Page 97 - the foreign language of motion

whose writing resists tendencies to fix potential into grid-like systems (thus removing transition from critical consideration), to posit that past and future need to be recognized as being folded into each other:
past and future are not just strung-out punctual presents. They are continuous dimensions contemporaneous to every present – which is by nature a smudged becoming, not a point- state. Past and future are in direct, topological proximity with each other, operatively joined in a continuity of mutual folding. The present is the crease. (Massumi, 2002, p.200)
Following Massumi, the phrase kinesthetic archive refers to the co-extensiveness of past and future, with the term archive gesturing to how the past inhabits embodiment and sensory perception, and the term kinesthetic, the present that creases moments and perceptions into thought. Paula Caspão (2007) provides us with a sharp critique of discourses that specifically define ontologies of dance as being limited to live witnessed moments. Caspão argues that theories of performance that refuse to accept secondary or mediatized sources as artistic events polarize artistic modalities. She writes that “such distinctions limit the field of operating possibilities, when it comes to dance and performance theory” (p.143):
what is missed by our most current perceptions of dance and movement, occurring within a linear timeline and in a Euclidean space, is that the most embodied of our bodily experience always occurs in a relational spatiotemporal smudge whose end differentially loops back to its beginning. (Caspão, 2007, p.139)
Caspão draws on Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi to suggest the need for performance research to move past the ‘fusty’ notion that dance and performance is defined by “vanishing present bodies”(Caspão, 2007, p.136) “as if representation wasn’t a dimension of event-reality, re-entering the relational continuum, always re-becoming eventful sensorial perception” (Caspão, 2007, p.141). Caspão’s argument is that the very notion that dance is defined by immediacy, by the being-there through a live witnessing of an event, hinges on definitions of space and time that are linear, Euclidean, and neglectful of alternative perspectives of space, time, the virtual and embodiment. My intentions with the development of the kinesthetic archive project align with Caspão’s discussion of the work of choreographer and performer Olga de Soto; “The choreographer not only transformed a documentation process into a performance, she also transformed the very act of performing into one of documentation, displacing both notions of documentation and of dance performance” (Caspão, 2007, p.148).
In his practice-led PhD research Indelible Simon Ellis (Ellis 2005) draws on the philosophy of Henri Bergson to discuss time and memory as inventive practices, elucidating how the concept of documentation might play a performative role in actively creating dance work, in an ongoing way:
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