I
These two voices — moving back and forth. Passing back and forth — offering and receiving. Sharing vocabularies — there is an energetic dimension.
To be prepared to drop (into) something — being receptive to what might arise. This space in the middle — of cooperation or participation that is neither being in control nor being out of control. This middle space of trust — of trust and vulnerability.
Entering backwards, not knowing, holding a space open. Entering a space backwards — not as a method or technique but to explore things in a dorsal way. It doesn’t mean that you know what is going to happen.
Ways of working with language — moving back and forth from the body. What the conversation brings, what the body brings. How to voice and listen at the same time. Reading, voicing and listening — the one moving into the other.
A space is held open. We are resting on the materials, yes, to rest upon materials. Being able to lean on materials. It is unpredictable, yet rests on what has come before. There is a rhythm and speed to it, like stepping into a river.
Time passing and words spoken, unfolding. To unfold until it stops — letting go or surrendering into the structure of the score. Coming back to single words — there isn’t a demand for making sense. Suspending the requisites of logic or of argument or of clarity. Yet something is unfolding — there is a sense-making.
Speaking words which chronologically might have had no prior relation. Sense-making arising through the bringing together of fragments. The organisation of this sense is not always grammatical — it finds its own way through. More sense-ful — to enter this flow of exchange, a river of words.
Our bodies becoming vehicles for letting a language arise. Between movement practices and voicing practices — the one flows into the other. A feedback loop, a different kind of feedbacking.
Different activities that are happening simultaneously — how to navigate and negotiate, how many foci can one hold? Agility in being able to shift, as if moving with the changing currents of the sea or a river. Knowing how to navigate the swell.
More like passing time or spending time and sharing time. A different kind of listening, a different kind of engaging. A different kind of speaking, a different kind of communication.
Temporal coordinates can feel slippery. A sense of circularity — we are working with texts that have a linear unfolding but engaging them in a non-linear way. It is fragmentary, it is looping, it is returning, sometimes saying again and again. This does something with the material itself and with time. Temporal confusion, the loopiness of time. Non-linear, returning — a kind of murmuring.
Sharing and witnessing — of a shared language, of a direct experience. The intensity of the languaging is not always to do with what the words are saying. Oceanic, watery, this watery fluid sense of language — words and phrases coming to the surface and then disappearing again. A different way of languaging — not to do with clarity as such, feeling closer to blood, or fluid, or breath.
A language that is not always about the meaning of the words themselves, but the contact between the words, felt as direct experience. Not quite opaque — an in-between state of sense-making that is neither clear nor opaque but somehow in this zone in between: greyish, murky, milky.
II
What does it mean to come back to? Not to follow through, not to exhaust — but to come back to. The gesture of coming back to something has a circling dimension. Leaving something, letting it settle. Not to force something, not trying to force something, but to come back to. A gesture of coming back to practices or coming back to scores or coming back to movement fragments or refrains — to just keep coming back.
Coming back — and reconnecting in the coming back. Returning to something — how consciously that can happen, how possible is that? And what is it that’s returning?
Returning to the score — to drop into the back and see what happens. Some things will have disappeared, later they might re-emerge. There are these levels of possibility and of consciousness, and sometimes of frustration: of having lost it, or of not being able to return.
Trusting, trusting in time, trusting there is time, trusting it can happen later, or it might not. Trusting — not really trying to return to something exactly but to the possibility. Not trying to grab hold of something, but just returning to the practice and seeing what will come from that.
To keep coming back to this sense of returning. And what is it that’s returning in this return? What is it that I’m returning to in this voicing? Returning to the direct experience of practising, a specific event of practising — to come back to those experiences, looping back to a direct experience. Not to circle out into abstraction.
The sense of returning is not only to do with human agency. It is not only like I am returning, but also that the practice returns. It’s not that I am seeking it or that I am returning to it, but there’s something of a practice or a sensibility of a practice or an attitude that returns, that comes about or, yes, emerges. Where is the agency in this returning? It feels as if it’s not my decision somehow, or not only my decision.
The practice itself has the capacity to come back into experience. Sometimes a practice returns unexpectedly in a different context or a different situation. Is it me that’s making that decision?
To return — you go back, you come back. But the way we are talking, it’s not linear at all. It’s more of a looping. Not to step back or reverse but turning over and over, returning through circling, to come about, to come around. Coming around again, coming back to. It’s not only us that have the agency to return.
There’s a circling, a looping, and the chance of things resurfacing, re-emerging or emerging differently. The surprise of returning to or coming back to a situation. Something re-emerges unexpectedly and the surprise in how this might feel — both familiar and unfamiliar.
A small shift rewires and disorients, reconfigures my thinking in a way. Like the gesture of being spun around and having to try to find myself in my environment once more. The threads of thought that were there are not quite where they were before. To stay with that in this turn.
There’s something of my attention being taken back. The attention drops further back into body. Into — it falls back into the body-ness of the body. The sense of noticing and registering and voicing from this present sense as it is unfolding, but also the recollection of previous practising. This temporal experience feels somehow indeterminate in a way.
This gap or difference between repeating and returning — the taste or the sensitivity of those two ideas feels different. Coming back to certain practices doesn’t feel like repetition — it feels like returning. To dwell in that difference and get closer to what this quality of returning is, if not repeating. Or even, what is it in repeating that is not quite the same as returning?
To do with time? With repeating — it feels like stepping into a future space somehow, a directionality that is moving forwards. Even if redoing or revisiting — the direction is one of moving forwards, sensitivity of direction towards a forward orientation.
