Transient Light: enchanted encounters with dappled light

June Gersten RobertsEdge Hill University

Abstract ‘The Dapple Light Project’ is a moving video and live dance performance

installation, offering intimate encounters with dappled light as a vibratory

place of sensuous enchantment. The article illuminates enchantment

experiences in the videoing processes and installation scenography of this

project, approaching wonder as a secular attunement with the physical, the

digital and the moving presence of this elusive light. Jane Bennett’s (2001,

2010) theories on materiality shape reflections on the wonder experience and

inform a view of enchantment in action. Laura Marks’s (2000, 2002) writings

on haptic visuality and Gaston Bachelard’s contemplations on reverie and

home offer intimate and sensuous dwellings for reflecting on mysteries of

body, abode and interiority as materialised in this video installation. The

article contemplates the transient fluctuations of dappled light as embodied

enchantment and considers this in relation to Buddhist understandings of

impermanence and dependant arising.

Key Words: Enchantment; Dappled Light; Dance Performance Installation; Video Installation; Haptic Video; Materiality; Dwelling

dapples waver on my shin … edges softening and clarifying

… I allow myself to sense into the verges of light and shadow

(process notes Gersten Roberts, 21 July 2014) 1

1

In the shade of a group of trees the ground is dappled

randomly with spots of light, some small, some large but all

regularly elliptical […] they are of course, sunlight that falls

through some opening in the foliage: all we see here and

there between leaves is a blinding ray of light. (Minneart 1993:

1)

Introduction: The Dappled Light Project

2

Figure 1: Caption The Dappled Light Project 2016 Dancer: Michelle Man; Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts; Photograph: Roger Bygott.

‘The Dappled Light Project’, Lunesdale Arts Trail, Wenning Studios, 2016:

The audience is invited into an expansive entrance hall in a stone built

Victorian Sunday School, currently used as a live/ work arts studio. The

space is a dance studio, with a deeply burnished dark wood floor and also a

domestic dwelling with comfortable settees and bookshelves as well as a

gallery, with large paintings and partially revealed storage racks of unseen

art-works. The room is darkened; a soundscape of shimmering harmonics

permeates the shadows. Small flares of light illuminate collections of hand-

written process reflections, photographs of dappled surfaces and maps of the

sites where the artists have danced and videoed.

A dancer circles the outer edges of the room, turning off lamps, allowing

darkness to deepen. She pauses, opens the door of a small storage

cupboard to reveal a tiny rectangle of light, a small, contained video of

pulsating dapples, projected onto the inner surface of the cupboard door.

Peripheral glow seeps into the recesses and onto the floor. Partly shadowed,

on the edge of the light spill, the dancer circles backwards and drops,

suspending her weight just above the floor, gently rocking and then spiralling

into a slide, she folds into and beyond and back towards the spillage of side-

light that is escaping from the projector.

The Dappled Light Project is a dance and video performance installation

project and a site for reflection and exploration, where Michelle Man and I, a

dance artist and a video maker, have been gathering and generating

experiences of dappled light. Together, we have been delving into memories,

sharing observations and searching for literary, visual and filmic references to

this elusive light scape. We have been on dapple chasing drives through the

Yorkshire Dales and Lancashire countryside, consulting weather maps to

locate where and when moments of sun might dapple in wooded verges or

leafy riversides. Michelle Man danced and I videoed as transitory winter light

filtered through the entwining branches of an ancient yew tree. We wandered

3

in darkening woodlands, searching for dappled moonlight. During the 2015

solar eclipse, we waited through the colour-sapping gloom, readied with

pinhole projectors and cameras, hoping to witness eclipsing dapples. We sent

each other dappled photos from sunny trips abroad and returned home to find

dapples magically spangling kitchen, bedroom and garden walls.

These experiences and the resulting collections of videoed and danced

materials have nourished the creation of our live dance and moving video

installations, first performed in 2016 at Wenning Studios, North Yorkshire as

part of the Lunesdale Arts Trail. 2 The Dappled Light Project invites the

audience into an intimate encounter with a vibratory place of enchantment,

offering ‘a place to dwell, absorb and observe, bringing performers and

audiences closer to memories and sensations of dappled light’ (Man and

Gersten Roberts 2016).

Figure 2: Caption The Dappled Light Project 2016. Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts. Photograph: Roger Bygott.

In the Wenning Studios performances, a moving video of dappled light

cascades from the ceiling and onto a wall above the heads of a seated

4

audience, inviting them to look up and feel the peripheral light flooding onto

their faces and chests. Flecks of dappling play across Michelle Man’s back

and legs, as she slides into shafts of a dappled video, projected onto the

floor. In the same performance, Man slowly folds into a darkened corner of

the studio, as just above her head, a flickering projection of a dappled yard

appears to emanate from a crack in a window blind and stretches across two

walls, crowning her performance with ellipses of tremulous light. The

installation ‘[melds] associations of landscape and dwelling to play with the

poetics of habitat’ (Man and Gersten Roberts 2016) as videos of dappled light

are projected onto domestic architecture and studio furniture, highlighting

hidden recesses, unseen spaces and unexpected corners.

Figure 3: Caption The Dappled Light Project 2016 Dancer: Michelle Man; Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts; Photograph: Roger Bygott.

This article describes some of the quests and encounters of The Dapple Light

Project, illuminating these with felt experiences of enchantment and wonder.

