dance #112, rhizome I

Sunday April 12, 2009

Rhizome I

5:30 p.m. A 20 minute dance in the afternoon light. I’m using a mirror for one of the first times in this series. Thinking through D&G’s rhizome. How is movement itself kind of rhizomatic phenomenon–a pack of lines in flight? Thinking about dance as a kind of enactment that entangles and propagates rhizomatically . This set up is not obviously rhizomatic: the dance is framed by a mirror; and mirrors are supposed to reflect, not diffract. Right? And yet, the dance gets crafted in a transductive play with another body–the one in the mirror whose forms continually surprise. This exchange is generative. This back and forth is not so much replicative but responsive and relational. Movement generates movement, exciting new possibilities for movement. The dance escalates as if there is an excitable tissue (Merleau-Ponty’s flesh?) that spans the space between me and the dancing image in the mirror. This excitability feels like a property of relationality, and it is this excitability that gets transduced as liveliness. In the dance my limbs get pulled along lines that ripple through my front body and back body. Curvatures arcing and propagating. Limbs articulate and articulating.

Alice grooms herself by my side in the armchair while I write. It was a gorgeous sunny and cold day.

~ by nmyers on April 12, 2009.