Case B
A deck of cards and a vocabulary for social choices
This case study is part of a full-length paper entitled, A Family of Sensibilities: Presented through 6 practitioners doing work grounded in Materiality + Embodiment. Read about it here. [Link will be available once article is published]
Intro
Ricardo Dutra’s project studies how to make visible intangible qualities of embodied experience. Ricardo collaborated with choreographer Arawana Hayashi to create an aesthetic (i.e. felt) language that could bridge embodied preverbal experience, and language. Groups of people do a practice called Village and use a deck of cards as a reflection method to further notice their social choices, and patterns.
The Case
The Village is an embodied practice in which a group of people (10–25 people) explore (using their bodies) what it could mean to co-create something together. People are asked to move in space, and through stillness, shapes and movement, they explore how to make a shared composition in the space. They can stand, sit, walk, turn, greet, lie down, or run. This “vocabulary” affords them certain social choices, e.g. to mirror each other, initiate something new, do the same as or different from others. As a collective, they are making “something” together. Their attention moves from themselves to the small group nearby, and to the larger group, developing a sense of a “neighborhood”. It is basically a “microcosm” of everyday life. We are always in social bodies (i.e. groups, and ‘villages’), as we constantly make choices, enacting a certain kind of social reality.
The practice was developed by Choreographer Arawana Hayashi. Over the past years, Arawana and I have been collaborating at the Presencing Institute (Cambridge, US), to make visible a language for people’s felt experience. We are exploring “social choice-making”, i.e. “what kinds of social values and intangible aspects inform people’s choices as a social body?” In this project, we developed a series of aesthetic language cards that are introduced in small groups (3–5 people) at the end of a Village practice. The foundation of the language are people’s felt and embodied experience. It was created from blending the aesthetics of visual composition (e.g. contrast, rhythm, balance), patterns drawn from relational qualities that participants usually talk about (e.g. connection, inclusion, belonging), and “awareness” in terms “how do people attend to the social field?” (Scharmer, 2018). This project was developed after a two-year-long series of conversations and prototypes with senior or advanced practitioners of Social Presencing Theatre and Theory u in Denmark, Mexico, Germany, and the US.
In this activity, people are asked to embody something. Through embodiment, they begin to attend to and notice their felt experience. When they have to reflect on how the activity might be of “support” to them in their context, they usually have no language to go back to. That happens because an individual’s felt experience is fundamentally pre-verbal (Merleau-Ponty, year). Part of the process of “making visible” is how one moves from embodied experience to a “felt” language.
“Materiality” is first of all, people’s bodies. To have a body and do something together with others is a straightforward way of making something visible. Just like it would be in a theater performance, bodies communicate something. You can see certain structures and compositions taking shape. For example, as people stand close to one another in the Village, someone might have a sense of a “forest” in formation. Certain shapes and compositions give rise to different feelings of safety, or oppression, belonging, or isolation. Using our bodies as our “materials” afford us to shape space and time. The cards are tangible materials integrating drawings, print, and written language. It is a way of materializing the discussion and bringing it to a single focal point of departure. When people are asked to sit down and reflect about an experience with others, and relying solely on their “memory” of the practice, there is a gap in communicating from embodiment to language. The cards act to ground and help to recall a specific memory. For example, someone might pick up a card that says rhythm or contrast, and they share with others (using their “I” voice) when they saw, felt, or did something that relates to that aesthetic quality during the Village practice.
If we think of our bodies as a “material”, their fundamental roles are a. to afford sense perceptions. Our bodies are our direct means of perception. Through sense organs (i.e. eyes, nose, etc.), we can perceive various sense objects (i.e. vision, sound, taste, etc.); b. To communicate “something”. When we make something visible with others in space, that is communicative. It might communicate a story, a feeling, a sensation, a felt quality. The cards (i.e. drawings, print and written language) were used to hold space for reflection, spark memories, focus group discussions, and introduce a “new” language — in that way building some kind of “capacity” for the group in terms of attending to and speaking of preverbal experience.
In this project embodiment is the activity that people are asked to do. They are basically asked to stay with, notice, and take action based on their felt experience. Embodiment is our capacity to be present with our bodies. Every sense organ has sense objects. For example, through our eyes (i.e. sense organs) we see others (i.e. bodies; sense objects) in the space. If embodiment were the equivalent to our sense organs, the materials would correspond to sense objects. Materials are objects for our perception. In their “naked” essence, materials are objects of awareness. If we were to expand out, we could say that just like “materials”, so “space” could also be an object of awareness. The spacious quality of our experience is the basic ground in which all materials and perceptions exist. On a second layer, meaning and sense can be overlaid on materials. In that way, they can hold a memory, spark inspiration, be a source of security or safety. This is like a human process of initiating a “conversation” with them, that includes laying meaning upon them, as well as having them “talk back” to us.
Materiality: sense objects, sense perception, felt qualities, tangible, form, and freedom.
Read more abut Ricardo Dutra here.
Read more from this publication
Case A | A handbag and the making of a boundary
Case B | A deck of cards and a vocabulary for social choices
Case C | A collection of home things and the gauging of limits
Case D | A balcony and a way of caring
Case E | A city playground and the connection of family and everyday life
Case F | A hacienda as an “instrument” to notice and wonder
