Science & Sensation

Science describes aspects of the universe that are much smaller and much larger than our human perceptions. In this respect, it attempts to undercut the intuition of the body. The body continues to assert itself, saying, Here I am! Attend to me, care for me, explore with me. Can we ever truly turn this "off," or is everything we know about the world filtered through the body?

Instead of quieting sensation, I tune myself to the information I receive through my body, linking feeling, thought and action. Currently I use this process to access a state of potentiality and imagine the future. At Djerassi, I pursued the elusive, ever-changing feeling of being on the edge of the unknown. With collaborator Elizabeth Chitty, I committed to a daily movement improvisation practice of "imagining the future," which put me in conversation with planetary history, the conditions of human suffering and my own mortality. I struggle to use words to describe this experience, which emerged so deeply from sensation.

I offered a performance to Open House visitors, where I invited them to write a wish for the future and then translated these wishes into movement, creating nonverbal, sensation-based experiences of each possible future. I relinquished control over composition, embracing each new wish as it arrived. The wish for a cure for cancer originates from a different body than the hope for world peace, or the desire to find one's soulmate. The performance lasted two hours, leaving me exhausted and exhilarated.

Science orients toward discovery. At the end of my time at Djerassi I installed two wooden signs from my performance on a mountaintop: "IF YOU WRITE A WISH FOR THE FUTURE" and "I WILL MAKE A DANCE FOR YOU." My discovery: We need each other, and dance needs to be made to be given away.

Between the Wish and the Thing, 2017. (© Katharine Hawthorne. Photo © Rewa Bush, Djerassi Resident Artists Program.)