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In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking 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 orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds 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 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?
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Within this collaborative project, we have explored ways for sharing our research within conference and symposia through the live activation and testing of various ‘dorsal practices’, specifically through the three-fold interrelation of various movement, conversation and reading practices for addressing: How is the embodied experience of a dorsal orientation? What forms of writing/language can be developed in fidelity to these embodied experiences of dorsality?