program A

Tuesday 12/12 at 20:30 - HaZira Interdisciplinary Arena Theater, Jerusalem

Friday 29/12 at 20:30 - Hateiva Theater, Tel Aviv-Jaffa


Tunezoom Observatory

with 

Lisa Nelson (USA)

Amos Hetz (ISR)

Anat Shamgar (ISR)

Scott Smith (GBR)

Carmen Pereiro Numer (ARG)

Beth Bastos (BRA)

Scotty Heron (USA)

Karen Nelson (USA)

Paula Zacharias (ARG)


The Tuning Score: composition, communication, and the sense of imagination is a performance research practice with a multi-sensorial approach to the questions: What are we looking at when we look at a dance? How do we sense and make sense of movement, from inside and out?

Fueling this research is the perception of the body as both proscenium and performer, as container and generator of imagery, as embodiment and instrument of thought and feeling—taking the body as environment of the imagination, and the inverse: the imagination as environment of the body.

The underlying activity of the score is tuning, as in tuning a violin or tuning in a radio signal. The action is propelled by cycling between proposing and replaying material, showing each other our perceptions of the space around and inside us. 

Operational verbal calls invite each player to act equally as performer, director, and observer to tune in a dance one wants to observe and inhabit at the same time. Together, our choices uncover the form as it arises and set the dance in motion.

As a practice of real-time editing, recycling, instant replay, and collaboration, the Tuning Score is an aesthetic game that taps into our innate desire to compose our experience. Actions and calls provoke a dance of consequences, disrupting, affirming, and recreating a constantly shifting consensus reality—revealing the fleeting confluence of attentions and intentions that illuminate the collective body’s circumstance in this moment of urgency on the planet. 

Public Observatories invite audients to witness the skillful play of their own imaginations, to note their own desires while being exposed to decisions dancers confront in navigating their physicality and making a dance together. 

[Lisa Nelson]


LISA NELSON, dance and video artist, collaborator, and learner, has been exploring the dialogue of the senses in the performance and observation of movement since the 70s. She is intrigued by dance behaviors, systems of transmission and translation, patterns of surviving culture—natural and human-made, and the collective body’s imagination. Her practice of Tuning Scores, an approach to real-time editing and communication, has developed in collaboration with many artists since the 80s. It is a vehicle to cultivate a more flexible and compassionate construction of our naturally wobbly world. Editing in many mediums has been a life practice, including Contact Quarterly dance journal since 1976.  Her writings are accessible on MovementResearch.org Critical Correspondance, and oralsite.be/pages/Anthology-Lisa-Nelson. She lives in Vermont, USA.