Page 109 - the foreign language of motion

Each of the pages of the kinesthetic archive book unfolds from exploration into conditions and atmospheres specific to the vagaries of an ongoing practice in dance. Watching Emma Strapps Dance (page 50) became a structural device for a solo performance. The poems written out of the Suture rehearsal process (pages 24 to 31) were recorded and woven into the fabric of the composition of its electronic score and used as choreographic source material. Rehearsal Text (page 49) was written in preparation for a score-based approach to somatic choreography.
The kinesthetic archive book is made up from the small, rarely seen moments of performance processes, such as notes, drawings, memories, images, readings and conversations, recognizing them as miniature performances and as works-in-progress. Poet Bill Manhire conceives of poetry “as a catalyst or an agent for diversification, rather than a message bearing, authoritarian structure” (Manhire cited in O’Brien, 1997, p.30). This conceptualization of poetry as ‘agent for diversification’ marries very well with the kinesthetic archive project, where the displacement of ideas between forms (dance, performance writing, poetry, philosophy) mutates them into alternative trajectories. This project proposes that these moments of movement-between are crucial to creative-practice research and that writing from such spaces allows insight into the specificity of practitioner-theoretical knowledges.
So I’m thinking about the act of leaving and the idea of leaving you with something – with what? A close friend once wrote that poems are wonderful because they are small enough to fold into a matchbox but can take a whole lifetime to unwrap. I have no idea where the copy of the poem is that contains that quote, and for some reason quotation marks just don’t feel right, right there. They feel like they are creating distance between the voice of this essay, and the voice of this friend. And this friend, Kylie Thomas, was someone who I made performances with, someone who passed away at quite a young age, someone who was very dear, and someone whose voice is actually inside the writing of the whole of this essay, one of the multiple authors inside the proper name of Alys Longley. Isn’t it the case that things like poems and performances often do take lifetimes to unwrap? With this in mind, shouldn’t we aim to employ forms of writing that embrace the slow unfolding of reading, the abstraction that invites the co-existence of complexity and simplicity, allows the possibility that the rules of grammar, sentence structure, page design and even quotation may be bent in order to make space for the affective spaces created by imperfection, looseness of form, movement, mess and the leakiness of bodies? That’s what I’d like to leave you with – with images of books spilling over with movement, with pages generated by bodies making stuff, quickly scribed in-between tasks, script readings, duets, rehearsals, notes – messy writing, formulated at breakneck speed to keep up with the sprint of the ideas. Making half sense, but enough sense to be useful. I’d like to leave you with a sense that such moving-writings offer something extremely valuable to post-Cartesian research, to not only performance and dance studies, but to philosophy, ethnography, research in education and to qualitative research. Such writing demands processes of editing and design incorporate affect, texture and atmosphere – leaving space for ambiguity and the layering of concepts. And here’s my leaving space
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