Interview of Eva Maes by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens : Hi Eva, I invited you to contribute to Replays, because we have been collaborating together for a long time and we share the culture of Tuning Score. I am curious about your current research. I sent you a series of basic questions that I am asking to each artist I interview for Replays. Would you like to introduce yourself? Do you want to talk about your research? Where do you want to start?
Eva Maes: I reread your questions this morning. Your first question is "when did you encounter Tuning score?”. I think it's a nice starting point because it helps me to answer the bigger questions. I met Lisa for the first time in person in a workshop, but I think I had met her work, or her personality, or way of being, before. I met her work for the first time when I was introduced to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s book, Sensing, Feeling and Action. I did not know anything about Body Mind Centering®, nor Tuning Score when somebody lent me this book. It was a very special book for me, because of its format being almost completely interviews. It's a book about one author, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, but as soon as you open it, there are chapters, fragments, islands standing on themselves and three voices articulating all this: Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. And even though I read that book in the year 2000 with a particular interest in figuring out what Body Mind Centering® was, I also kept photographed these other voices. And when I say “photographed”, I mean not only the names but their dialogue, their questions. So I think that was my first encounter with Lisa Nelson.
Sensing, Feeling and Action is partly a compilation of chapters which were published before in Contact Quarterly, the journal edited by Lisa Nelson and Nancy Stark Smith. So there is that connection from the start. And there is another connection for me with the work of Lisa Nelson in that book, and it's on the picture of the front page of its first edition . There is a side view of a bay held by a person which I imagined being Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and you feel the mutual gaze of these two. For me that mutual gaze and acting on that is at the core of Lisa's work too.
Meeting that book in 2000, wanting to study Body-Mind Centering® from the moment I encountered it and searching for more information about it, I found a little flyer announcing a workshop of Lisa Nelson in Bordeaux and at Contredanse, in Brussels in 2002. The description of the workshop has as a first line: " to explore the physical base of our imagination ". That was the line that then made me more curious. Then in the year 2003, I went to Lisa’s workshop in Bordeaux. It was a two-week workshop I think.
It was in a special place, la Manutention in Bordeaux. It's an old building with five or four different studios with completely different atmospheres. I can localise the first experience of a Blind Unisson Trio in that specific room, the Blind Learning in that other room. Each first encounter with a score is clearly localised in a room. That first workshop is still my reference point, I always return to my memory of that workshop. I feel it is a deep anchor. I think I was a very good listener at that time [laughing!] or a very good student. There was at that time still some insistence from Lisa in transmitting her scores. I remember the rhythm of having a long time, one afternoon… a call, next day in the afternoon… a new call… I remember the afternoon and the room when the reverse was introduced, I remember my first reverse. So there was really a time and a space for every call to be introduced and time to experience it.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, long explorations, long warm-up.
Eva Maes: That year, so in 2003, Iidentified myself as a dancer. Or a dance student maybe more at the time. I had left only a few years before an academic environment. I had studied history. For me it was a real liberation, after five years of studying and finishing a thesis, to enter the world of dance and movement. I felt that I needed a quicker trajectory to come to the core.
Anouk Llaurens: Did you start dancing at Lisa’s workshop?
Eva: No, I studied history and then the year after I went one year to Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, which was still in Lier at that time. I escaped after one year. I went to New York, meeting the Merce Cunningham Studio.
Anouk Llaurens: Did you have a dance education from childhood?
Eva Maes: I did have a dance education as an amateur, ballet, jazz, and modern dance. When I went to study dance after history at the conservatory we had ballet, jazz, dance, swimming, contemporary––which was more Limon based––but also improvisation. And I remember very well that it was so hard for me to get anything out of these improvisation classes. I heard Lisa mentioning several times that her work is not improvisation. I understand it.
So I was coming back from New York after two years of Cunningham Studio and a certain field of dance, trying to find some orientation in Brussels, seeing that there were only release classes. I was only able to stand on two feet after two years of Cunningham, yet I was really searching for how to continue exploring dance. I was waiting to start Body-Mind Centering® formation. I had to find a way to make the money and also, for a formation to start, because at that time there were not all the European programs of BMC® that exist now.