The writing is situated within the process of making the first performance

installations for Wenning Studios in 2016 and the explorative processes of the

previous two years. American political theorist Jane Bennett’s (2001, 2010)

5

writings on enchantment and materiality shape my reflections on the wonder

experience. Writings by Gaston Bachelard (2014) provide a home in which I

dwell on related mysteries of body, abode and interiority while writings on

haptic visuality by film theorist Laura Marks (2000, 2002) locate a sensuous

understanding of screening choices in The Dappled Light Project.

My writing is deliberately dappled with description and personal wonder

narratives. I highlight sensations, invite memories and project first-person

experiences. The article includes personal reflections and anecdotes of video

making processes and descriptions of performance scenographies for The

Dappled Light Project. I focus my writing through my experiences as an

improvising video artist, whose filming processes are infused with years of

dancing and dance making. I also write through the effervescent sensations

of my intermittent spiritual practice, as an on-off Buddhist, referring to

Buddhist teachings on light meditation and dependent arising. The article

dapples with questions about light, dwelling, enchantment and spiritual being.

Figure 4: Caption Dancer: Michelle Man; Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts; Video Still: Claire Iddon and Alistair Emmett.

Wonder, Enchantment and Dapples large and small

6

Enchantment, dis-enchantment and re-enchantment are well-traversed

territories in current critical analysis. Much recent writing on wonder and

enchantment (Bennett, 2001, 2010; Black, 2002; Brown, 2004; Curry, 2012,

2016; Fuller, 2009; Del Nevo, 2011, Moore, 1986) addresses the values and

strategies of re-enchantment in post enlightenment, secular academic

communities. Enchantment and wonder become affective sites for re-

negotiating Cartesian dualities and for questioning the dominance of

instrumental rationality, analysis and intellectual dis-interest as methodologies

for knowing and being-in the world. Much, although not all, of the re-

enchantment writing seeks a purposeful role for wonder and enchantment

experiences in the enhancement of social and environmental ethics, personal

wellbeing and deepening engagement with spiritual experience. Curry (2012,

2016) offers secular socio-political critiques for engaging enchantment

experiences and issues a passionate plea to ‘ […] rediscover and honour

enchantment in the world and in our lives’ (Curry 2016: 7), offering hope that

‘bodiment, embeddedness and enchantment’ (Curry 2016: 10) may provide

antidotes to the ‘modernist fantasy of ultimate control’ (ibid). Fischer-Lichte

(2008) critically historicises the metamorphic power of re-enchantment in

experiences of the liminal as created through performance. She argues that

‘[in] performance, both artists and spectators could experience the world as

enchanted. As creatures in transition, they could apprehend themselves in

the process of transformation’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 207). Bennett (2001,

2010) and Fuller (2009) consider enchantment experiences as sources of

ethical empowerment while Brown (2004), Fuller (2009) and Moore (1986), to

varying degrees, reflect on spiritual value.

The enchantment literature provides philosophical, critical and theological

contexts for reflecting on my wonder encounters, offering flickers of hope or

fascination and at times illumination on aspects of experience. A thorough

review is beyond the purposes of this particular article and theorising

enchantment and embodiment will figure in future study. This article offers

first tentative steps and a light touch, personal approach to exploring

enchantment experiences within the process of developing The Dappled Light

7

Project. I briefly and selectively reflect on aspects of Bennett’s writings and

refer to the authors mentioned above, in so far as they situate, highlight or

question my own experiences of wonder.

Brown (2004) for example, writes from a Christian theistic perspective and

considers a wealth of spiritual traditions in his discussion of the enchantment

of sacred places and images. Contemplating the recovery of enchantment

through the sacramental, Brown (2004) presents a compelling vision of how

place, home and the natural world, along with dance and sport, offer ‘forms

of experience that have been relegated to the periphery of religious reflection,

but which once made invaluable contributions to a human perception that this

world is where God can be encountered and encountered often’ (Brown 2004:

9). Enchantment, for Brown is in ‘the discovery of God under such forms’

(2004: 24) and he locates intrinsic value in ‘the way in which God can be

mediated’ (2004: 23) through enchantment experiences. As such for Brown

(2004), enchantment is valued for its inducement to worship and as

embodiment of the revelatory, no further ethical or social purpose is required.

Selective aspects of Brown’s writing on the mysteries and affective powers of

sacred sites and artefacts resonate with my video-making sensations of

delving into the presence of places and objects. His evocations of

enchantment as intimate and embodied encounters with the allure of place

(Brown 2004: 24), chimes with my experiences when dwelling within dappled

light. Although I do not find a concordant faith or personal conviction in his

understanding of the presence of God, Brown’s writing locates my Dappled

Light Project experiences in the embodied affective sensations of awe and

wonder when in the presence of an other-than-me reality.

Fuller (2009) discusses wonder as embodied spirituality through physiology

and psychology, and like Brown (2004), reflects on the revelatory powers of

wonder. He refers to a religious sensibility of ‘wonder-driven aesthetical

spirituality’ (Fuller 2009: 148) that is both bodied and participatory. He

alludes to the power of wonder to both reflect and elicit an experience of a

‘higher order of existence’ (Fuller 2009: 2) and ‘more- than-physical order of

8

reality ’ (2009: 13). These last two assertions have become touchstones for

recognising that while my own wonder experiences may be similarly

embodied, participatory and aesthetic, they are differently located. My sense

of wonder dwells in a secular connective attunement with and within the

physical. In the context of this project, the more-than that I may sense

remains rooted in the palpable and visceral materiality of dappling light as I

experience it: through location, skin and movement and through the camera,

image and projection, through my collaborative partner, Michelle Man as she

dances in dapples and in the dapples dancing on Man. Mine is an

enchantment of the felt touch and with the physical presence of incident and

incidence.

