Page 82 - the foreign language of motion

In order to highlight this study’s focus on process based, practitioner-led experience, the term movement-initiated writing refers to a dance writing practice in which:
• Thepracticesofembodiedperformancepracticeandwritingareimbricatedineachother.Ifthewriter has not participated as an active practitioner in the creative practice work of which they write, they are working in the more general field of documentation, rather than movement-initiated writing.
• Anemergentmethodologyisfollowed–thatis,writingemergesoutofattentiontoperformancelogics. Unexpected, illogical, random, poetic and incoherent streams of text and drawing are invited as a way to generate process specific vocabularies.
• Writingmightmergewithdrawingorotherformsofimageormeaning-making.Thisstudiopractice invites in a mixed-media approach, in which forms overlap and extend each other.
• Thepurposeofwritingistocontributetothedevelopmentofperformancelogics.Movement-initiated writing aims to feed, develop, extend and/or refine dance ideas from the site of the studio.
In a call for contributors to a practice-led working group entitled Silent Voices, Forbidden Lives, A Participatory Lab performance researcher Baz Kershaw identified – “three types of member participation, defined as observer or documenter, or, for want of a better word, ‘rapturor’ (from ‘rapt’, i.e, prepared for total involvement in the manner of an actor/ performer in rehearsal)” (Kershaw, 2009). Movement-initiated writing practices emerge through what Kershaw would describe as the ‘rapturor’ position, wherein dancers are immersed in a given creative process and write from inside the work. Perhaps to write something monstrous, perhaps not.
Performance knowledges and logics
Practice-led research has rapidly grown over the last two decades as have modes of philosophy that recognize embodied processes as sites of knowledge where meaning is actively generated, critiqued and developed. Despite these developments, on beginning this project it wasn’t obvious to me how I might create space for studio-led meanings alongside critical writing. How to acknowledge knowledge gleaned through dance practice? This has demanded I actively resist ‘proper’ methods of academic writing, and invent alternative writing practices. The opening paragraph of an early attempt read:
As a researcher writing dance practice, am I expected to only include writing about dance in literature reviews and to ignore information that I have received in movement, or though informal discussion with other dancers? It seems that to do so would be to ignore a wide range of extremely relevant information. Yet to include dance workshops, classes and conversations
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