Some readings that came along

• ·         Brugger, P. Phantom limb, phantom body phantom self in: Blom, J., Sommer I. (eds.), Hallucinations: Research and Practice, Springer 2012, pp 203-218
• ·         Dieguez, S., Blanke, O. Altered states of bodily consciousness  in: Cardeña, E.; Winkelmann, M. (eds.), Altering Consciousness: Multidisciplinary perspectives Vol. 2, Praeger 2011 , pp 237-262
• ·         Feldenkrais M. Awareness through movement, Harpercollins 1990
• ·         Giumarra M. et al. Corporeal awareness and the prorioceptive sense of the phantom, British Journal of Psychology 2010, p. 791-818
• ·         Hurtley L. Wisdom of the body moving. North Atlantic Books, 1995
• ·         Inui, N., Masumoto J. Effects of visual information on perceived posture of an experimental phantom foot, “Experimental Brain Research” 2013 May; 226(4), pp 487-494
• ·         Massumi B. Parables for the Virtual Movement Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press 2002
• ·         Noe A. Varieties of presence Harvard University Press 2012
• ·         RamachandranV., Blakeslee S. Phantoms in the brain Harper Perennial, 1998
• ·         Srivastava A. et al. Stroke with Supernaturary phantom Limb: case study, review of literature and pathogenesis Acta Neuropsychiatrica 2008 (20) Journal compilation Blackwell Munksgaard, pp. 256-264
• ·         Sacks O. Hallucinations Picador, 2012
• ·         Sacks, O. A leg to stand on Touchstone, 1998
• ·         Stevenson R., Wallace M.  Multisensory temporal integration: task and stimulus dependencies. “Experimental  Brain Research” 2013 Jun; 227(2), pp 249-61
• ·         Tomasini, F.:  Embodying loss and the puzzle of existence, “The Sociological Review” Vol. 56, Issue Supplement 2, p 249–263
  
  

Workshop and open moment in SIN 21.08.2013.

 workshop hours 3-6 pm

open moment: 7pm

In “Phantom Sensation” project we work at the intersection of dance and neuroscience, dwell and examine in practical and theoretical terms the phenomenon of phantom sensations. What we try to understand is if and how the phantomic experience of reality can inform the movement improvisational practices, and whether it can create a distinctive frame for thinking about some aspects of performance. It is a transdiciplinary venture.

To the workshop we invite everyone who would like to experience and play with what we call “phantomic sensation”. Through exercises involving touch, words, work with partner and eyes closed we will investigate different  modes of sensorial, attentional  and physical engagement in body awareness processes. From this point we will explore our moving-selfs.

In the open moment  we will share and discuss our research - concept of phantomic sensation and address the specificity of work emerging from the dialog between experience and neuroscientific knowledge.

Reporting resonance of touch in the body to the other who ilustrates it on the paper

Martyna drawing the experience of touch reported by Gaja

Gaja drawing Marysia's experience

Marysia drawing Martyna's experience

If I were a mountain

Floating thoughts, and many questions. 

What body appears, what body interests us ? 

There is a desire to enter a state of potentiality. A state or even a temporary cosmos where the differentiation between moving body and self melts. State in which a new organization may offer not yet quite familiar functionality. As if dance would derive from testing and learning new ways of functioning. 

Body that may transgress a common, daily formation. 

Body that dwells a certain “thing”, something that describes a body. So the body may become “something”, where the “something” might be an action as well, or a memory or a creature. And that something is being processed while moving.  

Body that listen also through touch. 

What happens when the stimulation comes ? How do I allow a stimulation to be translated? So we often touch each other. The touch we work with is also that which I have learned from Rosalind Crisp. For the stimulation we are borrowing, and using her tools. There is a vast of information that might be transferred through touch. Stimulating touch – one that contains variety of qualities and potentiality of movement may trigger an imaginary world for the receiver. Allowing appears to be an issue. It is up to the receiver what she ( as we are three females working in the project) will do with the stimulation, how she takes it into movement, or will be taken by it.

Sometimes we work with as least informative touch as possible, kind of a pancake or a tart. It is not very exciting, but we value, it gives warmth, and with time the information melts to the body, does not give much stimuli, but it is up to the receiver what she might do with that place under the pancake. 

