Naming material
Lisa Nelson on 'reporting'
Since the mid 1970s, choreographer, improviser and video artist Lisa Nelson has been researching the role of the senses in relation to the performance of movement, with behaviour, survival skills and environmental awareness as recurring points of attention. Her Tuning Scores are at once an observatory, a communication feedback system and a performance practice in which movement and perceptual behaviour can be investigated in detail and edited in real time by performers or viewers making use of calls such as ‘pause’, ‘reverse’, ‘sustain’, ‘repeat’, ‘reduce’, etc. These spoken calls reorganize the moment, affect the rhythm, timing and quality of the dance, and direct the intention and attention of dancers and observers. Over the years, a repertoire of calls has come into place, but new calls can be invented on the spot if necessary.
When asked to ‘report’, the performers voice aloud what they experience as they perform – how they’re navigating the situation, what they have in mind as the next step, etc. As it is a practice of verbal description and reflection embedded in the work, I asked Nelson about the function and genealogy of this specific call.
‘An action is a body’s response – conscious and/or unconscious – to conditions. This actualization, or expression, is a report in itself’, Nelson writes in an email on 29 March 2022. ‘At the end of a run, we shared verbally what I referred to as “field reports” on our experiences of the run, and followed that with reviewing the fixed camera video recording of the run to facilitate memory and interrogate in detail any single moment from multiple points of view. Video feedback was used from the very beginning. Building a history together by noting: patterns of behaviour, desire (to make sense?), emerging predictabilities of our individual and collective choices and perceived consequences, and mechanics of communication.’
‘The desire that instigated the call “report” was to change the sound space while sustaining the action and to bring the voice of the body into the image space.’ Nelson then defined the call: ‘Players and/or observers sustain their activity and release vocal sounding. Make an utterance that comes spontaneously from local internal conditions: this can be words, or any kind of vocalization. What’s on the tip of the tongue? Stuck in your throat? Players/observers report all at once.’
‘Many players chose to verbalize’, Nelson observed early on. ‘Perhaps they recognized an opportunity to express or reveal thinking. Or to insert imagery, an intention, a subtext or an affect into the image space that wasn’t otherwise perceptible. Calling “report” can tap into a desire to communicate a specificity: voice a question, discomfort, associative fantasy or desire, or can be a spontaneous reflection of inner state. Or/and, perhaps it taps into a desire to express familiar coded communication, to make sense emerge that way, or to rest or recuperate, or to make a big change in the proceedings. Often the consequence evinced vulnerability, was profound, banal or funny.’ She concludes with a note on the term ‘report’ (rather than ‘utter’ or such): ‘It had predictable associations with unpredictable consequences on the image space.’