About Lisa Nelson's work by Anouk Llaurens[1]

a- Background- environment - Influences

In the 70s, Lisa Nelson started to film with a video camera. The use of the instrument taught her a lot about her learning patterns. Simultaneously, she discovered the book “The senses considered as perceptual systems” By G.G Gibson. Behavioural psychologist, Gibson looked into how the organization of the senses and each sense organ was action and how those action where tied very deeply to the survival needs of whatever the organism was[2]. Fascinated by the concept of Survival, Lisa translated Gibson’s descriptions into movement explorations and into her own experience. Shortly after Gibson she met Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and the experiential anatomy. She became interested in knowing more about how the body systems dialogue with one another. Her interest into how the body learns was also triggered by her stepfather’s work, Ernst Von Glasersfeld who was a radical constructivist[3].

b-“Tuning scores”

Lisa Nelson organized ways of exploring how we look at dance and how it affects our dancing. How does desires arise when you are looking at dance, or looking at human beings? (Desire might be replaced by irritation or needs), and how do you survive your own looking? Lisa Nelson calls her work “Tuning scores” to describe an on-going activity, human behaviour and also animal behaviour, of how we have to be tuning into what is stable and what is changing in our environment in order to survive. And when we find that something isn’t changing sufficiently, what can we do to provoque change?

In the “Tuning score” all of the players are both actors and observers so it creates a kind of unfolded eyeball where there is no outside and no inside. The idea is that everything, in the image space, is visible to somebody. The game is set like a dialogue where the players are a cycling back and forth from being in action and being in observation. This setting plays as a feedback system that affords the players to get direct feedback from their actions. Playing “Tuning score” Is not about being accurate like a video camera can be. There is always accident and there is always the viewer.

“Tuning scores” is a communication system that allows each participant to taste their taste and to communicate their opinion to each other. The players are using an operating terminology coming from choreographic and editing practices to act directlyon the composition arising and tune the image in order to compose an experience that makes sense for them. The most frequently used calls are: enter, exit, pause, Repeat, Sustain, Reverse, Replace, Redirect.This practice questions, dance, composition, perception, desires, opinions, vision, and the possibility of being an individual taking part in a community. It values inhibition as a way to encourage the emergence of new forms.