Page 108 - the foreign language of motion

process of using Isabelle’s writing task provided me with fresh way into perceiving movement, a way to travel somatically with Emma’s body. The concentration and energy evoked through watching her kept my hand moving across the page as if electrified, it was as if my body was strongly kinesthetically engaged with hers, in a very specific way. Later, over dinner with Emma, we discuss modes of writing as forms of imagining, different modes of watching as ways of training the imagination, and that these writing scores are movement scores while the moving scores are writing scores.
After the dance explorations the group discussed the idea that the writing shifts how we watch – you watch in a new way through the attention of the writing task.
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 performance writing to be (at times) unpredictable, responsive, ambiguous – a mode of exploration and discovery. Artist-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 perhaps less-than-easily-legible forms. Creating this body of pages 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’.
hoping
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