I placed myself in the center of the park with the MoviBanda waiting for people to join me. While listening to pianos and trumpets playing far away. Enjoying the musicality of Washington Square Park.

Participants started to enter the MoviBanda without questioning what they were getting themselves into. They started to invite more people to this circle of fabric. This collaboration lasted for about three hours.

The MoviBanda is a circle and inclusive piece of upcycled fabric used in the “SE MUEVE” project allowing participants to interact with each other either from the inside or the outside. It is derived from dance therapy props and aims to induce physical and illustrative contact among the movers without directly touching each other, but through feeling others’ movements through the fabric of the band.

This is an excerpt from a dialogue among participants immediately after using the motion-band that identifies how they perceived the space within. It draws attention to how participants have recognized the sensations emerging either through interoceptors or exteroceptors of the sensorium. It is important to clarify that I didn’t explain to participants the purpose of the motion-band. (notes haven’t been edited):

“It felt like, this [the motion-band] was keeping the energy in one place of all of us…”

“yeah, that tactile sensation of you being on my skin”

“…but not actually touching you directly”

[…]

“We were really with each other”

“yeah, if there were like a societal fabric, like a group fabric, like what really connects us, this was literally and figuratively speaking that fabric.”

“literally, and then there were like the threads and then the energy was like intentional”

“and you could go against that or going with”

“it was like a good flow but also like a good tension, and I loved the feeling…”

“SE MUEVE” is not an attempt to generalize the use of dance knowledge and embodied performance just as modes of action and perception, but presents them as ways to create fewer attachments and less control of the environment by being open and vulnerable to the potentiality that the lens of the culture may enact rather than perpetuate static modes of knowing and relating oneself to the environment.