Closer to the body: Reflections on skript and extracts from collected writings

Abstract

In this two part article we reflect upon the experience of writing-dancing with audiences and artists in the context of our installation work skript (commissioned by Dance4, Nottingham, 2013). Part one considers how skript engages embodied, felt sense, improvisational and collaborative modalities in relation to the act of writing. As such we consider the ways in which the particular interface of language and embodiment, which is the focus of skript, might allow a knowing of 'something' otherwise -be that something a sense of our own bodies, a dance work, a performance experience or perhaps just that moment in time. In part two we share extracts of some of the writings that were collaboratively generated as part of skript. We focus on the work of three performance/movement artists: Guy Dartnell, Miguel Pereira and Rosalind Crisp. These dance-writings are published as they were written in real time, in the moment of engagement. They are edited only for length and at times to correct typographical errors (but only if the errors seemed to disturb the flow of the ideas) rather than to simply 'tidy' the text or the grammar. The writings are relational, improvisational and at times fragmentary. For more writings see: www.writing-dancing.blogspot.com.

The State of Dancingness: Staying with Leaving

“…What of a dancer who enters the word space with the same risk, trust in form, and presence as she enters the performance space? Many dancers write articulately of the experience of dancing, of inside dancing: Crisp, 20 Longley, 21 Gardner, 22 Bacon, 23 Foster, 24 and Parkinson, 25 among others. In activating the State of Dancingness, I am both looking toward the act of writing as the centralization of embodiment, and investigating the capability of the professional dancing body to reorient the relationship between dancing and the act of writing.…”