First published in Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, Ed. Jeffrey Gormly, Daghdha Dance Company, 2008

one
choreographic report: imaagineeering ten commandments | think: dance as a metaphor for thought

imaagineeering ten commandments… What would such a project be? Can one base an ethic on these ten ‘Thou shalt nots…’? or is our global village such that we need a new ground for behaviour today? Do we need commandments that we wish we could keep, or should we recognise and accept those patterns that emerge as rules in our day-to-day behaviour here and now? Are these rules part of a practical code for social living or a purposeful technology for knowing ourselves?
Assessing value and belief, context and social contract, this imaginative project compares ethics of non-Christian and non-religious practices, contrasts good intentions and bad habits, and aspires to simplicity and fluidity.
Running throughout Public Thinktank we invite contributions from everyone who visits Framemakers, international guests and Limerick citizenry alike.bq.
Framemakers Public Thinktank Program Book, 2005

opening a flexistential idea-space
This project embodied a change in textual practice, moving from dualistic thinking to thinking that takes place in a more populated thoughtfield: flexistentialism.
I chose a number of sources, religious, ethical and anthropological, which would open out a wide and rich field for conversation about values, ethical behaviour, and social living, with the 10 Commandments, being the ethical primer for most native Irish people, as the focal point and launch-pad for the enquiry. These other ethics act as vibrating gravitational bodies of thought, between which our own thinkers/thoughts are held in a dance of mind.

- From the Buddhist tradition I sourced ‘The Ten Precepts’ and ‘The Ten Positive Precepts’. What especially attracted me to these formulations was their wording, which offered a new direction to the prescriptive ‘Thou shalt not..’

- Ma’at was a Goddess of the ancient Egyptian religion KMT (Khemet) signifying balance, truth and (divine) justice who ‘exemplifies the eternal laws of the universe as Right and Truth’. Their 40 precepts are framed ‘I do not…’

- In April 2005 I interviewed the Imam of the New York Islamic Cultural Centre. When I asked him to relate the differences he perceived between Islamic Ethical codes and the Judaeo-Christian Commandments, he stated that Islam is essentially the latest and most accurate version of the same religion, and that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

- According to literature of Society for Ethical Culture in New York City, a ‘supreme ethical rule [is] to elicit the best in oneself and others by drawing out the unique difference that constitutes each self. … Characteristic of the ethical attitude is the painting, and constant retouching, of ideal portraits of our fellow humans and ourselves and acting toward them, and ourselves, in accordance with those portraits.’

- I created a matrix formed by comparison and contrast between two cultures: pirate communities of the period 1750-1800, with no hierarchical structure or strict social etiquette, but a tendency towards violence, and Balinese society, having a ‘non-cumulative’ social tendency, with little violence, but a rigid and complex arrangement of social positions. This matrix begins to flex our project’s idea-space.

- In my thinking for this project, I reflected on my own feelings of faith and religion. A devout Catholic as a child, I remember an intense sensibility I had for God and his ‘glue’ holding everything together. My overriding feeling was that God loved us ‘unconditionally, as children’, begging the question whether, like any parent, God might expect us to someday grow up, mature, and make our own way.

tentative steps into ideaspace

- Many people agreed that while the 10 Commandments as we know them may be perfectly adequate, ‘we’, meaning society in general, don’t keep these rules.

- Most people professed to have their own private, personal or internal ethic, which was largely summed up in either of two adages: ‘love others as thyself’ & ‘live and let live’.

- Nonetheless, it was observed that for most Catholic Irish people, the 10 Commandments were firmly embedded in our ethical and social education, to the extent that even if we didn’t think much about them, they informed all of our ethical choices.

- Séadna differentiated two kinds of ethical rule:
‘real’ rules which controlled the behaviour of the agents of an essentially neurotic world; & paternalistic rules that any citizen with commonsense can formulate for themselves.
I postulated one more category: Simple rules for a society of ‘mature’ humans.

