Scoring Daoist Energy: A Rhetoric of Collaboration1

153 Scoring Daoist Energy A Rhetoric of Collaboration1 DYLAN BOLLES & LYNETTE HUNTER This article explores using embodied principles of flexibility, change and collaboration from the perspective of Daoist philosophy within the site‑ particular as articulated by Ilya Noé: Site‑particularity offers a long‑term dynamic of to‑and‑fro within locational possibilities and limitations, made and remade.[It is] . . . a conversation, a process of collaborative construction: a reciprocal and simultaneous way of shaping and being shaped, a continual relearning, rehearsing and impro‑ vising of different ways to recognize and respond in the moment and with full awareness. (2009, 208) Because Daoism is learned through various media—written, embodied, aesthetic, etc.—it generates many ways of thinking and being. One of us (Lynette) is a historian of rhetoric, interested in exploring the shapes, structures and strategies through which Daoist practice trains people. The other (Dylan) is a musician who works on attention and awareness with a range of musical instruments and practices from around the world. We undertake these tasks through a collaborative practice that has led to performances of Dylan singing with Lynette doing one‑word 1 We would like to thank Desmond Murray, President of Lishi International, for his insight and guidance, and senior students Alex Boyd, Clive Nunnington and Claire Scollan for participation and feedback during exploratory sessions. 154 / Journal of Daoist Studies 5 (2012) story‑telling.2 It allows us to approach from a Daoist perspective the rhe‑ torical work of tuning, resonance, sympathetic dissonance and energy, according them more detailed listening strategies through the story‑ telling that supports the play with vocal sound. Our first contact was talking about indigenous practices of throat‑ singing in Tuva and in Nunavut (Hunter 2005). Tuvan throat‑singing often occurs in a natural landscape, as performers meld their voices to trees, water, wind, and other elements, recalling the energy of the past into the present by picking up dissonances between vocal mimetic mem‑ ory and present mimesis (Levin 2006, 77‑78). The word “mimesis” here signifies a practice in which a present body inhabits a mediated score held in any medium: sound, visual, musculature/visceral (Hunter 1996, 199‑218). It is not banal copying, but a rehearsal of the score through em‑ bodiment (Lepecki 2010) that makes that score responsive to the needs of the present. Daoism opens this signification by underlining the experien‑ tial connection to an ecology of energies in the lived context of the per‑ formance that necessarily changes the way the body presents itself through the instrument. Inuit throat‑singing usually involves two people singing toward one another, playing with the different “presencing” of a vocal story‑sound score.3 While this was our contact point for the performance, prior to this we had been training in Lishi, an ancient movement tradition based on Daoist energy practices. This is a complex practice from north‑eastern China that retains the health‑related energy techniques of a family sys‑ tem. Transmitted as a set of embodied texts, Lishi carries generations of traditional knowledge in breath, alignment, and energy techniques, skills, and practices. It has its own forms of taiji quan, daoyin, kaimen, and many other forms of traditional Daoist movement. It follows Daoism principles that infuse artistic practices from calligraphy through music to 2 The distinction between site‑specific and site‑particular is further enabled by work on situated textuality (Hunter 1999) based on feminist work in science and technology, especially that on situated knowledge by Donna Haraway (1988), on time/space by Doreen Massey (2005), and on ecological epistemology by Lorraine Code (2006). This genealogy opens up the links between Daoist phi‑ losophy and situated textuality as a rhetoric of the particular. 3 http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DqnGM0BlA95I Bolles & Hunter, “Scoring Daoist Energy” / 155 dance. The principles are concerned with concepts of equilibrium, root‑ edness, and “feeling” or affect. Daoist equilibrium focuses on the need to keep movement going through apparent stillness, so that there is no point of stasis that could possibly lead to stagnation or fixity. Rootedness involves skills for rooting down yet at the same time uprooting, so that we can ground experience at the same time as keeping profoundly...