How closely can this text engage with movement of its being read, as though moving close to the reader, as though offering a limb for the beginning of a Contact Improvisation duet? Can you feel the state of your breathing shift as this writing addresses you directly, as if locating you in your particular space? As you yield to or resist the gestures of these words, let’s take a moment to take in the kind of relationships we have going on here, let’s read this performance of reading as though it’s a choreography, beginning with the space. Uniform paper stock, uniform fonts, uniform headers and footers and numbers. Run your fingers over the surface of this paper, what is the tactile information your porous skin is breathing up, as it
feeds the grain of this paper into your nervous system? Does the sensation of this paper shift the performance of this text?
I would like to draw your attention to these texts on these pages: to the use of the font ‘Bell MT’, of margins, to suggest you read the spaces between lines, to read these letters as shapes rather than codes. Density of ink. Porousness of paper. Density of paper. Porousness of ink. The way the cadence of the words play against each other. The way the writing uses repetition and creates specific musicality out of grammar to pull you away from and towards itself. Partnering. Performance Writing. Somehow attending to the points where meanings shift, “writing becomes itself, becomes its own means and ends, recovering to itself the force of action... after turning itself inside out, writing turns again only to discover the pleasure and power of turning, of making not sense or meaning per se but making writing perform” (Pollock, 1998, p.75).
In her article Performing Writing (Pollock, 1998) Della Pollock clearly articulates performance writing as a kind of doing, rather than a particular linguistic style, a writing that is “always drawing its energy from a critical difference, from the possibility that it may always be otherwise than what it seems” (Pollock, 1998, p. 97). She identifies six key elements of performance writing throughout her article; that it is evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational, andconsequential.In this research project I am interested in applying Pollock’s theories about writing and mobility to the everyday logics of dance making. Part two of this chapter will discuss specific instances of dance practice that led to particular pages of the kinesthetic archive project, and the ways that writing fed choreographic processes through the development of the project.
Opening somatic experience to the page is a technique of translation between modes of attention, where somatic movement sensations enter the kinesthetic actions of writing and drawing; the technical work is as much about undoing tendencies to analyze, undoing the fear that words scribed on paper must be the ‘correct’ words, and allowing writing to be (at times) unpredictable, responsive, ambiguous – a mode of exploration and discovery. Practice-led researcher Paul Clarke writes of the positional contradictions in simultaneously practicing and theorizing practice. Contradictions arise when the practice demands as a researcher he is ‘in’ the work, and then analysis requires he discuss the work from ‘outside’. Clarke draws on Michael de Certeau’s essay Walking in the City to contrast the states of the theorist and the practitioner and draws attention to the complexities of articulating the knowledge of practice:
The bodily and tactile knowledges that enable such immediate practical decisions reside beneath the threshold of consciousness/perception and as
such are unpresentable. They are placed beyond the limits of the
practitioner’s own discursive knowleges such that they are difficult to speak of / reflect upon. (Clarke, 2004, para. 32)
Central to the entire kinesthetic archive project is the attempt to allow concepts embedded in practice to fold into artist’s pages. This often means that writing is allowed to follow, as Clarke puts it, the ideas “that reside beneath the threshold of consciousness/perception”. This research does, however, challenge Clarke’s argument that bodily and tactile knowledges are
“unpresentable” in its attempt to allow such knowledges to emerge in the sites of pages, albeit in unpredictable and possibly less-than-easily-legible forms. The process of generating the texts that make up this book-work involved trusting in and becoming familiar with writing from a sense of the unpresentable. A general rule in this writing was ‘don’t presume to know what you will write before you start, allow your writing to be disjunctive, unclear, to have messy grammar, to use the page space, to merge with drawing’. The following part of this chapter will discuss specific pages from the kinesthetic archive book in terms of the following methodologies for practice-led writing: the ‘solo in duet form’ structure; feeding choreographic structures; writing the somatic; a magpie approach to writing; notes from site specific
workshop; watching dance in a new way through the attention of the writing task; the list as choreographic score; freewriting.