Page 91 - the foreign language of motion

Each page is also a space and a view. As a space it is a site where objects are (or could be) placed (composition) and where movement takes place between them (‘reading’). The objects are marks. Even an empty page is scanned, perhaps felt. (Hall, 2004, p.16)
The field of artist books emphasizes processes of meaning-making wherein form and content become indistinguishable. Specific materials and design choices embedded in the kinesthetic archive project attempt to allow particular dance logics to spill into the ‘grain’ of the page – the torsion in the feel of spaces, lettering, image, the material handling (Bolt, 2004) of the work as it is activated by readers. The spill of choreographic thinking into material objects is a subject of in-depth research by choreographer William Forsythe, whose Choreographic Objects project asks, “What else, besides the body, could physical thinking look like?” (Forsythe, 2010, para. 7). With this research Forsythe has led a series of interdisciplinary dance projects that each explore ways in which choreographic thinking may be manifested in non-human form. These projects incite movement and invite consideration of the richness of kinesthetic ways of processing experience. As Forsythe writes, “a choreographic object is not a substitute for the body, but rather an alternative site for the understanding of potential instigation and organization of action to reside” (Forsythe, 2010, para. 12).
Feeding choreographic structures, p. 24-32
Pages 24 to 32 of the kinesthetic archive book presents poems written during the development of Suture (Longley and Pedersen, 2006), a collaborative, interdisciplinary performance. My memory of choreographing, co-directing and co-producing Suture with artist/clothing designer Rachelle Pedersen, in collaboration with two composers and three dancers, is of creating pathways of response and of continual translation between forms. My starting points were 1) poetic, small fragments of text to enter rehearsals with, 2) the beginnings of garments, 3) the concept of stitching as a metaphor. Choreographic ideas emerged from Pedersen’s aesthetic, and the physical restrictions of her garments. As we had worked together and known each other for many years, I was able to concentrate on the conceptual implications of her work, as a key element of choreographic development in terms of creating character, narrative, and image based dance phrases. Early in the rehearsal process, watching a rehearsal, I noted that I was “choreographing the way a body receives loss” (p. 24) and this became a key thematic element as rehearsals continued. These words became fragments of character and beginning points for improvisation scores.
Writing is a form of watching for you, a method for attending to movement vocabulary in space and time, you often find after watching a section of movement you’re left quite unable to say what you remembered, but if you scrawl notes or write directly after observing an improvisation or movement phrase somehow the images, tones, or spatial elements of
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