Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. How might attending towards a dorsal orientation unfold possibilities for alternative (affirmatively resistant) modes of engagement, encounter, involvement? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? Allowing, accepting, letting — a back-oriented approach to sense-making requires a different engagement with time, with teleology; a willingness for waiting, residing, abiding, rather than reaching towards destination, telos or goal. Its knowledges emerge obliquely, indirectly, tangentially, from the sides. Shadowy, murky — the experience of thinking with-and-through the back involves receptivity to the unknown, to that which remains behind, beneath, below habitual registers of meaning. Falling, dropping, surrendering, relaxing, softening, into back-ness — how might the passivity and vulnerability associated with this back-leaning orientation become reinvigorated as an active field of cooperation, a way of being-in-the-world that is radically alive, dynamic, vibrant? Rather than conceiving front/back as a binary relation, how might practising a sense of back-ness enrich a more holistic, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic sense of embodiment as the ground of one’s experience?
Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking has evolved through the three-fold interrelation of various movement, conversation and reading practices addressing: How is the embodied experience of a dorsal orientation? What forms of writing/language can be developed in fidelity to embodied experiences of dorsality? Since January 2021, Brown and Cocker have engaged in live enquiry, investigating the physical experience of dorsal orientation through various movement exercises. These explorations were accompanied by a process of conversation for reflecting with-and-through the embodied experiences of physical practice, often undertaken back-to-back as a way for heightening attention to the experience of listening and being listened to, for allowing the possibility of an emergent “dorsal voicing”. The conversation transcripts are then reactivated and re-organised through various experimental reading practices — conceived as an experimental, improvisational approach to textual generation — where a mode of linguistic sense-making emerges live through the interplay of spoken word, the intersubjective interweaving of two voices within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.
See research exposition here