In 2003, they started a European program. I delayed my participation in the first BMC® module because there was Lisa's workshop in Bordeaux, and I wanted to go. So, it was really a simultaneous encounter of modules within the Body-Mind Centering® formation and Lisa's work. When I was exploring following the map of the skin or following the map of the bones warm-up, in Lisa’s workshop, from the beginning I had these two layers, two bodies of work; there was at the same time a ‘BMC-voice’ saying “there are three layers to the skin”. So there was other information that I carried with me in Lisa’s warm-up sessions. Same with following the map of the bones, “there are the three layers of bone” …
Anouk Llaurens: So you were already hybridising both practices?
Eva Maes: Yes, from the beginning.
Anouk Llaurens: When Lisa proposes her exploration about skin and bones, there is no anatomical explanation. I find it very interesting that you had this more complex entrance to skin, a connection to the depth, the layers of skin.
Eva Maes: And, yet there is always this inversion between things. For example, you can say “ah yes, layers complexify, complete the picture, complete the experience”, but if I insist on following the map of the skin, I enter into so many worlds.
Anouk Llaurens: Also the word “map” suggests a lot of complexity. But do you mean that in Lisa’s warm-up you enter complexity through insistence and duration?
Eva Maes: Yes, insistence. And I feel that this insistence to remain in this sensorial exploration may be even more pronounced in Lisa's work. That is also why I always kept a curiosity for both works. Sometimes I really felt I was practising, or deepening, my BMC® in Tuning Score and vice versa.
And at its best, in each work, there is a very profound encounter with the self and others through the work. For example, this morning in the warm-up, following the map of the skin, there are places where you end up where you have never been in life for sure. I wonder if that might be the real adventure. And I keep going back to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Lisa Nelson. There is a very beautiful phrase of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: ´Revisiting the process of our creation—re-membering ourselves—brings us into the presence of the ongoing dance of existence. This is the essence of our dancing.’I keep returning to that phrase; that message.
Anouk Llaurens: So from the start there was this dialogue going on and it's pretty rare, no? Not so many people have a deep experience with both practices.
Eva Maes: I know that there are people like Otto Ramstad and Olive Bieringa, from Body Cartography Project, there is also Carla Bottiglieri who has practised both and you also, who engaged in the exploration of BMC®. Even though you did not go through the entire formation your practices were influenced by Body-Mind Centering®.
Anouk Llaurens : Yes, I was also fascinated by the book Wisdom Of the Body Moving by Linda Hartley. I studied it on my own, alone. I also followed a neuro-cellular pattern workshop with Bonnie. It has always been with me as a ground, and it showed up recently in my work The Breathing Archive which is based on cellular breathing and navel radiation patterns. If I would have had the money...!
Eva Maes: Yes. I realise I was young when I encountered this work. I was young enough to go for it and to work for money, to do all the repetitive work in factories to then escape.
Anouk Llaurens: You worked in factories to make the money to do the BMC® modules?
Eva Maes: Yes, three months in a row from 6am until 2pm, doing repetitive work.
Anouk Llaurens: Do you mean, à la chaîne?
Eva Maes: Yes I paid for my formation in BMC®, à la chaîne. This is another hybridization that I have kept until now. What is this work offering me when I go elsewhere?
Anouk Llaurens: Do you mean how this work is supporting you in any situation?
Eva Maes: Yes, in any situation. In the first year, the licensed BMC® program starts as a physical enquiry but then all the other layers show up. How this work supports me, not only my physical being, but other emotional layers, mental, intellectual…. I also know that in the beginning when I read the book Sensing Feeling and Action, for me it felt like an intuitive path and I was moved by this. But then Tal Halevi, the woman I was babysitting the kids for when I was studying in New York, told me "yes there is a part of intuition but there is such an analytical, verbal clarification with the aim, from the start, of teaching, sharing, communicating”. And this is completely different work you could say, but Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen is teaching. There are so many words, it is amazing how many words are in the BMC® notebooks, all assembled throughout the decades. And then, with Lisa, there are less words, but the words are there, we have the tools to use the words.
