SOIS A Movement Story of Now

Sound Sight Sensation

Personal writings by Juliet Shelley based on the practice of SOIS at Thistle Hall, 293 Cuba Street, Wellington, NZ.

SOIS is a name for a physical movement score.

This score is about responding to simultaneous non hierarchical fields of attention whilst moving and dancing.

SOIS is a state or condition of observing, perceiving and responding to information simultaneously on three basic levels of awareness: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

It is about being in a state of both responsiveness and action at the same time. 
It is about noticing where my attention is placed or where it goes to whilst I am moving and what restricts my information and choices moment to moment as I move and dance.

It is a state or practice which involves remaining present to myself, other people, my body and my environment as I move, noticing where my attention is going or being drawn to or being placed on a conscious level, what my attention is responding to and what choices or decisions I am making. It is a way to become conscious of how I am making decisions. 

It is about becoming conscious of unconscious patterns of action, behaviour or levels of response. It is about expanding my field of awareness in action, as well as having the option to choose differently.

I notice and differentiate physical information as perceived and experienced through my body; visual information as perceived and experienced through my eyes; and auditory/sound information as perceived and experienced through my ears. I experience them one at a time and simultaneously.

I notice how my visual field of awareness interfaces with and relates to my kinaesthetic field of awareness and how my auditory field relates and interfaces with my visual and kinaesthetic field.  And I experience how I respond to and embody this awareness and information in my movement choices.

Expanding my awareness reveals an infinite and ever changing variety of possibilities and relationships inherent in each moment. This has a quality of timelessness and abundance; I am expanding my awareness and appreciation of the rich choices present in each moment and the infinite number of varieties possible of combined experiences in sound, sight and sensation that are present in each moment.

I play within this condition and learn to expand and develop our awareness of both time-less and time-full modes of existence. I move, exist in a state of unfolding, revealing presence as well as in a linear time based world of past and future.

SOIS is a lens, a frame, a window in which to discover a means to exist in both a time-less and a time-full world and to choose consciously within each. It is a means to be as fully present as possible in the moment and to be mindful of what it is that can take me into being locked into the past or the future or where the awareness of and availability for the present is reduced, restricted or diminished.

This diminishing of awareness happens on all levels simultaneously, on the physical level through my body as reflected in my actions and the quality of my movement choices, and in my awareness of my visual and auditory fields and the information they contain. This diminishing of awareness takes place through my various individual attention fields becoming restricted, overloaded, exhausted or unbalanced.

So I move and play within this structure or score and expand and develop my attention levels to being able to bring them into a wide range of situations solo and in partnership with other dancers and in groups, both as participants and as observers.

I observe the role of ‘the mind’ and ‘thought’ and observe the energy of ‘the mind’ and thoughts as existing in a time based continuum, often in the past or the future, sometimes restricting me from what is available to me in the present. I notice where my attention habitually goes whilst I move in different or unfamiliar ways or speeds or relationships.

I notice how I can unconsciously close my sensory levels down when I identify with thoughts instead of observing thoughts in the same way as I observe what I see with my eyes and hear with my ears: as information which I can choose to relate to in a variety of different ways and without letting those thoughts take precedence over other fields and sources of information within the present moment. 

So I can observe rather than act or re-act to the thoughts and I can develop an awareness of all the senses remaining available to me, as in ‘coming back to my senses.’ In this way my senses can develop a voice to which we I respond, with a quality of information from which I can choose as equal to the information and quality of my thoughts.

SOIS is about learning to balance these sources of information and to embody them in my movement in a variety and range of different ways and situations, solo, in partners, in groups, at different speeds and tempos and within both improvised and set choreography.

I am engaging in and with simultaneous, holographic, non-hierarchical fields of attention,

in which the dancer (me) and my body are not in isolation of my environment, and in which each distinct system conditions and supports the other.

I am curious to see how other movers and dancers relate to these themes, how they understand them, embody them and practice them and to see the kinds and qualities of movements which emerge from the practice of this particular score.