This article, one of a series of co-authored projects between Rosemary Lee and myself, aims in formal terms to write a practitioner-focused knowledge of dance-making. However, the rehearsal economies and linguistic styles in which Lee evidences her practical knowledge of dance-making differ greatly from the knowledge economies of academic writing (Melrose 2003b). Discourse is used in the one to analyse interpretatively, in the other to attempt to record multi-modal and situational effects-of-(diverse) experience.

Our writing (the plural pronoun is problematic) aims to acknowledge a creative practitioner’s modes of knowledge as speculative and future-focused (Melrose 2003). The approach taken in this essay then is affirmative-productive (i.e. concerned with new-work-making processes), rather than critical-reflective (concerned with critical interpretations of work already made) (Massumi 2002:12)

As co-authors, we become “particularly motivated, present, intervening observer[s]” (Derrida 1985) of Lee’s dance-making, writing this article according to our asymmetric relations to writing and to dance-making practices. Writing marked in my, the researcher-observer’s voice, should be heard footnoted by the ethical unease that emerges from the fact that such writing cannot avoid objectifying Lee and her practice (as soon as writing requires that I name ‘her’ and ‘it’). What must be marked here, therefore, is the complexity, both grammatical and ethical, which dogs every attempt to write research into artists’ own practices.                

Niki Pollard