Hawksley, S. (2021) Landscape in the figure: cultivating presence as nature , Conceição | Conception. Campinas, SP. (Special Issue - Anthropo-scenes: performing arts, ecology, and diversity of ways of life). Vol. 10, (00), p. e021009.

→ PDF

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether we can make embodied sense of the Anthropocene, and if so, how we might locate ourselves in a more empathic relationship with the non-human world? By feeling, at the personal scale, the part we play in the natural systems that support life, we may become more able to make the necessary changes in our actions to address the global-scale degradation of nature. I discuss somatic and creative practices that offer tools for cultivating a sense of presence in and as nature, giving examples of artists' creative practices, including some of my own choreographic explorations aiming to embody the 'landscape in the figure'.

Project blog for Dwell: landscape in the figure (2022)

→ go to page

Hawksley, S. (2016) Coping with the (interactive) environment: the performative potential of interactivity. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (Special issue - Embodiment, Interactivity and Digital Performance). Vol.8. (1), pp.43-56.

ABSTRACT

This article explores the performative implications of coping with interactive performance environments, and ways in which such environments may be considered to 'make' people. Performers often practice for long durations in information-intensive technologized immersive settings, which demand and develop a combination of spread attentiveness, deep awareness and fast response times. This particular combination of embodied, embedded, durational and attentionally rich experience may prime the brain's neuroplasticity - the capacity to reorganize its structure and function by forming new neural connections. This is discussed in relation to movement practices, body and self-image, and debate about technogenesis - the idea that humans are defined by their coevolution with technologies. The article considers two interactive works, Garry Stewart's Proximity (2012) made for Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), and Crosstalk (2014), a collaborative work by artist Simon Biggs, choreographer Sue Hawksley and composer Garth Paine.

Hawksley, S. (2013) Dancing on the Head of a Sin. Leonardo Electronic Almanac. (Special Issue - Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media). Vol 19 (4), pp.84-97.

→ PDF

ABSTRACT

This paper will outline the practice and performance of haptic_dance (2011) and discuss the ethical issues raised and the challenges presented to dance's ontology by this work. haptic_dance is a dance work received by touch, choreographed and performed by Sue Hawksley for an audience of one. It aims to make tangible some impression of a dance, and through focusing attention on this aspect of the sensorium, to enhance the audience's experience of kinaesthetic empathy. The use of touch to deliver and/or communicate dance is a novel and little explored choreographic approach. Within Western traditions, while social dances are often shared kinaesthetic/kinetic experiences, theatre dance performances are generally engaged visually and from a distance. The concept of touching the audience in order to deliver the dance raises interesting issues concerning professional and ethical codes of practice. Touch is generally the least shared, or acknowledged, and the most taboo of the senses. Haptic and touch-screen technologies are becoming ubiquitous, but although this makes touch more commonly experienced or shared, it is often reframed through the virtual, while inter-personal touch still tends to remain sexualized, militarized or medicalized (in most Western cultures at least).
haptic_dance employs what could be seen as the simplest of mediating tools - the hands. However, the somatic senses are complex, involving the proprioceptive, vestibular and visceral systems, not limited to any specific organ but involving the whole organism. In haptic_dance I encountered the complexities of delivery and interpretation of inter-personal touch, and the limitations encountered by touching on a taboo. Does the haptic engagement with dance - a medium in which touch is nowadays often accepted (in social dances, tango, or contact improvisation for example) - make it easier for the work to transcend taboos, or does it add to the complexity? Dance has been prohibited in some European societies since medieval times, and still is in certain cultures. Another key issue this work raises is where the dance is located. Some audience members felt that it was in or around them, others felt that it was in me as the dancer, or in the danced material from which the touch version derives. This question of where the dance is significant in considering whether, how and why the use of haptic mediation technologies within this or another choreographic context can make touch more broachable.

Hawksley, S. (2012) Dancing to an understanding of embodiment. (PhD Thesis) Edinburgh College of Art thesis and dissertation collection, Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.

Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7918

ABSTRACT

This practice-led research employs choreographic and somatic practices, and their mediation through performance and/or technologies, to facilitate critical engagement and apprehension of notions of embodiment.
The core concerns are movement, dance and the body, as sites of knowledge and as modes of inquiry, with particular focus on lived experience approached from a non- dualist perspective. Central themes are action, attention, bodyscape, tensegrity, improvisation, interactivity, memory, language and gesture. Taking as a starting point the position that knowledge and mind may be embodied, and that the movement habits and stress markers which pattern bodyscape may in turn inform cognition, the choreographic practice seeks to illuminate, rather than explicate or demonstrate, aspects of embodiment.
The methodological approaches are (en)active, heuristic and reflective. Dance, as a exemplar of movement, and choreography, as a mode of creative and critical engagement with dance, are the primary research tools. Somatic approaches to practice, performance and philosophy are investigated for their potential to develop or reveal embodied knowing and awareness. Technological mediation is employed to inform and augment perception and apprehension of the embodied experience of dance, from the perspectives of choreographer, performer and audience.
The thesis comprises five dance-based performance works and a written text critically engaging the concepts behind and emergent from this praxis.

