Dorsal Practices by Emma Cocker

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 orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an 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. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

Dorsal Practices unfolds through practice-based exploration involving the three-fold interrelation of various movement, conversation and reading practices for addressing: How is the embodied experience of a dorsal orientation? What forms of writing/language can be developed in fidelity to these embodied experiences of dorsality? Since January 2021, Brown and Cocker have engaged in a live enquiry for investigating the physical experience of back-ness, exploring a dorsal orientation through exercises including lying down, axial rotation, transition from back-ness into movement. 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 transcripts from these conversations are reactivated and re-organised through various experimental reading practices where a mode of linguistic sense-making — conceived as an experimental approach to textual production — emerges live through the interplay of spoken word, two voices interweaving within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.

PHASE I | PROCESS/PRACTICE

JAN - OCT 2021

* BACK-NESS: IN LYING

* BACK-NESS: IN ROTATING

* BACK-NESS: IN TRANSITIIONING

* BACK-NESS: IN MOVING-SHAPING

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* PHASE I: DISTILLATION

PHASE II | PROCESS/PRACTICE

JAN - NOVEMBER 2022

* EXPLORING SCORES/PROMPTS I

* EXPLORING SCORES/PROMPTS II