With returning — there is a curve, a curve back. In relation to time — but not about the past. Returning — neither a movement forwards in the direction of the arrow of time nor a step back (in time) to revisit the past.
This stretchiness of time, the slowing of time, or dispensing of a temporal frame altogether. To suspend or hold open, to return, to just stay with. Maybe that is a different way of thinking about it — to stay with something, to extend the duration of, to become open to the duration of.
How is it to listen, to be listening? To open into another dimension of noticing, noticing how the body reconfigures. The relation of repetition and returning. Returning opens a different space, even going back to a same space, opens another space. A space in a space in a space — unfolding of other spaces.
Unfolding, overlapping — a different experience of time. Repeating can feel more like an action of making or of a making happen, trying to achieve something. To return — no pressure to remember. What is that gesture, what is that move — a reaching out that opens the situation to inhabit, to be in for a while. An opening, a capacity of openness — towards receptive listening.
Not to search for — just noticing what comes back, what returns. How movements or attitudes return. To take attention to the back, just to take the attention back. And the ways that thoughts come back or return. How much is it that I am returning to a thought or that thought returns almost by its own accord? It feels reciprocal — or it is hard to tell whether it is me that returns to thought or whether it is the thought that returns.
Dorsal practising — leaning towards, yet allowing the thoughts to return, surfacing or bubbling up. Liquid — a very liquid sense of thinking. Dropping in and dropping out — and how dropping out feels a spatial manoeuvre. There is a circle of attention — dropping out is horizontal, a step to the sides. To drop in is vertical. To drop in, to drop down, a shift in register. Yes, to drop in — I am falling in, becoming immersed. I am diving in. This liquid sense of thinking and thinking not being separated from the body.
III
Trying to revisit, seeing what would come. Starting to move, what returns by itself. Other things that I was trying to get in touch with, but that wouldn’t return. Returning to patterns or sensations. How the body is shaped by bringing attention to patterning and pulses, these rhythmic patterns.
Giving space — to not try to find something again. Trying to return to something, the idea or a memory … and recognising the elusiveness of that. The memory of sensation can get in the way of re-finding. To practise in a way where things can be re-found — it might happen the next day or maybe never. Or maybe it returns — recognising it in a different way, something has shifted.
All these nuances of returning and re-finding and things being re-found. Some things return quickly, they are embedded traces in the body, you just need to find the right switch and they are there again. Returning to something in relation to the body — what the body can remember or understand. What part does memory play, body memory?
This physical sense of letting patterns return or re-finding things, or re-familiarising, things becoming familiar again. This returning is not backwards, it is not linear. A kind of resurfacing — it is around. This around-ness of the turn — this being in the midst, experienced in the body, not having step back or retrace one’s steps.
The nuance of returning, the agency of returning. And what it means to return to something. And the sense of effort when I am trying or striving to return to something, there is a trying or a striving. Or when something is returning or recurring or re-emerging or reappearing again.
How to activate a practice, or how to be activated by a practice, which could be a different way of thinking about it. This sense of the practice returning, allowing the practice to return. In the moment, to trust, to allow a practice to return or a movement to return or a sensibility to return.
What the conditions need to be — what conditions are conducive? A sense of space and of openness to allow for the possibility of something to return — a different way of being in the world, a different rhythm, a different quality of time, a different quality of attention, a quality of patience. And when these qualities are not present — noticing the obstacles, or of trying to return to something with force and will.
Working with the body — it is more a letting go than a doing. Something about this dorsal quality of letting go. It can feel like nothing is happening. Not to try to make something happen. To trust that something is happening. Trying to hold on to it can stop the flow of what is emerging, appearing. To trust in embodied practices. And the kinds of words that emerge from this practice, the words almost emerge by themselves.
Dorsal practice as a means of letting go, no, not as a means, but as an attitude. Practices are cultivated towards a certain quality of living and of aliveness, and yes, a reorientation of living, or a reorganisation of life. There are different things at stake, and there are different durations.
We let our lives seep into this, and it seeps into our lives. Yet this reorganisation of living takes time, it takes a long, long time. Traces and patterns and habits, undoing and unmaking and unlearning. There is a seepage in this practice that happens over time, an extended sense of time. We have allowed things to take time. This patience, this quietness, this deep listening.
Coming back to the word return, and all these different senses of returning. Flipping something over and over, to see it in a different way. Turning it, literally handling something in my hands, turning it over, looking at it this way and then that way. Then maybe putting it down and stepping back. And in this act of returning to it, retouching it, you can move beyond the obviousness.
How is the ethical orientation of these dorsal practices? In forward-leaning moments, it feels like this “me”, this “I”, is pressing into the world, or leaning into the world, or intervening into the world — the feeling of separation between myself and the rest of the world.
With dorsal practices, the felt sense of the world is more present in my experience, so that line between — the line of separation — becomes less distinct somehow. That capacity to just dwell in the experience, rather than to try to press through or get through or push a way through life in a way. To just be in life and to be supported.
Disabling the desire to get somewhere else. A forward-leaning tendency is tied into a desire to be somewhere other than the experience that is unfolding. The shift towards the dorsal is accepting of that situation. And in accepting, it opens out. The edge between myself and the rest of the world becomes much softer somehow, experience less contoured in terms of myself trying to get somewhere.
Leaning but without gripping. Refiguring how the body is engaging in the world. The eyes are relieved of having to go forwards, of having to go anywhere. That pleasure or that joy just comes from not really thinking. No, not not thinking, but not a certain kind of thinking that is to do with being elsewhere.
