Synchronicity
The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurences that are meaningfully related—the cause and the effect occur together.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archeptypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence but are later found to be causally related are termed as "incoincident".
One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".In Nature
We see examples out synchronicity in nature so frequently that they seem ordinary. For example, look up into the sky and see how a flock of birds fly in formation. When they change direction, they all execute the same motions in sync. While they include hundreds of individuals, they move in harmony without an obvious leader. They never bump into each other. Physicists have been working for years to understand the properties that guide the movements of birds and so far they have been unsuccessful.
In Movement
Since I am basing my work this quarter on improvisational movement, I wanted to explore contact improv as a complex interactivity for the survey project. I am intrigued by the parallels between collective animal behavior/movement and contact improv dance, particularly as they both exhibit qualities of synchronicity. This is a concept that will inform my final project.
Not Until Now - "The film documents two dancers as they strive and sometimes struggle to create intimate connection both physically and emotionally. Using the form contact improvisation as their focus. The music, instrumental and skillfully composed, along with serene images of nature, set the stage for the dance to unfold."
What is Contact Improvisation?
This quote from Nancy Smith's Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation
explains well this complex interactivity:
"Contact Improvisation is a dance form, originated by American choreographer Steve Paxton in 1972, based on the communication between two or more moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia.
The body, in order to open to these sensations, must learn to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.
Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one’s basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened."
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