Output details

Sensualities: Experiencing/Dancing/Writing

This article offers insights into the meta discourses surrounding practices of writing/dancing, and in particular the concepts embedded in the author’s own creative work, 'Dear Practice...'.

This work takes the form of a series of letters between Midgelow as 'Dancer' and 'Practice'. These letters were published in 2011 as, 'Dear Practice . . .: The experience of improvising', Choreographic Practices 2, 9-24 (DOI: 10.1386/chor.2.9_1). They were also formed into an animated, text-based video installation work and presented as part of an exhibition entitled Sensualities: Movement/Screen/Experience (The Beetroot Tree Gallery, Derby, and Avenue Gallery, Northampton 2011) (see www.choreographiclab.org). Together these artistic outputs underpin the meta-discourses considered in this article and give context to this journal article.

The article presents new ways of thinking about and undertaking writing/dancing. It explores embodied, experiential and performative approaches to writing and the resultant challenges to knowledge formation, to propose writing from/as dance, as distinct from writing about dance as object.

It is significant that the article was published in a journal focused upon the discourses and pedagogy of new and creative writing, such that this dance writing sits alongside the emergent academic study of creative writing.