‘A sprinkling of sugar dust’: synaesthetic practices,affective entrainment and non-representational communication

Introduction

Non-representational geography seeks to develop a body of work in which we think with the entire body. ¹ While on a conceptual level matters of affect and bodily modalities have received considerable attention, methodological challenges remain and a range of questions persist concerning how we might apprehend and work with affect without relying on representational forms, and how the affective can be accessed inter-subjectively. ² I engage with both of these issues in this article. I present research undertaken with a ‘drawing dance’ project in which artists, dancers and a musician work together in an improvisational setting, which illustrates the potential for communicating non-representationally between cultural practices. I propose that research methods involving inter-practice encounters hold promise for non-representational geography. Specifically, I suggest that we might productively think about cultural practices as synaesthetic, and that this synaesthetic quality allows for non-representational communication between cultural practices, opening the door to inter-practice research methods to apprehend affect.

The ‘drawing dance’ project

I encountered the ‘drawing dance’ project during research exploring the emergence of spatiality and subjectivity in artistic practice. This research involved interviewing participating artists about their artistic practice, observing and recording their practice, and working artistically alongside participants during their practice. Through comparison between our respective practices and by varying aspects of our practices, I aimed to direct participant attention to aspects of their own practices of which they might not normally be aware. ³

I observed two ‘drawing dance’ sessions, in which three artists participate in an improvisational interaction with two dancers and a musician. These artists, who all practice in and around Oxford, England, are

In these improvised sessions, artists, dancers and musician respond creatively to each other’s performances. A dancer moves, to which the musician and artists respond, which stimulates subsequent dance moves. In response to the dance and music, the artists draw or paint marks on sheets of paper, and each artist takes it in turn to have the marks that they make projected onto the wall behind the dancers. The other artists also respond to the dance and music in order to develop their own practice, but only the artist working ‘under camera’ has their artistic mark-making projected onto the wall, contributing to the interactive improvisational practice.

All three artists described different experiences when working off-camera (to develop their own practice) and when working under camera (to contribute to the improvisation). When off-camera, Clare is mindful of which pieces might sell in their own right as art works, evaluating the marks that she is making on the paper, whereas under the camera, ‘what you are making is an environment rather than a piece of art on a piece of paper’ because the projection is contributing to the improvisation. Clare observes that when working under the camera, whatever the mark, ‘it creates atmosphere, it creates tensions, it creates moods, whatever, but it’s not representational in any way’. Essentially, Clare is looking to capture atmosphere when off-camera and to create atmosphere when under the camera; in each case, it is affective force that is sought.

Artistic practice as synaesthetic

Reflecting on the ‘drawing dance’ project, Clare discusses the difficulty she has in identifying ‘at what point you find yourself drawing the music as opposed to drawing the dance’, suggesting a lack of clear distinction between different sensory modalities. Clare goes on to say that the music

allowed the different types of brush stroke and the different types of mark, because that’s what my arm was hearing, but to be honest I couldn’t tell you what sort of music it was he was playing.

Clare considers that it was her arm rather than her ears doing the hearing, and that this hearing and responding occurred without engagement with the music on a cognitive level. Such cross-modal references between hearing and feeling are suggestive of synaesthesia. Stemming from the Greek meaning ‘joined perception’, synaesthesia is a perceptual rather than cognitive experience of sensation in one modality when another modality is stimulated, such as when letters are associated with colours or sounds, or emotions are associated with textures. Theorized as an elevation in implicit awareness of normal cross-modal activations in the brain, synaesthesia can cause discomfort or distress if, for example, a number normally associated with one colour is encountered in another. ⁴ Synaesthesia is reported to occur more commonly among those who participate in artistic or creative activities, ⁵ suggesting that creative or artistically inclined individuals might have greater cross-modal activation or more intense inter-sensory experiences than less creatively inclined individuals.

This is consistent with other participants’ accounts of their artistic practices as more-than-visual. For example, Laura, a 36-year-old artist who works primarily in oil paints, emphasized the physical and textural, rather than visual, aspects of her practice, commenting that it is the feeling rather than the appearance of the paints that is important when preparing for a commission. Similarly, Jane, a 71-year-old artist who works mainly in watercolours, spoke of the texture of the materials, the dampness of the paper, the need to negotiate the appropriate amount of pressure and their associated auditory qualities, rather than any visual aspects of her work. Such emphasis on textural and auditory features in practices conventionally considered visual again suggests a synaesthetic quality to these experiences. This is not to suggest that all, or indeed any, of the participating artists are synaesthetes, but that it might be fruitful to think about artistic practice in synaesthetic terms.

