Page 24 - Mistranslation Laboratory: An Unfolding

As a practice of performance improvisation, graphic qualities of writing carry abstract, somatic, visceral movement qualities beyond the content of linguistic vocabulary.
The gestural process of handwriting and mark-making form a fold between the dynamic tone of a movement phrase and its physical translation to paper.
The Shed for Poetic Encounter graphic works-on-paper sprawl through each iteration of the laboratory. In placing listening and attending at the heart of our artistic methods, poetic language creates a ground for collaboration, in which the musicality of sensing is moved between danced and written phrases. The affects of audience presence, time constraints and space all shape physical and written vocabularies. We perform writing process as embodied and graphic improvisation, a site of play and a mode of relationship. The authorship of these texts is likewise slippery – with dancers Alys Longley (all
sites) val smith (Wellington), Macarena Campbell-Parra, Carol Brown, Daniela Marini, Natalia Bakulic, Angel Garcia (Santiago), Christina Houghton, Clare Luiten, Zahra Killeen- Chance and Evie Logan (Auckland) performing as both movers and writers, poetic encounters resist any construction of authorship as an individual practice, instead framing authorship as visceral, collaborative, a tidal etching of interstitial vocab.
And then there are the endless lists, made whenever we title portals or samples or rubbings or curatorialled objects as a collective. The collection of lists begins with the first rehearsal process in 2016 and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates.
To engage post-disciplinary creative practices as forms of attending to porous, circulating bodies – bodies of vibration and force and intensity and desire and space and matter and memory and affect and emotion and weather and temperature and durational trace and function and disfunction and push and pull and colour and breakage and swell
To explore scores as shared acts of attending and creating, as containers for moments of tuning-with, little punctuations of time and care, & attend to the mattering of atmospheres, air currents, tidal information, climate, and relationships between ecologies of environment, body and stuff.