And I connect it to memory. Playing with memory in Lisa's work, it's always there, not only with the calls, the reverse, or with the replay, the repeat with the pause, it's always there, and it really transforms. This is a transformative practice.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, memory. I was thinking of that when you mentioned that you made a thesis in history. I am personally engaged with documentation, with memory, and oblivion also. And for me, memory is alive, it is not static, it is not about freezing. For me documentation is about life. I see the Tuning Score as a kind of ‘live documentation practice’, that observes the life span of memories. It is about revisiting memories.
Eva Maes: Yes, and because my encounter with Lisa's work was just a few months before my first exploration of “cellular touch” for example, my first reverse in life came before and I remember very well the reverse. I understand why I made a final project around memory in the body for the Body-Mind Centering® practitioner training”. That interest was already there when I finished my studies in history. In the introduction to my thesis, I wanted to emphasise that we never know what people from, let’s say, two hundred years ago, were living through. But yet, as a historian, you can show that life is different, and yet, experiences are shared at a certain level.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, and as memories are present in the body we can revisit them.
Eva Maes: The past and memories are present. I remember my first reverse was such a big gift. To pass through it physically, to enliven it. Yes to live it or to notice through movement that it's still alive, that it's still there. I think I took it as a thread in my Body-Mind Centering® formation. Also the interest of how, when we touch someone else, all these memories arise. It's not only a regression in memory. No! It's material. In fact, there's no regression, it’s there, it's now! And so these things keep coming back. I recognize them also in other people's research. For example, I witnessed from afar your documentation work, the Breathing Archive. I didn't see a presentation, but I resonate strongly with this act of inscription, the traces of this work.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, we are living recorders. And what about the DNA that we receive in conception? We are receiving an organic, living recording. It is from there that I developed the notions of “experiences are documents” and “poetic documentation practices”.
Eva Maes: Yes. And then from that continuum, that observation, I think it's interesting because we both end up with different research. But we intend to research something more “meta”, also around this work in relation to memory. There was a word… heritage. How then to inherit a work in which memory or aliveness is such a big subject?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, you don't inherit an object. You inherit life! And how do you keep it alive, this life that you inherit? How are you not actually freezing it, grabbing or possessing it? How do you let it live?
Eva Maes: And how do you continue to learn through holding that together? Because both works are also very much on the journey of learning.
[silence]
I think that's maybe the biggest gift of both works––Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s and Lisa Nelson’s––: it's a practice of research. We used the word “meta” before and I think it's very important. I feel for myself these works give me space if I allow myself to articulate how extensive they are on the meta level. There was a YouTube video of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen that appeared, I think it was in Summer 2021 where she talked about art and research like, inverting also like replacing one word by the other.
Anouk Llaurens: I feel that it could be a good moment to introduce your research, would you?
Eva Maes: The research project that I have now is called Transmitting the Body. I had the chance to receive money for it through the Royal Conservatory/ Antwerp School of Arts. When I wrote it, my idea was to focus on three different movement practices, "blind learning" for Lisa Nelson, “Questions and Answers " for Body-Mind Centering® and "exercise on eight" by Merce Cunningham. And I want to understand them. Not by conceptualising but, because I know them, I can share them. And maybe my desire with this research is also, you could say ‘selfish, to understand what it is that touched me, how they transformed me, what I have learned from them.
I used the word practice in my initial proposition. But then afterwards came across the word, “technique”. And I understand that “practice” is a very general term and I want to make it very specific for me. I didn't find a word yet how to name them. They're also not fragments.
Now, just a little word why I “zoom in” the blind learning. I really wanted to research through the things I know, the things that I’ve passed through by choice, by quest, by searching. This is what I want to revisit. There was something interesting there, or rather transformative, something I didn't encounter elsewhere. So, in the blind learning, we first teach ourselves a little movement phrase.
Anouk Llaurens: I remember that you teach yourself a movement phrase you've never done. So there is a search from the start, a discomfort. I remember myself searching for a strategy to do something I've never done. That's the way I received it.
Eva Maes: Yeah. I didn't hear it so much, but I remember the étrangeté because this was at the end of a two or three weeks workshop and suddenly, after weeks of eyes open or closed, of exploring the environment, youcompose a phrase.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, you set it!
