Through the art making process, may we discover new knowledge production potentially transformed onto the performative moving body.

Energies in Action

Modes of Making

Drip Painting Technique

As the Paintings spoke to Me, it was decided they not remain in their current state.

Ring Pour Technique

Materials & Process

Method in Motion

Reflection:

Seeking to emerge in the choreographic act through process and practice, I found myself aware of the camera, feeling as if this was a performance.  The first act did not turn out as I intended, not that I even had an artistic intention in mind per se, but actually, as I am writing this, I come to realize act one unfolded as it was meant to be, just not as I intended it to be.  Working in my basement, my husband entered the room and distracted me as he did a little jig on the side.  I invited him to join me to paint, adding, "we can dance a duet,” but now that I think of it, we would have been dancing a trio with materials.   After I finished dripping paint on the canvas, I was ready to pick one up. The color sagged as if it had a sullen look on its face.  The Painting diffracted an urgency to wash away this performance and prepare for act two.

I begin to reflect upon this performance through the lens of a phenomenological method of analysis.  I had completely let myself go as my practice took over.  Camera off and on to mixing mediums, like a mad scientist, experimenting with new compounds.  Glue, water, paint, and silicone oil.  As I turned the camera back on, I was in a trancelike state.  My gesture performed without stimulating a conflicting movement in itself nor the desire to make the act more fully my own.  The art came to be in the act of making a painting.  Without self-expression yet played out in space where movement connected to the energies of an impermanent experience.  Through this act, discovery leads to acceptance of an object of permanence.  Honestly, a relationship was cultivated into more than acceptance between self and object...a feeling of kinship manifested through processual creation.

Modes of Making

Imagery Mapping

Reflection:

In the process of reflecting on my movement inquire and my reading response this month (see m AN u Sc r i PT), as well as aspiring to develop meaningful lesson plans for my hybrid dance students during a pandemic (many of whom have never taken a dance class before in their lives), I found myself coming full circle with the topic at hand.  Scores.  During one of my recent class projects, I asked my students to choose 10 words from a section of writing on Climate Change and design 10 gestures or movements as they engaged their body in physical thinking.  As I assisted and prompted students to begin their movement exploration, I walked past a girl who was writing symbols on her paper.  I was exhilarated to see the markings and asked her what they were.  She hadn’t even stood up to begin moving.  She explained she drew the pictures to remember her moves.  I ask if she knew what the drawings were called and explained that she was notating a dance Score. I expressed how impressed I was with her choice in documentation to recite her movement as opposed to the choice of technology to record her dance. 

Pondering the conversation, I considered why I do not teach a unit on Scores.  In the interest of following the school’s curriculum guide, it is not a requirement.  It is also not clearly indicated in the State Standards to include notation while teaching dance.  As an educator, I clearly see the importance of teaching students the importance of formulating methods to develop and preserve their choreography.  This occurrence or happening located me as a researcher in the world, as an observer, making visible the practices in an attempt to make sense of the phenomena in a natural setting.  

As an educator by trade, I have been trained to follow a script.  As an artist participating in an interconnected practice in this field, I find it my place to execute this practice in the context within my classroom.  Drawing parallels from my student’s work of drawing symbols on paper, to my work with painting, the body is not dependent on embodying movement.  The act of choreography can occur without the body, yet it can be argued we are always using our body during every action we engage in.  The development of the Score is the act of choreography, made with pencil and paper or paint on canvas.  As for the difference between my student and my work, she had a direct plan in drawing her symbols, where action painting results produce unpredictable movement in the image.  Just as I teach my students about crafting dances, there is no right or wrong way.  There are a plethora of methods in generating movement as a variety of approaches in developing Scores.  Art can and should be different, provoking thought and discovery through creative inquiry.  It is here where thoughts in action become knowledge in motion, process is intertwined with shifting experiences, and the world's diverse ways expose themselves through the inseparability of entanglement. 

Reflection:

My intent in the studio was to revisit movement synthesized last month and apply Laban Movement Analysis through the four motion factors of Weight, Time, Space, and Flow.  After reading a suggested text by Valerie Preston-Dunlop, “Chu / Mm (Choreutic Unit and Manner of Materialisation),” I was motivated to incorporate her methods as I utilized my painting as the impetus to construct shapes in space.  Manipulating the body as the artistic medium, I explored Body Design, Spatial Tension, and  Spatial Projection. 

I focused on a specific image as I sculpted my body into living architecture and materialized the painting into Body Design.  I then explored tension within the body, between limbs, the muscles within my body, and the floor.  Once I felt confident in my stance, I proceeded to project my energy towards a Spatial Projection.  “These images are transformed into dance movement, emerging as synthesis of choreutic fragments, the curve, the line, the angel, the axis, performed in wrist, in head, in waist, in focus, in floor pattern, in relationships. Fragments of geometry are the particles in which choreographic imagination manifests itself” (Preston-Dunlop 80).

Discovering this direct relationship to the painting, I was aware of what I was attending to within the shifting space in my body.  I was aware of the intentional patterns of mattering produces through the intra-active agency shared between painting and self, the inseparability of the object diffracting material practices of knowing and becoming.  It is here where the body movement produces knowledge, although the body was not in constant motion, virtually to the eye, it was within the shifting space held within the body.   

(See Monthly Reading Reflection)

February 2021

Foot/Leg Guide Tracing

Exploring the Body as an Architectural Site