DISFIGURE / EUPHORIA

DISFIGURE/EUPHORIA is an interdisciplinary study that merges embodied, intellectual, and technological perspectives in an artistic process to envision new ways of relating to the more-than-human world by weaving new mythologies of the land. The interplay of different media activates a multi-sensory experience that dissolves boundaries between physical, sensorial, and visionary spaces. The methodology of the work, rooted in mapping techniques and somatic deep listening practices, integrates emerging technologies to expand our understanding of how perception, embodiment, and ecological attunement interconnect—serving as a strategy to foster a sense of our embeddedness in the cosmic order. DISFIGURE/EUPHORIA offers a dynamic research and creation space where dance, spatial sound and visual architectures converge, inviting audiences to engage in a fluid, multi-perspectival inquiry into how we sense, relate, and construct meaning in an interconnected world.

LOCATING AND ORIENTING IN MYTHOPOETIC BODY ECOLOGIES

“The repetitious act of spiraling is necessary if an inquiry is to reach the heights and plumb the depths of the mythic. Within each circle of the spiral, there is also a vertical movement. Even if the image or experience is the same, the perspective of it, as shown through the spiral lens, has in fact changed. Changing perspective is the action of perception, the mythopoeia.”
—Susanna Ruebsaat

In the act of dancing—where one navigates the complexity of coordinating movement and the forces it activates into specific forms and temporal sequences—a "thinking in motion," a multi-layered feeling-thinking occurs. Traversing various modalities of spatial perception, it transcends the boundaries between architectural space, aural space, feeling space, and psychic space. In these fluid shifts of perceptive states, the body becomes the spiral lens, a permeable membrane intersecting the continuity between internal worlds of subjectivity and external experiences in the world of physicality.

AFFECTIVE ECOLOGIES OF DEEP LISTENING / SONIC SOMATICS

“Experiences of listening can be appreciated as intensely relational, bringing us into contact with surrounding events and bodies, voices and things. Given that sound propagates and expands outwardly, as a set of oscillations from a particular source, listening carries with it a sensual intensity, whereby sonic events deliver intrusive and disruptive as well as nurturing and assuring experiences. Such a material force characteristic of sound suggests a deeply affective, locational knowledge path – that is, sound affords unique ways of exchanging, of being situated, and from which we often extend ourselves. [1] In this regard, sound and listening can be captured as providing a platform for understanding place and emplacement as processes.”

Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Spatiality

Hearing originates from vibration detection, a receptive, sensory experience that affects all the structural layers of our bodies, in contrast to listening, which is an active process where we engage intentionally with acoustic space, discerning and interpreting auditory,  affective signals. Sonic somatics is a moving, physical deep listening practice in which listening includes awareness of the whole of the somatosensory system. Through the kinaesthetic sense, the relationship between sonic and spatial perception is explored as well as how sonic flow composes body movements. Deepening into the sensation and affect of sound, we evoke a  presence in which the reciprocity between sound and the body can be experienced as a vibrational, resonant space that traverses the boundaries between physical and psychic space. Listening with the body activates a dream state in which the sensory experience unfolds in a stream of creative imagination contained in continuously expanding, sonic landscapes.