Some thoughts on Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore

Disclaimer : What follows in this second part is written for those who are already acquainted with the Underscore. It in no way is intended as a guide to learning the Underscore and in refering to phases within it assumes familiarity with them. They are not explained nor are they represented symbolically (an important aspect of Nancy's teaching of them).

If you want to learn the Underscore then you can do no better than go study with Nancy herself. She is the source. Her teaching promotes both a very individual relationship with the different phases/foci/activities of the score and the vocabulary to begin to articulate those experiences with others. See her link on right.

What follows is my own re-formulation/mutation of the Underscore. It’s how I personally have come to understand the various phases and use the Underscore in my own work. It’s a result of how I’ve questioned it. I’ve changed things around, added things together, divided things up. I use Nancy’s phases/foci/activities but my way of ordering them is a little different.

Part Two: My Relationship To The Underscore – Linearity Vs. Non-Linearity

When I teach the underscore score or lead a score jam, I usually insist on a linear progression through the early phases, what I call in my analysis below “Relation To Self”. I find it works great for a group with little or no experience of the underscore. Its strength is precisely that it encourages us to work alone until we’ve fully mobilized ourselves, gathering up as much of ourselves as we can muster at that moment, before we meet in dancing - and that we often find satisfying dances through that process.

I find that for people without a solid skill base, particularly the more dynamic skills including "flying", then making contact before being fully mobilised can lead to getting stuck in low-level, low-energy dancing. Insisting on establishing a solo travelling expanding kinesphere and warming up the pathways in and out of the floor before making contact with another brings people to a state where exploration (and therefore learning through dancing) of higher levels and more dynamic movement is more likely to occur.

But what I know for myself is that this linear progression doesn’t work as a container for all my desires, nor does it necessarily accurately describe what’s happening in even a linear underscore situation. Life’s just not linear! That said, this solo progression to full mobilization is still a valid choice sometimes, “choice” for me being most important word.

The last time I studied with Nancy in a workshop situation in Arlequi (2001), something big shifted for me in the way I used the score. That’s when I began to let go of the linearity and see the score as more of an internal reference to support my awareness of what I am doing in dancing contact, and as an external language which to put those experiences into words which I can share with others.

Since then, that’s what the underscore has become for me in my personal practice of it at jams, in teaching classes and at the increasing number of oportunities to practice the Underscore with others – a support for my awareness in a group process. I guess this betrays my Feldenkrais background – “When you know what you are doing, you can do what you want” – the Feldenkrais Method in a nutshell.

Annotating The Underscore – Part One - Unpacking

What I have noticed is that not all of the phases/foci/activities, the things that Nancy gives symbols to, are of the same order: hence my difficulty in referring to them by a single term. Some are definitely physical activities, things that one can choose to do; some are group activities, one needs the agreement of a group to do them. And some are not physical activities so much as mental ones, possibilities for focusing one’s attention in a particular way.

In my formulation I see the stages between what I annotate as "A Beginning - Forming the Container" and "An Ending - Closing the Practice" as somehow bracketing what happens in between. And in my reading, what’s in between can occur in parallel; simultaneous, overlapping, hybridizing. Hopefully this will get clearer later on.

For me, this way of thinking of the score as a support for awareness for events which can happen anytime. Rather than a sequence to be worked through, I see it more as a menu of possibilities that one can become aware of and share with others in the language of the Underscore. Thinking this way allows me to apply it more easily to any of the four situations detailed above in which I commonly use it.

What follows is my personal annotation of the Underscore - this is NOT THE UNDERSCORE. It is not written as it is classically formulated, there are no symbols, and there are numerous small additions and modifications. The additional subheadings are my own while addtional phases/stages/foci are rooted in what I have heard Nancy refer to in her teaching but not referenced in her Underscore. I should also qualify this by saying that her Underscore is fluid and not fixed therefore things may have changed since I last met her latest version of it (the last version I saw was in Spring 2006) and indeed what follows is tentative and open to modification - I think what might be of most interest is how I am thinking of it rather than my formulation itself - so:

• A Beginning - Forming the Container (group practice)

arriving into the space - seeing who’s there

beginning warm-up/tune-up process (solo)

circle

preambulation - sending out lines of connection to others

• Relation To Self – Mobilisation/Presence (Solo Practice)

arriving energetically

arriving physically

skinosphere

bonding with the earth

agitation of the mobilizing mass

kinosphere

low kinosphere

high kinosphere

expanding/travelling kinosphere

popping the top of the bubble

overlapping kinosphere

• Opening To Connections (Solo And/Or Group Practice)