Fuller (2009) also offers an ethical functionality of enchantment, suggesting

that wonder allows ‘enhanced rapport’ (Fuller 2009: 147) and ‘fosters

“accommodation” over assimilation, […] helping us to have empathy and

concern for the wider world ” (Fuller 2009: 147). Similarly, Bennett (2001),

writing from a secular philosophical stance, considers the enchantment

experience as part of an empathetic framework for ethical engagement,

through the power of enchantment ‘to hone sensory receptivity to the

marvellous specificity of things’ (Bennett 2001: 4). Bennett’s writing extends

the range of empathetic relationship to the non-human and the man-made.

She explores the agency of the material, which can ‘manifest traces of

independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.

[…] a liveliness intrinsic to the materiality of the thing formerly known as

object’ (Bennett 2010: xvi).

Bennett’s writings on new materialism (2001, 2010) offer specific resonances

with my experiences in that she investigates events of ‘everyday

enchantment’ (2001: 4) as secular and sensual agents of empowering

attachment. Bennett locates moral and ethical potential in the embrace of

wonder, offering the possibility that ‘[…] one must be enamored with

existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be

capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of

others’ (Bennett 2001: 4). While specifically stating that wonder induces

9

contemplative immobility (I will return to this) Bennett’s arguments for ethical

empowerment also offer the possibility that enchantment experiences can be

enabling and activating. She advocates ‘part of the energy needed to

challenge injustice comes from the reservoir of enchantment […]. For without

enchantment, you might lack the impetus to act against the very injustices

that you critically discern.’ (Bennett 2001: 128).

The inference that enchantment can be enabling reverberates with my

experiences on The Dappled Light Project. Bennett suggests that

enchantment can be an affective agent for ethical action, through nurturing

respect and empathetic attachment. I make no claims to ethical action, but I

do find the connective, vulnerable, embodied openness of enchantment to be

an activating experience. In wonder, I am drawn into a sensuous and mindful

attentiveness with an attendant attraction and awe that also energise creative

action. In wonder I film, edit and write, move. I find active participation in

wonder and wonder in active participation. (I come back to this later)

Bennett further advocates the potential for positive enchantments within

technologies and mediated sites, in cultural imaginaries and commodities. As

such, she avoids reserving enchantment experiences for affective encounters

with the sublime and the sacred, noting that ‘to be enchanted is to be struck

and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’

(Bennett 2001: 4). This view offers a scope for acknowledging the wonder to

be felt in and by the material and digital, i.e. within the world as I live it, use it

and make it. Her vision of everyday enchantment with the material reflects my

wonder-filled absorption in the gentle fluctuations of light on a mouldy wall in

a Yorkshire alleyway and also resonates with being enthralled by the

mediated video footage of that same dappling light, and with its precisely

situated projection into the corner of a working studio. Enchantment with the

everyday, when enraptured by the sensations of light and shadow seeping

beneath the surface of the skin and also by the appearance of recorded

dapples, osculating on the back and legs of Michelle Man, as she dances into

the light of a video projection. I am held in wonder by the other-than -me

10

phenomenon of light dappling and likewise enchanted by the immersive

intimacy of filming Man dancing in a dappled place.

Bennett offers the enchantment experience as somatised and embodied, a

heightened sensuous feeling state (Bennett 2001: 37). She also offers a

materialised ‘view of matter as wondrous’ (Bennett 2001: 73). In Vibrant

Matter a political ecology of things (Bennett 2010) she extends empowerment

and agency beyond sentient bodies to also encompass a vital materialism of

‘[…] dead rats, bottle caps, gadgets, fire, electricity, berries, metal […]’

(Bennett 2010: 107). Bennett introduces Vibrant Matter with a claim that

‘there is also public value in following the scent of a nonhuman, thingy power,

the material agency of natural bodies and technological artefacts’ (Bennett

2010: xiii). Bennett’s invocation to ‘[follow] the scent of a nonhuman thingy

power’ (2010: xiii) breaths an invitation to enter into the elusive intermittencies

of dappled light.

Dappled Wonder and the Uncanny Moment

To enter a dappled place is to cross a threshold into the presence of the

uncanny. If one lives in an environment prone to the overcast, as I do,

dappled light can be something of an exotic phenomenon. Occurrences are

infrequent, unpredictable, fleeting. The light itself is unstable, flickering,

appearing and disappearing in response to wind, birds, passing clouds and

the movement of the earth.

As a phenomenon, dappled light seems implausible and confusing,

ambiguous. It appears as a surface image, a speckling of elliptical light

patches on a shadowed road, a shimmer of light circles on a garden wall.

Dappling is also a spatial and multi-surfaced event; the effect of layering, as

light on one surface filters through to another. And it is also the absence of

surface, a light effect produced by the gaps in the shadowing leaves.