- We discussed the need for rules for social living. It was generally agreed that these rules were necessary primarily to maintain a stable society, rather than to illuminate a path to enlightenment.

- In discussing how 10 Commandments were phrased, we explored the different kinds of rules and their object. We wondered why with 10 clear precepts to follow we still had a society that had generated thousands of laws, and was generating them still. We conjectured that there could be a few very simple and elegant principles that would form the basis for a continually negotiated social conduct.

- Beyond concerns about ethics and social contract, it is important to consider people’s ideas of purpose. When I asked local man Donal about this, he responded that the purpose of life was to learn.

conclusions?
Most people, consciously or not, have some ethical base for their own behaviour. Our problem, which begs to be solved, is accommodation of these various ethics, which drive human behaviour with its multiplicity of ends and means. A choreography of ethics would seek to create conditions for healthy interplay of different private ethics. It would seek also to induce a state of ‘dance’, which is described by Michael Klein as ‘that state of excitement in a system wherein change becomes possible’, a state of lightness which allows new patterns to activate. This lightness and ease of movement enables a context free of crippling hierarchies of function or status as Bateson describes Bali (footnote 4). This state of dance would also be most conducive to exchange between agents: allowing them to move freely between perspectives, their private ethical codes becoming stepping stones to full communicative participation, rather than impediments to contact with other codes, or means of colonisation or consumption of ‘otherness’. ‘Our world’ is where our worlds meet.

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raw thinking / wild conjecture | think: dance – state of excitement where change becomes possible in a system

Think of society as a human construction, a very sophisticated defence mechanism. Society’s restrictions get bred into the cells themselves by a process of selection. And these restrictions become part of the self-regulating feedback in society’s governing system. There’s a serious question whether humans actually can break out of their self-regulated pattern. It takes audacious methods indeed to explore beyond that pattern.
from Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

I propose a choreography of ethics elaborated as a series of spaces or rooms. In an effort to move beyond pure instruction, I suggest that we account for types of activity desirable in an ethical 4th dimension, and to propose environments conducive to particular uses of bodymind mindbody.

Dance does not create or use space but discloses it as a meaningful situation. …does not diligently conduct a building project of the world, but rather stops mechanical building and begins a poetic living – a hearing and sharing the common being-in-the-world with the creatures of the world.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance, doctoral dissertation by Kirsi Monni

A most straightforward and flexible manner in which to begin would be, I feel, to imaagineeer spaces in which these activities, these uses of self, may accommodate their own iteration by separate agents.

Dance ..can be comprehended as laying out a world in its involvement with being.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

I believe, too, that in designing these spaces we may allow for contexts in which humans dovetail their activity with that total activity of biosphere in what we may call an ‘ecology’.

Can you imagine a species whose everyday existence depends on ethical decisions. Depends, mark you. I don’t understand their system yet . . . Each one of them is a universe … For them thought is a living tangible force.
from The Eye of the Queen, by Philip Mann

I believe it is important to conceive of such a way of life: ethics in a recursive trinity with aesthetics and ecology, as the way of life. In this wise, our efforts would be directed towards maintaining certain ethical principles which enable life to be meaningful and healthful, which enable meaningful and healthful communication; for with a collapse of ethical living, viability of a human universe collapses also, into an entropy of solipsism, decay, depravity and a mania for distraction that bespeaks only a compulsion to disguise a base insignificance and lack of meaning. I propose this Buddhist precept be true:

One’s thoughts control one’s destiny ….
A single thought can destroy or save a world

The question of a choreography of ethics thus becomes one of social choreography, and inhabits a domain of architects, planners, designers, developers, builders. It becomes an activity oriented around relationship and communication, involving all of us, curators of society – our social sculpture -, in various roles as citizen artist/healer, teacher/carer, parent/advocate, producer/creator, dancer/choreographer.

