Page 92 - the foreign language of motion

work flood the paper. These methods of ‘documentation’ then become feedback notes, materials to share with collaborators and navigation points as the structure of the work develops. They are integral in your ability to communicate with collaborators and to lead one rehearsal into the next.
The texts Amounts of Leaving (page 26) and She Measures the Weight of Her Own Breath (p.31) for example, were written as a kind of feedback that helped to define the quality and spacing of choreographic phrases, as well as refining the intentions of the dancers. The poem Held here and here and here (p.27) emerged through writing while generating improvisation phrases. I used writing as a way to distinguish between different improvisation states and to create scores for them. This poem then became the name of a specific section which composers Claire Cowan and Quasimodo could distinguish, and was used in the score of the work. We recorded dancer Cat Ruka speaking the poem, which became an instrument within a textured score.
The text Missing (p.25) emerged from writing that attempted to clarify the intentions of different phrases, as a tool towards heightening performance states. In the end it became a formative part of Suture – generating a choreographic motif from the imagery of shedding skin and transforming into something other. This concept of transforming out of your skin became a key theme through the costuming, choreography, music and lighting. A central compositional motif that weaved through the score was titled “Wrapping and Unwrapping”. The poetic, evocative nature of words is central in my ability to communicate with composers and designers in a shared language. Often movement, when it is in early rehearsal, is not the best starting point for a composer or designer to work from, but a very specific image, a disjunctive metaphor, or a line of poetry will often become a key that allows artists working in different media to develop a cohesion between concepts, while interpreting the writing in the idiosyncratic manner of their specific disciplinary practice. Val (a dancer in the work) and I named a very slow, contemplative phrase “The Desert”, and this name alone was enough for Claire to begin composing in the early stages of rehearsals. The poem Circle (p. 28-29) was written after we had finished Suture, when composer Claire Cowan asked me if I had any poems that would work for a choral piece – so I wrote with a deliberate focus on the way words sound – on images that might work with repetition, and be able to be interconnected in different ways. This poem was not specifically written out of dance practice, but it was written out of a collaboration created through choreographic practice. This poem nods to a practice that cultivates the ability to be able to respond in one artistic form to the demands of another. Response between the diverse logics of different artistic modes is central to my understanding of performance writing.
The term kinesthetic archive
The notion of the kinesthetic or of kinesthesia is one of the key tropes in the development of western thought 66