Movement Journals
In this final page of contextualisation, I include five samples (across four days) from my occasional video journalling practice. Periodically during the project—often in week-long clusters—I would take a camera into the forest in the late afternoon to film myself either (a) engaging in a movement-based response to the day’s excursion, encounter, or engagement, or (b) testing a specific provocation through movement. The examples included here are presented as samples of practice rather than comprehensive documentation.
During these reflexive “video weeks,” I would typically follow each movement journal with a structured writing exercise, responding to a template of prompts alongside a period of free writing. Brief explanations of each video journal are provided below, summarised from the corresponding written journals, which are also included here as samples of practice.
Goblindance (23/10/22)
Provocation: Be like of the goblins in the forest, animated by metamorphosis and growth (sped up in time). Complicated feelings toward the light: drawn toward it, but also fearful.
In Response to: Goblin walks, wondering what it is like to be a tree, the sensations of the light
Water (29/10/22)
Provocation: “Explore water. Grief’s: fluidity, floodiness, surplus”
In Response to: “A resistance to soggy weather, an open-ended longing, a curiosity surrounding water”
Outcome or takeaway: Ability to walk home barefoot without issue… “would not have even considered walking barefoot out of the forest if not for the barefoot dance… but it was easy and pleasant”
Drop (01/11/22) and Sunset (01/11/22)
Provocation: Drawn to explore gravity, clinging, and sunlight (refraction)
In Response to: A single drop of water clinging to a branch “changeable, restless, intentional, vibrant”
Outcome or takeaway:
“How loss buckles us, plucks us from branches, gives us over to gravity. How her body must have dropped to down the embankment and into the empty ditch. What other drops formed and swelled and fell after the silence, in the lingering echo. Remembering, too, the stag that hung by his antlers, how we hung him horizontal from the willow until gravity slowly stretched him out (with help from storms, from water), and so recently separated his head from spine. The spine dropped just yesterday. Vertebrate dangling. Ribs falling. And me, remembering and moving, and feeling a few times like I was falling into the sun.
Then I went to the willow and the Stag and tried to be the drop on the branches, to relax my muscles and let gravity slowly drag me from the friction of the branch. Allowing myself to give over completely to the force and fall. The muscles so instinctively want to cling. It takes more focus and intention to release, to let go.”
Wind (02/11/22)
Provocation: A dance with the wind (ghosts?)
In Response to: Vibrant Death, page 120, hauntology
Outcome or takeaway: a) eyes-closed movement (engaging with touch and sound), b) eyes-open movement (engaging with the visible), c) an instance with emotional/grief-based intention (intense affective response, detailed in the reflexive writing)
Entangled practices
This last video is cut together from the previous clips, as an example of the Assembly season, a process phase I often used to look for juxtapositions and resonances between the days’ practices as captured on video.
