After-thoughts are thoughts that occur after the completion of an act, and can be understood as additions, comments or replies.
In the re-enactment of Lisa’s improvisation, I notice that imagery plays an important role in the transformational process of becoming animal. As I stated in the previous article, imagery helps me to engage with different kind of animals, like a stork, a ray fish or an eagle. Not a general image but a specific one, with lots of details and some kind of vividness to it. In the case of a ray fish for example, imagery passes by of the at disk-like body, the boneless skeleton, the long and slender tail, and the large pectoral fins that are fused to the head and that remind me of the wings of an eagle. I am not only visualizing the shape of a ray fish, but also sensing its texture (smooth, unwrinkled, flat), weight (lightness), the way it moves (floating, suspending, drifting, slow-moving, wing-like movements) and its relation to the environment (bottom-dweller, navigating through the water by using visual olfactory senses).
At other times however imagery remains rather vague, ambiguous and indefinite. I sense a vague notion of darkness for example, a shape that is not easily defined (solely a contour) or I just imagine that something (I don’t know what) is approaching me, following me and at some times even chasing me.
Other (non-existing) animals join me. I become prey. I become predator. Through the presence of other (invisible) animals I build up structure and tension that guide my movements.
The imagery evokes affects in me.
However, not only animal imagery comes into my mind. The space provides imagery too. The floor for example: empty, smooth and flat. It is not that I visualize a specific natural environment (such as a desert, or a lake) in this case imagery remains more sensorial. Since I am devoid of the visual sense (the blanket is covering my face), the space becomes ambiguous and less defined. I sense a certain kind of thickness, of space that is slowly closing me in.
The theatre lights, with sharp contrasts between shadow and light, provide me imagery too. I sense a certain kind of drama, of theatre, my movements become more expressive and dramatic, bringing me back to the 20th century, to Martha Graham, to contraction and release, to breathing and to spiraling movements. Through the strong contrast between dark and light, the space be-comes a black and white movie, with no colors in it, just contrasts.
Martha Graham is with me pretty much all of the time while the stork, the eagle and the ray fish come and go. It is as if my body associatively connects Martha Graham with the theatre, the deep contrast between light and darkness, with shadows, with the blanket, with the expressiveness of my body. I have no intention whatsoever to imitate Graham, I even think it works the other way around. The images arise from my physicality. My movements are not illustrating the image, but I project myself into the imagery and then I see what projections and associations arise from there.
I easily move from Martha Graham to the stork, to the eagle and the ray fish. The animal is present and available to me without having a concrete image of an animal in my mind. Martha Graham is just as animal to me as the beaver. And the same is true for sensorial imagery.
Kent De Spain: ‘Images are not just things we look at, or even imagine. Images inimprovisation are fully fleshed-out.’ (2014, p.134)
Images of animals pop up, not general ones but but specific ones, like the ray fish, with lots of details.
Simone Forti: 'I don't think images come through just verbally, they come through as a whole presence of some awareness, of some memory, of some projection (in De Spain, 2014, p.30).
