Developing Skript


Writing-Dancing:

Developing Skript

This most recent project extends our ongoing work as and with dance artists, to focus on writing-dancing with the public.

Developed from the premise that the dance writings that the public most often come across are marketing materials, programme notes and critics reviews. While writing from within academic contexts tends to remain within a small circulation. In both contexts, while intend to elucidate, they are often obtuse, riddled in language that is off putting and laden by value judgment.

This project thereby seeks to find alternative modes of writing and offer dance writing as an experiential encounter.

Our Questions:
How can an audience engage with a different mode of dance writing?
How to write dancing in a manner akin to choreography?
How to engage the lived experience of the body?
How to make an invitation to a process (rather than take a didactic approach)?
How to frame the encounter in a mode sensitive to the processes of dance writing as informed by the articulation strategies as we have developed in the Choreographic Lab?

Our Tentative Answers:
Developing a micro installation as a context in which to write dancing we have developed a work in which encompasses a series of features:

Mode of writing:  Narrative, playful, poetic
Experience and the body:  an approach which emphasizes writing of/from the felt sense and the body, drawing on somatic practices.
Holding a space: One to one, simplicity, scale, intimacy
Access: open invitation to sit, flexible duration
Collaboration: as a mode through which to support and reveal the unexpected
Improvisation: writing operating as somatically based movement improvisation, writing with an immediacy and with only limited correction
Self-Other relationship: drawing in authentic movement practices in which we acknowledge and foreground the experience of self whilst engaging with/watching other.