Hawksley, S. (2012) Traces of Places. The Peripatetic Studio (journal-blog, no longer available online).

→ PDF

INTRODUCTION

Traces of Places is a dance for camera work by filmmaker Roddy Simpson and myself as choreographer, with dancer Freya Jeffs. Research and development took place at the Workroom, Glasgow, and it was filmed at the Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh. This is a collaborative project; I write here from my perspective as choreographer.
The work reflects themes that have interested me throughout my career in dance and bodywork, and which I explored in my practice-led Ph.D, concepts such as thinking in movement, embodied knowledge, enactive mind and physical thought. I am fascinated by the way habits, memories and stories pattern our bodies and movement and, if we accept that mind can be embodied, the idea that the shape we are (may) shape how we think.

Hawksley, S. (2011) Choreographic and somatic strategies for navigating bodyscapes and tensegrity schemata. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Vol.3 (1+2), pp.101-110.

→ PDF preprint version

ABSTRACT

This article reflects upon the psychophysical patterning and layered nature of phenomenal experience, and the interconnectedness of bodymind and environment. These are conceptualized as 'bodyscape' and 'tensegrity schema' and explored by engaging the principles of tensegrity (tensional integrity) with reference to dance, performance and somatic practices. In some performance environments, performers may be called on to bring in and out of focus, or simultaneously hold in attention, multiple layers and shifting perspectives of bodily experience. Giving examples I suggest that such situations, together with some choreographic and somatic practices, may facilitate an attitude of embodied reflection and skills of perceptual alertness. These can develop awareness of and capacity to 'navigate' bodyscape and tensegrity schema, and support the performer to better cope with the often conflicting multisensory and polyattentional demands of complex environments, whether highly specialized performance modes or everyday. The discussion derives theoretical flavour from dance and performance studies, phenomenology, somaesthetics and cognitive science, and is informed by my current practice-led Ph.D. research in dance and choreography enquiring into notions of embodiment.

Hawksley, S. (2009) Re-membering(s): Being There and Then, and Here and Now. Premise (University of Edinburgh Post Graduate Student Journal - no longer available online).

→ PDF

ABSTRACT

This paper considers questions of embodied perception, memory and cognition from a choreographic perspective, through an account of the making and performing of re- membering(s), a performance work comprising a series of improvised miniatures in contemporary music and dance.
re- membering(s) investigates the interfaces between performers, between dance and music, and between performers and audience in live improvised performance. What is transmitted? What is lost? What are effective choreographic means to apprehend, frame and articulate the fugitive impressions and traces of what happens in the danced- moment? re- membering(s) emphasises the activities of looking, listening, remembering and reporting, engaging aleotoric compositional methods to present performance strategies and situations pertinent to an inquiry into embodiment.
This paper discusses aspects of the creative process and context of this piece, focusing primarily on the choreographer's and dancers' perspectives, and on the role of the interdisciplinary collaboration in the evolution of the work.

Neville, S., DeGaris, A., Hawksley, S., Malani, D. & Thomas, M. (2024) Digital kinship in a Glasshouse.International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol. 20 (3), pp. 563–576.

ABSTRACT

Glasshouse is an embodied participatory virtual reality experience for the untethered Oculus Quest. The experience is composed of three interdependent worlds (keeper, insect and plant) through which relationships between both digital and non-digital entities and avatars are explored as symbiotic within a speculative future. Artistic research is based on experiential futures and simulation methods driven by questions based on how people move in a post-COVID world and how these movements connect and support each other. Participant's embodied response is analysed through physical tasks that encourage identification with avatars, co-presence and body ownership. Insights include how digital kinship facilitates a deeper understanding across human and non-human relationships and how transformational processes evolve in cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Biggs, S., Hawksley, S. and McDonnell, M. (2022) The Dancer in the Machine. Digital Culture & Society, Vol.8. (2), pp. 67-84.

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of distributed agency in human and nonhuman assemblages. The interactive artwork 'Double Agent', by Simon Biggs, serves as both a laboratory for this exploration and as an exemplar for the discussion. Following a short introduction about 'Double Agent', and the proposition alluded to in the title of this article, the text explores concepts of creativity, agency and ontology, with particular reference to N. Katherine Hayles' proposition of cognitive assemblage and James Leach's theory of creativity. A review of recent creative projects that explore the application of machine-learning to human movement and/or incorporate embodied human machine interaction provides a background for a more detailed description of the 'Double Agent' project and a discussion of the questions and ideas that motivated its conception and arose through its development and subsequent exhibition.

Biggs, S., Hawksley, S. & Paine, G. (2016) Bodytext: somatic data as agency in interactive dance. in: Fernandez, C. (ed) Multimodality and Performance, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, UK, pp.179-186.

