![]()
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Art enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.
John Dewey
This book attempts to delineate the conditions necessary for developing the relationship between the forces of what Expressive Arts (EXA) defines as “letting-go” and “shaping” in the context of movement improvisation and, more broadly, art-creating. While letting-go is more like a surrendering of control, shaping is an act of forming (these two terms are explained further in Chapter 5), and their relationship emerges, evolves, changes, and transforms itself through the different paths of an individual’s creative and/or improvisational processes. Each individual also comprehends, senses, feels, interprets, explains, and visualizes this exploration in many different ways. From a phenomenological standpoint, I am interested in exploring the essentials of the relationship between these two forces, of letting-go and shaping.
I have been researching the interplay of letting-go and shaping as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer for 19 years now. For the past eight years my movement technique and improvisation classes for first-year performing arts students at Istanbul Bilgi University have provided me with an opportunity to develop this research. Most of the students I work with want to become actors when they graduate, but I also have students who want to become professional dancers, choreographers, performance artists, and directors. Most of them come from a beginner-level acting background. They usually do not have much experience in free movement. In the first semester I lead them in what I call a “flow exercise.” The students are asked to move freely from one end of the studio to the other. As they cross the floor repeatedly, I increase the difficulty by adding restrictions, such as keeping their hands on the floor or keeping their pelvis off the floor for the entire crossing, or leading the movement with a single body part. After a few weeks most of the students get used to doing this exercise, but for some it takes a long time to let-go and surrender to the moment. Around the middle of the semester I start explaining the concepts of letting-go and shaping, as well as the importance of creating an interplay between them. I emphasize the need to empower both forces in order to experience an inspirational creative state. Everything gets very complicated at this moment. While some of the students understand what I mean, others flounder. As they begin to shape, they start over-intellectualizing the process and cannot let-go. They lean towards functioning from their minds rather than from their whole bodies. Because creating an interplay between letting-go and shaping is something they have never experienced and that cannot be completely verbalized and understood by the mind exclusively, they get confused. The confusion only precipitates them into a spiral in which they think more and more. Others try to cope by going to the other extreme and completely surrendering to letting-go, which is both impossible and unproductive.
The students’ aim should be to reach the state of “letting-be,” in which letting-go and shaping work together in an interpenetrated manner instead of struggling against each other. It is not as if one becomes active and the other passive. For the purposes of this study, and to open up a more fluid operative mode for an understanding of the full range of the dynamic forces of both letting-go and shaping, and thus the grand potential for their collaboration, I have relied on the closest Turkish approximations of the English words “active” and “passive.” “Etken,” the Turkish word for active, is defined as “the power that has an effect, the one that has determining power”; “edilgen,” the closest equivalent to the English “passive,” means “the one who is affected by what is done” (Püsküllüoğlu 1994a, b). While someone who is “passive” in the English sense of the word will not necessarily be affected or changed “in their nature” by the actions of others or by the situations to which they are subjected, the definition of the Turkish word edilgen implies a state that needs its opposite etken and the possibility of some kind of movement or other action directed towards it in order to have meaning. The state of edilgen is an active, present awareness of the other. The chemistry and potential alchemy between these two states—how they can chemically change each other—as they maneuver and interact among the letting-go and shaping forces of an individual are analyzed in detail in this book.
In order to explore the etken and edilgen states of letting-go and shaping during their interplay, I interviewed my peers, examined my own process as an artist, and conducted dozens of one-to-one sessions with three recent performing arts graduates and four undergraduates. In the book I refer to this group of individuals as the “Divers.” Their courage in diving deeply into this process and sharing it with me has been priceless. I had the privilege of accompanying them on their journeys while they went through them with all their resources, bumps in the road, dreams, and visualizations. I also had the chance to observe how they were often able to surpass their limits and barriers by accessing the full gamut of tools available to them in EXA.
THE DRAGON
Figure 1.1. Two-headed dragon illustration, created by Ahmet Ayık and myself
A few months after I began my research, I attended a contact improvisation session. In this movement practice where the participant explores listening and connection through points of contact, an image that symbolizes the relationship of the letting-go and shaping forces dawned on me: that of a two-headed dragon. Each head controlled one of the wings, while they shared control of the rest of the body. This image took the shape of a dragon because it best embodied the idea that both the letting-go and shaping forces within me were out of control. Each wanted to take charge of the improvisation. I realized that taming their natural instincts and helping them combine their strengths through being etken and edilgen was like creating an energy that flows like a radiance, in and around the dragon.