Astronomer Marcel Minnaert, in his well-observed accounts of ‘Light and

Color in the Outdoors (1993) first published in 1937, notes the surprisingly

11

regular repetitions of dappling shapes. Referring to Minnaert’s studies,

Edward Tufte, statistician and artist, identifies the effect as dependent on

minute gaps in foliage, creating multiple tiny apertures, each opening

functioning as a pinhole camera (Tufte: 1). A dapple is not simply light

permeating one surface to arrive dappled on another. Each dapple is a

concentrated and reversed projection of the sun, a moving, mutable ‘photo’

image of its own source, changing shape and size with the time of day, the

angle of the ground or surface onto which the projection is received

(Minnaert 1993: 3).

Figure 5: Caption Dappled Light and Shadow 2014 Photograph: June

Gersten Roberts.

This phenomenon elicits, in me, a jaw dropping, palpable, wonder at the very

unlikelihood of the event. For those, such as Fuller (2009), for whom wonder

reveals a reflection of a ‘grander scheme’ (2009: 153), the phenomenon of

dappled light as a projected image of its source could ‘elicit belief in a more-

than-physical reality’ (2009: 14). For me, it is the ‘thingy power’, to use

Bennett’s expression, that enthrals and enchants. I am thrilled and

enraptured by dappling’s very physical, more-than me reality. I am

experiencing a sustained intake of breath, an internal fizz, a bubbling-up,

12

rising from navel to jaw, palms opening, eyes widening delight at the

surprizing implausiblness of this other-than-human, material, present,

powerful, empowering ‘thingy-ness’ of light.

This is a queasy enchantment, to use Bennett’ expression (2001: 3). To be in

dappled light is unsettling. Dappled light is ephemeral, moving, ever escaping

and ever evading predictability. To film dappled light is to engage with the

ineffable and amorphous. Digital cameras can struggle to register the shape

of the light; dapples are soft subjects with variable intensity and dubious focal

points. In close-up the dapples dissolve. Focusing on the texture of the

dappled surface can resolve an image but can also over expose the light or

underexpose the shadows. Dapples escape the camera frame, or suddenly

appear beyond it. To record dappled light is to move with, respond to, to look

beyond and to wait, hold, be still and most importantly, to allow.

To video dappled light is to give oneself to the fortuitous. This is a good

fortune for which one can prepare, but that is beyond command. The process

can stimulate improvisational speed and heightened responsiveness.

Michelle [Man, dance artist] is visiting for a working weekend.

Very early in the morning, I am in my dressing gown, drinking a

cup of tea. Michelle calls from her room: the morning cloud

cover has lifted and there are two rectangles of light, dappled

by the heat rising from a radiator, projecting pulsating light

circles onto a low corner of the bedroom wall, just above the

skirting board. Dressing gown flapping, I fumble for my camera

and drop in a gap between the furniture, press my back into the

side of the bed, brace the camera between my knees and

pushing into the floor, roll, with camera, down to the level of the

image. I move into, sense and feel for a moment of light that is

gone within minutes. (Gersten Roberts, Memory writing of

filming on 11th Oct 2014)

13

And filming in dappled light can also awaken deep meditative patience, a

heightened awareness for that which is happening while the dappling is not.

To film dappled light is to let go of the quest and surrender to the un-biddable.

I am on the ground in a narrow, dapple-spangled ginnel, back

propped against one wall, knees lifted, feet pushed into the

opposite wall. I have been here for over two hours. I focus close,

framing a motionless spot of light, holding with its stillness. A

breeze moves dapples that are beyond my frame. I wait, hold,

breathe into, with, a minute shifting of light that slowly fades; the

dapple disappears. I hold. A cloud passes; the dapple blinks,

flickers into presence and disappears again. A neighbour slams a

door, calls out, a bird stirs the branches and the dapples sing

(Gersten Roberts, from process notes 16th May 2014)

Michelle lies still, eyes closed, in deep grass beneath the trees of a

wooded riverside. I wait; standing apart, let the camera hold with

her pause, finding slow transformations in a light that is not-yet-

dappling, allowing the movement that is waiting for the sensation of

dappling, breathing with the wind that may precipitate a light

change. (Memory writing of filming on 29th July 2014)

Dappled Light and Enchanting Metaphors

As a video-maker, I work with dappled light as physical phenomena, a

palpable sensation, an experience and also as an image. As an image of

light, dappling can be messy and confusing. It is both light and shadow but it

does not appear as either. In dappled shade, it is the light, rather the shadow,

which casts an image of its source. In dappling, it is the light itself that

becomes the subject of attention, rather than the object it is illuminating

14

Dappling also baffles images of light as a signifier of spiritual experience.

Shafts of light or light-beams, as portrayed in the western Christian painting

tradition, suggest a single source above, from which the light emanates,

traveling in a steady, unimpeded linear descent to be bestowed upon a

distinct (presumably deserving) beneficiary. This image of light as blessing or

absolution indicates a direct (and directed) spiritual connection, conferred by

a higher source, a God. Dappled light, with it’s circular or elliptical shapes,

spotty multiplicity, random occurrences and uncertainty of movement,

bewilders this image of directed linear connection. Dappled light is relational

to shadow, dependant on the intervention of multiple surfaces, its appearance

is variegated, fluctuating, indirect and transitory. Moore notes that ‘religious

and spiritual writers often symbolise their goal with images of light and sky

that draw us upward and away from the particulars of life on earth’ (Moore

1996: 3) Dappled light is an earth realised phenomena, drawing the body

down, into the surface on which the light is playing, to become the surface on

which the light plays.

