The last few years my interest has circulated around ideas of (dis)-orientation (low, dorsal): how we orientate as human-animal to self, to others, to an interconnected environment and how to disrupt or tilt the sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendency of contemporary (Western) living and working. In this project I am working with a notion of ‘hesitancy’ as another way of disrupting linearity and straightforwardness. I am curious in how low, dorsal, hesitant movement practices bring the senses (hearing, sight, touch, gravity) into another mode of cooperation with one another and seem to put us more amid our surrounding environments. And so other things, animals, insects (moths, dung beetles, glow-worms, bats) are seeping into my practice, from the side, peripherally catching my attention, particularly in relation to how they orientate to twilight and night and how their activities are disturbed and threatened by artificial light.

From exploratory research in residence at PAF (Performing Arts Forum, St.Erme, France) in Autumn 2022, in which I was working-with hesitancy as a choreographic entry point into the body, a diagram emerged and is operating as a kind of framework for working on the project: the words ‘turn’, ‘amid’, ‘pattern’ are circulating around the word ‘hesitancy’.

I am thinking of hesitancy as a space of possibility: dubiousness, this way-that way, dither as a shimmer, a split-second suspension, a poetic blur. Hesitancy too as a state of poised-to and per-haps-ness, a useful alternative to certainty, frontality, straight-forwardness. Distinct from ‘doubt’ as weighing down, blocking action, ‘hesitancy’ as a light, playful and vibrant force which allows us to let things in (large and micro scale) and be in the midst of it all.

I am curious how language, specifically words, inhabit and resonate from the body and can fold back into the body’s observations and physical practices, how these words open philosophical poetic landscapes that rub against each other, overlap and spark. I am playing with the philosophical poetic edges of writing (through the body).

In a residency Hospitalfield Arbroath Scotland Summer 2023 I started to work on a series of text-image and sound-voice pieces exploring voice-sonic recordings and editing and that will together slowly, maybe, umm, perhaps form a hybrid published work, Light Hesitates: turn, amid, pattern.

this restless body
this unsettled body
this dithering glitching body
this backward meandering body
this hesitant body
this sound caressed body
this body lying low
this nervy body
       spinning body
this reaching out to maybe touch body
this on edge body
this body poised

this dubious body
this amoeboid body
this swaying wavering body
this strangely unfamiliar body
this breathing at times breathless body
this almost in sync body
       slightly off-kilter body
this binaurally delayed listening body
this curious body
this body with

KB 2023