Eva Maes: And you know there's a conspiracy of two. So you're not alone, there's somebody else. Which you should not see, it's a game [ taking a storytelling voice, as if speaking to kids] you should not see the movement. You should make sure that you don't see what the other is doing. So there's “suspense”. Then there are all different rules. You stand next to one another and there's a person with closed eyes that only listens with closed eyes to the movement the other has prepared. And there's repetition. So there's not too much hurry in getting it. But yet there's “getting it”. There's a time to listen, approximate, first without touching and then touching. And then you show your movement at the very end, and you get to see the original. So yes, learning with the eyes closed, learning through touch, and, through it, the ‘completion’ of imagination. In that research I am not putting learning through touch on the laps of the Body-Mind Centering® world, as it seems that the work is all about that. No. For Body-Mind Centering®, I want to shed light on what's happening in the verbal exchange because I feel the work of Body-Mind Centering® is a collective learning. It's a process of holding the process of the group with which you learn throughout the years. Integrating first all the physical exploration without much feedback systems while improvising or while somatizing, there's something happening then in these “Questions and Answers”, when you assemble, when you verbalise collectively. And there are things that get verbalised, and many others not. And they're very hard moments, the “Questions and answers”, talking about inhibition, the notions of inhibition.
In the curriculum of Body-Mind Centering® there is for example, the course “Skeletal System”, and within the ten days, there will be maybe two afternoons of a class which is called “Questions and Answers”. And you have this all over the curriculum. This is a class where you sit in a circle. And then based on the thematic of the module and the class before, questions are phrased and then answered or not.
Anouk Llaurens: Answers come from anybody?
Eva Maes: Anybody. So it's not a ‘teaching’, it's a ‘sharing’.
Anouk Llaurens: They are big circles, no? How many people?
Eva Maes: Yes, sometimes fifty. It's about taking space…But a lot is happening. I learned new things for myself. I think that's where I learned sitting in the circle.
Anouk Llaurens : Is there a score for that?
Eva Maes : Well, I'm researching a bit what could be the “score”. I am trying to figure out also when this was brought for the first time in the program. I remember for example the first year where, let's say, a group of thirty people meets every three months for two weeks. There's a memory of the circles before, there's a memory of this person always talking, this other one never talking. I would say it’s very much about surviving, surviving the circles. It's about fertilising experience, it's about allowing the others, or trusting that if somebody else verbalises their experience, my experience might be transformed. I may not have to verbalise it myself in order to be seen.
Anouk Llaurens: This is like in the Single Image score when someone actualizes your imagination. So it's a circle. There is silence. Anyone can put out a question and answer it or not.
Eva Maes: Yeah.
Often there's no answer or there's a delay in answer. Or the answer will come ...ten minutes later, ten minutes of silence. There can be long silences. I think a class is either one hour and a half or two hours. So it's a long time and sometimes there's also this inversion of who is a student and who is a teacher. There are many processes, but I think my interest is in how it works, experience and verbalization. And how does one support the other? I really wanted to take that into the research because I feel it's in the shadows. If we talk about the work of Lisa or the work of Bonnie, there's very little attention to how these shifts from verbal exchange to experiencing/exploration function. And to how important, how key, they are to this work. And also to how much practice it takes to set this “equilibrium”. It takes a while to learn to speak or to learn to listen or to learn to accept that the others are speaking or trying to speak from a ‘place of experience’. At least for myself it's nothing evident, and I think for most people around me, it's not evident. We need to put words on things, as you said before.
Anouk Llaurens: If I don't put words on things––my words and my way of wording––I don't have a voice. So my culture has no voice. And it is good that there are many voices for the same culture. Also a voice that comes from experience.
Eva Maes: Yes there's a world out there, and how can we communicate, be generous?
Anouk Llaurens: But we didn't talk yet so much about “Exercise on 8” by Merce Cunningham. It is so foreign to the others…I am very curious, what is the connection that you are making?
[Eva stands up and shout in the direction of the recorder]
Eva Maes: I demonstrate!! So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Anouk Llaurens: Oh, you're a perfect Cunningham dancer. I can see. I really see. I see the practice. I did that too! I loved Cunnigham classes. And why did you choose this technique next to the two others?
