Page 18 - the foreign language of motion

attended to in writing, and in page design. They travel through the texture or grain of particular vowels, through the spatial choreography of letters weighted by or floating on surfaces. This essay will refer you to specific pages in the kinesthetic archive book as specific instances or examples create the structure of this writing.
Solo in Duet Form, p. 4-23
Solo in duet form is a rehearsal process of interdependent independance - Valerie Smith and I rehearse together because it is easier than rehearsing alone. We work on separate solos, with the intention to perform them together. We warm up together, work independently for a long stretch, share our work in process and collaborate on different means of documentation and feedback for each other.
Our studio practice has continued over ten years. A strong sense of shared knowledge and unspoken understanding permeates our work together. As I watch Val’s movement, I often write and draw my thoughts, and I weave her feedback into my movement between pages and studio spaces. It is this writing that forms Section One of the kinesthetic archive book. This kind of automatic writing and drawing functions through the openness of its form, through an insistence on writing into the unknown. Philosopher Rebecca Solnit, in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Solnit, 2006) discusses the importance of the unknown in philosophy and creative practice, in response to a question of the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno:
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? (Meno, cited in Solnit, 2006, p.4)
The Solo in Duet Form practice that Val and I developed over many years provided a way in which we could support each other to find that unknown thing. Page 14 of the kinesthetic archive book, Wednesday May 10 2006 4:36 pm presents a rumination on improvisation. We deliberately go into a space without a particular score or intention, and begin with waiting, with listening intently to the particular moment. There is a sense of phenomenological description here, of bracketing the etiquettes of the world out in order to attend to one moment in its particularity. This page echoes the way in which my consciousness shifts with physical sensation in performance improvisation. This text is written in the second person, a writer describing herself as if through another’s eyes – “You are waiting like a fisherman, for a call from beneath the sea of your skin”. This authorial technique echoes performing with concurrent awarenesses; the awareness of sensation and feeling from inside the body, and the awareness of how one’s movement phrase is being read by another. This evocation of a performer’s dual attention is clear in the line, “Intently listening, listening intently. You are this and that and the other thing, pale and how your hair moves when you shift the momentum of your neck”. The ‘listening intently’ referred to here refers to attention
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