Inyección de corriente durante un hueco de voltaje

In each developed draft copy of the immersed book, the pages designed to be folded out increased in size. The first version was made from A4 size recycled copies of edited draft chapters of this research, with the choreographic imperatives layered over pages already layered with typed and handwritten text. It was an aesthetic drawn from the texture of work and practice – not in an articulate and produced final form but one with all the messiness and groping of work on its way to a completed form. The larger the pages of the immersed book became, the greater the intensification of scale became in the work. The play with scale is a key element in the performance of this work (which as a dance duet was titled

Proximity and Distance). In order for readers to make out both large and small scale type they have to physically move toward and away from different texts, to dance through circuitous routes of text, possibly losing the trace of one line of thought as it merges with another.

Surely getting lost is one of the most important ways in which performance ideas develop, sometimes when something is lost, replacing it propels us toward a more interesting path, and other times the getting lost is what leads the ideas to form connections and relationships that may not otherwise have been found. However, for me, the feeling of getting lost most often leads to the feeling that failure is imminent, that I am unsure what I'm doing, that I'm constantly on the edge of letting the team down. Often, I have an overwhelming sense that I have folded out a bunch of interesting ideas that become totally unmanageable. I am immersed by them, unsure how to make decisions or to navigate through seas of ideas. immersed is a book that evokes, rather than describes a state of being lost. Multiple pathways are presented, there is no linear development through which to progress, only rhizomatic connections to be made.

The final draft of the immersed book emerged as one very large map-like page, folded many times. There’s an anxiety that I connect with this kind of map, which is the process of maintaining the clean form as I attempt to put the map back together. To me it is a kind of allegory for running a rehearsal –

often in my work there are three or so dancers, a composer, a lighting designer – and there’s a responsibility to be honouring the time they have given. And yet, with experimentation, some ideas just do not work and time might seem wasted. Working with the idea of a map that needs to be folded out (with the anxiety of folding it back together built into its design) carries for me the dream of negotiating a pathway that all collaborators involved find rewarding, and the reality of the anxiety, slippage and failure lurking behind creative decision making.

The process of binding the immersed page and its folds was made in collaboration with designer Emma Cowan. With each development of the book, I would create cover papers and choose the weight of card the papers would be fixed to and Emma would glue and hand bind the elements of the book together. We balanced the murky aesthetic of the working pages by choosing endpapers that reflected light. The original cover consisted of a scanned photograph of the Proximity and Distance work with Brent and myself, covered in bandage gauze to gesture through a tactile means to the potential violence (and the recuperative promise) of language. This was scanned so that the gauze enfolding the cover was

digitised. As the size of the book grew this image was enlarged. The photograph of us dancing was reincorporated into the work to become a very large format black and white print that forms one side of the map-like page that makes up the book.

Instead of a series of pages bound together, the final version of the immersed book contains one

enormous page that needs to be folded out. The size of the page is so unwieldy, readers must place the book on the floor in order to open the page to its full size, and move around it at different angles to read the different groupings of words. The page literally calls readers into movement.

As this book was initiated by a choreographic project entitled Proximity and Distance, a play with scale is central to the logic of its design. A single sentence is written very large on the page of the work. Inside the shapes and along the forms of outsized letters are smaller words that form readable phrases. These sentences nestle up to the bodies of letters like moss to a tree. You can read them by moving around the paper in the direction the words run, which may be horizontally as they trail in the space between two e’s, or vertically as they run along the slope of an l, or the words might spiral inside an o. The only set navigational pathway for these phrases is the landscape of the large-scale letters. It is up to the reader to decide which layer they will start with and then move to.

The immersed book contains residues of the Proximity and Distance choreographic project in the form of choreographic imperatives that are attached to the surface of the page with the heat of an iron, using tape made for hemming clothes. The logic of our studio work is also evident in the book through a focus on contingent, emergent, intuitive decision making, such as beginning the book with the cover rather than the contents or concepts. This book has no correct front, back, up or down side. Readers are left to their own devices to draw a pathway of logic or meaning out of the material on offer, just as,

when we entered the studio for workshopping our Proximity and Distance work, we had an abundance of movement ideas, but I felt I lacked a language through which to articulate the structure necessary to organise the movement into a choreography.

Creating and contextualising the immersed book has helped me clarify what our studio process was attempting and (possibly) achieving, and I now have a strong sense of how Brent and I could go about the further researching and structuring of ideas. Central to this book and this chapter is the notion of processual indeterminancy, that is, that I am writing about a project that I am nowhere near

completing, from the middle or the inside of the process, with none of the critical distance that I felt in writing about works or workshops that have completed their performance seasons or had the feedback of a final session. I will steer this chapter toward completion with a reflection on our Proximity and Distance work, in the hope that it will have your imagination circling back to a dance of close and far, close and far, close and far away:

Brent and I are in a dance studio treating presence as something you can turn up or down like a volume dial. Ten equals absolute attention to this precise moment, this moment’s social and environmental contents, absolute dependence on this here now. Zero equals attention absolutely elsewhere, no desire or observation of here, no sense of own body, contents of transparent skin evaporated, less than hungry, empty, away. We play with the transition points between one-to-ten, we create movement scores for specific zones, I record myself walking away from the radio, recording the sound of the creation of distance. We finish the process feeling lost, drenched with possibility, sparse of structure.

And now it’s June 2009 and she’s reading over all the chapters of this thesis, reading this chapter alongside the one that follows it. As a reader the meaning you make of this is formed in relationship with very many other pages. Both the current chapter and the following one, Chapter Six, Insomnia Poems, discuss methods of movement-initiated writing in which instability, experimentation and play are key. Whereas in the immersed artist book, atmospheres of not-knowing mean that readers have to work harder in reading to find where meaning lies, in the Insomnia Poems, the play aspect of dance making becomes central. In the Insomnia Poems not-knowing is just part of the rules of a game.

6.0 Insomnia Poems and Rules of Play : On Devising Games and