The dorsal is a stepping back, or a leaning back. Attuning to the vibrancy of the moment, to the particular alivenesses there. Being taken out of that cycle of reaching towards, striving towards. It even feels quite atemporal, outside of time. It lasts for so long and then it is almost as if chronology comes back. And then that desire to get somewhere again returns. A very different register of being — this sense of interlude.
And how we are shaping — and how we are shaped by — our own movements. How we perceive and how we put ourselves into our own bodies and into the world.
There is this depth, this diving or dropping into. Not a physical space in the sense of flesh and bones, but more like a kind of psychic space that you could drop into. Dropping, dropping through the body, behind the spine — and the spaciousness that is opening there. Dropping into the depths of one’s self, yet there is a space which opens up that is more than the physical space of the body.
Coming into this space of the back, from the back — the inner body behind the spine. The resource of spaciousness that is there. These two kinds of spaciousness — a spaciousness that opens out into the world through a participation with other forces in the world beyond the body, this feeling of movement as you are leaning into the wind, or leaning back, but also this spaciousness that has an interiority to it, of the more-than-material space behind the spine.
IV
Intermingling of voices and thoughts — being able to read, speak and listen to one’s own voice and the voice of the other, whilst acknowledging someone else’s listening and the complexity of that. The language creates a space of listening, a space for reflecting, a space for thinking, a space for connecting.
Coming into the practice as a way of coming back to an experience. I was searching for it in a set of ideas or concrete thoughts — and there’s nothing there, there’s nothing here. I cannot recollect. There is nothing to grasp or gather or capture. And as you’re talking, I’ve got my eyes closed, and I’m looking away — I’m there in the space again.
A different way of reconnecting with an experience — I was searching for it in the wrong places. Approaching it in the wrong way, trying to capture it, trying to hold onto it, trying to somehow take hold of it. It is through the practice that it comes back, that it will come back. Not to try to access the experience as if it is already there, but to enter from the back and then it’s there.
Loops of experience and understanding. Let’s see what happens, let’s see what happens in the moment. It opens up a different time. This listening and speaking at the same time, and the occasionality of that, the present tense of that. Re-meeting of the material and letting the material speak.
All these competing flows of energy — trying to make them sing together. A certain quality of concentration that’s involved in that — it cannot be too focused. To be open to all these interferences from the sides.
Focusing with openness, a concentrated capacity for distraction. To focus without getting too fixed. Scanning, letting, rather than trying to re-find. Feeling where that material has come from, to feel the time-space that material holds. Yes, something reveals itself.
Cyclical — to feel the folds and circles and coming back, returnings. The cyclical folding of the present, revealing and unfolding. Like layers, like onion layers. Layers and layers — peeling and revealing, a cyclic unpeeling. Re-finding or rediscovering the material in speaking and listening of the other’s voice, and how the material gets renegotiated somehow.
Renegotiating the variables — there is a fluidity between speaking and listening. So many things in motion — circling and cyclical. There are these two movements of circling — one on a horizontal register and one on a vertical register. The vertical movement — the temporal cycle of coming back to, like returning to in time. Coming back. Or things coming back.
There is this kind of looping. Feedback loops as well. Something re-emerging. And the relationship between something re-emerging or ‘me’ returning to it. Is something emerging or am I returning? I can’t really tell.
Somewhere in the middle — in this coming back and coming back and coming back. But not quite in linear time — there’s this quality of looping over and over again. To let something come — not so much returning to something but circling around. This notion of circling — against the violence of linear thought, the violence of constructing thought in the linear way. Circling or meandering thought — touching upon.
It is more indirect. Swaying around something, hovering over something — like the eyes hovering on the page and waiting for the words to come.
A sensitivity that’s to do with not trying to get there too directly — to allow for the circling, a dreamy oozy kind of space that might seem formless. Yes, formlessness, but still being able to register or recognise a quality of thinking — very formless and soft but still there.
Swimming around in this soft thought space. This intermingling — a kind of thinking or languaging that is emerging in this space in-between. We’re reading these fragments that are themselves in between our voices. There is the originary intermingling in the transcripts and the intermingling in the reading. This intermingling of voice, intermingling between listening, speaking and thinking.
A soft dance between thinking and listening. A peculiar listening space, or language space, opens up. Soft slippages — a soft amorphous space but very precise at the same time. How to honour that soft formless space, and at the same time bring into some kind of form? There is a density. More like a woven web.
Instead of speaking to somebody, there is a pool of words that someone is invited into. There is a pool of language and voice and sound, that you could drift in and out of. Watery, fluid, welling, bubbling — yes, welling feels closer to it. It’s not like me doing the thinking, the thinking is happening. Thoughts are swirling around and bubbling up and coming around and emerging and disappearing, cloudy, murky.
I get close and it drifts away and then it comes back. I was listening. I was remembering. Your voice is swirling and curling around — I am not able to grasp everything. You seem to have put me somewhere, into a wordless murky space. I’m in something.
There are memories coming around me, they are not vivid, they are more like sensations. Rather than communicating, there is absorption through the whole body. To keep coming back to the material — a kind of estrangement, seeing it anew. Sometimes the originary context shines through but at other times it’s like I’ve never seen that word or line before or never heard that before. In combination, it has a different meaning or different resonance that I’d never noticed. Exhaustion opens up to a completely different possibility.
V
This sense of wrestling with the material and how to meet with it in a way — more about listening with it, this alongside-ness. Not wanting something from it.
An exercise in listening. How it is to listen, what kind of listening is required? A dorsal voicing that does not accumulate, does not build towards argument. The form of the voicing itself might disallow or disrupt a certain kind of sense-making that is looking for cohesion or evolution of sense, something that can be discerned.
