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My Life as a Severed Head
At this moment in the Internet's history I am one of many, I would suspect, who often prefers to receive the world on demand, to leave touch with my immediate surroundings in order to surf the information of my choosing. This is a very particular and unique kind of information acquisition, it's accelerated and intentional. I've asked several friends in the cognitive sciences what to call this variety of mental processing, it's not intellectual perse, not rational necessarily, cerebral? These synonyms all have connotations that disqualify them as adequate terminology, so instead I'll call it "severed head." This particular state of being is characterized by the feeling that your body is trailing behind your head at all times, only to be felt when some mentally stimulating idea triggers a release of adrenaline. A fine feeling indeed.
Coop Himmelblau's Soul Flipper
This way of absorbing the world is very different from the world experienced by the body as a whole. And being a severed head myself, I often prefer Google search results to more physical sources of information. Recent experiences, however, have re-covered my appreciation for the latter.
Hana Van Der Kolk and I are like a lesson in fate. The strangeness of her recognizing me from the internet, unwittingly becoming my neighbor, finding out that not only are we both daughters of Dutch psychologists, but in the most remarkable twist of fate, it turns out an uncle of mine helped Hana's parents immigrate to America. So when Hana asked me to be in her next performance the answer of course had to be yes (and my solo would be nothing less than an incessant repetition of this positive affirmation).
It was notoriously hard to describe Hana's choreographic style to inquisitive friends. A blend of minimalist dance and performance art? With long pauses and pop songs? I think she said it best by calling it a mix tape, and I called it a collage, a blend of performance techniques. At it's core though, it was the performance of an altered state, and getting there required a perception of "the whole body at once," a task comparable to listening for the sound of one hand clapping.
After assigning us mental scores, Hana began to choreograph clichéd group activities, painfully simple solos, and duets that begged to be narrativized. The whole process was particularly interesting because Hana was in the position to direct us while reminding us not to plan or think.
This was a bit of a struggle, every clarification was like dancing around the mind's tendency to take information and smother it with intellectual constructions. It began to seem like the whole thing was an empirical study of how this strange clump of matter and chemistry that we identify as the human body might communicate complex sentiments without interference from "higher" brain functioning.
By the time the performance rolled around, I was eager to check this hypothesis with an audience. It was nerve racking, and slightly ironic, to present the work to a group of people harboring the very analytical agenda we were trying to debunk. It should also probably be noted that in addition to being told throughout my life that I "think too much," I'm not a seasoned performer, so the whole experience was like being in a foreign country with a bare minimum of vocab words at my disposal. It demanded complete dedication to those few words to facilitate this still unfamiliar relationship between body and mind.
The performance ended, and the only thing I knew for sure was that the audience had been audibly shifty in their chairs.
I soon learned though, that without any kind of character motivation or explicit direction, the performance not only hit certain narrative cues, but exceeded them. People were raving about transference, friends who I would never have expected to enjoy such a performance were trailing behind Hana to congratulate her, and on the third night I shed the most perfectly timed, completely uncalculated tear. It appeared that the intimacy Hana set out to cultivate was oozing from our unconditioned bodies with supernatural clarity.
I've often vouched for the internet as a unique channel for achieving intimacy, and a superior instrument for streaming thoughts without physical interference. But Hana's method was a reminder of the body's refined capacity to transmit and receive hi-fidelity information. I have never experienced a performance so devoid of intellectual burdens, so painfully simple and yet gut-wrenchingly complex.
Getting back to my life as usual has been like filing back into an anatomical hierarchy whereby my body is once again second in command. And as I sit here, a collection of limbs obediently stationed in front of a computer monitor, I'm imagining a sc-fi future in which the body is obsolete. In my mind, however, it's a mere perception that's been left behind, making way for a popular view of the body as an instrument of communication well worth being tuned.
pre-performance rehearsal, more photos of the performance here
This way of absorbing the world is very different from the world experienced by the body as a whole. And being a severed head myself, I often prefer Google search results to more physical sources of information. Recent experiences, however, have re-covered my appreciation for the latter.
Hana Van Der Kolk and I are like a lesson in fate. The strangeness of her recognizing me from the internet, unwittingly becoming my neighbor, finding out that not only are we both daughters of Dutch psychologists, but in the most remarkable twist of fate, it turns out an uncle of mine helped Hana's parents immigrate to America. So when Hana asked me to be in her next performance the answer of course had to be yes (and my solo would be nothing less than an incessant repetition of this positive affirmation).
It was notoriously hard to describe Hana's choreographic style to inquisitive friends. A blend of minimalist dance and performance art? With long pauses and pop songs? I think she said it best by calling it a mix tape, and I called it a collage, a blend of performance techniques. At it's core though, it was the performance of an altered state, and getting there required a perception of "the whole body at once," a task comparable to listening for the sound of one hand clapping.
After assigning us mental scores, Hana began to choreograph clichéd group activities, painfully simple solos, and duets that begged to be narrativized. The whole process was particularly interesting because Hana was in the position to direct us while reminding us not to plan or think.
This was a bit of a struggle, every clarification was like dancing around the mind's tendency to take information and smother it with intellectual constructions. It began to seem like the whole thing was an empirical study of how this strange clump of matter and chemistry that we identify as the human body might communicate complex sentiments without interference from "higher" brain functioning.
By the time the performance rolled around, I was eager to check this hypothesis with an audience. It was nerve racking, and slightly ironic, to present the work to a group of people harboring the very analytical agenda we were trying to debunk. It should also probably be noted that in addition to being told throughout my life that I "think too much," I'm not a seasoned performer, so the whole experience was like being in a foreign country with a bare minimum of vocab words at my disposal. It demanded complete dedication to those few words to facilitate this still unfamiliar relationship between body and mind.
The performance ended, and the only thing I knew for sure was that the audience had been audibly shifty in their chairs.
I soon learned though, that without any kind of character motivation or explicit direction, the performance not only hit certain narrative cues, but exceeded them. People were raving about transference, friends who I would never have expected to enjoy such a performance were trailing behind Hana to congratulate her, and on the third night I shed the most perfectly timed, completely uncalculated tear. It appeared that the intimacy Hana set out to cultivate was oozing from our unconditioned bodies with supernatural clarity.
I've often vouched for the internet as a unique channel for achieving intimacy, and a superior instrument for streaming thoughts without physical interference. But Hana's method was a reminder of the body's refined capacity to transmit and receive hi-fidelity information. I have never experienced a performance so devoid of intellectual burdens, so painfully simple and yet gut-wrenchingly complex.
Getting back to my life as usual has been like filing back into an anatomical hierarchy whereby my body is once again second in command. And as I sit here, a collection of limbs obediently stationed in front of a computer monitor, I'm imagining a sc-fi future in which the body is obsolete. In my mind, however, it's a mere perception that's been left behind, making way for a popular view of the body as an instrument of communication well worth being tuned.
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