The Spectatorial Site

Amsterdam, September 9, 2023

By Bruno Listopad

Writing about Ria Higler's practice may mean writing about someone who had the desire to live life by moving intensively, by cultivating intimate relation with what is unknown, and at times, even frightening. Ria was someone predisposed to create a program from however she felt her body to be on a given occasion.

To write about Ria may also entail considering the possibility of writing about the desire to enlarge the field of "subjective" potential, and do so inquisitively. The desire to not only create more room for maneuvering, but also for imaging the means that grant the opportunity for enhancing that very capacity, and the one of approximating not only to the abstract idea, but also to the practical formalization of the notion of individual freedom.

In a nutshell, Ria conceived the body predominantly and primarily as a porous entity. An entity in which even concealed movement seemed to result from what was, or perhaps appeared to be by her, and some of us who across the years had the chance to witness her pedagogical processes, having an innate condition of adaptability.

Characteristic such, that she, through her distributed pedagogy, sensitized others towards and incessantly promoted. A pedagogy that conciliated what at first sight, at least for the less informed, could have appeared to be composed of discordant perspectives potentially capable of repudiating each other; a more physiological one, of an almost analytical medical type, and another of a more holistic nature. At this moment, to our eyes, in Ria’s practice, the latter, at least during the last decade, was the most pressing and salient.

Yet the notion of nonmechanical adaptability itself was the one that may have endowed her work with the most significant practical artistic framework from which to create from, and when artistically demonstrated to be necessary, recede from too.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Ria revered the human body as the ultimate artistic medium. One that volatile was always already situated within the liminal condition of interstice of all the existing arts, and formed as a reciprocal continuum between two elements of the, arguably, so-called real; the "virtual" and the "actual."

When it concerns staging, such adaptive, yet reigning when dramaturgy is concerned, performative entity seemed to not have been by Ria considered to be merely "passively" witnessed by a public, but instead to be by the latter expanded, and perhaps ideally, even by such, physically proliferated.

This was to be achieved by means of a performer always predisposed to adapt themself or themselves to the impression that attendants’ presence pressed on them, both through their more obviously perceptible and less perceptible movements, and the circumstantial presence of the site as this presented itself to them.

Ria researched how to reorient the performance event by training a performative body to convert into the site of its own spectatorship—a subjective fragmented perceptual site that, once aggregated, processed, and resynthesized, reoriented the predominant tendencies of the spectator’s attention.

To attain a sort of temporary subjective suspension (if not a devolving liberating subjective obliteration), practicians were led to intensify their state, by often being requested to, while operating under the site’s pressing unstable materiality, invest in tracking their changes when practicing predominantly prolonged slow movement attended by their very own defocused gaze.

It was by practicing together with dance and artists of various disciplines and traditions, students and professionals, both in studios and outdoors, that Ria investigated her accumulative practice. She would build its pillars, often, by requesting, yet among other things too, for these to intimately listen to the movement of their bellies and the continuous gravitational pull of the very ground they stood and, both actually and virtually, moved, or attempted to move, from.

Ria’s overall predisposition towards deliberate osmotic performative intensive states, which we are here attempting to map in a rudimentary form, could approximately call to mind that seminal and viscous question that inspired so many practitioners dedicated to embodiment: "What can a body do?"1

Yet, considering from closer and hopefully with more acuity the general propensity of Ria's perspective, this seemed to alternatively be more specifically and in a subtler relativistic way posed, as follows: What else, apart from "itself," can the body set on motion?

By reassembling and devising her own techniques to create the emergence of an ever more acute cognizant body, one capable of harnessing the forces that led to the condition of its ongoing transformation by mindfully yielding into them, Ria aspired to set the site itself, the proper space in which the performer stood and acted on, into motion.

Such apparently simple cardinal operating principle enabled Ria to diagram her practice and perhaps enabled her to do so more than just tangentially. Instead, this seemed to enable her to achieve so, as an overall and encapsulating orientation, or perhaps even to produce the very delineation of a more distributed multinodal pedagogic program, that constantly reaccessed through somatic practices, would commit to the experience of freedom.