Shift of preposition: from listening to, to listening with or listening alongside. With and alongside — there is more of a dorsal sense of around-ness, of co-existence. Inhabiting the same space and time. Not listening to get something but listening to experience. It opens a different relationship to the body, to space, to time.
Not trying to tell something or say something or communicate something as such. There is almost nothing there to hold, it doesn’t accumulate. There is something about activating a different kind of listening, it calls for a different kind of listening.
There are these fields of practice: of voicing, and listening, and moving. This hard-to-graspness. Soft enquiry, soft listening. Holding open a space. This dwelling and inhabiting and moving and listening — the capacity to be.
Listening, less about attending to the content, but staying with the feel. Chains of thoughts — not sequential or logical. Sometimes one of the phrases resonates — and I hear it, I really hear it, or I hear it as if I have never really heard it before.
Yes, this co-presence between the act of listening and the voicing, or the moving and the voicing — a constellation of practices happening. A dorsal listening — which isn’t listening to, isn’t trying to glean information.
Slipping into a dorsal listening — listening to something, to someone and a sense of listening to oneself or of being listened to. This listening with or listening alongside includes oneself in the listening. It is not only me listening. A more inclusive sense of listening.
Returning or re-confirming or re-finding — knowing something or having experienced something doesn’t always stay, it needs to be re-found or re-experienced to be kept alive. Re-experiencing.
A not-facing form of listening — as a way of witnessing, of really listening. Really listening — what do I mean by really listening? Not being too forceful — finding a sweet spot between turning in and turning away. Between turning in and turning away — a kind of soft attention, not a direct glance.
This way of listening, coming from the back. There is a kind of intimacy, a kind of intimacy with the environment and intimacy with oneself. Intimacy — a closeness with things. Open to the complexity of what is happening — this dorsal practising opens up the poly, the multi, the around-ness, rather than a single direction or focus. Recognising this mutually supportive dimension, the co-presence of languaging and bodying.
It is not only a language-based enquiry and not only a body-based enquiry but the enmeshing of these two modes of thinking. The one and the other are not distinct — something emerges in their meeting. In the coming back, coming back and letting go. Different practices folding into each other — softening the edges, the edges of movement, the edges of language.
VI
Words enter the body, washing over me, dropping in, falling in. Exhaustion can create another kind of opening — a kind of vulnerability and fragility in that exhaustion.
What the voices are saying beyond their texture. Absorbing language through the body, through the skin. Texture resonating. The content is not always graspable — words passing through me. The feeling of language, the tone, the feeling tone. A way of becoming in touch again.
Content that feels mercurial, liquid. Letting it wash through. To listen — over and over, again and again, each time landing differently, feeling differently. Vibration, resonance — listening not only through the ears but through the skin, through the whole body. Not having to recall — but really to listen.
What comes to the surface differently? Voice as support — resting upon the voicing. A support to rest upon — to lay one’s thoughts. Something that has come from the body is folding back into the body. Folds and circles — this is another kind of sense.
The voice curls around, one voice curling around the other. Circling, cycling, entering in a different way. Listening to the single words and short phrases mingling, becoming more enmeshed.
Taking time and taking of time. You don’t have to think the words, the words are there to be felt. Forgetting everything that was spoken, that was listened to — it’s all gone. Not being able to recollect it or not being able to hold it.
To recognise the desire for capture, to want to distil, to make sense of — and yet each time it slips away. Language, fluid, airlike — breathing. First, coming. The feeling of the phrasing, a felt tone or sense. There is a kind of cadence, of one voice moving into another. The one bleeds into the other, the one merges into the other, the one becomes the other.
No feeling in the eyes that I was searching. Resistance in the words — they’re not hiding and they’re not not saying. They leave a trace but there is no solid body, it is not a solid thing. Yet something that has been experienced. Like air and bubbles, a language of air.
This languaging that never accumulates into something that can be taken away or that refuses to be summarised or précised. All these distilled hours of speaking, yet nothing can be taken from it. A languaging in the immediacy of connection — yet it doesn’t last, it can’t be held, it can’t be captured. Nothing remains.
Re— as in back. To re-turn or change back. Again, anew, once more — again, again. Restoring (to a former state) and at the same time undoing. To turn.
A turning back. A coming back. Again, anew, once more — again, again […]
This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. The original transcript material was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and May 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a dorsal turn. Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re— become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. Navigating this exposition, the video extracts and written texts can be engaged sequentially. Alternatively, the reader-listener might traverse the materials horizontally, diagonally, as well as vertically, or else generate unforeseen possibilities of sense-making through the (inter)play of overlapping voices. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself (presented to the left) as the central focus within this exposition, however, in what follows we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, alongside reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.
A Dorsal Enquiry
Dorsal — an adjective meaning of or pertaining to the back. A dorsal turn — that which involves turning towards the back. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. We are interested in how a dorsal orientation might support the releasing and de-privileging of the 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. We ask: How is the embodied experience of a dorsal orientation? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, or of turning one’s back on, how might a dorsal orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation, unfold possibilities for alternative and affirmatively resistant modes of participation and involvement? What emerges through a shift of attention from frontality, verticality, even visuality, towards increased awareness of dorsality, diagonality and listening? Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning.
