I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.
For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.
I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.
I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being.
I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.
I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality.
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