Within the phantomic sensation research we are also searching and finding something underneath, that may underlay performative presence, and movement – something else to the will, something that leaves a trace, and triggers difference in a body schema, evoking mental images as well...

And that difference in the body schema may become visible for a viewer, when the body image changes.

Body that is reformulating itself while moving. Body that can surrender to the image from within – a proprioceptive image, by inhabiting for instance different qualities of touch that it receives. Body that discovers its functionality a new.

Where are the borders of the body, and how they change in this practice ? Reference to phantoms certainly point that aspect. How do we feel, and experience as real that what emancipates itself in loss?

There is also a certain pleasure in a state where the body comes in a contact with an environment (understanding that term after Lisa Nelson). When coming in contact with an environment a relation happens. Relation within – with self, with a trace of the stimuli, with an image that may arise, with the desire which might be fulfilled in movement, with the space we share, with time. (We did not work with focus on relation to space and time directly, as for some of us it was already supportive issue) We worked mostly with translating various touch-stimuli, observing images that may arise, letting them go either in movement or in saying stories – that might be touch-stimuli-image reports, or memories, or streams of associations, or others.

Coming in the contact with environment gives a possibility to experience something pleasent, something profound–  forgetting oneself, a potential of union...  

The selfs we work with

Engaging into the topic of phantom sensations which is in neuroscience often debated in terms of neural body representations (body image, body schema), the question we needed to consider right at the beginning was „what body we work with?”- how the body is defined as a material to shape with experiences.

We chose our working body to be available and accessible for stimuli and any kind of responses, alert to its constant transformation, reorganisation, a fluently changing sensual form, which is uncertain or even does not know its own shape or constitution. Informed by reports of sensations in phantom limbs, in which the body schema built from sensory and proprioceptive information creates another body structure than the representational body image, the body we work with could only be the one adaptive to sensory input, which re-constitues itself due to sensory re-mapping.

Along the researching process, we found suspected support in somatic approaches, neuroscience and experiential reports. For instance, in Body-Mind Centering

"the 'mind' of each cell, body tissue, and fluid, expressed in feeling states, posture, and movement patterns, is by nature open to the constant flow of momentary change”.*

Interestingly, it is the 'mind' of cells which has the property to allow constant transformation. Here the concept of the body meets one of the fresh definitions of the mind in neuroscience, the view of mind as a „process that regulates the flow of energy and information”**.

This definition entails that mind is subject to ceaseless recreating its content, continuously formulating its matter. Moreover, it has a sense of intentionality – being a process heading somewhere, even if the goal realises rather in sequences (streams) of temporary states, than any arrival point.

As dance artist Gill Clarke states, „mind in a sense IS motion”***.

The integrity of the body and mind concepts invites to employ rather one consistent entity than analyze two separate processes. Following Gill Clarke, this entity may be the self which encompass integrated body and mind, defined with the described qualities. In this case not the body and the mind, but the self is undergoing or designing its own constant transformation of the matter. 

While the term "self" allows us avoid the dualism, it brings up another broad territory of psychological and philosophical discourse. However, it may function well when working with multimodal events, where sensations, stimulations, images, cultural associations, memories, bodily states, movement, gesture are all mixed together and inseparably bound with each other. 

* Hartley, L. (1995). "Wisdom of the body moving". North Atlantic Books

** Siegel, D. "Mindful brain. Reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-being" 

*** Clarke, G. "Mind is as in motion". www.independentdance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MindIsAsInMotion.pdf

Phantoms of the Paradise

Back in Budapest. 

After first week of exploration and revisiting exercises from our last meeting, we arrived at the point where many of the roads we took before came together to create a potential playground for the phantomic sensation to become present through movement, words and touch.  

Curious to experience the tangential point of phenomenological and physical body* we were experimenting with the space between attention directed to various places on the body and actual tactile stimulation. Through this practice we observed the life cycle of  sensation transformed to movement.

To keep the clarity of the work, we dealt in the beginning with the touch which remained simple and quite constant with its quality. That satisfied our curiosity for sensing and feeling, but awaked a desire for more stimulation – a touch that would deliver reacher motivation and prompts for action. As we noticed, a variety of touch qualities (as knocking, pressure, sliding on the surface, etc...) evokes not only somatic sensations but inevitably the non verbal, yet non conceptual somatic imagery. That realm of imagery opened up our field of inquiry.

