“Relationship is the binding agent of not yet” — Erin Manning

I have always been inspired by the first explorations in Contact Improvisation, especially by the “warm-ups.” According to Steve Paxton, these could be summed up as the “small dance,” that is, standing upright, remaining still and “observing” the micro-adjustments inherent to vertical posture, as an essential preparation for the unexpected, for improvisation.

Developing a being-with that will allow us to be in relation with the environment as fully as possible.

H. Godard offers us another imaginary: that “of a rabbit sniffing the surrounding space, its head suspended in the position that best captures the scents, sounds, shapes and movements of the environment.” This intelligence is neither in the animal nor in the environment. It arises in their coupling, in the relationship that mutually constitutes them.

“The living being only feels in order to pursue its oriented movement and only moves in order to better feel” (Barbaras). This recursive loop draws a territory where instinct becomes an intelligence of the situation — an accuracy emerging from the very weaving between sensing and moving, with weight-sharing as its essential component (I cannot encounter the world without falling, even if only by a few grams).

This instinct — or should we say this affect? — is nothing like a fixed program. As Massumi writes about animal play: “The form of the gesture becomes more or less subtly deformed under the pressure of the body’s enthusiasm that propels it.” Instinct is this power of variation, this ‘laboratory providing vital forms of action’ where invention is at play. More life means more inventiveness.

What ultimately deepens is the possibility of remaining within this “wonder of undoing/redoing” in action, of sustaining oneself in a place of emergence, where attention functions more as a modality of attunement than as an agent of modification.

This is what I would like to share and deepen during this workshop: exploring this moving territory where instinct is neither genetic program nor cultural acquisition, but a power of variation emerging through practice itself.