Eva Maes: Somehow, I could have picked any exercise of Cunningham training’s palette. But I always loved ‘Exercise on 8’. In each class you take, of the eight classes a week, there's this moment with exercise on eight. [Laugh!] Up until that moment, your spine isn't doing too much. You already had the “exercise on six” which is another one. But then with the “exercise on eight” you have all the directions. So with that exercise, I'm very curious about the process of derivation from a form through repetition.
Anouk Llaurens: Now I see! It's like a repeat in Lisa's work!
Eva Maes: It's a repeat, it's a repeat. It's a repeat, but it is maybe also each time a replay of a previous one.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, repeat and replay are close.
Eva Maes: I am also researching through interviews, and I would love to interview old teachers of mine, like Louise Burns, in person rather than on Zoom. It's not about the exercise but how an “assemblage” of persons accompanies another person. I'm very curious for these Cunningham teachers who have dedicated their life to teaching through repetition. It's very specific. At the end you're there to feel your own movement.
Anouk Llaurens: And to feel space.
Eva Maes: And space, and space. But not to show. It's about learning by and for yourself and also about listening. I remember that the first class where a dance teacher would come to touch me, it would be at a Cunningham class. I had a few classes with Merce Cunningham himself. When there was nobody else teaching, for example, at Christmas Eve or Eastern, he would teach the class. And then his corrections would actually be very somatic corrections. I remember once he said “Don't lean to the front, it doesn't serve anything». This process of repeat, repeating, repeating, always repeating… it’s true that it's never the same, like when you follow the map of the skin.
I learned through the meander, through the different practices. So that's why I made this choice for my research. I also wanted to see how these lineages are connected. And I am interested in the theme of preserving the work, or transmission of the work, or what is preserved of the technique and how the practices can be sustained. For Cunningham for example, there's no Cunningham studio anymore. There's still a place where you can follow classes in New York, but then the studio, the place where you practised isn't there, even though for a long time they tried to preserve it. Now, Martha Graham Company resides there. So how to maintain it? And then this question of legacy, how to preserve the work?
In Body-Mind Centering®, it becomes, of course, also a question. Bonnie just turned eighty.
But it's not a core focus for my research, it's something I am observing. That's the historian maybe in me that still likes to step back and see what time does.
Anouk Llaurens: You call your research Transmitting the body. What does “the body” means for you?
Eva Maes: Hum, it's existential and aesthetic a la vez. In all these three practices, there is the creation of a space to pass through its own feedback system. They give importance to creating a common collective field of passing through the process of ‘noticing oneself’. Transmitting the body is something profound, deep. It's nothing conceptual. You have to pass through experience. It is not something we can get snapping our fingers. No, no! There are “techniques” people have been tuning, inventing tools to establish “let's name it, let's shed light on it, let’s share it”.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes and a lot of research to shape and transmit these tools.
Eva Maes: And then how do we interpret different tools and learn from them? How do we speak about the tools and practise the tools, not possessing them? For example, I make the blind learning for myself, I also recycle, I teach the students and I take this as my research ground. My research ground is everywhere I go. This is a laboratory for my research.
Anouk Llaurens: So concretely you are teaching children, right?
Eva Maes: I teach in Jette and there I work with children.
Anouk Llaurens: How old are they?
Eva Maes: Starting at six. I have an adult group too, I mean till twelve, thirteen years old. I haven’t been exploring blind learning with all but with certain groups. I am also doing an audiotape of the retours after blind learning. It's so beautiful what comes out of their mouth. It's “transmitting the body”. When I hear a child that for the first time has been touching somebody else with their eyes closed, it's like, “this was so special! This was so special. It was not tickling”. Using touch to learn is actually basic, this is our base for learning, but it's not articulated as such. And so, these practices are, I think, all avenues to shed light on things that we all know and see how we learn through our body.
Anouk Llaurens: But are we still learning through our body these days? Most of the time we don't. You’ve re-learned how we learn through the body by passing through BMC® and Tuning Score. I had to relearn it myself too because that mode of learning has been actually cut from our culture.
