Page 83 - the foreign language of motion

demands a particular style of writing – one that diverts from the academic standard – as academic writing has traditionally attempted to exhume influence of the moving body, and what I am attempting is to invite it. Inviting the moving body into text may mean the writing is as unstable as it is stable, as rhythmic as a heartbeat, as able to stretch and lengthen as the tissues that support the skeleton. We are compressed and we expand in relation to our environment, and in bodywork it is often the case that a surprising amount of space is found in the sensation of reaching or lengthening in what we can feel that we know.
In her discussion of the 2003 Practice as Research in Performance Conference, Bella Merlin writes, “Acknowledgment was made of the fact that much of the knowledge gained through practical research may not be linguistically available to us – indeed should we be trying to look for its logical articulation?” (Merlin, 2004, p. 44). Eight years later, performance writers have stretched and expanded approaches to practice and writing in ways that evoke somatic, studio-based and intuitive forms of performance knowledge. The question of whether it is of use to search for “logical articulation” is a recurring one, which offers two immediate pathways of response. Firstly, a yes or no answer as to whether logical articulation is of any use to performance research. The second pathway might be to give up the logical articulation and find out what can be articulated of performance work when traditionally academic logics fail, but other things become clear.
The challenge of writing about performance making from a practitioner’s perspective is also a pragmatic one, and lies in finding an approach to the page that generates and enables creative practice, identifying the words, syntax, grammar through which to connect virtual and material pages with the rich and complex world of studio-based interaction and decision-making. I have chosen the term ‘performance logics’ as a way to refer to modes of thinking or knowledge that are particular to embodied studio practices. Examples of such ‘logics’ are multitudinous, but might include conceptual pathways, atmospheres, somatic qualities, aesthetic concerns and spatial designs. Dance academic Anna Pakes writes of choreographic logic in relation to the history of logic studies in philosophy, in order to elucidate “the choreographer-researcher’s claim to knowledge” (Pakes, 2009, p.10). She identifies the Aristotelian concept of phronesis as one that helps to identify the epistemological value of the choreographer-as-researcher’s work (p. 20).
The kind of research needed in this domain is ... a creative sensitivity to circumstances as they present themselves. Phronesis is not concerned so much with general principles, universal laws or causal understanding, but rather with what cannot be generalized. It is a kind of attunement to the particularities of situations and experiences, requiring subjective involvement rather than objective detachment; and it has an irreducibly personal dimension in its dependence upon, and
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