perpetual mvmt<>snd

Artist’s statement
A colleague who has watched my dancing for fifteen years recently described its uniqueness as “the ability to be affected.” I am interested in what dance “is” beyond how it impacts the eye. I want to understand in more detail the ways that dance has shaped my mind, and how my mind is in turn capable of re-shaping my body. I want to cultivate cellular empathy, to illuminate the role of the body in how we relate to one another and to ourselves. My ongoing studies of dance and yoga have deepened my belief in the influential nature of thoughts as physical processes and the body’s indispensable role in thinking. What type of knowledge is dance? How are body, mind, and meaning entangled with one another?

The philosopher Alva Noe, and others, have asked, “What can dance contribute to theoretical knowledge?” In looking for my own answer to this question I have cooperated with thinkers from disparate academic, scientific, and artistic disciplines. Much of my work originates in bodies resonating: with one another, with space, with sound. For the past two years, my collaborator Bilwa (a sound artist) and I have been investigating sine waves and how they interact with bodies, using them to map trajectories through geographic and energetic spaces. In this context, I have also been exploring feedback loops, one of the basic patterns of our life experience. I have worked as a soloist and in collaboration with other dancers, using choreographed and improvised movement (where choreography-improvisation is a spectrum). My work has been sculptural, durational, and nonlinear, and I have generated it in visual arts galleries, dance/theater spaces, and nontraditional sites.

My current project focuses on dance as a form of knowledge and is based on what is made possible by the physical/emotional relationships of dancers, even when we are separated by time and space. I am working with three dancers with whom I have collaborated extensively, drawing from countless hours spent observing one another to develop practices that allow us to focus on the exact points at which our body/minds make contact. Through experiments with meditation, shared rituals, and distance improvisations, we visit one another via our imaginative bodies, meeting in a shared somatic space to regenerate it and create movement in it “together.” My recent readings in neuroscience and noetic science have led me to think about our shared somatic space as existing in the physical world, as long as we are consciously able to bring it to mind. Dancers are in a unique position to explore the connective and transformational potentials of body/minds. We embody a form of distributed identity, sharing movement experiences that can dissolve strict body/ego boundaries, opening ourselves to the possibilities of the body as a complex system that can shift itself through perceiving and acting in the world. Works by philosophers Antonio D’Amasio, Steven Johnson, Benedictus de Spinoza, Alva Noe, and others provide connective tissue, helping me to interweave their ideas with my physical experiences.

view full CV—Emily Sweeney