Ecological Lenses in Move into Life

practice

Dr Sandra Reeve
www.moveintolife.co.uk

All my work with movement, whether in performance,

education or therapy, is engaged with developing personal
awareness, potential and choice. It is, therefore, directly
concerned with acts of personal transformation.

My approach – which I call Move into Life - takes a systemic

view of human beings. It considers each of us to be one part
of a social and cultural situation and, ultimately, one part of
an environmental context.

When I began, as part of my PhD, to formalise the Move into

Life approach to movement, I began to think about the idea
of ‘lenses’ through which the work could be viewed. These
lenses should ideally be helpful to me in developing the
work and to participants and students is understanding
where their movement work was taking them. I wanted
lenses that would allow me to look at individuals-in-their-
context, that would honour intrapersonal and interpersonal
dynamics equally. I realised that I needed ecological lenses
to provide an ecological framework.

Ecological lenses would be compatible with my background

in Buddhist Mindfulness practice, and Shiatsu (which works
with the Five Elements) and would also correspond with my
roots in Suprapto Suryodarmo’s Amerta Movement, which
is inspired by moving in natural environments.

Within the discipline of ecology, I found some fundamental

principles that would provide useful lenses for my work. I
chose niche, emergence and pattern as ways of reflecting on
the different projects I undertook for my PhD.
 ** Niche **

‘Niche’ offers me a word, (describing an ecological habitat),

to correspond with a systemic view of autobiographical
material. As a concept in ecology, niche is defined as:
the ways in which tolerances and requirements interact to define
the conditions and resources needed by an individual or species in
order to practice its way of life. The niche of an organism describes
how rather than where it lives and it is multidimensional.
(Hutchinson)

Equally, niche has been described by Gibson as a 'set of

affordances'.

Here are some thoughts on the role of niche in each of my

research projects (follow the links if you want more background
on any of them):

Strata

I can look at this workshop through the ecological lens of

niche, a term that encompasses autobiographical material.
In terms of niche, each participant selected a particular
behaviour pattern that they wanted to examine/change or
bring up to date. By investigating a habitual mechanism
through movement dynamics, they generated memories and
associations connected to that way of being and became
aware of their environmental preferences in relation to their
autobiographical or niche material, which included familial
and cultural associations.
Being able to witness themselves as a potentially adaptive
system, with the capacity for choice, immediately created
the psychological space for each participant to release a
fixed and determined sense of self, and to experience herself
as an interdependent being-in–the-environment.

Being in Between
In terms of niche, individually, the performers in Being in
Between were working with an awareness of the possible
transformation of autobiographical material within the
context of an immersive performance. How could they be
fully immersed in something and self-reflexive at the same
time? This dual intention almost obliged them to remain
present and involved in unpredictable circumstances.

In addition, as a system, the performance was challenging

the network of systems present in the zoo to become self-
reflexive about its own contradictions: ‘to hold a mirror up
to nature’. The systems were made up of individuals and
their attitudes.

Focusing on patterns of movement and actions arising from

various ‘modes’ could stimulate zoo visitors to become more
aware of their own particular patterns of behaviour whilst
they were at the zoo.
Movement Studies

Autobiography is not only an interpretative art but also a

recollective art and there is always the question of whose
memory it is anyway, given that we assimilate so much of
what others have told us about ourselves and our lives. We
also assimilate environmental factors: the weather, the
landscape, the architecture, the flora and fauna.

At this point the traditional concepts of the boundaries of ‘I’

begin to shake at the seams: suffice it to say here that it
looks as if autobiography may not only be a recollective, but
also a collective event, once one abandons classical Western
concepts of a unique, separate, individual ‘I’.

From an ecological perspective, I had selected the word

niche instead of autobiography, to include environment
within a definition of autobiography. I would be creating
and investigating niche through each movement dynamic,
analysing how I moved rather than why I moved, and
allowing my responses to emerge in the moment of moving.

In these movement studies, I strove to become aware of how

I was determined by my conditionings, or my niche in order
to experience different selves telling different stories about
me. With a developing sense of autobiography as niche, it
had seemed a contradiction to work alone. I wanted to
create a situation of dialogue with other artists, to be inter-
dependent, to observe patterns that might emerge from us
working together.

