Autonomous Bodies II - Zoom and the Six Viewpoints

Last year, I wrote an article - Autonomous Bodies - for the Somatics Toolkit, a publication encouraging anthropologists to remember their bodies during field research. This piece was specifically about consent in a group studio practice as it unfolded for me after years of practice with the Six Viewpoints. Another variation of my quest for us to have autonomous bodies lies in my decision to teach the Viewpoints on-line in 2018. Unlike the current moment where we must teach on-line to maintain social distancing, I chose to teach on-line because of its potential to increase each student’s autonomy. Since then, it has opened up many threads of research of how the materials of theatre and dance can interface with platforms like Zoom to open up its possibilities as a medium of communication.

As a classically trained dancer, I felt both trapped in particular techniques and feeling like I had no power under choreographers and teachers. It felt like I was judged on a binary of good and bad and most of that had to do with what I looked like from the outside. I longed for a room full of cooperation, where each person had a voice and was valuable to the creative process. 

When I started teaching, I found myself in the position where I could start to create this possibility. However, because this wasn’t modeled in my performing arts history, I wasn’t quite sure how to guide my students there. My attempt to give them space for their own experience would illicit feedback from both my colleagues and my students that I was “too nice”. I was told to take control of my classroom, impose strict rules, and place the students within the criteria of good and bad. 

The Six Viewpoints lays out a method for deconstruction, or the breaking open of the materials of performance - space, shape, time, emotion, movement, story (SSTEMS) - to reveal their infinite possibilities. This means there is no right place for the student to arrive or a specific experience that needs to be achieved. Through the deconstruction process, hierarchies can also be questioned, allowing for work together on the horizontal. As a teacher, this has translated to finding a strategy to de-center myself and bring my students into their experience. There are specific exercises and a student simply needs to follow the directions to get to know the SSTEMS. I facilitate these directions and the students set off to have their experience. Then they come back with their findings and usually some new research questions that help fuel their creative work.

I started to put this research to the test in 2014 when I got a job teaching Viewpoints classes for dancers who wanted to develop a sense of their autonomy and ownership within their dancing. After a few months of introducing the technique, I experimented teaching with a soft focus. If I couldn’t see the students, I had to trust the exercises and myself. Occasionally I would focus my gaze and witness the students doing tiny movements, wandering around in a far corner, or jumping and turning through the space. I saw they were choosing their own experience. And when we came together to share, they had found some freedom and were grateful for the space opened up in order to do that. 

In 2017, I had my first Zoom call. I was immediately curious about the gallery view of images - everyone seen and given the same amount of space. I wondered if it would be possible to teach the Viewpoints on-line and decided to offer a few classes in early 2018. Immediately I loved that I could not see my students. I was de-powered, but a lot of other questions also came up. Would the technology get in the way, be distracting? Would the students be able to find even more autonomy or would they just get bored being alone in their own spaces? 

Again, I was quickly surprised by the results. In the first class, I gave my short introduction to the theory of the Viewpoints and explained our first practice. We would Walk and Stop, one of the basic exercises of the technique, in our own spaces. As I pushed the bench away from the table to stand up, I froze. This felt radical. We would cease to be talking heads and go out into our individual three dimensional spaces, ignoring the tech except for an occasional glimpse of someone in the gallery view. I had no idea what would happen. I simply continued to remind them of the instructions of the exercise.

After about ten minutes I asked them to come back with a report. And the group recounted incredible experiences of really seeing their spaces again after so many years in them, or contemplating the life of a doorknob, or feeling frustrated they were in a small office. I realized that this medium of Zoom along with the Viewpoints had potential to open up doors into more research around autonomy. There was no question of am I doing this right or well? or could we work together better? The individual experiences started to create complexity within one moment.

Now, after a couple of years of on-line experimentation, I have begun developing specific research. The Six Viewpoints deals with is-ness, and teaching and learning on-line now is an unavoidable given - like gravity -that many of us have to contend with. How can we accept it’s is-ness and start to deconstruct the medium of Zoom and find more possibilities within it? 

Current research

1. Consent - explaining the possibilities of the tech to your students

The article I wrote - Autonomous Bodies - looks at the Viewpoints from the standpoint of consent. In a way, there is more consent possible through on-line learning. Do you want to be seen or heard? Not seen? Where do you want your camera placed? 

2. Warming-up with the technology

Have you muted yourself when you mute your audio? Have you disappeared with your camera off? What is your background or stage space? Can you choose what the others see? Where do you make exits off your screen? Can you orient yourself to your camera and the room you are in at the same time? Do you feel a difference in your body when you can see your own image or if you “hide self view”? What does it mean to connect in this space? Can we set up experiments that reveal the spectrum of connection or influence to disconnection/ignoring the others? What can we find in that? 

3. Clear instructions with space for the students to ask for clarifications

4. Facilitating conversation and encouraging individual research

The challenge lies in the ‘harvest’, as Nancy Stark Smith, dance-artist, calls the final sharing of her improvised gatherings. What do we bring back to share with the teacher? With our fellow students? What did we experience?  What surprised you? What did you learn? What are you inspired to make, to create? How can the teacher begin bring forth and encourage self-governed learning and creative work because of on-line learning, not in spite of it? 

Resource List
Overlie, M. (2016), “Standing in Space”, www.sixviewpoints.com
Wangh, S. (2013), “The Heart of Teaching”, Routledge
Freire, P. (1970), “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, multiple editions
Hooks, B. (1994), “Teaching to Transgress”, Routledge
Spatz, B. (2015), “What a Body Can Do”, Routledge
Black, D (2019), “Autonomous Bodies”, www.somaticstoolkit.coventry.ac.uk/autonomous-bodies/