SODA WORKS 2018

Saori Hara
Da Daa Dada
e a solo
1 Introduction
The performance “Da Dad Dada” is a solo dance project
which is examining the relationship between a successful
musical dancer in the 1960’s, Ken Hara, and me, his daughter
Saori Hala. We were related by blood, but never familiar.
After his death, I started to dive into his personal life through
the archives of him as a dancer, so that I could know about
him not only as a father but also as a dancer. In this project,
I dealt with his career archive as a dancer collected over the
last two and a half years, culminating with an audio recording
of our reunion, 3 weeks before his death.
The biggest purpose of this research is to distill and decompose
several elements and constructs of autobiographical narrative,
in order to share it with an observer in an abstract way.
My general research question since I started to work with
the body is “how do we read the context of the environment
and find motives to make our own actions?”. This was born
from my perspective as a dancer with a background in
design.
2 Concept and strategy based on “Affordance”
All steps of strategy in this project are based on the concept
“affordance” that was proposed by an American psychologist
James Gibson in 1930’s. Affordance originally means
“all possibilities of an animal’s action which are recalled by
an object or an environment”. In 1988, Donard Norman took
this word “affordance” to mean the possibilities of the action
that humans can perceive from an object or an environment,
within the cognitive psychology field. Nowadays, the word
“affordance” has even spread into the design scene. I was
first introduced to this word during my studies in design. To
explain the definition of “affordance” by Norman, leading the
action of the hand is often used as an example. When you
find a flat plate on the door, you can understand that you
should push the door to open it. Or when you find a handle
on a cup, you can intuitively see which part of the cup you
should hold.
As the first study to understand this thought, I performed an
practice to read the “affordance” from specific objects.
I put out two types of chairs. One with a back(chair), and
one with no back(stool). The question was “how do people
find an “affordance reason” that shapes interaction with
these chairs?” The chair with back showed the direction that
people should sit. And the chair without back does not. But if
that chair has a square seat on the legs, it help for people to
imagine four directions to seat. But in case of a circular seat,
it doesn’t matter which direction people sit practically. These
hints to make actions are thought of the affordance that
Norman proposed. But strictly speaking that is different from
original proposal by Gibson. The original “affordance” by him
is not the specific possibility of leading that an object/environment
show to a human. It should be the all the possibilities
of the relationship between an object/environment and
an animal. Therefore, even if people do no correctly read the
context of the chairs and use it in wrong way, for example,
to sit facing the back, this relationship between an object
and an animal could be “affordance”. It is all the possibilities
which include concrete hints that an object/environment
shows an animal’s intention of reading the context. It doesn’t
matter if it is right or wrong, if it is purpose or not. Meanings
and activities themselves are forms of affordance.
Over the last several years, I was wondering if I could divert
both thoughts of affordance to my current research as I was
shifting my interest in study from design to performance and
movement. The process of that is to transform the context
that I read from the environment and the motives behind
specific action when I place myself in relation to the space.
This in an example of one of the simplest exercises that
I did to explore the relationship between space and the
body in my study and practice : First, I stand on the center
of a square room. And I perceive the 8 points in the room
the 4 corners on the floor and the 4 on the ceiling. Then I
point to one of those corner randomly with my right hand,
and the left as well. Next is legs. The right foot should step