Turning Towards the Back
Rather than being propelled forwards from initiating questions towards some teleological goal or conclusion, our research process proceeds by leaning back, leaning into the back, carried by the momentum of turning and re-turning. Return — to come back, come or go back to a former position. Turn back, turn round. Returning — doubling back, coming back. Reversing — from re— meaning back and vertere meaning to turn. This shift from a forward direction, towards an orientation of returning, of turning back to an original starting place, is not always one of beginning anew but rather for feeling anew, encountering anew, imagining anew. Our own research journey follows an oblique path. Oblique: to give a sloping direction to, to slip sideways, aslant — deviation from or turning from what is straight or direct. Slanting, leaning, leading from the back. We engage with a wider discourse through a reverse glance, a side glance, from the corner of our eyes — not seeking direct correlation or correspondence, rather by coming back, coming back, holding open the possibility of re-imagining a relation. In Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology (2008), theorist David Wills stresses the importance of the turn “in its sense of a departure that is also a detour, a deviation, a divergence into difference”.1 Reflecting on the origins of human articulation and locomotion, he invites the reader to imagine “the human turning as it walks, deviating from its forward path in order, precisely, to move forward, advancing necessarily askew”. 2 He argues how the act of walking, which gives the human its bipedal orientation, necessarily involves deviation or turning — “a type of turning around or turning back, a turning from the back or from behind, a dorsal turn, a turning to or into dorsality”. 3
Reflecting on the 'turn' within our conversations, we observe that — the turn is … not straightforward […] It is constantly pulling you off the straight, the upright — pulling you a little this way and a little that way, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. Sway and to be swayed […] There is the sense of a diagonal orientation creating space where there appears to be none — this cut of the diagonal, all these diagonal paths […] refusing to be one or the other but being both […] That is why we have to turn — to keep turning and to keep moving the spine to turn — to activate these diagonal relationships, and the criss-crossings and the meanderings […] We conceive our dorsal practices of turning and re-turning as a form of resistance against the pressures of straightforwardness, perhaps even against the ‘violence’ of linear thought. 4 For Wills “the dorsal turn operates as a form, or forms, of resistance” against a certain (technological) logic that proceeds “straight and forward”, through a “straight-ahead linear advance”. 5 He argues how “Any departure, however slight from a pure and strict (and necessarily impossible to define) forward linearity makes reference to what is behind … inflects as it were that strict forward linearity of movement with a decelerating pull from behind and so implies or calls for a thinking of what is behind, a thinking of the back”. 6 A back-oriented approach to sense-making requires a different engagement with time, with teleology: it invites a willingness for waiting, residing, abiding. Dorsal Practices cultivates a receptive attitude of letting and accepting rather than of grasping and reaching towards destination, telos or goal.
Movement/Conversation/Reading Practices
Dorsal Practices has evolved gradually in and through practice, a live enquiry involving the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied exploration — various movement, conversation and reading practices.
* Movement Practice: Taking place through various blocks or ‘episodes’ of practice, our exploration of the felt experience of a dorsal orientation begins with various body-based, somatic-informed movement scores.7 Conceived as non-verbal explorations of a dorsal orientation, our physical practices have focused on everyday movement patterns (e.g., lying down; axial rotation; transition from back-ness into movement), alongside nurturing an expanded repertoire of movement patterns and habits (e.g., walking backwards, micro-turning) through repeated engagement with various scores and exercises.
* Conversation Practice: The movement explorations are accompanied by a process of online conversation for reflecting with and through the experiences of embodied practice.8 Our conversation practice takes place through a process of timed ‘turn-taking’ allowing us to each speak without interruption, moreover, for fully focused ‘deep listening’.9 We practise conversation (from con- and versare — to turn, together) as a way of attempting to come back or somehow return to the live(d) experience of dorsal practising. Often undertaken back-to-back (releasing the eyes from the frontal habits of online meeting), our conversations foster sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the embodied experience of listening and being listened to, allowing for an emergent ‘dorsal voicing’. Within this process, linguistic content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges in and through the process of speaking and listening. The process of conversation is recorded, which we then transcribe through an embodied process of ‘slow listening’ — the manual activity of transcribing experienced as a durational undertaking based on returning to the conversation over and over in the delicate translation of spoken word to written text.
* Reading Practice: The conversation transcripts are then re-activated, re-organised, even re-imagined, through various reading practices — conceived as an experimental, improvisational approach to textual genesis — where a mode of linguistic sense-making emerges live through the interplay of spoken word, the intersubjective interweaving of two voices within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.
Dorsal Practices involves a looping, circular process, folding in and out between physical-somatic and linguistic practices. It is a process that unfolds through a series of returns. In one sense, we conceive the movement practices as a way of coming back or returning to a felt quality of embodiment, experienced as a porous, receptive and participatory form of sense-making with and of the world, and that might easily become lost, forgotten or estranged through the pressures and conditioning of those forward-facing, future-oriented (inherently individualising and thereby isolating) ideologies so pervasive within our own experience of contemporary life.10 In turn, through the shared act of conversation (foregrounding the sense of listening and being listened to, of witnessing and being witnessed), we attempt to return to and prolong the embodied experience of a back-oriented being-in-the-world, or perhaps better, we attempt to create conditions wherein the felt experience of a dorsal turning might return. Through a process of recollection, we attempt to reconnect with the direct experience itself, allowing an experience (in the past) to somehow become felt again in the now, in turn, intermingling with the felt texture of the present. This act of re-imagining is not only one of re-connecting with a ‘mental image’ conjured from the past, but an experience that is also felt in the body, a time-based practice of re-feeling, re-understanding, re-connecting capable of generating new sensations of relation and understanding of self and world.