What happens if we do not only constrain the response to embodying images in movement but allow any arising associations deriving from touch, to enter our consciousness and to be verbalized and spoken out loud? Taking this question into practice, we discovered that verbalized and embodied sensations and images can create multimodal realities including touch, movement and words. Though rather then collection of elements the multimodal realities become eclectic set with the inner logic of relations involving narrative events.

This practice enables us to access particular state which might unfolds many different phenomenological existences, disguised by a physical body. 

Following this direction we can play with a physical body as an interface which runs and displays different programs of phantomic being. 

* inspired by Hilti and Brugger (2009) definition of phantom sensation as "dissociations between physical and   phenomenal body shapes".

Phantomic experience [01 definition]

I think of phantomic experience as the delicate aspect of memory, that is connected  with traces or echo of sensations and movement, and how they coexist with the present moment.

Sensations of touch and weight.

         The touch of the other but also the touch of attention.

          Weight as it shifts and swings within own body, or is normally distributed through some constellations of it,  but also weight that one gives towards certain things (value).

Movement as a term mostly understood as a physical action experienced by the performer (and/or reflected by the spectator via mirror neurons), but also movement of the thinking process and the question which is not pursued by the answer (even though question awaits the answer, the answer does not appease the question, it can only stop the movement of  it), is a self stirred movement of going to the bottom, uprooting, coming to the surface, opening, hiding again, turning, steeling away[1]

I call it phantomic experiences because though in many ways the nature of these traces is ungraspable, the studies in phantom sensations show how very much the subjective experience of a phantom sensation can be objectified or shared with the other via the image of brain activity. Though in medicine phantom studies are mostly occupied with developing ways of treatment, thanks to which patient who undergo amputation or stroke would develop the “better match” between the feeling and the body, some scientist propose that the demystification of the current-day concepts of “the self” will be amongst the foremost future prospects of phantomology.” (Balnke, Matzinger 2009, Brugger 2012)

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[1] Maurice Blanchot, Most Profound Question pp 11-25, In The Infinite Conversation

From the history of phantom limb sensations:

(form Hallucinations O. Sacks, and Phantoms in the brain V. S. Ramachandran).

Two Double Nudes (1959) by Joseph Beuys 

Reflecting upon the nature and origin of phantom limb sensations may give a specific insight to the body mind relation. One can trace changes in the interpretations of this phenomena throughout the history - from more spiritual ones to entirely scientific...  

Descartes was reflecting on the problem in Meditations on First Philosophy, placing in the fact that some people whose arm or leg have been amputated still occasionally feel pain in the missing limb, the basic distrust towards the body: “this lead me to think that I could not be quite certain even that any one of my members was affected when I felt pain”

Phantom limbs as bodily hallucinations appear very late in the literature (unlike visual or auditory hallucination). In 1870 Silas Weir Mitchell first gave them the name – but introduces the issue initially in form of a fiction story (“The case of George Dedlow”) published anonymously. It’s a story about a man who loses his legs in the war, and then through the help of an eclectic doctor and a medium rejoins the spirit of his missing legs for one session – in which he can even walk on them. Later  in “Injuries of nerves” (1872) Mitchell writes in the still quite “spiritual style” about the topic: “Nearly every man who loses a limb carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member , a sensory ghost of that much of himself. “

Lord Nelson would also write about his phantom sensations of arm that he lost in the battle of Santa Cruz (1942) as a “direct evidence for the existence of the soul” “For if arm can exist after it is removed why can’t the whole person survive physical annihilation of the body”.

Olivier Sacks after explaining neurological mechanisms of phantom limbs sensations provides kind of intriguing reflection on the subject:  phantoms are already in place, "revealed so to speak by the act of amputation".  

This lead me to questions: How can a complete body understand the phenomenon of phantom sensation? How can one reveal the phantom body?

