How do we perceive one another? How does this shape our day to day interactions?

The Way You Look (At Me) Tonight is an artistic expression from Claire Cunningham and Jess Curtis that answers and portrays the philosophical questions about the idea of perception.

On Thursday, Sept. 22, CSUSM Dance Studies, PADL West and the New England Foundation for the Arts held a sensory journey that included two performers and their audience.

Cunningham and Curtis stepped into the Arts building and began their journey that combined the movement of both the disabled and the able-bodied while delving into the human condition through the form of music.

Through choreography, each artistic piece interpreted self-awareness of ourselves and our surroundings by fusing a disabled art form with a form that is found to be traditional in everyone’s point of view. Through their dance pieces, Cunningham and Curtis integrated the element of how art it is not limited to the ability of what one is capable of physically evoking.

Claire Cunningham, an internationally distinguished disabled artist based in the U.K., creates multi-disciplinary performances to “to explore the language of contact improvisation.”

“I’m always looking for things that push me out of my comfort zone,” said Cunningham. “I want something that’s uncomfortable because it reveals what I’m avoiding, like speaking and improvising on stage.”

Jess Curtis, an award-winning choreographer, implements his movement based on social relevance in order to bring upon the idea of physical entities telling a personal story that relates to how gender and sexuality are perceived.

By connecting his work with Cunningham, Curtis came across all forms of communication to reach out and make his performance accessible to every person and apply various artistic interpretations.

“[Using] written text projections for the deaf left out the visually impaired, and having spoken word didn’t help the deaf. We started to re-conceive how to make the piece a work of art that everyone could respond to directly, without its interpretation being mediated by another (non-disabled) person’s take on it.”

One of the pieces in the beginning stood out, when the audience contributed to a spatial awareness activity. This piece aimed to have the participants remove their concentration from their central focal point and instead consciously focus on their periphery. Curtis and Cunningham derived this technique from Bill Shannon, who called it “peripheral fluctuation.” This technique allowed the audience to notice the unseen and offered a canvas that would be the starting point of artistic interpretation.

The Way You Look (At Me) Tonight provided a meaningful experience that separated the ideas that society imposes on us and redefined the underlying question of what makes us the way we are.