Chapter: 40th Anniversary of Studies in Symbolic Interaction
Longley A
Edited by Norman K. Denzin
A central issue in contemporary dance ethnography is that of writing the somatic – the attempt to articulate kinesthetic, bodily sensations that emerge in a particular culture or context, within a research format (Ness, 1992; Sklar, 2000). Emerging methods including performance making and poetic, narrative, experimental or performative writing create space for recognition of choreographic and sensory knowledges within ethnographic research.
This chapter presents a case study that illustrates what I term ‘movement-initiated writing’ – writing that emerges through dance making, wherein the dance ethnographer is a participant observer in studio practice. Movement- initiated writing presents a methodology for writing out of attention to embodied experience. It is an approach to writing influenced by graphic design and artist-books, where pages are treated as spatial, performative sites. Pages from the author’s artist-book the kinesthetic archive book are drawn on as an example of how this methodology may occur in practice.
This emic approach attempts to translate the felt affects of a specific world of movement into performances sited in the terrains of pages. This mode of writing draws on Roland Barthes (1977) notion of the ‘grain of the voice’, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘minor literature’, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) Hélène Cixous’s examples of écriture feminine (Cixous, 1991) and the field of performance writing.