Lisa Nelson has been exploring the role of the senses in relation to the performance of movement for many years. A seductive performer with a mercurial imagination, scalpel-sharp precision and sources as varied as Gregory Bateson and ballet at Juilliard, Nelson has unearthed a movement vocabulary built on an unleashed flow of responses to the invisible worldand pure verve. Her intensive movement research led her to develop the Tuning Score, a rigorous model for spontaneous composition and communication for ensemble and solo work. Boldly investigating the relationship of vision to dancing, the body as both container and generator of imagery, as manifestation of thought and feeling, she leaves Descartes in her wake.
"After many years of crafting choreography for my solo work, I found that my ideas about dancing did not necessitate setting individual movement patterns; that the specificity of movement was much more precise when it formed and flowed like speech. For each piece, including the collaborative ones, the choreographic formula is designed to include, in some degree, a predefined relationship within my body to the space I inhabit (light, sound, architecture), and to the observer. What is most important to me is not the methodology of the performance, but the theater it creates. My research in dance has focused on methods of transmission. The improvisational state has provided me with an endless source for this research."