Overlaps of virtual, physical and real … during lockdown
Unfolding the Invisible, Social Presencing Theatre online practice, during Covid-19.
Each Saturday, a group of SPT practitioners, co-facilitated by Uri Noy-Meir and Marina Seghetti, dived deep into an online exploration of how awareness practices and social art can relate to the collective challenges we, as a global community, are going through and sought to perceive how our inner practice increases our capacity for making a contribution to the world.
We encourage any of you to participate in this reflection and dialogue in order to keep the question alive. This way we can create a safe space for everyone and perhaps answer the questions:
“How can we create meaningful relationships in a global community? What types of dialogue, process work, and awareness will bring us closer and what will serve the greater whole?”
When we explore together as practitioners, every question that comes up creates a ripple effect on the whole field. As our collective presence gets clearer, there is an acceleration in the growth process for every individual.
That’s the beauty and functionality of a community of practice: the individual and the collective work together and support each other.
We learn together, reflect together, grow together.
Welcome to Unfolding the Invisible!
[written by Marina]
Zoom windows direct our gaze beyond the planes of walls to an outside that we cannot touch. We are simultaneously framed and framing, as we seek to define the new terrains of perception. The rectilinear frame of the screen becomes our entrance to other worlds. Negotiating these thresholds, balancing the outside and the within, we build relationships through a vibrational sensitivity. Through this unstable balance we approach the shifting terrain with corporeal questions:
How do we find balance in this world? How do we calibrate between physical & virtual conditions? How do we activate embodied longings for a sense of safe place?
What happens when we transpose movement from the in-person laboratory into the virtual field? And what happens from the virtual, back to the in-person?
This experiment leads to unexpected accidental discoveries. You have to concentrate on landing back within yourself, inside your body. In order to move forward, you have to re-centre and re-balance yourself.
Careful acts of recalibration are necessary in times of crisis, research and innovation. The potential of our movements, which is never fully present, makes spatial and temporal operations in the virtual field strange.
At Unfolding the Invisible I was interested in how bodies are able to feel/sense where representation falters. As a group, we shift perspectives, bend time, make stories malleable. Our task was to develop a process that embodied not just somewhere else but something else. Our use of the technological tools produced an altered sense of the field: an expanded field for shaping a different way of belonging through mind and body. As we played on the edges, a fractal sense of embodiment emerged, blurring the real. Online we were like figures in ecstatic trance, tracing pathways, holding multiple memories, overlapping places, feeling the contradictions and disjunctions in the spaces in-between.
Being present in the way one space talks to another, being alert to a moving panorama, an elsewhere, we listened to what was emerging on the journey, while keeping our resistance alive so as to reconnect in the real world!
Emergent conversations in movement
From the beginning of the lockdown we started meeting once a week, proposing the basic practices of Social Presencing Theater which were sometimes inspired by the questions that emerged in the group or by a proposed text. Uri and I found ourselves working together for the first time. This required some shared reference points to begin with, but the simplicity and sincerity of the offering and the truthfulness in the unspoken way we reciprocally held the space became our points of strength. These allowed the creation of a fluid nourishing atmosphere.
I had been reading the work of Wendy Wheeler on biosemiotics where she explains that every environment is abundant with signs.
“An environmental niche is always also a semiotic niche. Every environment is, at the time, and necessarily, rich in ‘information’: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch, etc. On this view, life is primally semiotic” (1).
Wheeler describes the entanglement between organisms and the environment as a kind of evolving conversation, explaining that this semiosis takes place from the level of simple life forms to the complexity of human cultural life (2).
We were intrigued to experience how meaning making might evolve in a virtual environment. We wondered how this virtual landscape might shape us and our interactions and if new narratives would/could emerge. One of our learnings was that “our online semiotic niche” did have an impact on our processes of meaning-making. We realized that when making intuitive unspoken decisions in action, our ability to follow these decisions required an attention to what was happening (rather than forcing outcomes), an attentiveness to what the material limitations might be, and to how these might determine the development of the process.
Adapting the method of translation between physical and virtual dimensions
Transposing movement onto the flat surface of the screen was challenging, not so much for Uri but for me. I resisted the new virtual medium. This gave an imperative to the movement, pushed my balance toward precarious stumbling until I gained familiarity with it. Hesitant, I could not touch or feel what was real. The overlapping of different visual stimuli to uphold the embodiment practice produced in me a kind of defamiliarization with what was real, which led to a finer tuning of my visual perception. I found myself looking at the real world through strange eyes.
