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Unfurling. Momentum. Flat. Receptivity. Sideness. Operation. Resisting. Falling in. Vibration. Feedbacking. Dropping back. Continuum. Wrapping. Twists. Activation. Opening movement. Roll. Relation. Asymmetrical. Tuning into. Slowing. Dropping into. Going this way. Appearances. Transition between. Something about. Releasing. Uncertainty. Mutual. Cutting off. Unknown. Edges. Upness and frontness. Quality of listening. Oblique diagonal. Below and behind. Heavier. Playing field. Stripping out. Force. Transition. Dip of the head. The sideness. Of falling in. Asymmetrical. Soft belly. Convoluted. Blur. Cooperation. Awareness. Resonance. Sideness. Bending. Really try. Just collapse. Cordon off. Slowing down. Thinking breath. Complex. Curiosity. Vulnerable. Horizontal forces. A field of cooperation. Back of my neck. Slip into. Deeply affect. Back and behind. Presence. Eyes scanning. Supporting hand. Sides. Kind of experience. Indirect. Resting in. Periphery. Blurring. Listening. Dissolving. Shadowy spaces. Belowness and backness. Behindness. Beneathness.
Dorsal Practices
An artistic collaboration between Katrina Brown & Emma Cocker exploring since 2021 how a back-leaning orientation and awareness can shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world.
Dorsal Practices — is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring a notion of dorsality or back-leaning in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. We work with somatic practices and experimental language-based practices (back-to-back conversation, transcription, improvisational reading). We are asking how does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? how a dorsal orientation can activate a letting go, releasing, even de-privileging of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — and 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 backwards-leaning orientation support an 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?
We are documenting our circular looping processes of practice on Research Catalogue https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3087871/3087872
And shared through workshop and presented at: Sentient Performativities Dartington UK May 2022: SAR 14th International Conference on Artistic Research in Trondheim Norway April 2023: Creatical Ideolectics (online symposium Music and Performing Arts University Vienna/Lancaster University) Dec 2024: Convocations II/SAR/SIG Tilburg 2024.
We were also excited to publish a chapter, Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World, in Humanities 2024, 13(2), 63, You can read it here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/2/63
In two residencies 2024 in Totnes, Devon and Exchange Place, Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield, we started to work on an upcoming artist publication with funding from Nottingham Trent and Falmouth University 2025