While psychologically it is the individual who is considered synaesthetic, the association of synaesthesia with particular practices might also suggest that those practices can themselves be conceptualized in synaesthetic terms. Although I did not specifically ask any of the participating artists whether they were synaesthetic, none of the participants made any reference to being synaesthetic, or to being aware of having experienced synaesthetic cross-activation, even when their articulation of their artistic practice might be considered consistent with synaesthesia. As a result, this synaesthetic quality seems to be specific to their artwork rather than a general feature of their perceptual faculties, and suggests that we might productively think about artistic practice as well as individuals as synaesthetic.

Affective conveyance and entrainment

Despite this apparent merging and morphing of sensory modalities into one another, suggesting an affective affinity between art, music and dance, and potentially allowing for the conveyance of affect, Clare describes considerable difficulty in interpreting other performers’ intentions. She comments that if a musician pauses or a dancer lies down, ‘other people get twitchy’ because group members are still ‘trying to find a way to telepathically express that this isn’t, you know, a folding down’, and that ‘often I feel I’ve finished but I can’t because the action continues, the music continues’. However, some non-linguistic communication does take place between performers. Kassandra describes her work off-camera as enabling her to identify movements for which she can produce a mark under the camera ‘to which the dancers will respond [because] it echoes or replicates something from their dance’. She comments that

if I initiate a mark that to me, if I haven’t told the dancers this is a turning motion, and if they see it and if they in turn decide, then there’s a link going on there.

There is no suggestion here that the performers seek to establish or agree a grammar of gesture that can translate between artistic mediums. Rather, Kassandra seeks to translate between practices in real time, seeking to discover, through her affective understanding of the unfolding dance, meaningful marks that she can convey to the dancers through her affective understanding of her own artistic practice, which she then puts to the test when under camera. Kassandra says that in this way, she can ‘pick up a movement or gesture and then put it back into [the dance]’ such that ‘the forms that were being created two dimensionally were being picked up three dimensionally by the dancers’. Clare too referred to this gestural aspect, describing a time when she ‘just did a line down the middle and suddenly that says OK you’ve got to move apart’, while Kassandra further explained the gestural equivalence between the artist’s blank page, the dancer’s lying down and the musician’s pause. In these sessions, artistic marks tell the other performers what to do by doing what they would otherwise say. Synaesthetic cross-sensitization occurs here interpersonally and between cultural practices, as well as intra-personally.

At its peak, such interpersonal sharing of subjective states becomes entrainment, in which the resonance experienced by individual practitioners synthesizes rhythmically. ⁶ Clare describes these experiences as ‘being totally in the zone with everybody involved’ and as including ‘a magic wow factor, a sprinkling of sugar dust’, in contrast to other experiences lacking this quality in which she feels that people are ‘out of sync’. Such entrainment occurred when Kassandra manipulated the paper surface rhythmically, a change that was picked up by both dancers and musician as a slowing of breathing rate. Translated into their own medium and simultaneously enacted, these rhythmic and expressive qualities generated an affective intensity which was palpable even to me as an observer: I found myself holding my breath. This affective entrainment was sufficiently powerful not only to work across different practices but to extend beyond practice.

Clare’s description of such occasions as ‘sugar dust’ speaks to their transformative impact, and at their heart lies the synaesthetically gestural quality of artistic mark-making. Clare’s drawing of a line down the middle of the performance space and Kassandra’s manipulation of the paper surface held no essential meaning within them: it was the synaesthetic gesture behind them that conveyed affective understanding between performers in a non-verbal manner. While verbal instructions can carry across contexts, outside of the performance setting, such gestures would not be articulated or apprehended in the same way: without the affective entrainment made possible by the synaesthetic nature of these practices, these gestures would be meaningless. As seen in the contrast between Clare’s dismay at her disconnection from the continuing improvisation and the wow factor of rhythmic entrainment, the evidence of apprehension of affect through the power of gesture lies in the response, and the inter-practice apprehension of affect is afforded by the synaesthetic nature of these cultural practices.

Conclusion

This brief account of an affectively powerful research encounter raises three points of particular significance to non-representational geography’s need for methodological innovation and invigoration ⁷ in its quest to develop a body of work in which we think with the entire body. ⁸

First, it suggests that we can think about artistic and other cultural practices in synaesthetic terms, and that in doing so, we are better placed to appreciate the ways in which these practices already do think with far more of our bodies than we customarily assume.

Second, it highlights the contingency and ephemerality of the affective entrainment made possible by this synaesthetic quality, and which enables non-verbal communication. This encourages us to question again the relation between the representational and the non-representational, as it suggests that affective entrainment might render representational that which would otherwise be non-representational.

Third and finally, it illustrates the potential for the development of research methods that employ inter-practice encounters as a means to apprehend and understand affect, for example, by interrogating the conditions under which affective entrainment and non-representational communication both flourish and disintegrate.