Losing Oneself

Tag: Katye Coe

  • becoming the passenger

    Yesterday I blogged about Jon Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing and how awareness is inseparable from experience.

    Going through the transcripts of my post-dancing conversations with Katye Coe, I note that I was starting to use this term. In this extract below I am trying to describe two things. First is the shift from the feeling of awareness-ing to the feeling of becoming a passenger in the improvisation. Second is the question (while ‘awareness-ing’) of why some kinds of movements and not others.

    I haven’t edited the text just to keep the sense of how messy it is talking about these things. The text is from 14 February 2024.

    I think I’d probably say two things. One is the shift from the feeling as if I’m tuning into my body … surfing or allowing awarenesses or things that are happening in my body: friction, temperature, tension, tone, tingling etc … which is like a wash of yeah very open sense of awarenesses like I’m awareness-ing. The shift from that to what you’ve described Charlie Morrissey as describing it as being the passenger. That … it’s such a stark starkly different sensation.

    And I should be clear that the sort of awareness-ing … it doesn’t feel like I’m reaching or wanting this other thing. So yeah that shift which is so stark and so clear … and so surprising and and weirdly, it’s not as if I’m aware that I’ve gone into it or gone from one to the other.

    And I think I can see it [the transition] in you and it’s shockingly different. But if you were to ask me what is it that I’m seeing that’s different it’s not even about the quantity of movement that’s … sometimes but not necessarily. So that … and then the other thing is yeah, this thing that we talked about last week, I think which was why some movement and not others, why some movements and not others. As part of that awareness-ing, that process of, of being in awareness.

    – Simon Ellis (in conversation with Katye Coe, 14 February 2024.

  • shimmer duet (video)

    Some more video but this time two separate video streams (one of Katye Coe, one of me (Simon Ellis)) placed side by side on the canvas. Two notes: i) I made no effort to match them or shift them in time; ii) the video is not slowed down at all.

  • ask where the horse is going

    In our work and conversations together Katye would often talk about the moment in improvising where one becomes a passenger. Katye says this is Charlie Morrissey’s term for the feeling that rather than you driving the improvisation, it is driving or leading you. Here’s one moment when Katye is reflecting on this idea:

    and the ability to really be a passenger in whatever adventure the practice and you go on … and to … and to hold that, be in that, process that, let go of that, allow for that, is like … that requires a set of grown up skills.

    – Katye Coe

    I was reminded of the following from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

    Where are you going? Ask my horse, says the man. And this uncontrollable emotion doesn’t let you pick your destination or even see it.

    – Rebecca Solnit

  • simple gif

    These images are of Katye Coe dancing on 13 March 2024. I looked at the first one (slightly out of shot) and then grabbed the next 50.

  • next phase

    Yesterday (Wednesday 13 March 2024) Katye Coe and I finished the studio-based phase of the project. If you’ve been looking around this blog you will have noticed that most of the posts are really background information: philosophical and theoretical things that have in some way been important to the research.

    This is what is next:

    • Meritt Millman will take a look at the various questionnaires Katye and I completed during the final 3 days of studio practice. These are questionnaires about mindfulness, flow and interoception.
    • Michaela Gerussi will continue reviewing literature exploring improvisation, awareness and consciousness.
    • Katye and I will work through the transcripts of the conversations before to see what needs further conversation and thinking

    Although I’ll continue to post background information here, very slowly I’ll start posting material that will reflect the conversations and practice. These posts will be (I think) a little bit more like insights.

  • low fidelity documentation

    I’ve written and presented in another context about documenting complex, rich, high fidelity human experiences with low fidelity (or resolution) forms of documentation. When we point any kind of camera at a human being improvising there is vast difference between the internal experience of the improviser and what is visible.

    In Losing Oneself Katye Coe and I are doing a version of authentic movement for four cameras which more or less cover the space. Three cameras are shooting time-lapses (every 3, 4 and 7 seconds respectively) and one camera is a locked off 4K video camera. The stills are RAW files so each photograph is about 25MB, and each improvisation produces hundreds of these per camera. After 9 studio days we have nearly 3TB of data. These data are unquestionably high resolution but still they capture nothing of the complex, rich and wide open experiences that Katye and I are having.

    So why bother?

    The truth is I don’t know. I think I might make a film out of the timelapses/stills but I don’t for a second imagine that film will somehow register anything of what is going on in the studio.

    Katye Coe, 4 cameras and a lot of light.

  • me doing into it doing itself

    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction as “me doing into it doing itself”.

    I’ll get more into this another time as it seems to be at the phenomenological heart of these movement improvisations Katye and I are practicing. My initial hunch is that these oscillatory experiences (between me doing and it doing itself) are different by degree, and not by kind.