Task 3: Sensory Reset
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After working with conscious memory, the third task aimed to shift attention from internal recall to external perception. In this exercise, I danced with my eyes closed, focusing solely on auditory cues, breath, and proprioceptive sensation. The absence of visual input heightened my awareness of subtle sounds, ground contact, and airflow, redirecting my movement decisions. Actions became smaller, more tactile, and often emerged from foot or hand contact. I noticed how the logic of movement no longer followed memory or habitual sequences but was instead guided by immediate sensory input.
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I became more and more aware of how perception itself could be the source of movement choices as I moved. I understood that I was asking my body to be in a state of heightened presence, where cognition was engaged through continuous environmental interaction by focusing on sensation rather than reproducing known gestures. This made me reflect on how embodied cognition emerges not from mental planning but from the body's adaptive responses to shifting sensory landscapes.
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Although this approach is in line with Lisa Nelson’s notion of Tuning Scores, in my experience in this task, it was not about applying an external method to my practice but about finding, through my own practice, how perception drives cognition and movement generation. This helped me understand that improvisation can show just how intertwined bodily attention and thought can be with the emergence of new knowledge and movement logic directly from sensory engagement. This task, therefore, became part of my research aim of understanding how the body remembers and thinks in motion and demonstrating how improvisation enables embodied knowledge production in real time.
