In June, Katrina Brown and I shared aspects of our research collaboration Dorsal Practices within the frame of Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human (Dartington, UK, 26 – 30 June 2022).
Image: Screen grabs from zoom conversations (back to back)
Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to self, others (human, more than human) and interconnected world. Brown and Cocker’s practical workshop aims to open and share their collaborative research process with attendees, drawing on the dialogue between the two researchers’ distinct expertise as a choreographer and as a writer-artist, by combining body-based, somatic-informed exercises with conversation-based practices and embodied deep listening. Through practice-based exploration this workshop explores: What emerges through a shift of attention away from frontality, verticality, even visuality, towards increased awareness of dorsality, diagonality and listening? How do we nurture radical receptivity towards the experience of not knowing and towards ‘otherness’ within dorsal practices? What new approaches emerge in the intermingling of movement-based ways of feeling-thinking-knowing, and language-based artistic research? Working with simple movement scores [activating touch, peripheral vision, what is glimpsed in the corner of the eye, back-to-back conversation], the workshop will explore axial and surface technologies of the back from a felt perspective, alongside the poetic and philosophical concepts of the dorsal that arise from this working-with and together.
Dorsal Practices – Performance Reading
Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to self, others (human, more than human) and interconnected world. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Allowing, accepting, letting — a back-oriented approach to sense-making involves receptivity to the unknown, to that which remains behind, beneath, below habitual registers of meaning. It foregrounds the 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 are experiences of moving, listening, voicing, even agency, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? How can this tilt — this inclination — towards a receptive mode of dorsal (dis)orientation enable new modes of thinking, perceiving and being-with, nurture more connected and sustainable ways of living and of aliveness, based on the reciprocal and entangled relationship between self and environment? Since January 2021, Brown + Cocker have investigated the physical experience of a dorsal orientation through movement exercises, accompanied by a process of conversation on ZOOM reflecting with-and-through the embodied experiences of physical practice. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting online habits of faciality) the conversations fostered sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the experience of listening and being listened to, allowing for an emergent “dorsal voicing”. This performance reading reactivates the conversation transcripts generated within this process, through an improvised experimental reading, through the intersubjective blending of two voices within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.
More on Dorsal Practices here.
About Sentient Performativities
Sentient Performativities investigates somatic (ie bodily) practices and their role in fostering ecological awareness and interspecies communication. In short, this is about how we feel the world rather than how we think about it. This broad reach into somatic-informed practices seems increasingly essential in view of the growing schism between the human and natural worlds. We invite you to articulate how you viscerally experience the agency of all living things. Reflecting on the emergence of new practices we are interested to both highlight as well as de-centre somatic work from dance and movement disciplines to see how a somatic approach is reaching into other practices. We invite you to explore with us new embodied dialogues between disciplines, opening up as well as defining boundaries, questioning and learning how somatic-informed practices can offer more intimacy in relating to ourselves and to other species, and looking at how this can inform new practices and modes of relationship at large. This symposium seeks delicate antidotes to an increasing dis-embodiment and apathy towards the aliveness of the more than human world and wishes to revoke the prevailing operating system based on dead matter. We propose that eco-somatic practices can contribute towards the cultivation of sensorial capacities that assist our awareness of how we co-evolve within expressive ecologies and that what happens to our environments is inevitably and inexorably happening to us. More here.
- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.
