Dorsal Practices: Vibrating with the Hum of the World
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition presents recordings of a live improvisatory performative reading practice activated as part of the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. This performative reading practice was activated as a way of generating the textual component of a journal article by Brown and Cocker entitled 'Dorsal Practices — Vibrating with the Hum of the World', submitted to the Special Issue ‘On Scores’, Performance Research Journal. The article itself is comprised of textual fragments that have been distilled from the transcript of this reading practice.
Dorsal Practices
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Initiated in 2020, 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?