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the foreign language of motion

The Foreign Language of Motion experiments with how the mobile, textured, abstract and kinaesthetic thinking that occurs in performance research might be articulated through different kinds of writing practices. Writing has been cast as monstrous—or at least violent– in its ability to disfigure, maim and destroy the life of live arts. Yet for many performance practitioners, writing is an integral part of studio-based processes, a necessary form of reflection and a site for creative experimentation and planning. This project explores writing that is coextensive with dance practice, in relation to critical theory that engages with writing as performance.

this book is :

 

an attempt
a following
a tracking
a listening
an attending
an articulation
a partial archive of movement an experiment in documentation an interactive object

activated by touch and sight
a refined presentation of selected journal notes
a form of translation
a form of transliteration
an event
a response
a product of two years of sustained dance practice

this book is not :


a representation
a description
a duck or animal (or other obvious thing that it is not such as an umbrella or cake)

a substitution for dancing
involved in killing or otherwise maiming any of the dance ideas that initiated it

And now it sits on your screen. Time stretches between us, you might know approximately how much, but I don’t, not from here. How many hours away from here are you? How many breaths? How many memories? How many kilometers? How many swallows (counting yours and mine together)? Heartbeats? Days? Years? Decades? Months? Tsunamis? Tornados? Holidays? Sleeps? How many academic trends? How many extraordinary and discipline-changing bodies of research? This project aims to contribute to a growing body of research advocating for and providing specific examples of creative practice research with the assumption that practice-led methods of producing knowledge and theory open generative spaces for thought, practice, critical thinking and education. This essay is in two parts, a book of experimental writing referred to as the kinesthetic archive book, and a contextual essay folded before and after it .Together these form the foreign language of motion. Which opens up a space for you to encounter some of the how’s and why’s behind the choreographic provocations that form the kinesthetic archive book. It discusses specific methodologies for studio practice (and processes of writing out of studio practice) in relation to critical theory and the fields of performance and dance studies. Welcome. Come on in.

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