"If we look at the whole body as a piece of paper, folding itself over time through movement and resulting in different areas of human attention, we can start to see the possibility of how things relate to each other.“
--Mike O’Connor¹

If the moving body can be likened to a folding piece of paper that produces lines, how can we unfold the creases that denote experience and tacit knowledge? How can we trace this movement of folding and unfolding across our “outer material pleats” to our “inner, animated, spontaneous folds”?² Perhaps, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, a fold is just a change of direction. Yet the philosopher goes on to observe that entire species are defined by degree of development assigned to their ability to fold their own parts and to unfold them.³ Herein lies (human and nonhuman) “knowledge” (or non-knowledge) — something that has not passed through understanding on its path to knowing. Something only “known” while moving; beckoning to the mind while dancing.

To imagine what dance could contribute to cognitive science, to linguistics or to perceptual psychology, one has to leave behind dance as an image-making process, as entertainment, as skill, as a profession, as a tradition, as a given. To centralize this potential contribution in one’s practice, as Mike O’Connor has done, is to step largely into the unknown. It is to transgress dance discourse in one’s search to facilitate the proto-knowledge inherent in dance infiltrating so-called “known” areas of thought. It is to point to the uncomfortable fact that, very often, fields like philosophy or phenomenology or cognitive science have, by necessity, substituted a rational understanding of movement for the opacities of the moving body. O’Connor’s practice invites us to ask what kind of knowledge would be constituted by knowing the body without understanding? What might it mean to work with the body as the means to know it, and perhaps in doing so, to un-know part of what has, until now, constituted “knowledge”? Could we set aside our long-held “understandings” to come instead to new questions, to new opacities? (Who knew that dance could provide a different way of approaching linguistics or that the entangled bodies of two dancers might affect our thinking on gravity?)

These questions also offer new ways into dance. O’Connor’s work suggests the possibility of re-informing how we look at the body and performance in dance practice. It tests ways to move beyond personal choices of individual aesthetic taste; it delves into language functions and the chemicals released by interacting bodies, echoing the body in love. Combining theories of cognitive science and practices of performance, O’Connor has invited dancers to “move around X”, where x is not the unknown, but rather “a known subject matter that is constantly shifting and changing, presenting itself in different forms”.⁴ Moving onto the “x of y”, he has invited dancers to work with metaphors in a physical exploration of whether the architecture of thought resembles the world around us. (When space becomes a metaphorical landscape, it becomes possible to see language in action.) In “Tertiary” one performer holds a watermelon in her hands, turning it slowly. Another dancer repeats her movements, holding the head of a man in his hands, an object that now appears awkwardly attached to a body. In fact the turning of a neck suggests the drawing of an incomplete circle; an open-ended line in space that carries a trace of the head’s weight. As one dancer loses hold of the watermelon, allowing it to drop downwards for several inches, we anticipate the subsequent drop of a man’s head on the floor. And so we dance in the neuroscientific notion that watching is like feeling; that the borders where one person stops and another begins are blurred.

If dance is a line in space and thinking is a sequence of thoughts in the mind, how can the dancing mind interweave its various strands of knowledge? If we inhabit the dancing body, can we research movement from within and without, seamlessly and simultaneously? The terms of this reflexivity are surely not a reflection on “self”, but a condition in which the body “itself” would be regarded as both interior and exterior to its “self”; the dancing body as both subject and object.⁵ This marks the inseparability of two folds, which collectively produce the crease or seam along which movement-knowledge is constituted.⁶

Publication: This is one of seven text portraits by Lucy Cotter, commissioned for and published in Fieldings – Propositions for 3rd Cycle Research in the Performing Arts, published by DAS Publishing, the new publishing platform of DAS Research, the lectorate of the Academy for Theatre and Dance in 2021.

The book was edited under the chief editorship of Sher Doruff, in collaboration with editors Julien Bruneau, Konstantina Georgelou, Rosie Heinrich, Marijke Hoogenboom and Nienke Scholts.