel the surface of the ground touching the surface of my hand. My hand slides back and
forth for some time as my body keeps rocking. Fingers open spaces between joints, as bones
articulate and disarticulate, muscles weight and levitate. In movements of mutual exfoliation:
ground and flesh. Nothing remains when skin surrenders to dust.

“ – Working with the reinhabiting of the territory, developing an activity”, Rosemary Butcher
says.

Rocking back and forth in rhythms of another time, I listen to how the action is moving from
the sensation. What am I seeing? Fine lines of the sun outside drawing paths in the same
ground where I am sitting-kneeling, here inside. The weight of my wrist changes into waves
of fluency, dragging my fingers and its small bones through the subtle density of air’s
particles.

“ – The wrists and the weight…pushing…the front and the back”, she says.

A silent voice hidden resonates in the palm of my hand keeping me here, transforming
sensation into action. The depth that transports my movement…invokes a form that I must
embody.

Fig. 1: Dust
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

Fig. 2: Hands-paws

Fig. 3: Seeing

Hands slide and adhere to the ground. I listen to Rosemary saying “ – Mapping the floor,
mapping the territory through the hands, replacing and placing”. A curve in the space is then
made…hands were searching and walking, knees followed through the exactitude of a
dislocation. Looking back, coming back, everything changed. Left hand, right knee, right
hand, left knee, coming forward. Two hands one above the other, curve, one being covered by
other, they curved back again.
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

Fig. 4: Hands covering one another

“ – Finding new direction for the body with the areas removed”, says Rosemary.

Fig. 5: Rolling

“ – Ground plane, surfaces, plane surfaces, articulation of fragments connected to the whole,
everything connected to the whole. Emptying, leaving”, says Rosemary.

Rolling, sensing the roundness of my thorax, and the way it is imprinting its bones and flesh
on the ground, as time weights upon me. “ – Weight gets put in different places”, she says.

Images arrive from other grounded places of bodies dislocating in this earth, here. Tremors
and fissures align for different sensible communities, when earth breaks in their souls.

“ – Distances, marking the territory”, she says.

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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

“ – The weight is put on different planes, the weight supports the planes, the breathing goes
through the back, the still breathing”, as I listen to her words.

A breath that stills, distils me through time and space connected to the whole: a surface was
moved.

Fig. 6: Plane-surface

Fig. 7: Relocating

If you were a bird you could fly

According to Dolto (1992), the “unconscious image of the body” is a permanent construction
of an unconscious map where movements of desire are inscribed, in an interpersonal life of
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

relation (Gil, in press). According to Gil (in press), the movements of desire are movements
of transformation of the intensities of the body and that interpersonal life of relation is a
“communication from unconscious to unconscious”. In the intimate relation of the body to
language, words and gestures emit forces (virtual particles) that transmit unconscious and act
in the body (Gil, in press). Words and gestures make “sensations-actions” emerge in the
body, and, therefore, they are “words and gestures-force” or “words and gestures-action” (Gil,
in press).

“ – If you were a bird, you could fly. (…) If you had feet, hands, you could do like that little
boy, you are as astute as he is” (Dolto, 1992, p.21). These are the words a mother says to her
child, whose arms and legs are lacking, so that the child can develop an healthy behaviour:
“an healthy unconscious image of the body, a desiring body, erogenous, despite the lesions at
the level of his corporeal scheme” (Gil, in press).

This child needs his mother to transmit him the reality of his condition through a
communication from “phychism to phychism” (Gil, in press). This communication from
“phychism to phychism”, or “subject to subject”, that is, “to speak from desiring subject to
desiring subject” is, according to Gil, a “communication from unconscious to unconscious”
(in press). The transmition of reality by means of a communication from “psychism to
psychism” with the child will allow him/her to develop “healthy and free affective relations
with others”, also, it will allow him/her to express himself/herself freely and create the
phantoms of his desires” (Gil, in press).

There is a “crossing” between the “unconscious image of the body” and “body schema”4:
“crossing means that the unconscious image of the body that transports desire finds in the
body schema a means to attain, concrete or phantasmatically, the communication with another
desire – and, this way, compose the unconscious image of an healthy body that relates to
another through an healthy relation of desire” (Gil, in press). In sum, the “unconscious image
of the body” “incarnates the memory of the interpersonal desire’s events of the child” (Gil, in
press).

Dolto’s notion of “unconscious image of the body”, through Gil’s perspective, underlines the
relation between body and language, that is, the aspect in which “language is intimately
connected to the body”: “For Dolto, the history of the formation of verbal language has its
origin in the body” (Gil, in press). Words emit forces: “word-force” (or “word-action”),
“because they act in the child as an action” (Gil, in press).

We can understand, from this conception of language and adult-child

communication, that there is an unconscious of language that is formed throughout
the whole evolution of language’s states in the child. This unconscious is, as we
shall see, above all a drive. It is a language of forces exchanged between mother
and child, rather than being a language of signs. A child receives the meaning of
the word by hailing the force of the emotion that accompanies it. The meaning is
that force: this takes the meaning. It is a word-force. It transmits the unconscious
of the body (in the adult, because in the child, the unconscious is at the edge of the
skin (Gil, in press).

In the “communication of unconscious”, the agency of a “word-force”, or “word-action”

requires both the existence of two beings and their mutual becoming: “double becoming, the
mothers’ becoming-child and the child’s becoming-mother that operate within the
communication from “unconscious to unconscious” or “communication of unconscious” (Gil,
in press).

