Author: Ira Ferris
Dancing and music commonly come hand in hand, but many professional dancers prefer dancing to silence. Choreographer/Performer Sonja Pregrad tells me that dancing to music is “very often deafening, like dancing in gloves, putting something on top and erasing so many other information which are subtle."[i] Dancing to silence, on the other hand, allows one to perceive the full sonic spectrum of the environment, while also becoming audible to oneself. Instead of tunnelling the hearing towards a single highlighted source, silence leaves the dancer “in the dark shapes with no form”[ii] where they confront uncertainty and vulnerability but are also given a space and time to discover movements that exceed their training and expectation.
One of the key reasons why dancers choose not to dance to music is to avoid structure. R. Murray Schafer writes: “Rhythm is direction. Rhythm says: ‘I am here and I want to go there.’”[iii] Which is what the music does. It has a rhythm and it commandeers direction. Within this frame, which demands our full attention, our range of movement is limited. Salome Voegelin writes that music leaves no space to move; we are “held down to the ground by the weight and exclusivity of the sounds;” our body “besieged” and our “sensory-motor actions […] reactions to the […] demands of the sounds.”[iv] Constrained within this limited and limiting frame, outlined by the sound of music, the dancer struggles to notice, explore, uncover anything else. They fall into the habitual pattern of movement. Turn the music off and the dancer is left in darkness.
Dancing to silence is terrifying! There is nothing to lean on or hide behind. It is an experiment that can easily fail, and there is little certainty that it will not. Silence opens up a vast prairie of options, which is at times a dizzying kind of freedom. At the beginning, we are likely to feel naked and vulnerable which is why we tend to avoid silence, fill it in with content; a protective shield. Dancing to silence is like theatre without words. When the music is on, one can hide behind the sound and become mute or muted, but when the music is off “so much starts to sound.”[v] “I found it really hard,” told me theatre maker Michelle St Anne, who experienced dancing to silence while studying at VCA. ”It's really difficult. Because, it doesn't give you that comfort layer. It's kind of really weird.”[vi]
So, why do it?
Because silence is “the beginning of listening.”[vii] When dancing to music, the dancer is inaudible to themself. Swallowed by the tone and the rhythm of music, they simply respond in a mechanized manner. But the artist wants to escape the conditioning! They want to create. And to create, they need to stop listening to the external instruction and come back to their centre of intuitive innovation. When I asked St Anne why did her lecturer made them dance in silence, she said: “I think it was about building up the centre of movement, what it is to move.” Dancer who has so far been instructed to dance to a composition, is now left with the terrifying freedom to dance to their internal sounds. In silence, the dancer returns to the intuitive wisdom of their body. This process of centring begins with deep, attentive listening.
When they speak of ‘silence’, dancers are, of course, referring to ‘silence’ in Cage-ian terms, not as an absence of sound but as an acoustic environment that is free of intentionally organised sounds. This environment is filled with noise, with the acoustics of the space; and this space can be either an indoor studio or an outdoor venue (i.e. a park, a beach, a parking-lot, a corn field, you name it). In this sonic environment, a dancer is surrounded by a whole range of unpredictable sounds and the exercise of moving within this space involves their recognition.
In this process of deep listening, where they allow for the most minute and most distant sounds to reach their ears, dancers discover that they too are sound-makers. Apart from hearing the sounds outside of their bodies, they tune in to the sounds of their bodies – the swooping of the feet, the rustling of clothing, the hush of breath, the drumbeat of the heart. They are noticing the sounds that they are, an awareness that is lost when the music is on. Music deafens us. Music disembodies us.
In the process of attentive listening, the dancer’s attention slowly shifts from listening to the sound to being in the sound. The process is in some way meditative; it begins with an all-inclusive listening of what surrounds us, then we slowly tune in to the sounds closer to our body (sounds of and within our body), and eventually the attentive listening stops altogether and we find ourselves in the sound, “entwined with the heard.”[viii] This is not a meta position of separation; we are in what Didier Anzieu calls “sonorous envelope;”[ix] an enmeshed relationship that dissolves the object-subject position of interrogative listening and reactive movement. This is when the thoughts on how to move properly, beautifully, in rhythm, etc. drop and we allow our body to take over; to move intuitively. We now find ourselves in the experience of inner silence which music made unattainable. The body is now “estranged from [all] assumptions.”[x] The inner chatter of how should I move, the nervousness to do it ‘well’ melts away.
