premiering 27/02/2021 a short film on the theme of ‘Liveness’ for Newcastle University Performance Research Department. Captions can be enabled in youtube.
My Heart Cannot Hear Yours From Here
Humans ‘know’ that we are alive, as we breathe and sense the other in same space/time/place. Our species is tribal and collective. Like most mammals we seek to associate in groups and we communicate and sense via Heart Connection (electro-cardiac impulses) – perceiving the other within a critical 3 feet of our hearts – and co-regulating to the nervous system of one another.
Science validates this powerful, unspoken resonance. It’s why we seek out gathering – to connect and to feel part of; alive and whole. All other communication is secondary; The body feels relationship – proximity – and commands the brain against reason or logic to defer to ‘sense’. Being together matters because without heart connection we start to feel bereft; without reference point or sense of human agency-in-community. We are compelled to find resonance in space and time and place to feel real.
The voiced expression of this connection – this liveness – this mutuality of experience – is story. And story sustains us, but it cannot replace the felt sense of temporal and spatial proximity. Collective bodily experiencing.
The filmed group experienced live-ness then as pure connection (other sense redundant). Before story; In the beginning. The viewer here is left free to create story from the visual – there are no imposed clues or caveats. Viscerally, the watching soma in this iteration is not in that screened live-ness and feels the frailty of secondary sensing.
