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?

PART 1

EXPLORATION PERIOD: February - March 2022

During this phase, we re-engaged with our notebooks, memories and recording conversations from the previous PHASE of practice research, in order to identify and explore the potential for prompts/scores therein. What did we actually do? What were we actually exploring in practice? Identified scores/prompts/exercises were also added to the record of previous activity.

PART 2

EXPLORATION DATE: 24.03.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration during which we revisited the transcript material from the whole of the previous period of exploration, seeing if we could 'extract' prompt, cues, triggers, questions, provocations within that material for future explorations. Some of those extracts can be found towards the right side of this page.

STRUCTURE OF PRACTICE

Speaker is not visible (masks camera with tape), listener has back turned, active listening.

0. Arrival (lying down or movement practice) [10 mins]

1. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

2. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

3. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

4. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

'SCORE' FOR CONVERSATION PRACTICE

- Take a moment to tune into the chosen object/focus of exploration – this could involve a period of recollection, or looking back at notes, sketches, wordings that relate to the object/focus of exploration, or by noting/drawing/diagramming.

- Connect and try to stay connected with your direct experience.

- Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say – thinking through speaking.

- Feel free to speak in single words, partial phrases, half sentences, and thought fragments.

- Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment – for wrestling with, stumbling and falling over one’s words.

- Consider different speeds and rhythms. Allow for silence.

- Approach listening to the other as an aesthetic practice.

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