Sth about us

Gaja Karolczak

Currently working as freelancing researcher/ writer in the field of dance being supported by Institute of Music and Dance (Poland) and Flemish government.  She is unfolding her project on phantom sensations in frames of a.pass Brussels and VARP -pa. Her interests circulate around interdisciplinary ventures involving dance /movement  and cognitive neuroscience reflected speculatively and work of experimental dancers like Deborah Hay or Lisa Nelson. She have completed MSc  in  Performative Creativity (University of Malta  UAM, Poznań) and MA in Art History. Wrote On Mirror Neurons  and Kinesthetic Empathy (“Didaskalia” nr 112, 2012) and soon her article On reception of dance improvisation will be published in a book following the exhibition  on dance improvisation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Łódź.

 
Martyna Lorenc
a person curious to work multidisciplinary. Interested in cognition, creation, expression, the topic of mindfulness, somatic and therapeutic techniques, applied both for dance as well as for well-being. Got a master's degree in cognitive science at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland writing on direct action-perception interactions. Has studied contemporary dance and pedagogy at Anton Bruckner University in Linz, Austria. Currently engaged in several companies and projects, e.g. C.O.V. Company Off Verticality Rose Breuss (upcoming project in collaboration with violinist Ernst Kovacic), Editta Braun Company ("planet Luvos"), as well as in own choreographic tries ("Alien drive" a solo in collaboration with music composer Lorenzo Romano). Loves to work with live music and video. 

Marysia Zimpel,
 studied “ Dance, Choreography and Context” at HTZ, at Universitat der Kunste in Berlin. At the University of Poznan, Poland, at the Department of Cultural Studies, she defended her master thesis: “Dance practice  –  mobile space of creating of the self ”. She is an author of several solo works,and one duet with a poet Eric Green Working like a dog, she also performs for others, as well as works in collaboration. In years  2010-2012  she was part of the Vienna  based performance collective  –  “God’s Entertainment”, which gave her a unique experience. In cooperation with Anna Czaban curated an event of choreographic performances – Serendypia, which took place in City Gallery Arsenał, ’10,’11 in Poznań, PL. In May 2012 was invited by Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke for their project “(En)tropical Institute”, Berlin/UferStudios. As a danced she worked with Isabelle Schad in choreographies “Music” and “Experience#1”. Recently was invited by Alexandra Borys to the project Unisono which was premiered  on 22.06.2013 in Komuna Warszawa, PL. 

”Walking and turning around rapidly with a satchel in one hand, a cane in the other”
Animal Locomotion Plate 49, 1887
 Eadweard Muybridge

Yesterday on the way to a.pass, when I went out at the tram stop and headed towards canal, I started to, while keeping attention to my walk, revisit my sensations from the way I went through till the tram stopped.

I was wondering if I can parallelize experience that lasted for some time with the one I am having now, keeping the track of two sensational realities at once.

I only managed to have some short parallelities, some more intentionally driven, some less:

While walking simultaneously dawn the stairs in my house and up the road in Molenbeeck I almost freeze when feel the nervous jump done some 20 minutes ago in the moment when I think that I forgot the keys in the room, and maybe the telephone too.

Carrying my heavy bag on the right arm, walking through zebra crossing, I put it down on the floor of the corridor and bend to look inside. The telephone is there, and I have it here somewhere under my armpit in the bag.

Then sitting in the tram, feeling my back leaning upon sof, but filthy seat, and walking is not so easy. Just giving attention to this parallel is making me turn my pelvis in, bend my knees and give more weight to the back of my body having the legs leading me in a funny way, which is not at all comfortable position to walk.

 It is easier for me to feel the gesture of folding my skirt together after adjusting myself to the new sit in the tram, and looking down on to my feet rhythmically appearing one ahead of the other in front of me, on  the pavement. Do I fell this motion in the tram?

Then looking at the Japanese men in front of me, who suddenly starts to turn his palms, as if giving warm-up to his wrist before a Kung-Fu class, he does it for very long, lifting the hand high,  and I feel my wrist turning too,  a smile on my face,  and suddenly a row of chickens on the roasting spit on my left side, turning too. And then there is a street corner, I jump again, because I think I just missed my stop, and run to the doors when realizing, it’s not really a stop, it’s a fish shop stinking really bad, again on my left.  Then I look  in the book which I hold in the left hand:

“Increase of awareness will help them to find a way out of confusion and free their energies for creative work”[1]…

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[1] Feldenkrais, M. Awareness through movement, Harper One 1990, p 171