Book: Longley, A.M. (2015). Radio Strainer. The Preface Series. Winchester University Press, UK.

Radio Strainer is an interdisciplinary artist-book documenting a choreographic research project built around the practice of translation — or more precisely, mistranslation — as both method and subject. Longley traces how ideas move and mutate between languages, disciplines, and bodies: text becomes movement, movement becomes drawing, drawing becomes video, and back again, with something always shifting and something always remaining in the exchange.

Structured loosely around Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree as a governing image — climbing into unstable, ever-changing worlds, then falling back down a “slippery slip” into a new one — the book resists conventional documentation in favour of movement-initiated writing: text generated from within the practice of dance-making itself rather than written about it afterward. Longley draws on theorists including Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Andrew Pickering, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Carter to frame choreography as an “agitation of matter,” and translation as a generative, embodied, often chaotic process she likens to a mangle wringing water from laundry — ideas stretched, distorted, and reshaped between forms.

The book documents specific works and processes from the Radio Strainer project: a deck of improvisation score-cards later translated into Japanese; the Hills, a remixed sound-work built from a New Zealand radio interview; Mt Fuji, a shadow-and-voice video piece built from a single text translated into Italian, Japanese, and read aloud by native speakers; and the Red Chairs sequence, in which ordinary furniture becomes a vehicle for channelling embodied memories of shame and mistranslation.

Running throughout is a second, deeply personal thread: the book was made across two pregnancies and early motherhood, and Longley folds the disorientation, exhaustion, and “kid-logic” of parenting small children into the same conceptual frame as her choreographic method — treating both as processes of growth, spill, care, and productive loss of control. The result is a book that treats the physical page itself — its paper, handwriting, layering, and materiality — as a choreographic and kinesthetic site, inviting readers to encounter it intuitively and bodily rather than simply read it in a straight line.