Borders of Humility and Humiliation

In Borders of Humility and Humiliation, as well as positions of
humiliation imitated from photographs and then invested
with my own responses, I embodied material associated
with moments of humiliation I had experienced as a child
and as an adult. I became aware of how certain postures,
stances and breathing patterns connected with the feeling of
humiliation had been practised from childhood through to
adulthood.

I also evoked embodied memories of moments of humility

and, in the crafting of the score, I created the opportunity to
explore each night how, through movement, I might
transform feelings of humiliation into feelings of humility.

How could being cowed or bent over become a bow? What

needed to change in the movement, in terms of flow, weight,
space or time, and what might that reveal about the
respective attitudes? So, within the performance, I was
investigating how transformation might happen or the
mechanism of transformation itself.
The transitional phase from humiliation to humility took
place from the cameo scene in the window, through the
placing of the beer cans and the white cloth, through the
improvised movement piece by the little tree, until the
unveiling of the Abu Ghraib poster and my response to that
image. My response to that image was the call for humility.
The lighting of the fire torches marked the beginning of the
humility sequence.

I discovered that the states of humiliation and humility

corresponded to different notions of self. Both were striking
as states without boundaries. Humiliation seemed intent on
demolishing a fixed position or status, often to an extreme,
pushing past any behavioural norms or boundaries, until
the victim was left adrift without any familiar reference, or
with humiliation itself as the familiar reference point. It
emphasised human-to-human dynamics. Humiliation is
something that is often perpetrated against someone else;
even if we do it to ourselves, it is usually based in a
comparison of self and other. During this part of the piece,
my ‘characters’ felt used and abused and I felt as if I was
using and abusing the environment. ‘In character’, my
attitude was self-centred.

Humility, however, is a condition that I can cultivate for

myself. It seemed to require a responsive attitude to
constant change or transition, experiencing myself as part of
the environmental situation, aware of my proportions in
relation to the whole, rather than myself as the centre of the
situation.

My experience in performance was that as we moved from

the world of humiliation to the world of humility, my
awareness of the whole environment expanded until, by the
final movement piece, I was aware of the slightest shift of
movement in the audience, the particular traffic sounds and
rhythms, the distant lights of Exeter as well as of my
movement dialogue with the other performers.
My sense of my own boundaries was very thin; my
perception had shifted to my being-in-the-environment and
my niche was the present movement. I felt appropriate to
the moment. Niche itself was situated in time and in the
flow of impermanence, rather than in a self-centred belief in
a position of permanence.

I was interested by this notion of boundary in relation to a

sense of self, given my hypothesis of letting go of a fixed
and deterministic notion of self. In humiliation my sense
was of an abandoned self, a self whose boundaries had been
broken down through pain.

This felt very different from the cultivation of a sense of self

situated in humility, a humble self, which I experienced as a
breaking through boundaries to an expanded sense of the
particular life around me.
 ** Pattern **

Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you
necessarily destroy all quality. (Gregory Bateson)
I choose pattern as the third primary ecological principle
and lens. The perception of pattern involves an awareness of
overview and horizontal view simultaneously and an
apprehension of past and future within the present moment.

Pattern indicates to me flow, movement and design,

connection, repetition, aesthetic, meaning, process and
product. All of these qualities and concerns are present in
my movement research projects.

One of the key principles of ecological thinking is to

recognize the existence of patterns and to see that we exist
as part of those patterns, rather than as separate from them.

In this case, I am suggesting that an embodied awareness of

movement can support us to recognise our own patterns of
movement, and those of our fellow beings, as an intrinsic
part of the changing environmental patterns. This could
help us to experience ourselves as part of the pattern of life
(for example, as part of the food chain, or as a contributing
factor to global warming), whilst still acknowledging our
unique capacities and the contributions we can make to
planetary life.

The creation of pattern may be seen as the mutually

reciprocal creation of aesthetic and meaning. When we
notice a pattern, we notice some kind of coherence usually
highlighted by the process of repetition. Through the
pattern, we understand how the pieces fit together, that is to
say we find the structure of meaning inherent within the
pattern.

These observations hold true for body patterns. A held

physical pattern is the embodiment of a character strategy,
developed over time. Its inherent structure reveals
information about the individual’s characteristic tendencies
and relationship to the environment. Appropriate patterns
of behaviour can be anticipated once the body pattern has
been noticed, acknowledging the influence of past
conditioning on present circumstances. Equally the
performance of that behaviour in the present immediately
conditions possible futures.