Gregory Bateson in his discourse on transcontextuality recognized the interdependence of living systems. Through this lens I discovered the mutual texture of seemingly distant places and spaces. Resisting the flattening of things to a single plane or context opened up entirely new dimensions to experience. Like in a kaleidoscope, many perspectives were swirling in the field.
Affective resonances emerged through
Over time Unfolding the Invisible became a language of movement through which we communicated our belonging and shared our understanding of this ‘here and now’ as an ‘everywhere at once’. Although our physical senses indicated the opposite, we felt not only the richness but also the fragility of the “virtual landscapes” we were walking through.
Even little bits of movement sequences through the virtual landscape seemed to constitute a sense of the whole, as if these fragments referred backwards and forwards to each other. We were not always ‘in’ the current global situation but references to it were always present and the events that took place during the practice continued to resonate long after we had each returned to our own separate places.
I described this experience as follows: I’m touching with my eyes, yet feeling rather than seeing, drawing from my motor activity continually updating my position in the “in-betweenness” thereby echoing Nicholas Salazar Sutil’s reflections,
‘It is only by being in between that the knowledge of both subject and object, of both here and there, of self and other, of myself and that which is not myself can be integrated.’
Learning from the distance
[written by Uri Noy-Meir]
Unfolding the Invisible for me is an opportunity to collaborate with practitioners from across Italy and the world, holding space for research and exploration. Together we experience the possibility of connection and shared awareness from a distance, transcending the physical space limits and tuning into the awareness possibilities that the social distancing and lockdown have sent on our ways. I feel the practice supports my capacity and will to bring this work to broader and more diverse groups of people, also locally. To recreate this type of knowing and learning spaces which can support communities and society, as it is facing the current moment of great transition and transformations.
Lockdown measures in Italy started early March, holding us in place, and nudging us to explore the different ways of connection and practice. Italy has been my adopted country for almost nine years. It is a historically and culturally diverse and vibrant country, every town and city seems to have unique cultural components. This diversity affects the perception of distance. And so it sometimes feels that Milan and Rome are further away then Milan and London.
The opportunity of Unfolding the Invisible is to connect those different parts inside as outside. An enriching and creative experiment to test and check the limits and the possibilities of connecting without touching or seeing. As I practice, I’m attending with a soft gaze to the awareness which lies beyond the screen; I become aware that eyes can lead us as they can mislead us. I feel the aliveness of this research when we tune in to each other, sharpening our capacity to “see” the invisible social landscape of our encounter. Sensing our collective presence, even with eyes closed or with a poor internet connection.
Descartes’s “I think. Therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) is a landmark in western scientific thought and philosophy. Yet who is doing this thinking actually? Where is this thinking coming from?
Social Presencing Theatre practices invite us to listen to the embodied experience of being right here and now. To attend to the “we space” in which as human beings we constantly attune ourselves to the unfolding movement between layers of reality and imagination, dreams and societies. As thought is emerging from how we perceive here and now, this sensorial perception of the present moment tells us who we are. Exploring SPT research is opening us to the subtle, pre-verbal experience from which thought emerges from being, moment after moment.
With the intention to connect the virtual online learning experience to a physical offline practice. The lockdown measures have been relaxing after 3 month of lockdown and so I reach out to the small group I practice with near where I live in Lake Trasimeno. We meet to practice at “Campo del Sole”, on the shores of Lake Trasimeno, the largest lake of centre Italy.
On 20th June 2020 members of the Trasimeno practice group met again in “Campo del Sole”, a sculpture garden in the shores of Lake Trasimeno, in the centre of Italy.
The last time we met as a practice group was almost a year ago and with the previous months of Social distancing and COVID-19 outbreak, it seems that all of this was ages ago. Three of the members are teachers, and as we gathered around the stone table shaped sculpture in the middle of the field, they started to share their experience of online teaching. It was interesting to note the different experiences of quarantine time. The high school teacher was exhausted and spoke of long days and hours in front of the computer. The middle school and elementary school teachers have, on the other hand, spoke on lighter workload and time to spend in nature and with loved ones. Another member shared that ironically in the lockdown she has found a new job, designing a herb garden for a rural estate. I share my experience of the lockdown, slowing down of the local project working with regional authorities for social inclusion of migrants, and an explosion of online gatherings, events and practice groups I was participating in, holding space for and co-creating with others around the world.