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strange attractors in a morphogenetic field

…organizing fields within the developing organism, called morphogenetic fields. These fields contain, as it where, invisible plans or blueprints for the various organs and for the organism as a whole. In mathematical models of morphogenetic fields, the goals of morphogenetic process are represented as attractors. These attractors lie within ‘basins of attraction’ in a multidimensional phase space, and draw the developing organism towards developmental aims.
Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense Of Being Stared At(11)

…the subject matter of the new dance orientations .. is about a change in understanding of reality, .. new deep ecological ethics where the philosophical horizon is formed by the shared participation in being-in-the-world.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

What qualities might attain to or be valued in this ethical space of dance?

techne ’Monkey see, monkey do’. In a karaoke culture such as ours, where transmission of memes is by mimicry, duplication and adaptation, our choreography of ethics can expect to be embodied and distributed by exemplars: people who, to remix Kirsi Monni, employ techne:

Techne.. human mode of knowing.. / dancer’s.. bodily knowledge.
Techne is grounded on the practice of bodily awareness. It can be outlined as
i) a research of the body’s (and mind’s) functional intelligence.. (Asking questions such as how a person moves, what sense and reason guides it?)
ii) the ability to listen and perceive the lived body experience
and bodily memory.
iii) ..practice of certain non-reacting and non-acting, which brings the dancer away from conventional body (and mind) instrumentalism to functionally perceptive, unique here-moment and body-mind integrity.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

on ‘purpose’ I quote briefly from Gregory Bateson. I suggest you read the whole article.

I am guided in my perception by Purposes. ..Consciousness ..is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly to what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; (Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system) …what worries me is the addition of modern technology to the old system… Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us. A pathology –a loss of balance– is threatened.
Gregory Bateson, Conscious Purpose versus Nature(12)

How do we short circuit our natural purposive instinct, which has driven our evolution as a tool-building species? In a world of ‘actors’, purpose –‘motivation’ is the driver. Dancers, however, may be moved by something other. Let’s say intuition, our internal navigation system for entering the ‘unknown’.

intuition: social dreaming matrix We consider our quest for knowledge, and our accumulation of information by means of scientific observation exploration dissection and experimentation, to be expressive of our highest achievement, our noblest purpose. However, our quest to ‘know’ disguises strategies that embody a desire to dominate coerce and control – ‘divide and conquer’; our probes –scalpel, electron microscope, stopwatch, drill– are invasive, divisive, and, as quantum physics has discovered, ultimately misleading.

…one cannot eventually separate matter and spirit, body and intellect without executing the life.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

Lauren Bale has argued(13) that our current model of stewardship over the natural world i.e., tagging tracking counting and managing species, is merely a new iteration of an old strategy of husbandry, dating back to Genesis. I suspect this desire to make familiar the strange is perhaps related to unarticulated fears about that most important of unknown quantities- ourselves.
A choreography of ethics must provide for our innate curiosity by elaborating models with which we can navigate ‘unknown’, and cultivate our ability to live in a world replete with ‘unknown’: a humble admission of ignorance, a reappraisal of our notion of primacy among creatures, and a commitment to stop trying to ‘penetrate’ mysteries of life, while also encouraging production of self-knowledge.
Social dreaming, written about elsewhere in this publication, is one such choreographic tool. Taking place in a Social Dreaming Matrix i.e. womb, this choreography of dreams, thought and communication is precisely a fine-tuning of intuition: allowing the new, the unknown, what W Gordon Lawrence calls the ‘unthought known’, to grow. In a safe and unpersonal context, intelligence about ourselves and our system/s is cultivated from raw thinking material of our unconscious.

fourth dimensionality Soul: ultimate strange attractor.

All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can become an internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true Elysium.
Terence Mackenna, New Maps of Hyperspace

When I watch a Lovespotters performance, people with Downs’ Syndrome and Autism dancing, I fancy that what I see is such an exteriorization of soul. I ‘see’ them project their love/joy/soul outwards onto the faces and bodies of friends family supporters – audience– and swimdance within their fourth dimension of soul- their joy, their love.