→ PDF preprint version

INTRODUCTION

Bodytext is a performance work by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley, with interactive sound by Garth Paine, which seeks insight into the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking and voice recognition that drives interpretative language systems, digital projection and audio re-synthesis. The dancer's verbal description of an imagined dance, derived from somatic experience, is acquired and displayed in an immersive projection. The displayed written texts respond to the movement of the dancer with their own movement and, when they interact with one another, exchange grammatical and syntactical elements in a manner that retains syntactic structure, thus evolving new textual descriptions that, in turn, determine a new dance. The dancer's speech is also acquired as a series of audio events that are subsequently re-mediated and sonified. The emergent texts and audio-visual compositions generate an ever-evolving dance and its ever-evolving description which, in each iteration, is danced again. Dancer and machine are enmeshed in a recursive dynamic they both must follow towards its (il)logical conclusion.

Biggs, S., Hawksley, S. & Paine, G. (2014) Crosstalk: making people in interactive spaces. MOCO 2014. Proceedings of the 2014 International Workshop on Movement and Computing. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 61-65.

ABSTRACT

Crosstalk is an interactive performance work by media artist Simon Biggs, choreographer Sue Hawksley and composer Garth Paine. The work employs real-time multi-modal sensing and interaction systems, including three-dimensional tracking of multiple performers combined with multi-source voice recognition for speech to text and an interactive multi-channel data driven sound score. The three artists have previously collaborated on Bodytext, an interactive multimedia solo performance work in which a spoken (described) and performed dance are simultaneously interpreted by both the performer and the computational system. Crosstalk developed out of the processes undertaken in Bodytext, specifically the 'drama of the performance', which arose from an antagonistic but interdependent human/machine relationship. Created for two performers, Crosstalk engages social relations as articulated through performative language acts. The project explores ontologies of self-hood within the generative potential of a technologically mediated social space. The elements in the system, including performers and machines, affect how each adapts from state to state, as the various elements of the work - language, image, movement and sound - interact with one another. Developed as an enactment of the proposition of 'making people', inspired in part by contemporary anthropological ideas, Crosstalk begins with two dancers speaking descriptions of each other. Automatically transcribed in real time into a virtual three-dimensional world, using speech to text software, these descriptions become textual objects that inhabit the environment and interact with other elements within the system, both human and non-human. The spoken texts form the foundation for an evolving sonic environment. When moving the performers collide with the text objects, causing them to also move. As the text objects interact, they re-write each other, facilitating the emergence of new textual and sonic material, created through the recombinant computation of the texts in the collided objects. Through this generative mechanism, the interaction situates each dancer as a product of their initial perception, the evolving environment, their interaction with it and their interrelationships. Crosstalk thus presents the multidimensional emergent properties of perception, interaction, place making and identity.

Biggs, S., Dima, M., Ekeus, H., Hawksley, S., Timmons, W. & Wright, M. (2009) The "H" in HCI: Enhancing perception of interaction through the performative. in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol.5622, pp.3-12.

→ PDF preprint version

ABSTRACT

Motion sensing technologies are well developed at the bio-mechanical (motion capture) and geo-locative (GPS) scales. However, there are many degrees of scale between these extremes and there have been few attempts to seek the integration of systems that were designed for distinct contexts and tasks. The proposition that motivated the Scale project team was that through such systems integration it would be possible to create an enhanced perception of interaction between human participants who might be co-located or remotely engaged, separated in either (or both) time or space. A further aim was to examine how the use of these technologies might inform current discourse on the performative.

Hawksley, S. & Biggs, S. (2006) Memory Maps in interactive dance environments. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 2 (2), pp.123-137.

ABSTRACT

This essay explores current research by the authors into dance in interactive mediated spaces. This text seeks to articulate the thematics underlying the creative thinking in the work and the technical and methodological aspects of how it is being developed and realiszed. This research develops out of previous collaborations between Sue Hawksley and Simon Biggs involving dance performance and interactive visual art, as well as other collaborations between Biggs and, variously, Sarah Rubidge, Stuart Jones and Stephen Petronio. The work discussed here is part of a longer term project developing a range of specific interactive real-time authoring systems for use in performance and interactive installation works.

Fedorova, K. (2020) Tactics of interfacing: encoding affect in art and technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
- a book by Ksenia Fedorova in which she discusses Bodytext.

Candy, L. (2019) The Creative Reflective Practitioner: Research Through Making and Practice. London: Routledge.
- a book by Linda Candy which includes an interview with Sue Hawksley.

Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2019) Digital Uncanny. Oxford University Press: New York, NY.
- a book by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in which she discusses Bodytext, Crosstalk and Blowup.

Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2016) The Digital Uncanny and Ghost Effects. Screen, Vol 57 (1), pp.1-20.
- an article by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in which she discusses Bodytext.