* PUBLISHED ARTICLE HERE

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Dorsal Practices 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, and world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, or of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing or even de-privileging of the 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 and affirmatively resistant modes of engagement, encounter, involvement? How are the experiences of listening, voicing, even 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 of reaching towards destination, telos or goal. Its knowledges emerge obliquely, indirectly, tangentially, from the sides. Shadowy and 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?