TRACE: articulating improvisation

I’d like to share a few traces with you… Traces of a dance practice… Traces of memories, half-forgotten, half rubbed over… Traces of bodily pathways, of emotional resonances, of geometrical conditioning… Traces reframed in moving image, writing and sound. This performed presentation shares the practices encountered and developed in the movement research project TRACE. The project asked: What are the ontology’s of solo improvisation in dance? And, how might improvisation, and the experiences of it, be articulated and documented? This led to questions such as: What kinds of documentation and/or critical writing are appropriate to improvisation? What forms might be able to articulate the irreproducibility of improvisation? How can the body be (re)instated? How might the sensory, physical, subjective and material qualities of improvisation be expressed? How can kinaesthetic pleasure resonate across different forms? How can a reader engage with the experience? Scholarly and poetic, pedagogic and playful, this presentation implicitly challenges conventional modes of academic analysis and discourse, wherein performance is subjected to the edifice of the knowledge machine. For here the sensuous sits alongside the critical, and the conceptual is intermingled with the physical, providing new perspectives and new models through which to articulate the movement research practice that is improvisation