Perceiving, Perceiving+ Perceiving
Looking through the lens of Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed, phenomenology is the study of how bodies experience and orient themselves in the world. It focuses on lived experience, asking how perception, movement, space, and social norms shape what comes into view and what remains unseen.
Ahmed extends classical phenomenology by showing that orientation is not neutral. Bodies are directed along social lines such as gender, sexuality, race, and habit. What feels natural or comfortable is often the result of repeated alignment with dominant structures. Queer phenomenology examines how deviating from these lines creates disorientation, opening new ways of sensing space, relation, and possibility.
In this framework, phenomenology becomes a method for understanding how experience is shaped and how shifting orientation can transform both perception and world making.
I get curious about this in day to day life, in a cafe, encountering a crush or in the moments before a heartbreak. I become aware of this most viscerally in moments when orientation happens faster than understanding. Can we translate this into improvisation? On to the stage, where an image is made and then it unfolds. We begin with an image. A sense, a projection, a quiet story forming before anything has actually happened. I notice how easily I can see another person through what I am longing for, fearing, or imagining. In these moments I am learning as much about my own interior landscape as I am about the person in front of me.
Relational space becomes a negotiation between what I perceive and what is real. When I allow another person to reveal themselves beyond my initial image, something has to shift. Sometimes this brings tension, sometimes relief, and often disorientation. The practice becomes staying present as the image changes.
Two or more inner worlds meeting, adjusting, finding rhythm. Encounters unfold gradually. One can track the speed of the imagination as something different from the speed of the nervous system and trust. For me, resilience is living as closely to reality as I possibly can, while also allowing hope, dreaming, and imagination. But only to the extent that when it is met with the world and the universe of other people, and undoubtedly deviates, the disorientation is temporary and not so painful.
Ahmed locates the moment of deviation in the context of straying from a inherited heteronormative culture. I am interested in looking at the moment of deviation in relationship. When a person diverges from the script, deviates from the score, when projection shifts, when interest or disinterest changes, the project, the plan, the idea—what we do with ourselves. The potential distraught, surprise, or joy. The ability to adapt as a scenario unfolds in front of us. The skill we are building here is an ability to adapt to deviation, to change with what is presenting itself as the new truth of a moment.
Are we composing together, responding, moving toward or away?
In class we take these happenings, distill and translate them into tangible practices that help us zoom in on these human events of relationality and translate them into movement practice for compositional improvisation. If we are looking at how we compose ourselves in our day to day lives, this gives us rich material to practice, explore, and play out different possibilities of orienting toward or away, being with, and being surprised. We allow these things to unfold over and over and in different ways, and we practice being in the disorientation of a no longer linear timeline. We unfold in the multiverse of possibility in each of our individual experiences as we come together to create one system that is moving and thinking together, an ensemble.
We practice commanding the field around us. We become incredibly aware of the power we have over an image or a room with only the tool of attention. How to expand the room with my heart, make it bigger than the universe, or bring it in so small it is a tiny memory locked inside the left chamber of my heart.