Body is all over / in the walls on people’s faces / … / my body is a shared place
Elena Gianotti, notes for Einem

Only, perhaps, our intuition, disciplined through an art of time, through spontaneity, can dance discovery of soul, which does not lurk somewhere within us, but is to be recognized in systems within which we dance.

centredness Bodyminds dance in relation to each other in a flexistential field. They relate from far within themselves, centre to centre. Imagine this choreography of minded bodies, based on a

…three-fold property possessed by every consciousness: (i) of centring everything partially upon itself; (ii) of being able to centre upon itself constantly; and (iii) of being brought more by this very super-centration into association with all the other centres surrounding it
‘Beyond the Collective: the Hyperpersonal’ in The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin trans Bernard Wall

slow is a new punk A new discipline of time:

practice of certain non-reacting and non-acting, which brings the dancer away from conventional body (and mind) instrumentalism to functionally perceptive, unique here-moment and body-mind integrity.
About the Sense and Meaning in Dance

Slow down, stop; stillness, look around. Power of presence in our high-impact car-crash culture is not to be underestimated. It is no longer an anachronism nor a luxury to take our time. It is a necessity.

“relating means moving”(14) Communication implies a volunteering of self into new possiblities for configuration, a willingness to move into a new position in order to stay with a relationship.

Choreonautics A new discipline, inhabited and developed by those who dance with one foot inside and one outside a system.

Choreography (v.): the arrangement of bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): the arrangement of relations between bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): the framing of relations between bodies ……… ‘a way of seeing the world’
Choreography (n.): the result of these actions
Choreography (n.): ‘a dynamic constellation of any kind, consciously created or not, self-organising or super-imposed.’
Choreography (n.): ‘order observed…, exchange of forces…, a process that has an observable or observed embodied order’
Choreography (v.): the act of witnessing such an order
Choreography (v.): the act of interfering with or negotiating such an order
Michael Klein and Jeffrey Gormly, What is Choreography

Choreonauts are bodies in time and space, witnessing, framing, interfering with and negotiating dynamic constellations of which they themselves are a part. Choreonauts rely on intuition to dissolve dualities of subject and object, and resolve multiply-framed partial images of a systemic whole which is unknowable by we subjects of that true unknown, the universe.

Use of this morphogenetic field as a choreographic means desires us to project these strange attractors, strong ideas that draw us to them like gravity wells of planetary presences, into a space within which our dance can take place. This space may be bound by space, time or context. We heavenly bodies are held in suspension between around among these strange attractors. We do not land on any particular planet, we are not obliged to make our committment to one ideal or another, but rather to preserve a lightness in our thoughtful movement that allows us to negotiate with grace and gravity our paths through this morphogenetic field, our living with change in this morphogenetic field.

4
endfootnote: avant-gardening

mapped be consciousness and aesthetics shall surface / questions ask. who answers? endless the process . exploratory the framemakers
cut-up, limerick, 2004

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch

we are an ordinary mind
play strong . play for real . it’s a game but the stakes are high . abandon hope all ye who enter here . what’s left after hope? (faith?) mind answers itself . mind at work: pople carry thought(s) around a room.. what (why?) is a thought that thinks itself? How are thoughts that think a mind?.. an ordinary mind. Is a mind so unusual? ..ask itself . think dance with hands feet body in mind . frame it. move on. Leave a trace . sediments form a bed for growth . dig in . move on …
electricity. join your body and move in mind . there are ehoes . thoughts detach and grow new paths to play out mind, planting seeds for fresh growth, avant-gardeners cultivate ideas in an ecology of mind . stop . think . (to think, to dream..) sleep on it . do something .there are people all around; space stuff specklestuff all around locked in forms we think we know . nerves take root and grow out into reach stretch out into contact, and feedback, feedback, and reality; |Think: (resist|dance)| with a lightness, that is of dance, a naievety that is of dance, a desire for joy, that is of dance, dance, dance, an economics of fleibility, that is dance. And when the mind rests, dreams are made to dance . the city is your stage . landscape is your stage . join your bdy and we move at the speed of thought . (sound of where-you-are | sound of |Think: life|) evolving unconscious paths to cross, creating possibility, growing through growing pains. Here comes society. Society means everyone. Everyone an artist.
Jeffrey Gormly, Sediments of an Ordinary Mind: the book