It took time for us to move into the actual practice, it was “a long pause”, and the will to verbally unpack our personal experiences was noticeably felt. When we finally start to let the body speak, making images with our whole body, “living sculptures”, of how we are, a new quality of silent presence arises. We are sensing into each other’s images, naming both the visible as the invisible. “I see fingers touching the ground”, “I feel the ocean”, “Thank you.”
We move into a practice of “duet”, in this practice, we work in pairs, in which, one by one alternate movement and stillness, a dialogue without words. The pairs then shared their felt experiences, one of the pairs described an emotional experience in which it is as if one was a balcony from which the other can be looking out. “We did not want to move.” “We could have stayed longer”. The conversation starts again, a group member who teaches in a kindergarten shares a frustration when interacting with a foreign parent of one of the children who does not join the activities.
I suggested doing a “micro” 4D mapping to explore one of the themes that came up in our conversations. We decided on three roles to explore (Teacher, Foreign Parent and Child) we moved to an empty patch of grass and one by one I invite/call-out one role at a time:
The teacher moves to the middle and turns outward with hand forward, her sentence is accoglienza “welcoming”. “Parent”. The parent moves into and then out and far to the back of the teacher and the imaginary circle we have to expand in order to include her new image.“Pupil/child” both the two remaining members raise their hands. I decided to go with that and invite both an “Italian pupil/child” and “Foreign pupil/child” roles to enter one by one. After they added their sentence the image started to move.
The movement begins with the “teacher” that turns toward the Italian pupil, the “foreign pupil” starts to move on the ground and then turns towards the parent. The parent seems to be trying to pull with an invisible thread the giant cement column standing in front of her. The image finds a second sculpture where the teacher and Italian pupil are near to each other and on the other side, the parent and the foreign pupil are near on the other side in the shade of the great cement column. I invite a sculpture three, as I feel more “wants to happen”, teacher and parent face each other, the Italian pupil sits with its back to all “Che Noia/what boredom”. Sharing in our WhatsApp group the video, Marta (who took the role of the foreign parent) adds, I now see I was always in the shade. Only in the last sculpture, with much effort, I moved out slightly to get my child.
What are the learnings from this time? What potential could be found in this period of physical distancing? What is the highest future possibility that can emerge from our period of distancing?
Some feedbacks we recieved from participants
[written by Giulia Argentino]
“My experience with SPT: research from understanding myself to understanding myself to understand the world.
A thought that always insinuated itself with a devastating gentleness and delicacy, but that advanced with more and more decisiveness, through these exercises that inevitably require me to place attention and awareness on a body that until now I had ignored even too long. And not only mine, the collective body as well. It is as if this practice had given me the opportunity to give a sort of “discipline” to what I vaguely understood intuitively, a bit like when Brunelleschi finally traced the laws for the perspective we still use today but which at first was only an empirical approach.
I often find myself associating these two events because I think that the SPT can share the same revolutionary power.
I especially got confirmation of this when at the end of the “learning journey” we did to the practice group conducted by Agathe and Katherina I would never want to detach myself from them again, because I felt that my story and my soul were now irremediably connected to those people whose mother tongue I often didn’t even share.
I hope that this testimony can help you to continue in the research and promotion of SPT, because the world now more than ever, needs it.”
[written by Federica Giuliani]
“Participating in the spt during the quarantine meant above all to build a small community that would take care of the emotions, the “whys”, the fragilities and the reflections and that would transform them into a sort of collective intelligence and awareness. In a historical moment in which we could concentrate on our own cores, abandoning our common superstructures, we had the concrete possibility to decentralize, move our radius and area of growth towards new peripheries”.
[written by Roberta Fonsato]
“Participating in the “Unfolding the invisible” meetings was an unusual and surprising experience from several points of view. In this period of lockdown, many were the proposals online, even more difficult to make an appropriate selection, especially finding myself forced to experience new forms of sharing.
Personally I was (and in part I remain) a bit reluctant to the web, especially when it comes to practices that touch more “the invisible” of our being and coming from years of work and personal research, which presuppose the body experience shared and in presence.With surprise, by participating in these meetings, I was able to think back on the effectiveness of more subtle and less didactic experiences also through a screen.
