Against Discovery

This essay investigates how settler subjectivity shapes modes of attention in post-Judson Western contemporary dance, specifically through this dancing culture’s embrace and value of “discovery” as an attentional framework and aim of dancing. Engaging Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense along with existing research into the nature and operation of attention in Western contemporary dance, the writing highlights the ways in which “discovery” is mobilized through assumptions of porousness, availability, and worldmaking in the space of encounter between a dancer moving in this lineage and their surrounds, thereby enacting and extending everyday, commonplace settler modes of feeling and perception that dynamize ongoing indigenous dispossession. The essay concludes with a summary of a “coordination” practice, initiated and refined in the context of an advanced contemporary dance technique course at Smith College in the spring of 2023. Through analysis of two constituent “coordination” scores and informed by conversations with dance students in the course, the writing explores how “coordination” as an attentional framework supports movers’ awareness of both implication and distinction within their surrounds, and honors and upholds both mover and surrounds as always already underway and in the midst.