Seismograph body

Philosophy 

Corps sismographe® is a method of instantaneous choreographic composition designed for both stage performance and site-specific dance. Developed by choreographer and researcher Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, the practice combines concrete tools for sensory bodily grounding, composition, and shaping with unconscious and imaginary elements to support the creation of engaged and unique forms. 

The Seismograph Body resonates with different places and their temporal, energetic, or emotional imprints. It simultaneously traces vibrational information originating from environments and the inner self. By selecting different entry points, it composes in turn from internal and/or external, sensory and/or emotional sources, interconnecting them with one another. Thus, it is a matter of dancing, but also of being danced by places and circumstances. Dance then manifests the connections between the body and its environment. It captures and reveals the energies of places without seeking to assign them meaning, in order to make visible what does not always appear to ordinary perception. By weaving threads of continuity between the human and the non-human, the conscious and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible, shadow and light, the practice is situated within a perspective of choreographic creation in relation to living beings and the Earth.

Relationship 

For the seismographic body, the relationship comes first: it begins with the relationship between others and the self, the world and the self (a self that has no defined boundaries and that constantly reconfigures itself based on internal and external data).
Through dance, it opens up possibilities and invites the joy of not knowing in advance what is taking shape. This demands a connection to life and implies a lightness, a non-wanting that slips beneath forms to inhabit the not-yet-visible. This lightness excludes all psychology, self-consciousness, or a spirit of seriousness. It dissolves narcissistic shells and cannot coexist with the fixed. It eludes attempts to pigeonhole it or interpret it. Traveling between successive determinations, it plays with representations as with so many peels or husks.
The aim is to catalyze new modes of creation involving a relationship of openness attuned to the collective and the environment. Dance is produced in the moment of the act, arising from a connection to an off-screen realm. The seismographic body is thus an “off-limits” interface that listens beyond the indistinct boundaries of perception. His dances are not predetermined artistic objects, reproducible and adaptable to various contexts. They are arranged in real time based on the relationship to others, to the environment, to the place—that is, to the human and non-human collective in which one participates.

We dance and are danced—shaped by relationships, places, people, circumstances, and the weather. In this sense, dance is seismographic, for, like a seismograph, it signals in real time the relationships that connect it to the world.

Ethics

For the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, ethics is: “the sense in which the interiority of an act finds meaning in the exterior.” The relationship between the internal and the external forms the basis of ethics. This gives rise to a dynamic of reciprocity between the inside and the outside and a poetics of resonance between the two. The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark also conceives of the collective through the dimensions of interiority and exteriority. The individual is thus open, in relation to a field in which they participate. They are not solely at the service of the collective or absorbed by it; conversely, they do not use it for personal gain, as in a society that serves only certain individuals. The collective and the individual mutually create one another through relationships that enhance each other—one with the other, one independently of the other—in their power to act, to live, and to create. This reciprocity between the internal and the external also lies at the foundation of the practice of yoga and similarly informs the practice of seismography.

Kaleidoscope

The seismographic body is by nature multifaceted, fractal, and multidirectional. It has multiple arms like an octopus, multiple simultaneous perspectives. It coordinates its facets and can initiate movement from several places at once. Thought emanates from every facet of the kaleidoscopic body. Neither unidirectional nor monolithic, it is not localized in a single, overarching point but is multifaceted by nature.
In the octopus, each arm moves independently. Each part of the body possesses its own intelligence. Like the octopus, the seismographic body possesses a fluid pulsating quality, a multifaceted intelligence—feet, skin, muscles, fascia, cells… This intelligence can be transferred to choreographic movement. Through kinesthetic sensation, every part of the body thinks. It is a sensitive, vibratory thought, unquantifiable in its dimensions because it is also connected to invisible dimensions and to a consciousness that is not solely localized within the body. Dance signals this thought. It makes visible the connections that the body activates between multiple layers of sensation, perception, and imagination—to the invisible, the quantum, the vibratory, the magical.

Silence at the heart of things

The seismographic body inhabits the “silence at the heart of things.” This is its point of departure. It listens to the void between particles—a void that constitutes us and accounts for 99.999999% of matter, both in our bodies and in the world. Animated and inanimate bodies are thus woven from a single volumetric/vibrational fabric that envelops us and vibrates beyond what our senses can perceive. It is the music of magic.

The technique

Practice activates : 

• A fluid, cellular foundation that enables the activation of spaces of resonance between bodies, as well as between bodies and their environments.
• A transindividual dimension that interconnects bodies with what lies beyond them, through the collective sharing of unique experiences.
• The means to make visible and interpretable through dance the connections that link us to the world.
It involves dancing by engaging in relationships sensitive to matter and the living, and activating a dynamic of reciprocity between the internal and the external: the body, like a seismograph, traces in real time the information it perceives (images, movements, impressions, sensations…). This practice navigates perception from layer to layer, allowing us to engage, through choreographic phrasing and composition, with different registers of sensation and perception. It also involves working with emotion, the imagination, and the unconscious in the creative process

References

The development of this method builds on the research-creation work conducted by Nadia Vadori-Gauthier and her doctoral dissertation in the arts and philosophy of art (2014) - University of Paris 8. 
It has been informed by references and works by artists and thinkers, including Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, founder of Body-Mind Centering® (embodiment at the cellular level; pre-noetic consciousness), Anna Halprin (dance, nature, and environments); Lygia Clark (the work is the relationship; Möbius strip; empty-full), dance and resistance; dancing to live), Ana Mendieta (Siluetas; the sacred dimension of nature), Starhawk (the need to “Dream the Dark” collectively; magic is the language of things), Henri Bergson (cone of memory; subtractive perception; creative imagination), Gilles Deleuze (becomings; Dionysian regime of image production; plane of consistency; syntheses of time; regime of signs; producing meaning), Antonin Artaud (making a body; healing life; completing reality), Federico García Lorca (duende), Félix Guattari (machinic device; machinic unconscious; ecosophy; rhythmic launch), Gilbert Simondon (collective connection to the pre-individual; transindividual processes of creation; transductive relation), Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (Thought in Act; rendering formative forces; inventing devices of relation), Édouard Glissant (thoughts on tremor), Vinciane Desprets (non-human intelligences and languages), Benoît Lachambre (undulatory-percussive; opening up spaces; manifesting the connection), Kiki Smith (body, nature, and cosmos), Fabienne Verdier (vibrational void; silence; gesture; stars), Joanne Clavel (ecosomatics), Julie Perrin (situated choreography), Emma Bigé (tenderness, antidotes to identity hierarchies; being moved from within and without).