This first blog post follows a series of workshops held by the UK-based arts company, Fevered Sleep for 1st year vet students at the Vet School at the University of Surrey in November 2019.
This is the first real blog post I have written for this project. I am not – I don’t think – a natural blogger. And yet, there is something about the form that I feel might usefully afford a different kind of thinking that I would like to at least try to practice. It feels related to me, to a parallel effort that I want to make, to get better at “live thought”: of contributing to conferences and other research gatherings, for instance, less in the form of pre-prepared papers and more in the form of a thinking with those with whom I am occupying a particular space and time.
The stakes of what happened today only really occur to me afterwards:
As of November 2019, there will have been an entire cohort of first year Vet students who have done a workshop with Fevered Sleep as part of their communication module.
Before the workshop, David (Harradine) and Sam (Butler) had already come into one of the students’ regular lectures to introduce themselves, the company and “Sheep Pig Goat”.
But mostly, I imagine, the students will not have encountered the company before.
There is skepticism in the room. There are crossed arms. There is discomfort and doubt. A foot tapping. Someone still wearing their coat. Bodies shifting from side to side; avoiding gaze. I am trying not to watch them. I can enjoy the changing feeling in the room without looking. Through listening.
It takes about 10 minutes for them to loosen up a little and to laugh together – which happens through simple exercise of passing a clap around a circle, making eye contact as the clap is passed. There is a twittering playful energy in the room now; a giddiness of release - and then a return to focus.
And - at one level - there is nothing radical about what David and Sam are doing in these workshops. They do a series of games and exercises that would be familiar to those who have worked in a range of drama or performing arts contexts. Simple exercises about paying attention to your own body and those of others in the room. Simple exercises about eye contact and about status. They are the kinds of exercises that they would do with the other groups of people with whom they work: children, performers. It doesn’t really matter what they are doing.
But at another level - in this particular context - what they are doing with the students may well be radical. What the Vet School has allowed us to do - by offering a workshop as part of this course - may well be radical. Our sense is that, on the students’ normal communications module, there is quite a lot of talk “about” body language but perhaps less attention to it through doing. There are role play exercises with actors pretending to be clients. But how might a trainee vet learn how their own body speaks and listens to others? What if vets in training had an entire module focussed on performance-based approaches to the body? How might that change how they embody their future encounters with people and nonhuman animals as vets?
Some of the exercises are about the often unconscious signals our bodies give out and receive: for example, of coming to a greater awareness of the ways in which our embodiment, including our faces, may be communicative to others in ways that we do not intend and may not wish. There is reflection on the potential mismatch between what you feel and what others think you are feeling and the role that conscious and unconscious bodily performance might have in the communication of feeling between people. (Sam says she has been told she has “resting bitch face” so she’s working on that!). I wonder if the Vet students would otherwise have opportunities to attend to their bodily behaviours or come to know them before they enter into clinical practice.
These exercises acknowledge that judgment and interpretation are part of the world; they acknowledge how quickly humans “read” each other’s bodies and make judgments accordingly (consciously and unconsciously to varying degrees). But they also acknowledge and draw attention to other ways of being in the world - notions of inhabiting bodily openness, for instance - that are not to do with reading bodies for meaning, but sensing our own bodies and those of others in ways that require a suspension of judgment, however temporary, in order to allow for an other quality of noticing to take place. This is not about teaching them some universal body language. There is no certainty in what bodies mean, and their uniqueness is constantly affirmed. It is not that performance knows what and how bodies mean and they don’t or veterinary science does not. But there is - possibly - a multiplying of bodily languages and a pluralising of modes of “reading” or listening.
Judgment can ‘neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence… Judgement prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence’ (Deleuze 1998: 135).
“Noticing without judgment” also comes in in how David and Sam observe and interpret how the students do the exercises - like the clapping exercise - differently. It is observed and acknowledged that one can clap shyly, confidently, skeptically (or, rather, in ways that might be read as “shy”, “confident”, “skeptical”, though not better or worse as such). “Noticing without judgment”. Or is it? They don’t want the students to feel judged. And yet, it is “better” (in this context) to bring energy to a gesture like the clap. It is “better” to do it honestly rather than skeptically. To be open rather than closed. And yet, contra Deleuze perhaps, the judgment - of David or Sam - might also help bring that openness about (to persuade the skeptics to do first and doubt later, for instance).
The exercises also draw attention to how much is going on even when very little seems to be going on: to bring awareness to the richness of ordinary and seemingly simple encounters; when bodies meet. Attending to what is happening, to qualities of encounter - without judgment - is difficult, if not impossible. The exercises also invite us to notice the very small differences between gestures: variations within how eye contact is performed, for example.
And it is noted that there are all kinds of reasons why eye contact might be easier for some than others - cultural, biographical - in ways that make judgment unhelpful; a blunt instrument. Though one that can also be simply noticed rather than judged. David notices how quickly he makes judgments (or assumptions) about the attitudes of the students based on his reading of their body language. Noticing not judging, judgment itself. Or perhaps it’s not judgment - David later reflects - it’s ongoing unconscious analysis of the bodies we encounter in the everyday.
And perhaps – a blog requires a kind of writing without judgment, a kind of live writing that I need to practice: a liveness that is not some simple spontaneity, but requires rehearsal, preparation, the honing of techniques.
I will keep trying.