Figure 6: Caption The Dappled Light Project 2016 Dancer: Michelle Man; Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts; Video Still: Claire Iddon and Alistair

Emmett.

Dappled light as earth realised, in-flux and multiple might suggest a more

Buddhist oriented image. However the variable and random speckling of

15

dappling light and the situatedness of its occurrences all mark dappling as

distinctly different from the light imagery used in Buddhist meditation practice

and iconography. The light of Buddhahood, as described in the language of

Tibetan Buddhist sadhanas, is clear and expansive (Lingpa et al. 2015).

Buddha bodymind is visualised as pervasive in its luminosity. Tibetan tantric

practices offer meditations on embodied spiritual light as radiating outward

from the heart; expanding in all directions to and from ones body (in union

with the body of the deity), traveling on the breath, extending infinitely beyond

and infinitely returning inward (Lingpa et al. 2015). These Tibetan light body

meditations are significant parts of powerful idealising practices for giving and

receiving, which are intended to integrate the aspiration, generation and

realisation of enlightened being.3 The visualisation in these Tibetan Buddhist

practices is of extensive, pervading light, with unimpeded radial flow. As

such, the Tibetan Buddhist light imagery is significantly different from the

localised, uncertain and intermittent light characterised by dappling.

The image of dappling light also confuses the allusion of light in the term

enlightenment, in both the humanistic and the Buddhist sense of the word.

Dappling is too ephemeral to suggest humanist enlightenment as a state you

can cultivate or achieve; too unpredictable to indicate enlightenment as self-

empowerment or control. Dappled light’s fluctuating focus also muddies

implications of Buddhist enlightenment as state of attentive awareness or of

being-in focused mindfulness (Lawless and Allen, 2003:50-52). However, the

Buddhist concept of enlightenment is rather less dualistic than this might

imply and in other respects dappled light qualities of dependency,

ephemerality and volatility could suggest an apt image for Buddhist

understandings of impermanence, of enlightenment in the world and the

realisation of emptiness. In Transforming The Heart Geshe Jampa Tegchok,

(1999) elucidates

Because all phenomena are empty, they are dependent arisings. They

are dependent arisings because of being empty. […] When we

understand that all phenomena are empty of existing from their own

16

side, we will be free of one misconception, the extreme view of

permanence or eternalism (Tegchok, 1999:260)

Thubtun Chodrun, in his introduction to Tegchok’s text, simplifies: ‘Emptiness

does not mean total nonexistence. Rather it means things arise dependently

and thus are flexible and changeable’ (Tegchok 1999: 15). The place and

imagery of dappled light offer a site for immersion in such transient

conditionality, a place for dwelling within the flexible, changeable, situated

and dependent, a locale for being with the impermanent and ambiguous.

As an image, dappled light acknowledges the presence of the transitional, the

transitory and the uncertain, perhaps also the dangerous. To further this

allusion, I am moving now from imagery in Christian and Buddhist spiritual

traditions to consider examples of dappled imagery in recent films.

Cinematographer Richard Deakins uses an image of dappling light to

disorientating effect in the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There

(Coen, 2001). Shadows and night dapples flay across the windscreen of a

car, as the driver pauses at the wheel, caught in a moment of hesitation

before entering into a situation that is beyond his control and that will

irrevocably change his life.

In Beautiful Creatures (LaGravenese, 2013) a Gothic romance with

cinematography by Philippe Rousselot, a dapple lighting effect adds a sense

of hazard and creates a transitional locale. A young man leaves the familiar

safety of the road he knows, to follow a dappled path towards the door of a

bewitching beloved. As he travels this path, first in naive quest, later in

determination, the dappling suggests potential threat and a breaking- up of

the securities of the character’s ambitions to offer a questioning, fluctuating

potential of a new reality with ambiguous balances of right and wrong.

The dapple effect in Beautiful Creatures (LaGravenese, 2013) is of broad

uneven patches of dark and light. There is an instant when dapples

momentarily catch on the face and shoulder of the character, giving him an

animalistic, slightly deviant, camouflage. He is no longer quite as he has

17

appeared. He is spotted, marked, vulnerable, caught in the light, passing into

shadow, revealed as changing, changeable, a changeling.

These dappled qualities of mutability, animism, risk and the unknowable all

draw dappled light into the realms of enchantment, described by Patrick Curry

as ‘irredeemably wild, as such, unbiddable’ (Curry 2012: 3 Curry’s emphasis).

As sites of wonder, dappled places offer intimate abodes for being, being-in

and being-with uncertainty and vulnerability. As sites of vulnerability, dappled

places become locales for exposure and in exposure, sites for encouraging

(en-hearting) potential for opening connectivity (see Gersten Roberts in

Karkou, Lycouris and Oliver, forthcoming 2017). A dappled place offers a

liminal site for heightened receptivity, a place for opening affinity.

Moving Dapples and Wonder in Action

To be in dappled light is unsettling. To be in that place of wild, un-biddable

enchanted, vulnerability and uncertainty is innervating and enlivening. To be

videoing in dappling light is to be in a state of heightened sensibility, alert,

present, necessarily permeable, open to change and, for me, it is also to be

moving.

