Page 81 - the foreign language of motion

Movement-initiated writing
We are living at a time when a vast amount of performance practices and theories have been explicitly complicating the never simple relations between pastness, historicity, memory, and archiving with notions of presentness, futurity, movement, forgetting and destruction. Mediating all these poles, writing appears as a dynamic, hyper-kinetic operator that draws from its constitutive mobility its full performative force. (Lepecki, 2008, p. 2)
In his more recent work Andrè Lepecki (2008) elucidates writing as a form of movement. His discussion of writing as a ‘hyper-kinetic force’ draws attention to potentials for writing to move strongly outside its documenting tendencies into a more complex and slippery play with readers. A key element of this mobility might be considered to be in writing that crosses disciplinary boundaries and textual conventions. It is common for practice-led research projects to generate writing from the site of the studio and for the resultant writing to reflect and develop performance logics and concepts (Brown, 1999; Ellis, 2005; Forti, 2003a, 2006; Crisp and Ginot, 2007; Minnick, 2003). The term documentation is often employed in reference to methods for gathering together process-based notes and reflections in a form that allows processual knowledge to travel past the site of the rehearsal space. This term also refers to highly formalized notation systems (such as Laban notation) that are designed to facilitate the reproduction of choreography through time. The multiple agendas and purposes at work within the field of performance documentation has led to critiques by leading performance theorists who claim that documentation is outside of the ontology of performance, yet, as performance researchers such as Simon Ellis, Sophia Lycouris and Rebecca Schneider assert, documentation is folded into the development of performance in innumerable ways. Ellis writes that,
not only is it important to generate new methods for representing experience, but the process of representing experience changes that experience, and it alters our very processes of understanding. This presents a context for imagining an interdependent relationship between liveness and documentation, in which new representational practices offer an experiential means of entering the project’s domain. (Ellis, 2005, p.36, authors’ emphasis)
Rebecca Schneider’s (2008) article The Document Performance discusses the potential for methods of documentation to be understood as performances in themselves. According to Schneider, the blurring of documentation and performance practices “raises tantalizing questions about the duration of performance; about the limits or limitlessness of liveness; and about the trajectory of a scene into its playing and replaying across hands and eyes that encounter it still in circulation” (Schneider, 2008, p.118).
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