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consciousness, language, history and politics. She connects Condillac’s work to that of his contemporary Raoul Auger Feuillet whose method of dance notation was adopted widely throughout northern Europe and England. Feuillet is attributed with defining the term choreography as, in Foster’s words, “the writing down of dances” (Foster, 2005, p.87). She argues that both Condillac and Feuillet, in systematizing and disassembling embodied perception and embodied movement, “each affirm the centrality of a center and its governance over a periphery” (Foster, 2005, p. 88). A key issue here is the relationship between notation and embodiment. Is notating a dance necessarily a form of colonizing it? Does the act of notation imply a kind of centralized governance over the marginal art of dancing? Or might there be forms of notation, (or movement-initiated writing) that promote the proliferation and exchange of dances, while recognizing and affirming the kinesthetic affect of movement? Dance academic Laurence Louppe evocatively describes such notation in the book Traces of Dance (Louppe, 1994), which catalogues an exhibition of idiosyncratic forms of dance notation invented by choreographers as they generate dance work. Rather than presenting examples of notation as a way of creating generic records of danced concepts, the dance writings catalogued in this book present notation as a way of carrying highly specific ways of travelling movement to the page:
Scattered, tiny surfaces of life, memory-bodies, mirror-bodies, to what mysterious universe does the multitude of your traces refer? Unfinished writings, humble springboards of virtual space, modest advances beyond the possible, you exist but half way, in the absence of the body that alone can read you. (Louppe, 1994, p.33)
The writings of Susan Leigh Foster and Laurence Louppe emphasize that kinesthetic empathy and forms of dance notation are in no way benign, but reflect wider political assumptions – particularly in the degree to which dance is made to conform to an overarching system or whether there is space for a dance to, in its specificity, rewrite and interrupt given notation systems and writing forms.
Is the kinesthetic archive project a colonizing one? It may be considered to be, as it moves from the terrain of touch and kinesthesia to the terrain of the page, yet the mode of movement-initiated writing that I explore in the kinesthetic archive book does not create a set system of language. Instead, like many of the examples of choreographic notation exhibited in Louppes’ Traces of Dance book, it aims to allow gestures of writing and drawing to crease and rupture the systematizing tendencies of grammar, within an improvisatory and somatic approach to studio practice. In the kinesthetic archive project, I am using the term kinesthetic to refer to movement with a somatic sensibility, in a more general sense, in order to encompass not only somatic sensations but also relationships between somatic, spatial, choreographic and artistic awarenesses connected to particular movement qualities.
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