“We are constantly recomposing our body and our attention in response to the environment, to things known and unknown. This inner dance is a most basic improvisation – reading and responding to the scripts of the environment. It’s our body’s dialogue with our experience.”
Those words written by Lisa Nelson in her text Before Your Eyes: Seeds of a Dance Practice follow me whenever I think about attention, perception, bodies, relations, care, responsibility and how artistic and social practices intertwine. Following my research into embodied attention in dance (encouraged by Joanna Leśnierowska and supported by Grażyna Kulczyk fellowship) I have invited Rosalind Crisp and Lisa Nelson to have a dialogue on the role of attention in their practices. The proposed questions were the points of departure for the conversation: What “choreographing attention” means to you? What is the role of attention in your practice – both artistic and everyday? How attention relates to empathy and can it help us change our relation to others – humans and non-humans? How can it help us navigate between intimate, social and planetary challenges?
Lisa Nelson begins the dialogue by sharing how she started to be interested in attention (against the logic and demands of economy of attention the recording lasts app. one hour).