Page 107 - the foreign language of motion

Cixous’s description of how her handwriting animates and communicates different elements of her work through the physicality of its affect articulates an approach to handwriting as a drawn form that contains highly particular aesthetic information. With the kinesthetic archive book I was determined to allow such information to speak.
Throughout the process of writing and editing all elements of the kinesthetic archive book my intention was to attend to and evolve the felt meaning of particular dance practices through the printed, written and drawn site of the page. From the ‘edited drafts’ journal (which gathered together process notes from many different journals) I then created a file of digitized writing, with the formatting limitations (size of lines, size and style of fonts, obsession with even and orderly line). I then printed these pages as a body of texts, in order to interact with the pages as material bodies in the following ways: returning the gesture of handwriting to texts, attending to every line break, and as the editing process continued, to the placement of text in the wider space of the page and to how pages opening against each other related conceptually and spatially. Over time, digital photographs from the journals merged with printed pages that were drawn on by hand and scanned, in an attempt to translate a sense of incipient change, of contingency, transition and a sense of the interior logic of movement practices to the pages of the kinesthetic archive book.
You watch in a new way through the attention of the writing task, p. 50
On page 50 of the kinesthetic archive book, ‘Watching Emma Strapps’ is a text written out of a provocation for writers as they observed a dance improvisation, in a workshop focused on dancing and writing led by dancer practitioner Rosalind Crisp and academic and somatic practitioner Isabelle Ginot (Crisp and Ginot, 2007). Such provocations focus how one attends to events, what one notices, how the muscles of imagination engage with specific creative practices. Provocations for invention may be applied as much to studio-based writing as to developing performance material. Ginot offered a choice of three watching/writing tasks:
1. Watch all the beginnings in the work
2. Imagine you keep one hand on a specific point on a dancer’s body, feeling how the person is moving through the immediate information of (imagined) touch.
3. Watch the impossible body – whatever that means.
I imagine my hand is cupping Emma’s ribcage, under her right armpit. Projecting my imagination into the sensations of her body, the processes that are the undercurrent to her movement. Having recently spent an intensive week studying Body Mind Centering, the processes of the body are vivid in my imagination. The
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