Eva Maes: It's exactly what I'm saying. Therefore also the big event that was for me, for example, the blind learning,.. If you end up teaching in a situation like that, where the form is so set, where people come to dance class, and you propose to them blind learning, they go with you, they share, they transmit. It's actually thanks to the research that I started to appreciate my teaching again, in this context where you find the less privileged populations of the city of Brussels. The children come from everywhere, lots of children of different ethnic descendants.There are a lot of migrant families. Dutch is for almost none of them their native language. So it’s also very poetic how they speak. We try to articulate their experience in Dutch. Sometimes there's a French word which shows up. There are more children until the age of twelve, thirteen, because then there's a rupture often as they are not allowed to go to movement class anymore.But I see there's this little insert possible for exploring through moving. But I feel that what I try to share, is to see what comes out, the resonance of this work. For me, that is research and I bring that to an institute as research. I feel that the paradigm to understand what dance is about––or what dance could be…––is vibrating there, in that context.
For a long time, I looked for a photographer to come with me.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, how to document your research?
Eva Maes: Sometimes pictures but it's really hard to negotiate, as I started off by taking pictures while teaching at the same time. I also always shared the images with those portrayed. As a specific strategy, I explored for a while students photographing each other. In more recent years, I developed the project further with a photographer. This project, which started as a zoom into Blind learning and its ‘translation’ in rather non-aesthetic teaching places evolved slowly into an investigation. How can archival sensations, accumulated in the lived and moving body find a counterpoint through its encounter with the photographic image? The “stilling” process does not only involve an extra presence at the performative moment (the photographer(s); the one(s) who capture or harvest the images)..., it also leads to the possibility of revisiting the sensorial tuning as pertaining to the captured dance. How does photography and dance- the world in movement- support each other to render visible and to generate agency? That is still a quite vast and enigmatic question and possibility of photography, which is not always elaborated upon, even (almost) 200 years after the first daguerreotypes. I started to name this project Still.Dancing within the photographic image.
Three years ago, I started to google the word “embodiment” to write a proposal for the master in Antwerp whose program presents as its core theme “the relation between embodied practices and artistic embodied practices”. I came across a very appealing book called Agency and Embodiment, with the subtitle Performing gesture, producing Culture. It is written by Carrie Noland, a professor of French literature at the University of California. She also wrote a very nice book on the work of Merce Cunningham two years ago. In short, Noland states “okay, there's gesture, but let’s not forget, gesture can always be more than only cultural inscription in the body”. For me it's evident. It's always been evident.Thanks to the work of Body-Mind Centering® and Lisa Nelson, I learned to enjoy “being me” on the floor. I learned that I can indulge for a while in this place where it's just me and myself…. I use the word “indulgence”, because I know there's a lot of recent criticism on somatic practices as if they would be self-indulgent, and only about being busy with oneself. That criticism is just a hollow cave, as somatic movement and dance practices just advocate not skipping the space of listening to oneself, listening to a sensorial realm.
Anouk Llaurens: Anyway, to be busy with “ourselves” is to be busy with “the world”. We are not separated from the world; we are the world and the world is us.
Eva Maes: Yes. Again, it’s a shortcut. There's a shortcut there. The shortcut would be to judge somatic practices from an external viewpoint, to judge it at first sight. Well, it's only when you enter that you figure things out.
Anouk Llaurens: Also, it's not something to be seen, that's supposed to be public. I remember Lisa mentioning that the warm-up is for you. Just for you. But if you do look at it, what about looking at your own way of watching, what about practising empathy?
Eva Maes: Yes, and what Lisa allows for with these warm-ups is to create a collective space for different people. And there's a lot of potential in meeting that space really versus not meeting that space physically, but only reflecting on it, only talking about it. For example there's recently a lot of criticism of somatic practices as being very “white privilege” practices. It's quite a pronounced voice. They would be, there we go, "anthropocentric practice". For me, this criticism comes from a distant place, a––why not––very white place, a place of non-experience, a mainly conceptual space. If you pass through experience, you can not say that. And maybe the work that I'm trying to do is precisely that: from passing through experience in different contexts and articulating our experience of passing through experience in different contexts, there might be a big potential for “queering”, for the singularities. That’s the wilderness. Wilderness, singularities… and it is not to be taken for granted, it doesn’t come by itself!
I know that if you work with movement, with dance, there are strategies, there are tools to work with. See how we interpret different tools, speak about the tools, practise the tools, not possess the tools. And maybe that is the biggest gift of the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Lisa Nelson: holding the question “what is the practice of research?”.