FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 2nd STUDIO RESEARCH PERIOD, 18TH/19TH MAY 2026

Notes 18th/19th May

STANCE AND MODE CHANGE

'Funmi:

I work sometimes with what I called 'stances'. Every time I get to a new stance, or position, in relation to gravity, then I can bring in my own improvisation. I change the texture. The stance is a marker. Posture is a very important thing in every dance form. Once you shift the posture you change the dance.'

Lauren:

There's something called 'posing' in Popping, which is similar to the idea of stance. My teacher calls it 'mode change.

Katja:

It's a somatosensory anchor. You're planning contextual things to initiate your improvisation through. The content of your motor output emerges through this anchor.

Guido:

By setting a different stance you access different reflex actions. It's a way of setting some conditions, in order to tap into these less conscious possibilities.

Lauren:

I was thinking about sequencing and for me music plays a huge part in determining the sequence. Often the different stances or styles are overlapping. There are many layers to sequences. For me what stuck with me is how certain postures can trigger the adjustment of something. If I compress my chest I automatically trigger a waving movement. So the sequence is connected to the drill you've done in relation to that posture.

'Funmi:

When Lauren spoke about pathways I recognised that, and how when you reach a certain place there's a switch and you change to a different movement. The pathway you create is dependent upon particular stances which release particular vibrations. To do this transition I realise I have to set the next stance here and then the swing happens.

Guido:

Is the expressive change triggered by the thing you do, or do you start with the expression?

'Funmi:

I don't know what comes first. I shift into a stance usually triggered by something I've heard in the music, and then I go more deeply into the expression. I don't know if it's the movement or if it's the memory of where that movement comes from. There's an inward gaze, which is about you, and then there's the outward gaze. Certain stances suggest certain modes. I started to work on this movement as classroom material so it wasn't meant to mean anything except for certain physical qualities, but then I thought I liked this phrase so I started to find what expression was in it.

Guido:

You've offloaded the sequencing to the music, so you can decide on other levels of organisation. The building block there is a continuous one, and the sequence depends on what petubations you add to the buidling blocks.

Katja:

When you dance to music you also have competitive queuing of the sound, in terms of your expectation of what could happen.

Lauren:

I think you can accent certain tones within the stance itself, so different things can emerge from one stance.

PLANNING HORIZON

Katja:

I'd like to ask something around the planning horizon, with something that's well known or something that's unfamiliar.'

Katja Kornysheva

Lauren:

If learned movement is well rehearsed then it can feel like improvisation, but if I'm learning something fresh the planning is a couple of steps ahead.

'Funmi:

I find fixed choreography very difficult and I think quite far ahead. With improvisation I have to warm up because the more I dance the more I get the movement, otherwise it's just a skeleton of the movement. Your body and mind have to get to a place where they're playing with energy.

Katja:

Not every movement is controlled, they're also emergent.

SEQUENCING AND INDIVIDUAL MOVEMENTS

Kayja:

Imagine you're planning a sequence ahead of time. If you don't go ahead with it but someone asks you to show a part of it, the separate part of it is harder to access.

Bojana:

You have all the elements there but they're difficult to retrieve by themselves, because they're now part of the sequence.

Katja:

Yes.

Guido:

With the competitive queuing paradigm you learn a sequence with fingers and buttons, then when you see a red light, for instance, you're asked to perform the sequence. However, if I cue you to produce the sequence but I ask you to start with the third finger, it's harder to remember it. You have these gestural elements of the finger pushes, but when you but them into the context of a sequence the gestural element is coded with the other elements.

DISCRETE AND CONTINUOUS

Guido:

It sounds Katja like you're saying it's all discrete, seperated into discrete blocks. So what's the connection between discrete and continuous? This maps the division between choreography as discrete and dance as continous.

Katja:

The majority of the sequences we produce are internally discrete. I would challenge you to find a skilled sequence that's not recombinable...we tend to take the language as being how it looks rather than what's happening internally. It may look continuous but at the same time it's divided into discrete parts.

Guido:

What disguises as continuity when we dance is often based on other cycles, like walking.

Bojana:

The continuity for a dancer is only a matter of perception. Once we have the modular blocks, the discrete blocks of the sequence, the perception is that flow is happening.

DISRUPTING THE SEQUENCE

Katja:

How would you describe the disruption of the edges of the sequences?

Lauren:

I was giving myself concepts. When I say a pathway I mean a journey that I then isolate or break up. With a waving pathway I can change speed, shape or quality. When I think of Popping I think of a journey. Finding variation within the technique.