Rather than trying to find the words for describing these dorsal experiences, we attempt to lean back, allowing the experience to somehow find its own way into language. It is often only in the act of returning to the recordings that we realise what has been said (realise — to bring into existence, make or cause to become real, comprehend the reality of), for in the process of conversation itself the words can have a quality of air or water, disappearing, dissolving even as they appear. The act of transcription is a patient practice, returning to the recordings over and over. Rather than necessarily crystallising our textual materials into a conclusive or definitive written form, we are interested in how an experimental practice of reading and re-reading might keep the texts alive, endlessly capable of being reconfigured. Reading as a live process of sense-making where content is each time apprehended afresh. In parallel, we return to the transcript material again, deep diving into specific words that were recurring or resonant during a particular research phase through a live practice of etymological exploration. These phases of research activity have a sequential dimension, but are also inherently interwoven, cyclical, looping, where the findings generated within one phase of practice are re-visited, re-activated, re-organised and re-enlivened within the next.
Returning: A Folding Back
During the first period of our research enquiry (January 2021 – May 2022), our blocks of exploration proceeded through the arc of practice described above.11 However, in October 2022, rather than continuing as such, we became interested in what might emerge through returning back to the practice: by reactivating existing scores and exercises; by returning to and reflecting upon occasions where we had shared our enquiry with others; by coming back to the archive of transcripts; by listening and re-listening to our accumulation of dorsal readings, listening as a form of returning. We undertook six blocks of exploration (which we called Returning I – VI) between October 2022 and February 2024 where we focused specifically on various acts of returning. Within this exposition we return to and re-activate the conversation transcripts generated during this specific phase of enquiry, re-meeting and re-imagining this material anew through the intermingling of two linguistic approaches each generating its own form of sense-making (presented on the left of this exposition). The two language-based approaches are:
* Condensation: We returned to the conversation transcripts generated within our the six ‘blocks’ of practice (Returning I — VI). Re-reading these transcripts again and again, over time and through several iterations, we have been able to gradually condense, even densify, the original texts towards a series of thought fragments, which in turn speak of and to our process of dorsal practising, and the act of turning and re-turning therein.12 These ‘condensations’ or ‘densifications’ are presented as six sections of written fragments (I — VI) within the exposition.
* Dorsal Reading: On 27 May 2024, we returned to the original conversational transcripts once again but through a different approach, coming together online for a live improvisatory reading practice, alongside re-reading extracts of our etymological dives into specific words: reverse, straightforward, intermingle, release, reflect, reveal. Within this exposition, we present six video extracts from the recording of this reading practice.13
Reading-as-returning
These two different language-based approaches to coming back to (indeed to re-imagining) the transcript material activate a form of reading-as-returning albeit in different ways. Through a slow process of condensation or densification, we return again and again to the original text, gently highlighting and in turn redacting words and lines, until we are left with a poetic form of languaging, a dorsal vocabulary that was perhaps already there within the original transcripts, but which is now allowed to somehow shine through. Alternatively, the live reading practice proceeds through a score-based approach. Within an agreed time frame, we each scan the transcripts selecting fragments of the transcript to read aloud as a live improvisation — in the very moment of voicing creating a ‘new’ and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making.14 Reading score: Have the transcript to hand, allowing one’s gaze to be soft, to glide or roam the pages. As the practice begins, when the time feels right, read out loud single words, phrases or a cluster of sentences as they come to your attention. Attend to the emerging sense-making between the lines of two voices intermingling — letting one’s attention shift between listening and speaking. This reading practice offers a way of bringing into touch fragments of thought that may not have existed in chronological relation or proximity within the original transcripts. Through the practice of reading, the chronology of linear sense-making is eschewed in favour of a palimpsest formed by circling and returns.
In Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (2017), Michelle Boulous Walker outlines the importance of the slow and patient act of returning as a necessary precondition for engaging with the complexity of the world. She explores what it might mean to “reread, and return to what one reads”15 as an ethical practice for engaging with, staying with, dwelling with, for being-with the other. She states that by “Reading slowly and rereading, returning time and time again to read anew, we return, similarly to the things in the world anew”.16 Significantly, Boulous Walker’s insistence on a form of slow reading does not “simply mean always reading slowly, but would, rather, involve a preparedness to return time and time again to what we read”.17 With reference to the work of various philosophical thinkers including Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Simone Weil, she emphasises the importance of patiently returning, re-assessing, re-considering and re-engaging with texts as a mode of attentiveness, moreover of incompleteness, a form of reading unconcerned with grasping at sense (as the desire to know), but rather more open to the potential of transformation, of being transformed. For Boulous Walker, “By allowing things to emerge and becoming part of them, we open ourselves to the world”.18 Whilst Boulous Walker addresses the potential of transformation enabled through a slow and careful reading of philosophy, Dorsal Practices explores the act of reading and re-reading as an aesthetic practice, where the return of slow reading becomes activated in a different key. Over and over, our own previously uttered words become transformed as they are re-spoken; through the act of reading and re-reading, different potentialities of sense-making becoming manifest, where each time the transcript is encountered afresh. In turn, we approach the practice of dorsal reading as a kind of training, transforming the desire to know, to find or fix meaning, into a capacity for being with openness, with unfinishness, receptive to what comes.
Boulous Walker advocates for a form of reading that is “willing to slow down and to wait for meaning to emerge”19 — “to suspend reading, to slow it down in order that we avoid hasty, definitive and closed readings”.20 She argues that “in the present act of speaking, meaning has not yet congealed into a meaning, and thus dialogue is still a possibility [….] The listening opens each to a meaning different from its own, and in this difference the rudiments of an effective intersubjectivity is born”.21 Our looping act of returning, of reading and re-reading leans back, holds back or attempts to suspend a definitive form of the written text (as noun) in favour of a live languaging, reading as writing (as verb). This form of sense-making offers a more suggestive, affective, fragmentary way of reading-listening that might work with the (sensorial) imagination, moreover, is capable of infinitely permutational possibilities. Rather than grasping at sense or meaning, listening is approached as a practice of attention enabling the soft letting of language, in turn, the potential of emergent wor(l)ds. For Boulous Walker, “One takes shelter in this refuge of letting-be, and the space this provides allows us to work towards creating a dwelling with the other. Such a dwelling relies on the development of a new speech, new words and a new and radical listening”.22 Within Dorsal Practices, we conceive listening as an act of turning and returning; listening as affective attunement during the ‘turning together’ of conversation; listening as an act of returning, repeating and re-engaging through the slow process of transcription; listening as the basis of dialogic and kairotic sense-making within improvisational spoken word.
Listening With, Listening Alongside
At intervals within our enquiry, we have taken time to listen again (over and over) to our own readings — listening, moving, writing, notetaking. Within this entanglement of practices, each informs the other, opens up to the complexity of what is happening, opens up to the poly, the multi, the around-ness. Our returning act of listening seeks to affect a shift of preposition: from listening to, towards listening with or listening alongside. Not listening to get something, but listening to experience: a different motivation, a different relationship to thinking, to the body, to space, to time. In this exposition, as within our own live practising, we explore the shifts between reading and listening, inviting an engagement with different textual registers that attempts to blur the lines between these two modalities. Boulous Walker raises the question of “what it means to think of reading as a kind of listening”,23 where “(t)he present of reading would then be something like a reading capable of a radical listening, a reading attentive to the presence, proximity and nearness of the other; a transformative openness that offers the world anew”.24 Dorsal Practices explores how listening might create both an intimacy with oneself and with the world. Intimacy — a closeness to things, a way of practising that moves between things, with different degrees of in-touchness or proximity. In The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (1990), Gemma Corradi Fiumara addresses the neglected role of listening within the logos of Western philosophy which has tended to foreground the value of speaking, of saying, of enunciation. Challenging the dominance of a form of thinking “revolving around grasping, mastering, using”25, she advocates for a listening perspective, “characterized by the requirement that we dwell with, abide by, whatever we try to know; that we aim at coexistence-with, rather than knowledge-of”.26 For Corradi Fiumara, the recovery of a listening perspective “may be facilitated by a retrieval of a more ‘circular’ way of thinking, as it were, entailing repeated confrontations which may eventually result in the rule of dwelling and coexistence”.27 We recognise a form of circular thinking within Dorsal Practices, a process of thinking that proceeds through loops and returns, resisting the straightforwardness of linear thinking and its desire to know, by holding back, holding a space open. We approach Dorsal Practices as a means of re-orientation, of re-organisation — as a research practice and as a practice of living, of life. We continue to imagine and re-imagine our acts of turning (towards the back) and of re-turning as quiet tactics for resisting the forward-facing and future-oriented demands of a (academic) culture underpinned by neoliberal values of progress and (economic) growth, as a turn away from what comes next, next, next. Or else, in the affirmative sense, we conceive the dorsal turn as way of holding a space-time open for attending to, for dwelling with. We consider our own enquiry as part of a wider turn, perhaps even revolution, turning away from the teleology and linearity of goal-oriented, progress-driven, acquisitional approaches to thinking, knowing and knowledge, in favour of an alternative praxes and poetics based on a willingness and receptivity towards co-existing, for listening with and alongside. Revolution: to revolve — to travel or orbit around a central point, again and again, to return, repeat or come back. To re-turn or change back. Again, anew, once more — again, again. Restoring (to a former state) and at the same time undoing. To turn. A turning back. A coming back. Again, anew, once more — again, again […]
Endnotes
1. David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 4.
2. Wills, 2008, p. 4.
3. Wills, 2008, p. 5.
4. During our performance reading at the Society of Artistic Research conference, Too Early/Too Late, in Trondheim, Norway, 9–21 April 2023, a member of the audience invoked the writing of academic and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva to reflect on the circularity of the thinking witnessed within our practice in contrast to ‘the violence of linear thought’. For Denise Ferreira da Silva, we need to activate a ‘shift in thinking’ that begins with decolonialization. See Ferreira da Silva., ‘Shift in Thinking: It all Begins with Decolonialization’ (16 May 2022). Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQTroNAHE3w (Accessed 30 May 2024)
5. Wills, 2008, p. 6. We further elaborate on Wills’ notion of the dorsal turn in Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, ‘Dorsal Practices — Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’, published in Tara Page (ed.) With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied, Special Issue of Humanities 2024, 13, 63. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020063. In this article, we also draw on the work of feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed who in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2007) confronts the shaping and ‘straightening’ directionality of heteronormativity, to then explore possibilities for a queer phenomenology that “faces the back, which looks ‘behind’”. Ahmed, 2007, p. 29.
6. Wills, 2008, p. 5.
7. The movement component of Dorsal Practices evolves from Brown’s ongoing choreographic research in relation to the reorganisation of the senses away from visuality and uprightness. See Katrina Brown, ‘circling, tumbling, dancing around: Back pieces’ in Choreographic Practices 13/2 2022, pp. 145–63, and https://katrinabrown.net/project/tilt-rhythm-back-dances-drawings (Accessed on 25 March 2025).