• Relation To Others (Group Practice)

grazing

engagement

development

resolution

disengagement

recirculating through the score

open score (contact duets, trios, quartets and more ... leading to group formations, dancing with energetic connections, observing and re-entering)

• Floating Foci (Solo Practice)

telescoping awareness

gap

streaming

sending out lines (for me this seems like an anytime, all the time possibility)

• An Ending - Closing The Practice (Group Practice)

resolution of the room

disengagement from the final pattern

reflection – harvest (solo)

thanksgiving - sharing

• Aftermath - Composting (Solo)

letting the experience sink in

something returns at odd moments

Annotating The Underscore – Part Two - Repack(Ag)Ing

Writing out the score, even in this annotated fashion, still doesn’t convey my experience of it. For me it is just a step towards what I think is a more interesting and useful way of representing it on paper as a reference for myself. What sticks out to me from the annotations that I’ve made above is how some aspects of the score seems to refer to the group activity act of forming a container, some aspects refer to solo activities/foci/practices and some refer to group activities/foci/practices.

I go one step further by reassembling all the phases in the matrix form which you see below. What is interesting for me is to read the horizontal axis as time passing and the vertical axis as a flow from solo to group activities. I can imagine ways to refine this representation of the score but for now this simple form works for me. And before you get to it, here’s a reminder that when I read it, I see it as a menu of possibilities, to do and/or be aware of, and not as a list of tasks to be performed.

modified underscore diagram

Notes On My Redrawing Of The Underscore

Re-framing the score in this way clarifies for me how I apply it in different situations. Whatever we do (dancing the score as a group, going to a jam, teaching a class) has a beginning and an end. Sometimes this can seem arbitrary (the continual process of “composting" is missing from the diagram) but often it is not. For me this beginning and ending marks time, marks out time. In a score practice all the beginning and ending phases are present, in a jam maybe not, in a class situation maybe some are. Sometimes they are explicit and sometimes they are not.

As for what happens between the brackets of beginning and ending, the diagram allows me to see what I am experiencing in terms of layers: there is the layer of my relationship to myself and the layer of my relationship to others; and like glue holding them together are the layers of the floating foci and the connections which for me are more ways of considering where my focus of attention can be at any time.

I’m still unsure whether the floating foci and the connections should be separate since noticing connections seems to me to be a subset of telescoping awareness – I decided to draw them separately for now.

Finally, one way I read these layers is in terms of proportion – how much I am in one activity compared to the others at any moment - hybrid phases/states/foci

So ... some examples ...

... I’m warming up, I’m maybe 80% focused on my solo activity (maybe skinosphere) 5% aware of the group activity and 15% telescoping my awareness out to be aware of connections – I’m rolling, I’m aware of others rolling too, I open my eyes and in my field of vision I see someone with green pants and someone else with a green shirt

... I roll up against someone, I’m now 70% in my solo activity and 30% grazing (a touch event) and I’m focused completely on the activity of the interaction rather than noticing connections – I roll away, alone again ...

... I’m building up my low kinosphere, travelling 50% in solo activity – my eyes are open and I’m noticing the group, I’m grazing touches, 30% in group activity – noticing connections as I go, 20% in connections

... later on, I’m in an engagement, sometimes I inhabit the whole of my kinosphere, there’s lots of activity, then, still engaged it slows to a dance of skinospheres - duets can be read in terms of the quality of kinosphere that they inhabit, and maybe one is in one quality while the other is another

you get the idea hopefully

One final note is that for me, as stated before, one great value of the score is that it provides a language that I share with others to talk about the experience of being in an underscore practice, a jam, or a class situation. Reframing the score like this seems to open the possibilities of using that language to communicate more complex events than a traditional notation of the score allows – something I’ve noticed in practicing the score is people sometimes struggling to fit their experience into it rather than seeing it as a support for the experience that they’ve just had.

Summing Up

My intention with this article is simply to articulate some of my thinking around the Underscore and in doing so to contribute something to the growing community that uses it. If it’s useful to you then feel free to use some of the ideas alongside what you know already. What I write is intended to supplement not supplant: it’s just one person's way to represent what you already know, which is Nancy’s work of the Underscore. I welcome any feed back.

go back to Part One: A Brief Personal History Of Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore