About SF
This space-practice existed and was held through the limbs, histories and movements of Lili, Alicia, Toria, T and Catalina, String Figuring Participants. This online piece holds a modest amount of gestures and traces from our four-month-long embodied study of our individual and collective histories. It contains movements, forms of knowledge, histories, that are the marks of our witnessing.
String Figuring was a space and a practice to move-with others during the COVID-19 pandemic. We met to critically and creatively explore forms of relating to and intervening our individual and collective histories, particularly concerning our social positionality. This space-practice proposed creative prompts to address our positionality through space, place, entanglement, and refusal. The online platform Padlet was our surrogate space to meet and share art and movements, even when in distance and a-synchronously. Through Padlet boards, we shared movement, thoughts, and art, witnessed others’ work, and responded with offerings. String Figuring also included weekly Zoom gatherings, usually Fridays at four or five in the afternoon. We practiced movement exercises during our weekly synchronous sessions to connect and reflect upon our weeks’ experience with the individual score exploration.
String Figuring was also more than these specific “doings.” String Figuring existed as a durational process. It was a journey of keeping questions close to our bodies, our history present in our skin, and attending to how it lived through our spaces. It was an individual process of reflection and exploration through which each participant developed a series of creative responses. String Figuring was also how we attended and responded to what others had created and shared in our online space. Therefore, it was too a practice of receiving others’ reflections and making connections with our own. It was also a pause to move and talk.
String Figuring originated as an invitation extended by Catalina from her doctoral research in Art Education with emphasis on Dance, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Latino/Latina Studies. However, String Figuring extends beyond this specific research and has initiated other iterations of similar relational movement-based study.
Materials: Scores
Scores are:
Scores are an invitation
Scores are a question
Scores are a path
Scores are companions of study
Scores are loose directives
Scores are specific instructions
Scores are to be rebelled against
Scores are to be followed
Scores are grounded in embodied experience
Scores are inspired by the impossible
Scores are pedagogical resources
Scores are creative tools
Scores are a form of inscription of a process
Scores are texts, maps, drawings, or objects
Scores are devices… They can be what you want them to be.
String Figuring unfolded through creative prompts proposing questions to explore our individual and collective histories through space, place, entanglement, and refusal. Drawing from dance improvisation and contemporary art, I call those prompts scores. I conceptualize scores as creative and pedagogical devices that set up an encounter (with others, with one’s history, with a space) and offer an inquiry and a path of exploration. Also, the scores in themselves are creative pieces that, in their activation, offer a sort of organic documentation of the practice from within.
Learn more about the scores of String Figuring - Urbana -Champaign below:
SCORE 1: How do you walk/move through the world?
Can you create a “tutorial” to teach others to move/walk like you?
Animation by Mary Kate Ford
SCORE 3: Who/what is part of you?
Which gestures and movements keep us connected to loved ones? Can you study one gesture of connection to share?
Animation by Mary Kate Ford
SCORE 2: Where are you? What/who is close to you?
Can you take “us” through your space gathering textures, sounds, movements, smells, and images?
Animation by Mary Kate Ford
Score companions: Tension Creature and Kaleidoskopic Entangler
Fabric pieces helped us explore space, place, entanglement and refusal (what I call Kinesthetic Concepts) as creative materials.
Pieces created by Lys Kutz
Collaborative making of Scores:
The scores of String Figuring originated from a series of questions about social positionality and propositions around space, place, entanglement, and refusal that I called kinesthetic concepts. Scores existed in this project in the form of animations and fabric pieces, developed in collaboration with artists Mary Kate Ford and Lys Kutz. These pieces offered participants a course of exploration and were companions for the process. Given that this project took place amidst the Covid 19 pandemic and I had limited opportunities for direct facilitation, the scores functioned to support and offer some guidance to participants’ experience.
Mary Kate Ford, dancer and interdisciplinary artist, developed our digital scores. Taking advantage of animation as a media that inherently uses movement, these animations helped participants explore the scores kinesthetically, even when isolated amidst the pandemic. Lys Kutz, educator and artist specializing in fabric art, developed artifacts posted to participants’ homes. We called these objects the Kaleidoscopic Entangler and the Tension Creature. These fabric artifacts were companions for participant’s study of tension, place-space, entanglement, and refusal (four kinesthetic concepts guiding my design of the scores). The fabric companions offered a surrogate body for us to delve into relational and embodied study, even when alone: they provided extra weight that we could feel in the body, limbs to hold us, extensions to knot ourselves with our spaces, and lenses to change our usual perception. Thanks to their undefined forms, participants placed these objects in conversation with their own questions and findings.