Ria’s mentor practice could also be perceived as seeking a particular sort of embodied and relational individuation, of the one as many, the multiple as genera, in which the "self," or, perhaps, the cluster of concurrent "selves," when receding towards what could by us be presupposed to be a sort of mutable "foundational" condition, that is, the idea of a preceding abstraction, provided the elusive impression of coherence, precisely by anticipating the idea of "form," when attempting to subscribe to the latter's partial disappearance.

Ria assembled a pedagogic focus on porous technicity (even if she did not understand her movement research practice as a formalized dance technique per se, technicity was nevertheless in her practice present), enabled her to understand, inform, and guide the body, both as cumulative and subtractive processes, and leading this oscillatory subjectivity, particularly when its components were attuned to other subjectivities, to progress towards their own alterity, by an idea of presence that, although not absolute, permitted grounding the impression of anchoring (a tangibility evocative of the "nerve meter" that Antonin Artaud expounded on),2 and perhaps enabling acting as if the latter preceded them, that is, the constitution of the present body.

Although Ria explored other expressions too—she drew, painted, and sang—within her, so to speak, somesthetic practical cosmogony, practices such as these were to her, and this may sound perhaps slightly surprising to read, a sort of performing arts derivatives.

Accordingly, Ria believed, or so it seems to us, that the practitioners of other arts themselves, be these painters, sculptors, installation artists, composers, writers, and so on, could mature their practices by investing in acquiring an acute (or at least a bit more acute than the one by themselves until then experienced) somatic awareness.

That is, Ria was glad to share her practice with artists of other media than those who elected dance and performance to dedicate themselves to. In fact, she was happy to do so with anyone curious and wishing to experiment following her somatic principles, regardless of whether such persons aspired to undergo or not, via the abovementioned principles, or by some other means, a deliberate fully fledged individuating process.

Put differently, Ria devoted her life, or a large part of it, to somatic research in which the pedagogical dissemination was to this immanent. Her approach involved reassembling the body, as she occasionally referred to it, as "chameleonic," as if such body wished to become, partially or even fully, undistinguished from the spectatorial site in which this volatile entity was immersed and immanent to.

The body that Ria proposed developing could be described as an aperture, or better, a series of successive apertures, in which the deliberate attempt to convert the body into what is external to it was one of their both constitutive and programmatic components.

According to such a framework, one's transformation process would manufacture the semblance of agency, potentially permitting the co-composition of one’s own virtual site of relational, relative, and occasional freedom under actual physical formation.

In sum, Ria’s mentor practice resulted in the delight she had in precipitating change and observing the movement of this very change manifest across several temporal modes and generational arches. In setting ideas and the people that conceived these into motion. This entailed her turning simultaneously to the body’s receptive physicality and its shadiest internalized history, and externalizing both, by exploring diverse registers of embodied abstraction, and doing so as if she were on the lookout for an effective form of inventing an alternative future, rather than one that could be presently anticipated, by having partially fallen under a sort of Prometheistic spell.

All in all, Ria's pedagogical practice—either movement research or mentoring, one that was intrinsically associated—was aimed at facilitating students to fabulate themselves through perpetual somatic examination. But instead of attempting to lead these to do so solely through radical introspection alone, as perhaps could be by some of us expected, she advised them to do so also by pursuing this through the opposite via: by exteroception, by focusing on the differentiated stimuli that was to them external and even strange, and by encouraging them to utilize the resonances that such encounters occasionally arose as potential conceptual frameworks from which to negotiate freedom and artistically conceive from.

1 This question—"What can a body do?"—is closely associated with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly their exploration of the body's transformative capacities in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In this work, they explicitly draw upon Baruch Spinoza's original inquiry into the body's potential in his Ethics (Part III, Proposition 2, Scholium). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 149–166.

2 Antonin Artaud, "The Nerve Meter," in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 83–84. "Nothing but a fine Nerve Meter. A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the mind, right in the middle of everything."