'Funmi:

I got to the limits of changing the dance as I knew it. There's a limit to the disruption because otherwise you're not disrupting anything anymore.

Katja:

I was interested that the change was uncomfortable but then becomes familiar. In the brain you would have these attractor states.

REPETITION

'Funmi:

We don't repeat we go deeper in. Because the dance style this movement is based on uses a lot of momentum, it feels like a loop rather than just repeating. And if you keep going you might shift the initiating impulse, and that would change the movement. So you have to be careful with that if you don't want to progress to a different movement.

RESIDUAL MEMORY

'Funmi:

When I was in the (dance company) Cholmondeleys there was a cancan sequence and my leg was always one count behind everyone else. I realised I come from African dance so I bent my knees before I kicked my leg, so in the end I had to add an extra-fast beat for the knee-bend so my leg kicked at the right time. In forms of West Coast African dance you start with your right foot, and when I did contemporary dance class and was asked to start with my left it was chaos.

TEMPLATES

Katja:

The accepted definition of synergy is a combination of muscle pattern and spatio-temporal information. The motor learning is embedded completely in sensory information. The cerebellum combines these informations from other parts of the brain and transforms them in real time. The neurons fire 200 times a second. If you don't have the sensorimotor template for the ballet arms you have to make it.

WALKING TEMPLATE

Guido:

I'm thinking more and more how all dance is walking. We have a very strong patterning for walking.

DYSTONIA

Katja:

In order to have flexibility to learn quickly and adapt in the moment the building blocks are modular. With musicians and some dance and sports you have this condition called dystonia, where you suddenly have a curling in a part of your body which prevents you from doing the art-form or sport. One perspective is that you've built up such a strong skill that it's become inflexible.

TECHNIQUE AND VOCABULARY'

Lauren:

For me Popping is the hitting which is the contraction and release that underpins it. The hitting is the technique but not the vocabulary. You work from principles.

FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 1ST STUDIO RESEARCH DAY, 28TH MARCH 2026.

1st task - Work with movement that draws on already embodied forms, coordinations, types of movement, default pathways, habits? How do you experience or not the existence or emergence of movement/sequences with a sense of syntax (beginning, end, rhythmic and logical connection)? Sequence here and throughout is used as a descriptor of links between movements, rather than an aesthetic category of dance.

Gillie's responses:

Repetition is a response to not knowing what to do.

I definitely have units of movement or units of action which are 6 or 7 movements long.

There's an order of things I do then it becomes about sensation seeking, and this is the pattern of what I do, how I organise my dancing.

When I'm dancing I'm moving between quadrants.

When you say choreography is about a feeling of how things transition into another, it sound like something is only choreography if it's right? Some choreography is wrong.

Suba's responses:

The thing that gives me the ground from which to shift things is the rhythmic structure.

I wanted to change the speed of the movement within the rhythmic structure, to slow it down, to feel it.

Something around the physical me moving, and then the form and the movement that's in my body.

If I was only classically trained could I access this conversation? I'm curious and want to investigate whether these things do happen in Bharatanatyam, but which are languaged differently.

2nd task - Move while focussing your awareness on shifts between pre-embodied (but unaware) form, form you are aware of, experienced flow or reflex movement. How frequently do you experience a shift? What kinds of overlap occur?

Gillie's responses:

I noticed a lot of a kind of transition between something not decided and not named, and then I'd notice myself doing it and it would become the thing that I was doing.

I was struggling to escape the overlaps (between quadrants). There is a sense of needing for it to read as dancing.

Suba's responses:

So there was a lot of conscious work to undo that pre-embodied form creeping in. Something kept creeping in gesturally. However free I wanted to be

I didn't actively try to make the gesture disappear because it didn't feel odd.

My body was balancing out the creeping in of pre-embodied forms.

Then I went back to the original (Bharatanatyam) sequence and I didn't want to be there because the freedom I'd given myself made it seem wrong.

The shifts (between the quadrants) were frequent and the overlaps frequent.

Guido on quadrant:

I would place stage presence top right (procedural). Flow sits in all four quadrants.

Once something is embodied and inaccessible you only notice it because you can't do something else.

You have so many automised sequences subdivided into chunks, and you can access them.

A ritual is for the person doing it but a performance is for the audience which is outside the quadrant.

FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 2ND STUDIO RESEARCH DAY, 29TH MARCH 2026.

Guido:

Where do you find comfort and where do you find discomfort?

There's a lot of learning in the background.

Krakauer uses the image of clamping, where you I

the errors artificially, but at the same time you remove the learning.

1st task - Move freely while observing how, when and why appear to to change.

Gillie responses:

Gillie

For me the interesting thing is the not knowing. There are moments when the not knowing is more.

I repeat to give me the confidence to go on.

Gillie on being led in the dance:

When I did waltzing with my friend who comes from that background, I gelt I didn't have to dance at all.

Guido:

In that moment you can be on the right side (of the quadrant) - sequencing of the left side is taken away from you.

Gillie:

There's something about copying where the performer doesn't have to be present performing.

Guido:

Stage presence is the top right quadrant (Motoric/Procedural/Continuous Explicit/Deliberate/Accessible).

Suba responses:

Suba:

The jathi is in the body, but it's alive and it always changes. Part of the training asks that you keep it alive.

Gillie:

I think a lot of this is about what gets offloaded. There's a certain kind of offloading the overwhelming. Things get moved out of the way, and then sometimes tiny things can happen. Tactics to offload different bits of the matrix.

Guido:

It's about a desire to move from the left to the right, which then feels like I'm arriving at what I'm capable of. As a dancer you don't want to be on the left side; you don't want the self-consciousness of the left side. You lose the self-consciousness not by taking it away, but by getting to the right side.

Suba:

When I dance the jathi I do want to be on the right side so that the form is there.

Guido:

A culture like ballet or Bharatanatyam is defined by being on the left, but when you actually do it you also want to trust that it's there - to rely on the mastery of it.

Gillie:

In Strictly you can see the left side of the untrained dancer working so hard.

Giving at to somebody else to offload it doesn't have to be a person, it could be a score.

2nd task: Move freely while observing the moment of recognising the emergence of 'this is what I'm doing now' - what does that transition feel like from it not yet being named to recognising it as a thing (even if you can't name it)? - 5 minutes.

Jonathan responses:

The timer itself removes the responsibility to organise the larger time and the task determines to some extent the smaller time.

An awareness of things receding as well as things emerging. The transitory nature of the moment of recognising that 'this is what I'm doing now'. Some of these moments are directly named ('circling', 'balancing'). Some of these moments contain complex coordinations or overlapped movements that are recognised only as a rhythm (which repeats until it fades into the next thing) - the repetitions contain a strong element of physical pleasure.

Throughout is a definite movement between internal doing (eyes often closed) and external doing (mapping through and into the room). Throughout is a definite series of moments that ask 'How did I get here?'.

Balance plays a large part in the physical changes, as weight shifts the direction and focus of a movement.

I wasn't aware of alternating right and left. I was very aware of multiple already embodied possibilities re-emerging.

Gillie responses:

The wish to move is stronger than the wish to stay focussed. Everything is referential to me so I start to notice things I recognise. But it's not mindless. I noticed that the recognition of 'this thing as this thing' is very fleeting, and if I stay with it I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is. I can identify it by body parts. I know it but I couldn't tell you what it is.

I can never get myself interested enough in the individual actions when I have so much else I could be interested in.

Suba responses:

I started with 'what does my body need to be doing?'. The transitions came quite slowly. What became 'the things that's happening' came quite slowly.

Then when that felt comfortable the gestures crept in, but in a very imprecise way. That made me think what was the curiosity in the lack of precision? Then I started thinking about what is being seen.

Guido's responses:

I immediately remember tasks from other people, so it's a cultural thing. Then I was thinking about strategies that I use.

In order for me to repeat something I often establish a rhythm, and then shift body parts by maintaining that rhythm.

That it becomes obvious music is a way to offload decisions. Music provides the scaffolding of rhythm,, but also the scaffolding of a meaningful context.

How do you find ways of taking information in your body, and then through repetition pay attention to them? So they move from left to upper right (of the quadrant).

3rd task - Take time to begin a process of creating and memorising a short sequence of simple arm movements - ask are you aware of elements of the sequence 'chunking'? - are you aware of the emergence of an abstract 'generalisation' of the sequence that appears as a rhythm, shape, feeling or inevitable logic?

Suba responses:

I have to go back to the beginning and then go on, then once it's 'chunked' like 'phrase one', then I can continue. There's a point in my body and my head when they've reached a place of knowing, so to build the sequence I have to get to this point and then continue. I was aware that the movements needed to be teachable, that it was explicable.

Guido:

In that process of teaching you reveal the cognitive structure that this phrase takes on for you. You also convey the 'chunks'. And that all happens completely intuitively. You break it down into those chunks.

Then what you described as one movement making the next movement easier is 'priming'. Symmetry also primes the next thing. A natural boundary

for a new chunk to start.

When you mark things with your spine only, you don't really do it with your spine, you visualise it and then don't show it.

To find the 'chunks' start with the 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th movements until you find the boundary which isn't accessible to you.

We can only hold 3 or 4 elements in the memory, which is why telephone numbers are in 3's.

FROM JONATHAN: SOME NOTES FROM THE CONVERSATION WITH ADRIÁN YORIS 4TH FEBRUARY 2026.

Guido

We thought you'd be a good person to talk to for two reasons: dancers draw from somatic practice so are concerned with interoceptive experience, so I'd be interested to hear from a neuroscientific perspective as to what if anything you can feel; and that for me in the absence of an external musical rhythm that guides movement, dancers draw from internal rhythms.

Adrián

I can't help thinking about many things while Jonathan was introducing the topic. First of all the body has a choreography and everybody within movement has a specific choreography, we don't only have to think about dance.

A definition of the interoceptive: how the brain and body are connected and how that information is taken from the body. It makes me think of some studies in trauma for instance, where dance is used as a therapy to introduce changes at the level of memory. There's a connection between this research and how emotions are processed. How we are more accurate at detecting these signals in motion and use them in therapies.

One of the problems is how we measure interoceptive information. It has at least three sources of information: the heart, respiration and stomach. All of them come with methodological issues.

Bojana

I like when you make the link with emotions. This idea that everybody has a choreography also makes sense and it makes me think of social choreography. When I read your paper I wondered about whether hormones play a role? Dance is interested in pleasure hormones, and I wonder if dancers are imagining these affects?

Adrián

I should research on that to provide a proper answer, but stress hormones seem to affect interoceptive experience. However, they do this secretly, at a very slow pace. The stress hormones are particularly difficult to catch.

But you are not looking for a design at this point, it's a philosophical questioning at the moment.

Bojana

I like reading this in your paper that there is no robust evidence, which is bad news for the somaticians, but where are they getting the feelings from?

Adrián

The heart and respiration are connected by the autonomic system.

What happens when the signals are de-synchronised. This is interesting in terms of what a dancer feels in a repeating movement and so forth.

Guido

Normally you don't want to feel your interoceptive feelings, because you usually only do that when something is wrong.

Adrián

I've never found publications related to other organs than skin, heart, lungs, stomach.

However, my yoga practice that I do every week also asks that you tune into organs.

Bojana

The aesthetic expressions in somatic work are self-similar, to do with slowness and interior focus. It's eroded a sense of social liveness. It's become focussed on individuality. The interest in the motor paradigm is that it frees us from this introspection.

Adrián

Are you making a distinction between the anxiety of skilled dancing and the pleasure of 'just dancing'.

Guido

One interesting question for me is when the dancer intensively practices this somatic work over years, what are they becoming an expert in? Do they get better at perceiving their bodies, or do they get better at something else, for instance dual targeting their attention between themself and the outside world.

Adrián

I can share an image from cyclists: trained cyclists show the ability to be able to regulate exertion. During high demand those who have better experience in terms of regulating breathing have a better performance. This was related to the brain activity.

Jonathan

I think this does relate to dancers because dancers have used somatic practice to avoid injury by developing more efficient bodily use, which requires interoceptive sensitivity.

Adrián

I'm thinking also about pain. There's a gate theory of pain that says when the heart ejects blood to the blood stream there's a gate wherein nothing is felt even pain, but when blood pressure goes down is when most interoceptive information including pain is experienced. Also emotions showing in the face are related to this cycle.

Jonathan

Dancer talk about having a high pain threshold, so they're practicing to become more aware of interoceptive experience and at the same time blocking pain.

Bojana

I'd be interested in a dialogue between interoceptive understandings form dance and neuroscience.

Guido

I feel that aside from interoception as an experience, I'd like to understand these signals of breathing and heart as a source of felt choreography that provides a rhythm.

Jonathan

And the connection between interoception and sequencing.

Guido

The question is not whether somatic work changes something, it's whether it changes what was intended.

I feel like it might be good to talk to someone in meta-cognition (cognition about cognition as a mechanistic explanation to consciousness). For instance that what changes is not cognition, but how we deal with cognition.

Spinoza is still the groundwork for interoceptive research.