I had a week between deciding to create the cards and performing at an event where I was using them to structure a solo improvisation. I sat with my process notes, underlining and writing out possible combinations of words, images, spatial patterns, remembering as I did so various somatic explorations, duets and solo performances Katherine and I created for each other.
In keeping with the design of the pack of cards, I decided to create a series of images, intending to place an image of us in rehearsal on the reverse side of each card. Rather than have an outsider enter our practice in order to photograph our process, I decided to go with an ‘insiders’ perspective on the movement, so we photographed each other soloing, and then brought the camera into a duet, so that it was like the third dancer in a trio. Katherine and I took turns holding the camera at arms length while dancing in order to take photographs of random, chance moments of our movement from inside the work. The sense of this being a trio came from the constant awareness we needed to have of the placement of the camera and of the dancer holding the camera so that its lens faced us, while continuing dancing.
We took hundreds of digital photos of which about twenty are used in the Insomnia Poems.
Katherine and I agreed that the resultant photographs present a kind of partial mapping of our duet process. The combination of images that are in focus and those that are out of focus serves well to present the emergent, unfinished nature of our work.
When I made the first set of cards, the images formed one side of the cards while the drawing and word arrangements formed the other. I considered each card a field, a microcosm of the studio space. I imagined a bird’s eye view of the studio from above and mapped the directional pathway of specific improvisations. The challenge was to graft textual fragments from our rehearsal process onto the card space in such a way that a residue of the performance work translated into a flat design space. This was an attempt at transferring the spatial, conceptual and affective coordinates of our dance practice into the flat space of card.
Each of the Insomnia Poems could be considered a map of an affective, ephemeral, transitory, somatic space, offering players an opening to explore or enter the poetics that our
improvisatory workshop processes generated. Charles Bernstein draws on the poetry of Susan Howe to discuss poems as spatial systems for navigating readers through fictional, affective imaginings.
I prefer to imagine poems as spatializations and interiorizations – blueprints of a world I live near to but have yet to occupy fully. Building impossible spaces in which to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell inside the pleats and folds of language. (Bernstein, 1999, p.100)
Bernstein’s discussion of poetry emphasizes the spatiality and transition evoked in poems. Juliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotions (2002)presents a conceptualization of cartographic practice that encompasses emotional, gendered, fictional and affective impressions of space and place. Poems exist in the liminal spaces of language, and themselves might be considered, as Bruno would put it, cartographies of intimate space that “relate affects to place” (Bruno, 2002, p.208). Bruno discusses her analysis of affective, emotional and somatic spaces as a kind of geography – a study of the nature of specific terrain.
This geography is a terrain of “vessels” that is to say, it is a place that both holds and moves. The notion of vessel incorporates a double image: that of
the boat and that of the artery (as in blood vessel); it implies the container of a flux and a system of routing. (Bruno, 2002, p.207)
Juliana Bruno discusses the tender maps of Mademoiselle De Scudery in eighteenth century France as an example of the haptic routes of maps wherein “space is fashioned in a corporeal vein” (Bruno, 2002, p.208).16 Bruno also writes of the “map as link between people” (Bruno, p.235). The Insomnia Poems are simultaneously tender maps and poetic blueprints for creative practice. Hands holding the Insomnia Poems transfer movement practices between people; each dancer who plays recreates the world of the work and each card offers a small, partial
navigational pathway into a studio process.
Beneath the surface of each card are chambers of memory and affect – processes that underpin the vocabulary and design of each one, and the worlds of memory and interpretation that players bring to their collaboration with the Insomnia Poems. Another way of considering the
Insomnia Poems card deck is as a body of cells or vessels both containing information and assisting actual and conceptual travel. The cards map a studio process – each card might be considered a pathway into the revelation of a place in a specific dance process. Readers of this card deck might literally move as a way of discovering these places, or might simply imagine the responses these cards elicit.