Interlocking environmental and human patterns create a

tangible weave of interdependent dynamics between the
individual, the community and the environment. This
promotes a sense of being a resonant part of a living system,
rather than an isolated individual. Autobiographical
material perceived as pattern translates, once again, into the
ecological notion of niche.
Rhizome

The rhizome is an a-centred system, non-hierarchical and non-

signifying […] uniquely defined by a circulation of states.
(Deleuze & Guattari)

Finally, I choose rhizome, as defined by Deleuze and

Guattari, as a suitable methodological pattern for devising
and scoring ecological performance.
 ** Emergence **

Emergence is a process through time, responding to changes

in environmental conditions.
I became interested in the correlation between notions of
emergence in dynamic systems and the apparent vagaries of
the creative process. It seemed to me that it was important
to keep the creative process inclusive and open to change for
as long as possible (without descending into chaos) in order
to allow it to crystallise its own ‘product’, to reveal what
needed to be said.

This attitude is akin to that of the wood carver who follows

the patterns inherent in a piece of wood and then allows the
shape to emerge, rather than imposing an idea from the
outset.

It is my intention to train workshop participants to

experience themselves bodily as a creative and ‘emerging’ or
‘becoming’ part of ‘the scheme of things’, rather than as
isolated individuals: to experience their niche as part of a
wider pattern.
Creative Process

The movement studies I undertook for my PhD were all

about emergence, both in terms of my personal process and
in terms of how I and my collaborators worked together. In
order to allow time and space for emergence, it felt
important to pay attention to whatever was arising from a
receptive position, to recognize what was already
happening, rather than trying to make things happen.

Once the relationships between the available resources had

revealed themselves, often with an unexpected logic
emerging from the dialogue between the different media,
then I began actively scoring the material in a way that
made that meaning visible.

For me, meaning emerged through sensations, (for example

through a sense of what felt right, or of what needed to
happen) – from the receptive self. Later that meaning was
articulated into words by the active self.
Emergence and spontaneity

In terms of emergence, as I learnt in the Gorilla House

(during the Being in Between movement study at Bristol
Zoo), if I had tried to establish more control for the two
performers by tightening the score or imposing performance
spaces, I would have done them a disservice. Their system
would have become part of the ‘over-determined’ motif of
the zoo, and they would have been fettered in their possible
responses to the moment.

As it was, the score was intended to give them confidence,

inner logic and enough of a map but to allow them to
improvise and enter the ‘unknown territory’ whenever they
needed to. Out of such spontaneous moments, the
unexpected emerged, as in their encounters with the lemurs
and the spider monkey.
Example of an unexpected emergence of meaning

In terms of adaptability, Suprapto Suryodarmo’s arrival two

days before my final PhD performance – Borders of
Humility and Humiliation - created a new condition of
instability at a crucial moment in the process.

His responses to humiliation and humility amplified and

threw new light on the previously scored material.

In Capra’s words:

Emergence results in the creation of novelty that is often

qualitatively different from the phenomena out of which it
emerged. The constant generation of novelty is a key property of
all living systems.
By refusing to determine the details of the score, I was
performing as part of a living system, and I felt that the
‘novelty’ or ‘performance’ that could emerge from all the
humility and humiliation ‘phenomena’ would be
qualitatively different, if I could steer us through the
potential chaos. I found it exhilarating that the selected
theme was culturally accessible to both of us and that we
could speak about it freely and from our own references.

I became aware that the cultural resonances of the Abu

Graib poster multiplied profusely in meaning for me, and
probably for the audience, when we performed together.
At its most basic, the poster was of a white woman and
brown men. I had not foreseen this and it was not intended.
It only became apparent to me when we were both there
and I was face to face with the poster. I was uncomfortable
with some imagined possible readings, but I decided to stay
with it and accept that it was a tangible example of the
multiple cultural readings that had emerged. Such
occurrences happen constantly in daily life and it seemed
contrived to attempt any kind of editing.
Ography

Front cover painting by artist and sculptor Greta Berlin

This e-book is courtesy of Scribd
For Deleuze and Guattari see A Thousand Plateaus
For Gregory Bateson see Mind and Nature
For Hutchinson see A Treatise on Limnology
For Capra, see The Web of Life
For Move into Life workshops see
www.moveintolife.co.uk/workshops