Performing the line: imaginal writing and line drawings

In a series of re-enactments, I explore the relationship between performing, drawing and writing in close collaboration with children and professional dancers. In the first part, I start from the draw writings (also referred to as play writing) of young children. I explore the tight relationship between drawing and writing on the one hand, and the process of sensorial (non-linguistic) sense-making on the other hand. Professional dancers and children engage in the act of imaginal writing, and through a series of re-enactments, I try to gain an embodied understanding of how both drawing and writing can be seen as gestural re-enactments of the line (Ingold, 2016). In the second part of this artistic research, we continue our exploration of the line. Through a re-enactment of Richard Long’s artwork ‘A line made by Walking’ (1967), we engage with the line in a performative way. The linearity (straightness) of the line is disrupted by discontinuous movements. Finally, we conclude that living lines are open-ended - they are laid down along a path of movement.

Step 1: the spontaneous play-writings of my  my daughter (at that time 4 to 5 years old) who writes imaginal letters to me. At the age of 4-5,  she is at the threshold of literacy, still a stranger, not yet an insider, since the writing is entirely entangled with the drawing. Meaning is not produced in  linguistic terms but is expressed through tactile/sensorial inscriptions.

Step 3: imaginal writing exercise with young children (3 to 5 years old). Amsterdam: May 20, 2021. We are sitting on the ground, surrounded by sheets of papers and felt-pens. I invite the children to write an imaginal letter to their mother, without using real words. The youngest girls start immediately, with no hesitations, affects and intensities are expressed in their immediacy. The oldest girl gives it some thought and consideration. She picks her colours carefully (blue and pink) and then she writes her name, together with her mam’s name, surrounded by pink hearts and a blue carriage. The four-year-old boy is confused. ‘But I cannot write,’ he says. I explain that it doesn’t matter, that we pretend to write, that we write with curves and lines. He is still confused. He finds himself in-between the drawing and the (not-yet) writing, a place somewhere in the midst, a place of uncertainty, oscillation and indecisiveness.

Drawing and writing are not opposites. They both can be seen as varieties of graphism. Ingold (2016, p.129) states: “There can be no picture […] that cannot also be read, and no written text that cannot be looked at.” Both (drawing and writing) are made up of characters that move in-between signs (representing units of language) and graphs (visuals).  Every drawing, every writing moves “between ‘pure visuality’ and ‘legible systems of signs’ – which pull in opposite directions” (Ingold, 2016, p.131). Even more, drawings and writings are not projections of an internal state, as Rawson (in Ingold, 2016) would like us to believe. First of all, drawings and writings are never complete. They are unfinished, always in a state of becoming. Second, the lines and curves are not confined to the boundaries of bodies, but inside and outside are deeply entangled. In the drawing and writing a world is brought forth, not in a pre-conceived way but unfolding while the hand inscribes itself on the paper.  

PART I: Performing the Line, An Exercise into Imaginal Writing

Step 4:

Another incident of imaginal writing, this time an imaginary letter exchange between me and my daughter (who is now fifteen years old). Amsterdam: May 21, 2021. After a short instruction (from my side), we get to work.  Hers takes longer than mine. We exchange letters and the reading starts. My reading only includes timbre and rhythm. For my daughter, however, a whole world is invented on paper. She declares that my imaginal writing is about ‘a wounded pigeon that I found on our holiday in the Alps and that I cared for’. My telling, is a telling in sounds, melody, timbre and rhythm. Her telling finds a way back to the semiotic world, to words as carriers of linguistic meaning. She is capable of integrating two apparently distinct worlds, by giving words to what was originally expressed in pure twists, loops and curves. My daughter crosses the border between the visual and the semiotic apparently easy. For me, this is not the case. Once I have chosen a side (the semiotic or the sensorial), I tend to stick to that side. 

Step 2: imaginal writing exercise with professional artistis, during  the ADiE (Artistic Doctorates in Europe)  intensive research week in Chichester.Together with Claire French (choreographer/dance educator), Paula Guzzanti (dance scholar/performer) and Alex Hoare (glass artist), we explore the notion of imaginal writing (see table 2). We play-write on big sheets of paper: we engage in the act of writing without producing actual words. We are practicing and inventing a kinetic/kinaesthetic language, a practice of lines, curves, curls, spirals and contours. We follow the movement of the hand, its trajectory, how it travels across and presses itself into the materiality of the paper. This imaginal writing is open-ended, non-hierarchical and non-representational.