The dancer is no longer moving but is moved. Dancing to silence transforms to dancing in silence; or dancing silently.
Dancing to silence also stills our movements, in a sense of slowing them down. There is no imposed timing, so we are allowed to follow our own pace, unhurried. When speaking to dancer Olga Uzikaeva, about the experience of flow, she told me she often struggles to experience the flow because she is moving too fast, rushing to fill the space with movement. She says, “I want to slow down.”[xi] Silence provides an opportunity for that to happen. Without imposed rhythm, which is to say without imposed time, we are given a choice to still our movements. What we firstly encounter, in the absence of music, is our own “internal rhythm,”[xii] the conditioned speed of the blood in our veins which wants us to move at a particular pace. Even that sometimes needs to be interrogated! Before s/he reaches the centre from which the movement originates, the dancer needs to shake off the bondage of habitual, learned, conditioned movements. Uzikaeva explains that this is when the body stops moving with the dancer’s conscious control and it feels like “floating;” a sort of “disappearance,” or “melting.” It is a kind of death that enables the birth of a new type of movement that the dancer’s mind could not think of, but her/his body certainly could, if left in silence. Silence, reminds us Toru Takemitsu, is beginning and the end; it “surrounds the dark world of death.”[xiii]
The movements are now not responsive to anything external to dancer’s body. They are neither moving to the music, nor to the acoustic sounds around them, but are freed from everything.[xiv] They have moved beyond the consciousness of sound! However, there is a synchronicity between the surrounding sound and the sensibility of the movement. Intertwined with the sound, the dancer is unconsciously informed by it. Uzikaeva uses a metaphor of “seaweed”; moved by the wave, “floating.” We are in, what Jeff Todd Titon calls, “sympathetic vibration”[xv] with the sounds around us. The whole body becomes ears. “It is at the very moment when the somatic boundaries between inside and outside dissolve, […] that […] I am, ‘all ears’,” writes Tim Ingold. “From being a body with ears, I am becoming ear-body.”[xvi] In the loss of this mind-body division, the sound is not merely heard but experienced; felt. Vibration touches the body.
The body resonates.
In this state of flow, the dancer lets go of preconceptions about what is supposed to happen. Because they have lost control, they are inevitably uncertain where they are headed and how it will all end.
Dancing to silence is risky and it is, in fact, an exercise in embracing uncertainty.
Pregrad speaks of dance as a process of surrendering and working with sensations; learning “how not to grasp but to move, which is to dance.”[xvii] Dancer and movement researcher, Kate Sherman speaks of it as an “emergent process” through which all the layers are peeled off and we are left in “unfurling presence;”[xviii] liberated. The process is forever “doubtful,” never “a mute stability;”[xix] as any movement should be. The dancer is learning how to lose the ground beneath their feet.
REFERENCES:
[*] Expression ‘ear body’ was encountered in Tim Ingold, “Noise, Sound, Silence,” Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices, Kathleen Coessens (ed.). Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2019, pp. 55. Tim Ingold notes that ‘an ear body’ is an expression originally used by the sound-performance artist Fabrizio Manco (2016, 89).
[i] From the interview with Sonja Pregrad, recorded on 15 January 2020. Transcript and sound available here: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-sonja-pregrad.
[ii] Salome Voegelin writes: “listening […] defies expectations and habitual perception. It builds in the dark shapes with no form.” Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, New York, London: Continuum Books, 2010, p25.
[iii] R. Murray Schafer, Ear Clearing: Notes for and Experimental Music Course, Toronto: Clark & Cruickshank, 1969,
p21.
[iv] All three quotes in this sentence are from Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p47.
