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Nov 22 2008 / Choreography & Writing
I was reminded recently of how intimate the connection is between choreography and writing. In order to build works, conceptualize them, generate new material, writing must be an integrated activity. It comes as fragments of thought, as poetry, as analysis, as personal notation code, as script/synopsis. It is always there feeding and flourishing movement's dimensions of time, space, weight and quality.
I've been having some strange parallel experiences as I fight to manage the ongoing creative process with its documentation. At one end I am trying to go back to the project's beginnings in 2006 to "catch up" to this point. It's generative as it makes me think closely as to how my thoughts about house as a cultural politics and way of being have developed not by myself, but always in relation to others' knowledge or lack thereof of Chicago house. But, it's straining on the brain as I try to analyze the past contents while moving forward with the new. Part of this will be resolved once I literally do catch up. We'll see as to the rest.
Anyway, I have totally digressed.
So, all this documentation - locating notes, ideas, fragments and building on them, connecting them, organizing them - is much like the synthesis of field work, field writing and writing up the field experience. There is action (the field work), there is reflection (the field writing) and there is a meta-reflection (writing up the field experience). Similar to the creative process with the ethnographic process, one needs to think in small pieces, paying attention to singular happenings and then to begin to link them, group them, fill out their meaning by connecting these individual events into a networked whole which eventually becomes the backbone of the cultural code(s) in question. But you can only achieve synthesis/cultural meaning - you can only translate embodiment to the written field narrative/analysis - by going through the muddy hands on intimate work of relating to people and contexts whether in studios or the field.
I've been having some strange parallel experiences as I fight to manage the ongoing creative process with its documentation. At one end I am trying to go back to the project's beginnings in 2006 to "catch up" to this point. It's generative as it makes me think closely as to how my thoughts about house as a cultural politics and way of being have developed not by myself, but always in relation to others' knowledge or lack thereof of Chicago house. But, it's straining on the brain as I try to analyze the past contents while moving forward with the new. Part of this will be resolved once I literally do catch up. We'll see as to the rest.
Anyway, I have totally digressed.
So, all this documentation - locating notes, ideas, fragments and building on them, connecting them, organizing them - is much like the synthesis of field work, field writing and writing up the field experience. There is action (the field work), there is reflection (the field writing) and there is a meta-reflection (writing up the field experience). Similar to the creative process with the ethnographic process, one needs to think in small pieces, paying attention to singular happenings and then to begin to link them, group them, fill out their meaning by connecting these individual events into a networked whole which eventually becomes the backbone of the cultural code(s) in question. But you can only achieve synthesis/cultural meaning - you can only translate embodiment to the written field narrative/analysis - by going through the muddy hands on intimate work of relating to people and contexts whether in studios or the field.
isislady |
Latest page update: made by isislady
, Nov 22 2008, 8:57 AM EST
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