THE FIELD
When I started out on the journey of this book, I thought my research would be confined to the domain of the performing arts and, even more specifically, movement. But as I dived deeper into the research I realized that the art form under consideration was not as crucial to my research as I thought. My particular knowledge is in the area of contemporary dance. The Divers are students and junior professionals in acting, directing, contemporary dance, tango, and performance art. Even though the substance of this research has, thus, largely come from the performing arts, I believe that my findings can also be applied to the ability to improvise and adapt in many other areas, including life itself. I personally, for example, was immediately able to incorporate my findings on the dynamics of the relationship between letting-go and shaping into my writing and living processes.
I incorporated improvisational elements into my writing process for this book, not just in formulating and framing the content, but even in choosing the physical locations where I would sit down to write, listening to how each moment would inspire me to try different places. On some days I packed my bag, stepped out of the house, and randomly took different kinds of public transportation without having a preconceived idea of where I was going. Wherever the day took me, I did some of the thinking and writing there. This also became a method I incorporated in my mother and son days. We would go out and surrender ourselves completely to the moment to see where it would take us. I felt free and powerful by doing this. My son enjoyed it even more than I did. We were shaping the moment, and also letting it flow.
THE QUESTIONS
As I incorporated the ongoing results of my phenomenological research into my life, the questions posed by my study started to become clearer:
1. What are the critical steps in preparing for improvisation?
2. What composes the essence of the relationship between letting-go and shaping?
3. How do individuals describe the state of being that arises from exploring this relationship?
4. Can one become sensitized to the interplay of letting-go and shaping by using intermodal EXA methods?
5. Can EXA methods help remove the blocks to sensitivity and spur the desire for discovery?
6. How does traversing the state of letting-be transform the individual?
THE CONTENT
As I weeded through and attempted to sort dozens of hours of interviews, notes, drawings, photos of sculptures, and videos of improvisations, I realized the dimensions of the challenge of organizing all this information and presenting it in a coherent manner. In the end I decided to divide the book into the following:
In the “methodology” chapter, Chapter 2, I detail the arts-based research and EXA session architecture that I incorporated into the research of my theme.
In Chapter 3, I introduce the Divers, with portraits I created of each participant after the completion of our sessions. I also explain the process we went through with each Diver.
In Chapter 4, “The Passage,” I explain the importance of preparation—the awakening of one’s sensitivity and imagination—to a productive improvisation session, and explore different methods, regimes, and practices that can be integrated into the process of each individual.
In “The Journey” chapter, Chapter 5, I describe improvisation through the experiences of the Divers, myself, and other professionals, including noteworthy artists in dance and other fields. Experienced practitioners have created systems of exercises to structure improvisation, but this study does not cover the structuring of improvisation, itself worthy of its own book. Rather, it focuses on the inner processes that take place during all kinds of improvisation.
In Chapter 6, “The Essence,” I set forth the necessary conditions for a relationship between letting-go and shaping.
In a post-face, in Chapter 7 I discuss the limited parameters of my enquiry and propose possible directions for future research
My “Conclusions” chapter, Chapter 8, is divided into three parts. In the first, I concentrate on understanding the relationship between letting-go and shaping as states of multiplicity, and portray the individual as an elastoplastic form that becomes transformed through letting-be. In the second part, I discuss the benefits of integrating EXA methods into the improvisation process. And in the third, I explain how the process of this book has affected me as a dancer and choreographer.
In Chapter 9, I gathered the responses of some of the Divers after the research was completed and some time had passed. Chapter 10 is for my last words.
My ultimate goal in this book is that the voices I have gathered—from students at the beginning of their careers and explorations, to established artists as varied as Salvador Dali and Twyla Tharp, to philosophers including Martin Buber and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as accomplished scholars in the EXA field, and even my own voice as an artist and person as it evolved during this process—will leave the reader with both a macro and micro pic...