[v] Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p83. Voegelin also writes: “In the quiet sounds of Silence the listener becomes audible to himself.” Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, pxv.
[vi] From the interview with Michelle St Anne recorded 8 January, 2020. Transcript and sound available online: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-michelle-st-anne
[vii] Full quote: “When there is nothing to hear, so much starts to sound. Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening.” Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p83.
[viii] Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p5. Voegelin also writes that this is “not a sense of listening to, but of listening in.” Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p29.
[ix] Quoted in Steven Connor, “Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art//2005,” Sound: Documents on Contemporary Art (Caleb Kell ed.), London, Whitechappel Gallery, 2011, p134.
[x] Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p69.
[xi] From the interview with Olga Uzikaeva recorded 5 May 2019. Available online: https://soundcloud.com/artemis-projects/dance-cinema-olga-uzikaeva?in=artemis-projects/sets/dance-cinema
[xii] Dancer and choreographer, Diane Busuttil brought the idea of the dancer’s individual or ‘internal rhythm’ to my attention when she said: “I'd say there's always an internal rhythm. I always hear rhythms that I can just interpret through the body, so I guess that nobody else hears them but I'm not sure if it's really silent.” From the interview with Diane Busuttil recorded on 21 January, 2020. Transcript and sound available online: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-diane-busuttil
[xiii] Toru Takemitsu, Yoshiko Kakudo, Glenn Glasow, Seiji Ozawa, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1995, p17.
[xiv] I would like to emphasise that when dancing to silence, the dancer is not playing out a tune of any sort in her/his head. S/he is not dancing to any musical reference or an earworm. However, composer Trevor Brown pointed out to me that this is more difficult for a musician to do, as their job is to find music in silence. So, if a dancer happens to be a musician s/he will likely start composing music in her/his head. This will prevent them from sinking in and experiencing the inner silence that I am describing as a prerequisite of innovative movement. (Full interview with Trevor Brown recorded 30 December 2019 is available here: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-trevor-brown)
[xv] Cherice Bock, “Interview with Jeff Todd Titon re The Sound of Climate Change (2017),” AcademiaEDU, https://www.academia.edu/37366485/Interview_with_Jeff_Todd_Titon_re_The_Sound_of_Climate_Change_2017_, p4.
[xvi] Tim Ingold, “Noise, Sound, Silence,” Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices, Kathleen Coessens (ed.). Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2019, pp. 55. Tim Ingold notes that ‘an ear body’ is an expression taken from sound-performance artist Fabrizio Manco (2016, 89).
[xvii] Full quote: “Something that I've been practicing for this 30, or 35 years that I've been dancing, and especially through my adult dancing, is flowing with the state of change. […] Flowing is allowing myself to be on these waves and changing and learning how to let go; how to roll down when it goes down and how to come up when it comes up. So, I surrender […] And I wait for another breath to come in and take me further. I look at how to work with the sensations, and how not to grasp but to move, to dance.” From the interview with Sonja Pregrad, recorded on 15 January 2020. Transcript and sound available here: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-sonja-pregrad.
[xviii] Full quote: “Dance can be many, many things, but I guess for me, the practice of dance is an emergent process. It's a process of following a moment by moment presence. And, you know, that doesn't always happen. Often you can get into your head. But I think, when you really feel deeply connected and are in this state of flow, your body doesn't need to know the end result. It's our minds that need to know the end result, it's our minds that need to make sense of things. Our bodies are quite happy just to be in this unfolding emergent unfurling presence. And I think there's an incredible freedom in that because that's actually our natural state. […] And, I think it can be really hard sometimes to be in the unknown if we're in a battle with our heads because our minds are really scared of that and don't understand that and kind of go into a terror, or wanting to analyse it or rationalise it or all these things. But once we can find the way to actually be in that state of the unknown, it's incredibly liberating and freeing and pleasurable and joyful and expressive.“ From interview with Kate Sherman recorded 26 January, 2020. Transcript and sound available online: https://www.artemisprojects.com.au/dance-matters-kate-sherman.
[xix] Both quotes are from Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p5, p11.