“if you were a bird, you could fly” only happens if the force of the mother’s word acts in the
body of the child, intensively: “the mother generates in the child, in his body, the real forces
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Conversational approaches about what is and what is not

and sensations that allow him to imagine-live in his body the action of flying” (Gil, in press).
A “becoming-bird”, because it is intensive, is a “molecular becoming that crosses the whole
body” (Gil, in press). That child, through the force of the word that hails, experiments the
flight. He/she adheres to his/her mother’s word, through which attains his/her “becoming-
bird” (Gil, in press).

In the process described above, it is the “formation of the phantom (or image) itself that
becomes the real movement of desire, movement of transformation of the body’s intensities in
such a way that new organs could spring out at the surface of the body (like the wings,
meaning the necessary forces to have wings and fly)” (Gil, in press). This becoming
“intensive-body” corresponds to the formation of the “plane of immanence” (Gil, in press).

But, what forces are at stake here? Like Artaud’s magic words, in Gil’s (in press)
philosophical thought, “the forces that the mother passes on to the child through the word”
are, in Dolto’s study, “instinctive forces”. Although, in Deleuze’s philosophy, “forces” are
“emission of particles”, virtual and unconscious (Gil, in press).

In this research on dance and philosophy, danced gestures are real forces that transport an
image-sensation and charge it expressively. Dance performer and choreographer developed a
“communication of unconscious”, in which words act and generate sensations in the body that
hails them; through the force of the particles words emit (“particles-force” that constitute
language’s unconscious”, according to Gil, in press). For example, the forces of the
movements of wings and flight in the child. When force encounters force, a plane is formed to
support and transport movements of desire. The “change of scale” creates the possibility for a
“becoming-other” in dance: intensive, molecular, virtual and real. And the sensorial document
reenacts dance sensations through writing at a scale of forces, since it reinscribes intensive
transformations of a body that dances.

To conclude: I gather the meaning of your word or gesture through its emanating force.
Desire makes us become one another to become something-other still, in the dissolution of
our skin’s dust. As I become you and you become me, our words and gestures provoke the
emergence of sensations and real forces, which, on their hand, take us to live the action of
becomings in dance experimentation – wings and flight. Listening bodies connect by adhering
to their forces, mutually. Desire moves them towards an incessant formation of the
(in)corporeal images and their potency that dance reveals.

References
Dolto, F. (1992). L’image inconscient du corps [The unconscious image of the body] (2nd
ed.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Gil, J. (1998). Un tournant dans la pensée de Deleuze [A turning in the thought of Deleuze].
In Alliez, E. (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Une vie philosophie Rencontres Internationales Rio de
Janeiro – São Paulo 10-14 Juin 1996 (p. 69-87). Luisant: Institut Synthélabo.

Gil, J. (2001) Movimento total: O corpo e a dança [Total movement: the body and dance].
Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.

Gil, J. (2002) The dancer’s body. In B. Massumi (Ed.), A shock to thought: Expression after
Deleuze and Guattari (p.117-127). Londres: Routledge.

Gil, J. (2005) A imagem-nua e as pequenas percepções: Estética e metafenomenologia [The

naked-image and the small perceptions: aesthetics and Metaphenomenology] (2nd ed.).
Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.
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Gil, J. (2010). A arte como linguagem [Art as language]. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.

Gil, J. (in press). La métaphore et la parole-action [The metaphor and the word-action]. In
Cardoso, J.C. (Ed.), Deleuze and the Problem of Literality. Edinburgh University Press.

Gomez-Peña, G. (2013, September 3). Radical art, radical communities and radical dreams.
In TEDxCalArts: Performance, body and presence. [Video file].
Retrieved from http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Radical-art-radical-
communities;search%3ARadical%20art%2C%20radical%20communities%2C%20and%20ra
dical%20dreams%3A

Mira, A. (2014) Silêncio, potência e gesto: um corpo na dança [Silence, potency and gesture:
a body in dance] (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e
Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa.

Footnotes
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1
The concept of “small perceptions”, originally by Leibniz, is approached by Gil in his study on
aesthetics and metaphenomenology: “The small perceptions are infinitesimal unities of articulation,
like phonemes; they are the mute phonemes of vision. Sustaining and assuring the separation of the
visibles, they release their meaning, still prisoner of the inherence of the body to space. Leibniz writes:
“small-perceptions form this something, these tastes, these images of the senses’ qualities, clear in their
reunion but confused in their parts, those impressions that surrounding bodies cause in us, that envelop
the infinite, that connection that each being has with the rest of the universe”. These impressions are
the articulation of things in the space of vision. It is vision that apprehends them, opening an infinite
dimension in the meaning of things, capturing the lowermost and invisible signs that populate
henceforth the clarity of space. In search of language” (p.52).
2
Gil approaches the deleuzian concept of “event” in the following sentence: “(…) the event is an
incorporeal effect of surface that comes in limited time, a becoming between the past and the future
infinitively dividable and that always escapes the present: Aïon as unlimited becoming. The tree is not
green, it greens; the verb, which marks the event, gives the meaning, the verb is a result of the body’s
actions and passions” (Gil, 1998, p.71).
3
Gil mentions the predisposition of the body to “become-other”, the infinite tendencies to “become-
other”, in detriment of an objective and identifying conception of the body. It is from the “intensive
body” that the “becoming-other arises” (Gil, 2005, p.294).
4
According to Dolto (1992), the “body schema” consists of our “carnal life in contact with the physical
world”, since the “experiences of our reality depend upon the organism’s integrity” (p.18). The body-
schema” “interprets, active or passively, the image of the body”, because it “allows the objectivation of
an intersubjectivity, of a libinal relation of language with others”; without the support that “body
schema” represents to the “image of the body”, this later would remain a “non-communicable
phantom” (Dolto, 1992, p.22).