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 for 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 is comprised of textual fragments subsequently distilled from the transcript of this reading practice.
The recordings (left) document Brown and Cocker engaging in the improvisatory reading practice itself, which was activated live on ZOOM (15 April 2025), for bringing together the emergent vocabulary of their own research enquiry with a wider critical milieu. In the recorded sections entitled Walking, Wayfinding and Vibrating, Brown and Cocker's reading interweaves fragmentary extracts of conversational transcripts generated as part of their ongoing project Dorsal Practices.
The original conversational transcripts were produced through an extended process of practice-based enquiry involving: (1) Movement practices as somatic fieldwork exploring a dorsal orientation in different land/scapes; (2) Conversation practices undertaken back-to-back for sharing together our experience of the previous phase of somatic exploration. Over a period of 3 years (2021-2024), Brown and Cocker generated thousands of words of transcript from these recorded conversations. In Summer 2024, they gathered and reorganised this archive of textual material according to eight emergent categories: Lying, Rotating, Transitioning, Moving-Shaping, Walking, Wayfinding, Turning, and Vibrating. This exposition (and its related article) share the emergent vocabulary of Walking, Wayfinding and Vibrating, where the relation between dorsal practising and land/scape emerges as a central ‘clew’ or thread.
Within the reading practice, Brown and Cocker each have piles of transcript material from their previous conversations spread out on their respective tables. Within an agreed period of time, they each scan the transcripts, selecting fragments of these texts to read aloud as a live improvisation — in the very moment of voicing creating a new and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making. The live reading activates the following 'score':
Score for the Practice of Reading
Reading (Noticing Attraction/Distillation) — Take time to tune into the transcript, noticing phrases and words that strike you or that resonate. As the practice begins, when the time feels right, read out loud single words, phrases, or a cluster of sentences. Once familiar with the practice, allow the act of distillation to happen spontaneously in the moment, speaking words and phrases live 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.
For the 'interludes', Brown and Cocker extend their improvisatory practice of reading to a wider critical milieu. In Interlude I they read between the lines of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) and David Wills’ Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (2008). In Interlude II, they practise a transversal reading of Tim Ingold’s Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011) alongside Judith Butler’s ‘Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall: Interdependency and Ethics in Cavarero’ (2021).
This approach to language attempts to enact the ethos of Brown and Cocker’s embodied somatic practices — subverting the hierarchies and values of linear understanding in favour of a circling, intersubjective mode of dorsal voicing.
The overall process of Brown and Cocker's enquiry is not the central focus of this article/exposition. However, for those readers wishing to get a sense of how the process of conversation and resulting transcripts were generated within Dorsal Practices, an indicative example of the working method can be encountered via the link below. This linked page shares the working process from a 'block' of exploration focused on Back-ness in Movement which was presented as part of the 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