8. The Practice of Conversation evolved within Dorsal Practices builds on a practice called Conversation as Material developed by Cocker over the last decade within a series of artistic collaborations. See Emma Cocker, ‘Conversation as Material’, in the Special Issue ‘Practices of Phenomenology and Artistic Research’ of Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17 (2022), No.1, pp.201 - 231.
9. The ‘turn taking’ without interruption is based on Nancy Kline’s ‘time to think’ model. See Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, (Ward Lock, London, 1999). Whilst influenced by the ‘deep listening’ practices of sound composer Pauline Oliveros (See Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers’ Sound Practice, (New York, Lincoln: Deep Listening Publications, 2005), the practice of ‘deep listening’ within Dorsal Practices is also informed by a method called Awareness Centred Deep Listening Training (ACDLT®), a programme founded in 2003 by Rosamund Oliver to develop meaningful and beneficial communication between people and in communities. Cocker is trained in Awareness Centred Deep Listening.
10. Of course, not all experiences of contemporary life have a forward-facing, future-orientation. Whilst not the focus of this specific exposition, a further development of our enquiry might consider contexts where a dorsal orientation has been affirmed within a specific culture, or alternatively where a back-leaning orientation might not have the affirmative connotations that we propose within Dorsal Practices.
11. Periodically, we have returned to the transcript material once more, coming back to re-read, to re-imagine the content through public reading practices. For example, we presented our enquiry through a performance reading and a workshop within the frame of the symposium, Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human, (Dartington, June 2022) and as a performance reading at the Society of Artistic Research conference, Too Early/Too Late, in Trondheim, Norway, 9–11 April 2023.
12. Writing about the ‘vocative’ dimension of language, phenomenologist Max van Manen describes how the density and intensity of language, with its strongly embedded or incarnated meaning (van Manen, 2014, p. 45), might have the capacity to slow down the process of reading for the reader. See Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, (Routledge, 2014).
13. The video extracts presented in this exposition relate to transcripts from the ‘blocks’ of Returning as follows: (Video Extract 1) Improvisatory reading/returning to conversation transcripts from Returning I (10.10.2022) and Returning II (27.11.2022); (Video Extract 2) Re-reading extracts of our etymological dives (Straightforward / Reverse); (Video Extract 3) Improvisatory reading/returning to conversation transcripts from Returning III (16.01.23) and Returning IV (22.05.23); (Video Extract 4) Re-reading extracts of our etymological dives (Release / Intermingle); (Video Extract 5) Improvisatory reading/returning to conversation transcripts from Returning V (15.12.2023) and Returning VI (01.02.2024); (Video Extract 6) Re-reading extracts of our etymological dives (Reflect / Reveal).
14. The ‘reading scores’ evolved within Dorsal Practices extend Cocker’s ongoing artistic research interest in reading as an aesthetic practice and the ‘poetics of attention’ therein. See for example, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, 'Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading', RUUKKU, Issue 14, ‘Ecologies of Practice. Available at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/618624/618625 (Accessed 25 March 2025).
15. Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. xiii.
16. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. xv.
17. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. xv.
18. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 21.
19. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 116.
20. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 115.
21. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 113.
22. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 118.
23. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 104.
24. Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 119.
25. Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, (Routledge, 1990) p. 15.
26. Corradi Fiumara, 1990, p. 15.
27. Corradi Fiumara, 1990, p. 16.
The transcript materials used within this exposition were generated through a series of explorations which we called Returnings. As part of this exposition, we share one of the pages of our working process from within this block of enquiry (for Returning III) to give an indication of how the arc of our practice evolved through conversation, transcription, reading, etymological exploration.
LINK HERE.
The overall process of our enquiry is not the central focus of this exposition. However, for those readers wishing to get a sense of how the arc of practices has been activated within our project, you can encounter an indicative example of our working method via the link below. This page shares the working process from the 'block' of exploration focused on 'Back-ness in Movement' which we presented as part of a previous journal article Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, 'Dorsal Practices — Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’, in Tara Page (ed.) With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied, Special Issue of Humanities 2024, 13, 63.
LINK HERE.
Within this exposition, we are interested in testing the intermingling of the two registers of languaging (spoken and written), so have elected to present extracts of video in dialogue with the written text. However, the full recording of the reading practice does enable the potential for just listening. For those readers-listeners interested in engaging with the full reading, we invite the possibility of encountering that material as we have done within our own research process through the following listening 'score':
* Come to lying on one's back, making oneself comfortable, maybe even closing one's eyes.
* Take time to get in touch with one's direct experience, the felt sense of the body.
* Explore the possibilities between moving and stillness, shifting between positions.
* Allow the voices to resonate with and through your experience – not grasping for sense, rather letting a dorsal sense-making emerge.
To encounter the video recording of the full reading practice that we activated on 27 May 2024:
LINK HERE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, ‘Dorsal Practices — Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’. Humanities, 2024, 13 (2), 63. Available here — https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020063
Katrina Brown, ‘circling, tumbling, dancing around: Back pieces’. Choreographic Practices, 2022, 13/2, pp. 145–63.
Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, ‘Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading’. RUUKKU, Issue 14. Available here — https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/618624/618625
Emma Cocker, ‘Conversation as Material’. Phenomenology & Practice, 2022, 17 (1), pp. 201–231. Available here — https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/article/view/29475
Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, (London: Routledge, 1990).
Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, (London: Ward Lock, 1999).
Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, (London: Routledge, 2014).
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers’ Sound Practice, (New York, Lincoln: Deep Listening Publications, 2005).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Shift in Thinking: It all Begins with Decolonialization’ (16 May 2022). Available here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQTroNAHE3w
David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).