Reflexive Wrestling

October 2015

Elizabeth Grosz has observed “Knowledge is an activity; it is a practice and not a contemplative reflection. It does things” (Meskimmon 2003, p. 151). I confess I have been doing things. Painting in the void, I have been leaving things unsaid, whilst madly scribbling on the body of my own self, and of others. A repository of ideas and of the doing of things, the body has become an archive of memory and of the story of doing things that effect change.

I have wrestled with this mark-making on self and others. My own critically reflective practice has plunged me into reflexive approaches: a portal to analysis and review. I find I have few words to fully describe the creative act-in-action effectively. Words strangle the lightness; the feathered lightness of insight and of being. I think of Maggi’s written observation:

Thinkers and artists grapple with this unregulated realm of yet-to-be-knowledge, straining to delineate incipient patterns in the flux through whatever means of articulation might be at their disposal (Phillips 2014, p. 285).

I hold the thought that reflexive approaches invite an experience of the unknowable other through the creative act and the art work itself. I insert myself into the narratives of others, knowing that “reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty . . . ‘remainder’ between the visible and the invisible, the present and absent” (Stronach et.al. 2013, p. 288). I am alert. I miss Maggi. I recall remnant acts of making in which the creative risk forged connections sometimes elusive, sometimes clear. Each has been infinitely precious and absolutely terrifying.

In the past years of Remnant Dance practice, I have been exploring borderlines and surfaces, both physically and metaphorically. My intention has been to look through glass fronts: to shatter them if possible, in order to encounter the perspectives of others. I have been shocked at how often my own reflection is all I have seen.

In Myanmar, I looked away. But there were glass fronts in every direction. When I closed my eyes, small fingers nudged their way into my large hands hanging limply by my own form, inert and stuck. Surprised by touch, I could look in another direction and found myself within large smiling eyes, framed by white thanaka on brown cheeks and wordless connection through the movement of one small body towards that of my own. As my fingers closed gently around the brave, bold hand, I responded to the tug and turn of this quiet body, and was led in a different direction in the world I thought I had entered.

As a reflective practitioner I am responsive, reflexive and uncomfortable; present in this moment. I continue to wrestle with knowledge, both spoken and unspoken. There is an ache for what has been, yet traces remain. We are connected, you and I. Marked by colour, framed by text we telling the story of our wrestling together.

wrestle 2

References

Meskimmon, M. (2003). Women Making Art. London: Routledge.

Phillips, M. (2014). Choreographies of Thought: Dancing Time Back into Writing. In L. Ravelli, B. Paltridge, & S. Starfield (Eds.), Doctoral Writing in the Creative and Performing Arts. Oxfordshire: Libri Publishing.

Stronach, I., Frankham, J., Bibi-Nawaz, S., Cahill, G., Cui, V., Dymoke, K., & Khir, M. M. (2013). The X-Factor: Performing Reflexivity as Indeterminate Praxis. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(288), 288-297. doi: 10.1177/1077800412471508