In a dappled place, I search for viewing points. Dwelling in the

visual world of the viewfinder, blinkered by focus, my body feels

for places from which to support an image. I climb into branches,

crawl through woodland roots, press between the walls of a

dappled ginnel. I drag the camera along my leg to track, brace

the camera against my nose to pan, feel my knees drop with the

dips and slides of appearing light.

The light moves, the light moves me, my body becomes

videoing process. Michelle moves, my breath responds. A

breeze swells through my arm, the light changes; a smile

spreads through my back. I hone closer to the pulsing of the

light, pull towards the nuances of Michelle dancing. The camera

18

etches my sensations into the image, layering breath into the

worlds within worlds of the image moved and moving. (Man

and Gersten Roberts 2016)

Bennett (2001), Curry (2012), Fuller (2009), and Moore (1996) all specifically

identify the wonder experience as a moment of contemplative pause. To be

enchanted, they suggest, is to be stopped in ones tracks, transfixed, held by

the experience. ‘It is difficult to imagine being busy and enchanted at the

same time. Enchantment invites us to pause and be arrested by whatever is

before us: instead of doing something, something is done to us’ (Moore 1996:

6) or, as Curry suggests, if you are really wanting to buy something, it is not

enchantment (Curry 2012: 8)

And yet, when gathering material for The Dappled Light Project, I am

enveloped in fascination, awe and amazement at the same time as I am

actively focused on locating a frame, finding an exposure, making an image.

Open, vulnerable, enchanted and busy. In the process of filming I am held in

wonder by the unpredictability and unlikeliness of the light, by the movement

of the dapples, by the way dappling transforms the location and by the active

process in making, by Michelle Man dancing as well as by my bodied,

moving, making, finding, acquiring responses to her dancing.

In the edit process, I am both recycling and renewing that wonder. I am

finding new resonances in video images as enchanting alluring things, new

powerful things, of light residing in the computer screen. Images that become

quite other than those experienced on site while filming. And as Man and I

work in the studio, the wonder experience is reverberating in memories and

reveries as we explore potential performance scenographies. In the studio we

are creating new enchantments of place and abode. And I am enchanted yet

again, as we find unexpected corners to locate a dance, unnoticed edges

onto which we can fold a projection. In the devising of a performance

installation there are moments of breath-catching wonder, as we actively find

the potential in the life of new enchantments. This is an active, participatory

19

enchantment. I am en-wondered and in wonder, while doing things I find

wonder-filled and wonder-filling.

As I write this article a flash of sunlight filters through a window and

momentarily dapples the edge of the room. This is unexpected. I have lived

here for nearly thirty years but this is first time I have seen light dappling on

this particular wall. I smile, in recognition; it feels like I am greeting a

cherished friend. I am delighted, but today, I am not entranced or enchanted

by the appearance of light. I am not experiencing awe or wonder. I am not

enthralled or absorbed. A year ago, while actively gathering, acquiring,

material for The Dappled Light Project, a similar unexpected and unlikely

appearance would have gripped my breath and entrapped my attention, as I

reached for camera, notebook and pen.

Contrary to Curry’s assertion that enchantment ‘cannot be used’ (2012:4) I

wonder if my enchantment experiences, within The Dappled Light

Project, were nourished by productive purposefulness and intentionality, fed

by the making processes. Perhaps it is the using, the doing, the active

absorption and intimate embrace of making, in wonder, that situated and

focused my experience of dappled light and opened me to dwell enchanted

within dappling. I wonder, is it the active making process, in wonder, that

allowed me to be open and exposed to being dappled for long enough to

allow enchantment. Perhaps, to adopt a Buddhist concept for an unintended

purpose, ‘One is enlightened when one acts enlightened […]. Buddha is as

Buddha does’ (Thurman 1984: 171). Perhaps to activate enchantment is to

be enchanted, to open the heart to dwell in enchantment.

Dwelling in Enchantment

Of the many liminal ambiguities offered by dappled light, another is the

ambiguity of affective space. A dappled space confuses the interior and

exterior. The sudden appearance of light dappling on my kitchen wall

20

mystifies me with its unexpected reversal and expansion of my sense of

domestic enclosure, enchants me with its wild light intervention into the

sheltered privacies of the home. And as I enter a woodland site of dappled

shade, I find myself stepping into a place of intimacy, a private locale, place

to dwell, a contemplative place, a momentary home.

Being in dappled light, feels like being in solitude, including being in dappled

places with my collaborative partner, dance artist Michelle Man. In dappled

light I hum with a sense of entering a secret. These spaces return me to

memories of childhood stories, gothic fairy tales, memories of imaginary

places, which probably never actually included dappled light but which none

the less, excited an associative sense of fantasy or induced a dappled

sensibility of reverie and dappled in my imagination.

Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (2014) first published in 1957, offers an

invitation to dwell in reverie and contemplation within the shadows,

imaginaries and memories of domestic spaces. In his introduction to the

2014 edition, Kearney suggests that ‘Bachelard shows us ways of dwelling

again in the flesh of space […] where we can delve back into the world of

natality, newness, beginning’ (2014: xviii). Bachelard (2014) writes into

daydreams and sensations of drawers and wardrobes, cellars attics and

corners, nests and shells, enclosed spaces to shelter imagination. Drawing

on poetry of the home, on Jung and on phenomenology of the imagination,

Bachelard (2014) invites interiority and intimacy into the sensuous lived-ness

and the imaginary embodiment of domestic places. ‘[…] the house is not

experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative or in the telling

of our own story. Through dreams the various dwelling places in our lives co-

penetrate and retain the treasures of former days’ (Bachelard 2014: 28)

Preparing the space for our 2016 performances of The Dappled Light Project,

Michelle Man and I posted our biographies on the wall. We included Man’s

story, my own and a biography for Howard Haigh, who created the

shimmering soundtracks that permeate our performances. We also included a

21

biography for the stone-built, Victorian Sunday school that houses Wenning

Studios. The studio became a collaborative partner and live performer in the

2016 performance installations. A spacious live/work room with an

expansive, dark burnished floor, Wenning Studios offers a wealth of

enchantment-inducing locales in which to home the imagination: a settling-in

corner of cushion strewn sofas and cluttered bookshelves, a large empty

desk with compartmentalised box-shelves, filing cabinets, old-school

cupboards and partially enclosed racks for storing paintings and easels. A

stairway descends into an unseen cellar; closed doors hint to rooms beyond.

This darkened dream-space of corners and recesses, closed doors and open

boxes, became our location for performance exploration and a site into which

we re-locate the intimacies of dappled spaces.

As Michelle Man and I invite our audiences into Wenning Studio, we offer this

invocation of dream absorption and intimacy. We darken the space, drawing

the focus inward. The corners and cupboards of Bachelard’s poetic reveries

become our screening sites. The features of the space blur in the soft fur of

darkness. One of the dappled videos is projected within a cupboard, another

in hidden space, high above some storage racks. We activate the

imaginative potential of the space, highlighting the unseen, illuminating the

unsightly and enchanting the familiar and domestic with the unknown

elsewhere. We dappled the space with films of light and also by generating

an unsettling and uncanny locale of uncertainty and unpredictability. Videos

appear in unlikely corners, scud high above the audience’s heads, scattering

across multiple surfaces and skim along the floor. The films disappear, move,

change size, shape and scale as the projection chases up walls and spins

across the ceiling.

22

Figure 7: Caption The Dappled Light Project 2016 Dancer: Michelle Man; Video Projection: June Gersten Roberts; Video Still: Claire Iddon and Alistair

Emmett.

Five videos are screened in this installation; each is of a single location and a

single dappling event, offering sustained closely observed shifts in plays of

fluctuating light. The films are screened on shimmering repeating loops,

appearing and disappearing at intervals, throughout the performance, offering

a haptic engagement with the sensation of rippling movements of light.

Michelle Man and I break up the flat image planes and rectangular frames of

the video images, projecting across multiple surfaces, angling and moving the

projector. Man veils a video, dropping layer after layer of translucent paper

over a projected image of herself dancing in a dappled wood.

In ‘Writing Body Stories’ (Gersten Roberts) to be published in The Oxford

Handbook for Dance and Wellbeing (Karkou, Lycouris and Oliver forthcoming

2017) I write about using similar screening devices to bring the audience into

‘the immediacy of physicalized experiences’ (Gersten Roberts forthcoming

2017). In The Dappled Light Project, Michelle Man and I offer the video

materials as moving, indeterminate and physically present, ‘things’ that can

be experienced sensually. These screening scenographies attune with the

experience of haptic visuality described by film theorist Laura Marks (2000,

23

2002) as ‘a way of seeing in which the eye lingers over innumerable surface

effects’ (Marks 2002: 6) and through which ‘the viewer is called on to fill in the

gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image leaves’ (Marks 2002:

13). In earlier writing I suggest that ‘the haptic experience offers the viewer

[… a] caught- in- the- moment sensory presence, vulnerable […] open to

sensual connectivity’ (Gersten Roberts forthcoming 2017). Through these

haptic, sensuous scenographies, Michelle Man and I offer our audiences an

experience of participatory wonder in an intimate felt enchantment of a

dappled place.

Conclusion

The Dappled Light Project continues with further performance installations;

Michelle Man and I move into new enchantments as we generate

performances in other spaces. At Tate Liverpool, in Feb 2017, we will be

seeking new relationships to dappling when dancing and staging in an

uninflected, top-lit, white box space and performing for a passing gallery

audience. What do we take with us? What can we bring? What do we offer of

this felt relationship between dappled light, enchantment experience and

performance installation? This article gives me a place to reflect on what

draws me into the dappled light experience and what Man and I might seek to

offer for our next audiences, bring into new spaces, with what we might play.

I find awe in the ‘thingy power’ (Bennett 2010: xiii) of dappled light, in the

implausible, multi-layered tree, sky, earth, sun, leaf, bird and cloud

dependencies of its material generation. I am caught-in reverence, within the

power of light physicality; it’s more-than-me, un-biddable, wild, uncontrollable

material presence. I am in-wondered with the surprise of the light, the sense

of being gifted by its arrival. There is the ineffability, the changeability of

dappled light’s unpredictable appearances and disappearances. I am

enraptured in vibratory delight by the vacillating movement and the subtleties

of dappling fluctuations, the experiences of holding with, moving into, feeling

for these minute plays of light that may or may not happen.

24

There is to offer the immersive sense of being in a place of enthrallment, the

mysteries of entering into, of being-in and dwelling within a site of

enchantment. There is the space of dappling: the play between earth surface

dapples and the sheltering, shading leafy canopy, the play between enclosure

and exposure, the liminal indeterminacies between the insulated space of

reverie and the transitional space of uncertainty and mutability.

