tilt-rhythm-back: dances & drawings

talking to Paul from Dance4 today in the studio. he wondered what the role of memory was in the activity of drawing from the back drawing backward behind. Traces are left on the wall/paper and the body too retains traces that can be worked with. And familiar things to return so can I activate remembering more directly.

just drop it. let it go. turn away from it. drop the attention. move front forwards. take a breath.

On Sunday and Monday the wonderful choreographer Bakani Pick-Up came into the dance4 studio to work with me.  Wonderful reflective exchanges of experience- talking about perception of time, about our interest in presenting activity … more about the blind spots we played with in the next post … or the post before … which way am I going? where have I been?

.brush they air the like light are and curling fingers – hair my of out cobwebs clearing like ,backwards hands my throw I

Unsettling .neck her of back the on up stand hairs the and spine her down trickle Shivers

.eye her of corner the from disappearing something of shadow a catches she ,shoulder her over Looking

.her surprising ,behind from appear things ,backwards Walking.

A dialogue with artist-writer Emma Cocker. Also as a spectator. She talked about leaning as sometimes a hard thing to do, especially for women. To be independent is to be strong, as good desirable and dependent as weak.  But to lean can stabilise, and to accept support can be a decisive positive act. For the body leaning into the wall, it anchors and fixes one part of the body so another part can freely move. leaning is tilting.

Leaning into the wall.

The dorsal as an expansive force rather than a convergent forward advancement. An alternative to a persistent cultural progression. An opening up to peripheral, to twilight zones!, to a sinking back – slowing but not really slowing – something about time- and futures behind us as unseen and past unfolding in front of us as that which we can see, know, reflect upon.

hanging back in time

the drawing has its own embodied conditions and indexical immediacy. eye-hand co-ordination is disrupted. eyes have the ability to measure, to judge, to lead. here there is no measuring. there is a mechanical organisation of the body. drawing process and marks here are not to do with language.

the arms and hands and eyes gesture, but are not aiming to communicate or convey meaning to a spectator. I am engaged though in a process and activity of gesturing, of presenting gestural figurative movement. but things are flipped, the up, down, back, front, forwards, backwards are slightly messed up. hanging and leaning back into a bio-technological (David Wills)-mechanical human-figure-amoeba.

and one could say in the flipping of sense-making there is a horizontal organisation of the moving, drawing body in relation to itself and others.

a kind of presence that lingers, leans, tends, scans.

I have my back to the paper-wall [wall-paper haha]. I organise my body in different ways so the arms operate behind me, behind my back and head.

Some extracts, fragments from David Will’s book Dorsality: thinking back through technology and politics. I am noticing what he writes (what I think to understand) directly in my body and in my moving, as well as being able to turn short fragments into movement tasks or scores.

a some-one who turns
what turns will be presumed to be something human
in turning, it turns into something technological

the turn – a bending, an inflection, the movement of a limb, articulation
there is technology as soon as there are limbs
as soon as there is articulation, the human has rounded the technological bend, the technological turn has occurred, and there is no more simple human

it turns as it walks
the human being turning as it walks, deviating from its forward path
a detour, a deviation, a divergence into difference
advancing askew [oh yes!]

even if in turning one (the human) deviates from itself in the simplest or most minimal fashion, turns just a little to the left or to the right – say to correct its bearing – it turns, for all intents and purposes towards the back

the animate first articulates, and so becomes technological in the self-division of a cell, in the self-generation of an amoeba.

Wills proposes a bio-technological relation beyond the more traditional understanding of technology as a human-mechanical relation. He mentions the amoeba! In 2003 I made a dance piece called Amoeba Blues and I recently picked up my amoeboid body again in developing the performative presentation writing body/annotating gesture.

My human animate body has an increasingly amoeboid tendency when working with and through the back and gestural articulations that refuse to settle, fully form, give meaning.

NB
An amoeba is a term generally used to describe a single celled eukaryotic organism that has no definite shape and that moves by means of pseudopodia. Pseudopodia or pseudopods are temporary projections of the cell and the word literally means “false feet”.