My question, my doubt was: “how much can I “ experience the subtle” without the direct body experience and sharing in presence?
Participating in the different groups, somehow stimulated me to pay more attention to this question and to how much attention was present, albeit in another form. I questioned myself on the theme of the invisible and I told myself that the relationships are woven with invisible networks, with “invisible movements”, but definitely strong and solid, such that they determine the form of the relationships themselves.
So why not dare more? And be amazed by the “invisible” form of the web and try to live the experience.“Unfolding the invisible” has allowed me to retrace my steps and the opportunity to approach the experience of non-physical presence. The perception of the visible and the invisible are part of the same dance and both move and we with them.
In this regard, I am reminded of the concept of “Urpflanz”, the original plant, which Goethe had drawn and which did not actually exist, belonged to the invisible, but he was able to imagine it and therefore draw it and make it visible.”
[written by Debora Barrientos]
Practising SPT since the beginning of the lockdown has been a great and unique experience in such a disruptive moment in the world.
Many (a lot) of my inner structures were breaking down and at the same time, because of the practice, my body, my outer structure, was strengthening. My practice was helping to use my body as a container for my inner change. I guess that, in part, was because of this fact, that I walked through that internal journey. I was alone at that, but I was being held by my field.
The connection with the field through the screen, was a surprise. Starting the practice by zoom, was like seeing a new experience. When we practice in the flesh, or when we are with people, I guess that we take for granted a lot of things about the connection and the impact that we have into the social field we are in. Practising online was like seeing all the threads of human connection again, realizing again and in a way, feeling grateful because of that. The experience helps to make visible what It was, but at some point, was invisible. It confirmed what sometimes is forgotten, the power of being connected. The power of trusting each other and the truth of the field. We are all the time impacting others and being impacted by them.
Even though there was a lot of chaos, pain, grief, and fear outside and sometimes inside, practising with our regular group, offered me a place full of love, compassion, tenderness and closeness. I have noticed that I met a lot of new people, and all those connections have the same characteristics of the group. I realized that when you start to show or to see people for the first time, in a context of SPT, it is a shift in the way that things happen. The space offers you the possibility (and I think if you surrender to the practice it happens), to be yourself and be genuinely accepted because of that. My reflection is that if we could use the characteristics of SPT practice to our relationships in our day-to-day, probably we will have more effective, honest, and sustainable interactions. Are we ready to be genuine?
Biases, thoughts, previous ideas, opinions and so on, do not leave space to a not knowing place. Holding the MA showed that those previous ideas are always fear.
Another thing, after regular weeks of practising a couple of times per week, is that I felt my body much more connected. Surprisingly, even the days that I thought that I could not have a “great” practice, because my head was really in charge, my body did. It imposed over my head and guided me to spectacular practises and reflections. My body knows a lot, we really do not have to make much effort.
Every practise had a surprise for me. Even the days that I felt it was not being great and the end always had a lesson. All of them were big. There is not such a thing as not doing it OK, there is no necessity of performing in a way or another, there is no need for results. Being there, with my body, was all that I needed to be and what really changed me at the end.
I have learnt a lot about how the inner place worked, I saw it in every practice. I experienced being an unconditional witness. I did not need anything else than myself to be there. I did not need to be anyone else than myself. I’m practising this in the external world. It means arriving with my body to the experiences, with a beginner mind and trusting my own power and the field’s intelligence. Holding my forces, shadows, lights, and the emerging future that is always arising in us. I realized how important it is to hold questions. I’m open to being transformed by others.
I felt blessed by those spaces. By all the people that were part (and still are) part of the social field that we created. I feel grateful to all of them. Thanks for holding the spaces. Thanks for being such a great light during the chaos. Let’s keep on practising.
What’s next for us?
The online environment knew how to make a place in our heart, we will continue. But we know that getting used to it is not always good…
Our next steps are towards meeting in person. We will take with us the questions and learnings that emerged during the online time.
Soon we will do a 4D mapping of a historical event and host a Movalogue in Trasimeno.
To be continued…
(1) Wheeler, Wendy (2006) The whole creature: complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart (p. 126)
Bateson, Nora (2016) Small arcs of larger circles: Framing through other patterns. Axminster: Triarchy Press.
Contact info: Uri Noy-Meir urinoymeir@gmail.com e Marina Seghetti marina@paramitalab.com