NOTES
(1) Source: taped lecture by Hunter Adams. An interesting coincidence was that my source for this material describes the expulsion of a large number of Semites from Egypt for lawlessness. This Exodus led the Semites to eventually formulate their own social ethic- The Ten Commandments- as if this had become necessary to their survival as a people, see footnote 5.
(2) A key facet of this thinking was the notion of ‘the “reality-producing functions of the mind” … We can represent that reality out there because the structure of our minds has been shaped by the same forces that produced [that reality] … our sense of the diversity and the unity of the universe and of the relational (and so ethical) nature of human experience were reflections of a larger reality .. termed “transcendent”. The mind could read off that reality because it was structured to be “reality-producing”. from A Concept Map for Ethical Culture: Towards Philosophical Consensus – A statement of the National Leaders Council of the American Ethical Union
(3) Pirates created a world of their own making, where they had “the choice in themselves” – a world of solidarity and fraternity, where they shared the risks and gains of life at sea, made decisions collectively and seized their life for themselves in the present, denying its use to the merchants as a tool for the accumulation of dead property. “Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at Pleasure, unless a Scarcity make it necessary, for the Good of all, to vote a Retrenchment.” Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson), A General History of the Pyrates “Every man had as much say as the captain and each man carried his own weapons in his blanket.”
Dutch Governor of Mauritius
The harshness of life at sea made mutual aid into a simple survival tactic: “I.. hope, as ye have the bravery to assert your liberty, you will be as unanimous in the preserving it and stand by me in what shall be expedient for the good of all;
All should be held in common And the particular avarice of no one should defraud the public.
Since we have unanimously resolved to seize upon and defend our liberty …, I am under and obligation to recommend to you a brotherly love to each other; the banishment of all private piques and grudges, and a strict agreement and harmony among ourselves. In throwing off the yoke of tyranny, of which that speaks an abhorrence, I hope none will follow the example of the tyrants and turn his back upon justice; for when equity is trod underfoot, misery, confusion and mutual distrust naturally follow.
The trading for those of our own species could never be agreeable to the eyes of divine justice; no man has power of the liberty of another, …, I have not exempted my neck from the galling yoke of slavery and asserted my own liberty, to enslave others.”
Words of Captain Misson as recorded by Daniel Defoe (op cit)
(4) “The perhaps basically human tendency towards cumulative personal interaction is (..) muted. It is possible that some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax…
It is immediately clear to any visitor to Bali that the driving force for cultural activity is not either acquisitiveness or crude physiological need. … There are very few Balinese who have the idea of steadily maximising their wealth or property
It is common to find that activity, rather than being purposive i.e. aimed at some deferred goal, is valued for itself… Instead of deferred purpose there is an immediate and immanent satisfaction in performing beautifully, with everybody else, that which it is correct to perform in each particular context.
..there is such misfortune inherent in the loss of group membership that the threat of this loss is one of the most serious sanctions in the culture
…many Balinese actions are articulately accounted for in sociological terms rather than in terms of individual goals or values.
..offence is felt to be against the order and natural structure of the universe rather than against the actual person offended. The offender.. is not blamed for anything worse than stupidity and clumsiness. …these patterns which define correct and permissible behaviour are exceedingly complex … the individual Balinese has continual anxiety lest he make an error (..) forever picking his way, like a tightrope walker, afraid at any moment lest he make some misstep.”
‘Bali: The Value System of a Steady State’ from Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson
(5) This was reinforced by an anecdote recounted by Séadna: A man and a priest were conversing, and the man was asking the priest “What kind of sins do you get in the confessions?” Of course, the priest declined to answer, referring to the confidentiality of the confessional. The man insisted, however, until finally the priest said: “One thing I can tell you is that people never grow up.”
(6) I did not interrogate, however, whether people felt they made many informed ethical choices in the course of their everyday lives. The question of having choice but not having or making the time and space to exercise that choice, is, I believe, a key one.
(7) “From a choreographic point of view commandments act as simple rules given to the individual, that when played out in the social sphere create a more-or-less ‘liveable’ society. It can somewhat be seen as a survival mechanism, a code of conduct that guarantees survival on a larger organisational sphere than the individual. If a commandment would say ‘Kill thy neighbour’ – the survival of the society as a whole would be rather short.’ Michael, Choreographer
(8) ‘There are rules about actions e.g. robbery, adultery that can be prohibited: ok. But ‘coveting’ for instance, which is an internal/emotional response, can we rule against that? We can’t stop people from being greedy, but we can prevent them acting out of greed. Rules that should go into law should be those which affect others.’ Séadna
(9) Donal subsequently contributed this note: ‘Our greatest glory consists … “Not in never falling/ But in rising every time we fall.”’
(10) I propose we categorically end notional separation between body and mind and propose these terms bodymind and mindbody to identify human ethical agency.
(11) ‘First, morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns or structures on otherwise random or indeterminate processes in the systems under their control. Second, they contain attractors, which draw systems under their influence towards future goals. Third, they evolve, along with living organisms themselves. The morphic fields of all species have history, and contain inherent memory given by the process I call morphic resonance. … Morphic resonance works across space and time, from the past to the present.
Through morphic resonance, each member of a species both draws upon and contributes to a collective memory of the species.
…
Morphogenetic fields are part of a larger class of fields, called morphic fields, all of which contain inherent memory given by morphic resonance.
Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields. Through mental fields, the extended mind reaches out into the environment through attention and intention, and connects with other members of social groups.’ Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense Of Being Stared At
See: A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981), The Presence of the Past. Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1991), all by Rupert Sheldrake
(12) Gregory Bateson, Conscious Purpose Versus Nature, Lecture to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, July, 1967. Reprinted in Steps to and Ecology of Mind
(13)At Framemakers Symposium 2005
(14) This is a choreographic instruction/guideline from Michael Klien’s Sediments of an Ordinary Mind, Daghdha Dance Company, 2004-7

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Hunter, Ma’at Moral Matrix for Doing the Right Thing, taped lecture
Bateson, Gregory (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: University of Chicago Press
de Chardin, Teilhard (1965), The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall, London: Perennial
Defoe, Daniel (Captain Charles Johnson), A General History of the Pyrates
Framemakers (2005), Public Thinktank Program Book, Limerick
Gianotti, Elena (2006), Notes for Einem, Limerick
Gormly, Jeffrey, Sediments of an Ordinary Mind: the book, Daghdha Dance Company, forthcoming
Herbert, Frank (1966), Destination: Void, New York: Berkley Medallion
Mackenna, Terence, New Maps of Hyperspace, http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Artists3/McKenna,Terence/NewMapsOfHyperspace.pdf
Mann, Philip (1982), The Eye of the Queen, London: Gollancz
Moni, Kirsi (2006), About the Sense and Meaning in Dance, Doctoral Dissertation
National Leaders Council of the American Ethical Union (2005), A Concept Map for Ethical Culture: Towards Philosophical Consensus, New York
Pratt, David (1992), Rupert Sheldrake: A Theosophical Appraisal, Theosophical University Press
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-shl.htm, accessed 13/9/007
Sheldrake, Rupert (2003), The Sense Of Being Stared At, London: Random House