And also, in a new performance and a new location, there is the opportunity

to re-discover the caught in suspension moment of closely felt being-in

presence of minutely observing barely perceptible movements, the still-hold

of attentive focus.

There are the spinning sensations of ‘queasy ‘ enchantment as dapples race

across blowing grasses, the dizzying sensations of instability as dapples

disrupt the certainly of ground. There is the sense of being drawn to earth, of

becoming surface, of allowing the play of light to pass into skin, the feel of

light pulling on the bone, pores opening, pelt softening and rising into the

moving margins of light and shadow. There is the jump-to responsiveness of

locating a moment, the restless fiddling with tiny wheels and minute levers to

adjust to another exposure, the shifting, moving into new space to capture the

evasive.

And there is that most elusive connective response between myself and my

collaborative partner, dancer Michelle Man, the responsive twist through my

back as she moves, the shared lift of the chest, empathetic flow with her

breath into mine, the honing into the spaces around her moving, with her, with

camera, with light. We can offer this participatory, actively vulnerable, open

receptivity of enchantment and can give dappled glimpses, moments,

instances of de-light: of bringing down the light.

Notes:

25

1. Edited excerpts from the author’s interpretive writings and process notes

for The Dappled Light Project are included throughout this article.

2. The Dappled Light Project debut performances on the 2016 Lunesdale Arts

Trail were funded by APPL and Lancashire County Council and supported by

Edge Hill University. Dance artist Michelle Man and video artist June Gersten

Roberts produce the Dappled Light Project. Music by Howard Haigh has been

composed specifically for this project, For further information see project

website http://thedappledlightproject.com

3. From oral teachings and mediation retreats in the practices of the Buddhist

Tibetan Gelugpa lineage and New Kadampa practice taught by Geshe

Kelsang Gyatso, Lama Yeshe and Geshe Techog at Manjushri Institute,

Cumbria, and London, Lama Tsong Kharpa Centre, Italy 1979-1990, Dzog

Chen practices taught by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Nyingmapa

practices taught by Lama Ogyan Tanzin Lopon 2014. Also John Reynolds for

his teachings on his translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts, 2015. I thank the

many other teachers, sangha and fellow travellers on the Buddhist path who

have patiently tolerated my doubts, nourished my questioning and supported

my sporadic practices in the these Buddhist Traditions.

References

Bachelard, G. (2014), The Poetics of Space, New York: Penguin Books first

published 1957.

Bennett, J. (2001),The Enchantment of Modern Life, attachments, crossings

and ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bennett J. (2010), Vibrant Matter a political ecology of things, Durham,

London: Duke University Press.

Black, J, D. (2002), The Politics of Enchantment: Romanticism, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

26

Brown, D. (2004), God and the Enchantment of Place, Oxford University

Press: Oxford, New York.

Coen, Ethan and Coen, Joel (2001) The Man Who Wasn’t There: Working

Title Films.

Curry, P (2012) Enchantment and modernity (A draft of a paper in PAN:

Philosophy, Activism, Nature, Issue no. 12, 2012, pp. 76- 89)

http://www.patrickcurry.co.uk/papers/Enchantment%20and%20Modernity

%20for%20PAN.pdf Accessed 10 September 2016.

Curry, P. (2016) From enlightenment to enchantment: changing the question

A draft of a paper in Thomas-Pellicer, R. de Lucia, V. and Sullivan, S. (eds),

Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-embodiments

(London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 106-118.)

http://www.patrickcurry.co.uk/papers/From%20Enlightenment%20to

%20Enchantment%20-%20PCs%20final%20edits.pdf Accessed 17 August

2016.

Del Nevo, M. (2011), The Work of Enchantment, Herndon VA: Transaction

Publishers.

Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008), The Transformative Power of Performance,

Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Fuller, R. (2009), Wonder from emotion to spirituality, Chapel Hill: The

University of North Carolina Press.

Gersten Roberts, J. (in press) Writing body stories in Karkou, V.,Lycrouris, S.

and Oliver, S. (eds) The Oxford Handbook for Dance and Wellbeing, Oxford:

Oxford University Press (accepted for publication 2016).

Lawless, J. & Allan, J. (2003) Beyond Words, Dzogchen Made Simple.

London: Element.

27

LaGravenese, Richard. (2013) Beautiful Creatures: Alcon Entertainment.

Lingpa, C., Wangpo, J.K., Adeu, Topgyyal, O. 2015) ,The Tara Compendium,

Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications.

Man and Gersten Roberts (2016) The Dapple Light Project: a performance

ex-change between video and dance http://thedappledlightproject.com

Accessed 7 October 2016.

Marks, L. (2000) The Skin of the Film, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Marks, L. (2002). Touch, sensuous theory and multisensory media.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Minnaert, M.G.L. (1993) Light and Color in the Outdoors New York: Springer-

Verlag.

Moore, T. (1986) The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, New York: Harper

Collins.

Tegchok, J. (1999) Transforming the Heart, The Buddhist way to Joy and

Courage, Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications.

Thurman, R. (1984) The Central Philosophy of Tibet Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Tufte, E. (2016) Edward Tufte Forum: Dappled Light

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002pS

Accessed 3 Oct 2016.

28