Page 100 - the foreign language of motion

legitimate orders’ by valuing somatic, sensory, felt and abstract qualities of design and writing. Such qualities are manifested in the book’s emphasis on the texture evoked in the visual surface of the page as much as it does to the texts, redistributing the attention of this dance research away from productions on stages to barely-visible or invisible sensoriums of practice. Caspão goes on to describe the critical impact of the affective dimension of performance and performance writing:
This is the way affect goes against modes of communication that legitimate the “appropriate”, those in which every body, every sense and every thing is attributed a place or non-place. Blurring positions and functions, affect appears as a tool for opening up constant redistributions of the places attributed to every body and every thing. (Caspão, 2007, p.144)
Throughout the different modalities of the kinesthetic archive, I aim to create spaces where felt meanings, silent voices, subtext and intuition are recognized for their formative status in performance research. Somatic methods of bodywork are by their nature ‘first person’ – thus they cannot be described or shared and are, in a sense, silent and untranslatable. However, such states are hugely generative of performance concepts and well worth exploring in terms of their bearing upon performance research. The attempts to translate somatic and process based dance states into another form via the kinesthetic archive project is motivated by the critical imperative of opening space in dance writing for the importance of sensory affect.
Writing the somatic, p. 33-40
I’m dancing. Experimenting with images that subtly shift the way I sense my spine. I am surrounded by ten or so other dancers, responding to a stream of sounds, the awareness and momentum pathways evoked through Scott’s speech. We have moved from discussing concepts and looking at anatomy books, now we move constantly with fragments of image shared through the spoken word, keeping our dancing focused, the investigation developing. The improvisation is brought to a close and I immediately grab my journal and begin drawing and writing, noting key images that were given as taught material, and that I noticed in my own investigation. Focusing on the memory of moving and responding to verbal feedback, I write all the sensations I can. I find if I write them as soon as possible I’m more likely to remember them in their specificity, to catch the precision of images, to remember how different ideas relate to each other.
Pages 33-40 of the Kinesthetic Archive Book emerged through my attendance at two somatic workshops; Materials for the Spine, with Scott Smith (Smith 2006) and Body Mind Centering with Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstead (Bieringa and Ramstead, 2007). Each of these workshops evolved over a period of five to six intensive days of dancing and presented similar challenges in terms of dance writing; both had a somatic focus. The group
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