Morfill, S.E., 2020.

Romance and Contagion: notes on a conversation between drawing and dance

This chapter reviews a period of collaboration between the author and dance practitioner Karen Wood that took place as part of the overarching project Fragments, organised by artists from the collective Five Years. Considering commonalities in language across disciplinary divides, language emerges as a seam that connects the gestures of drawing and dance. A sequence of processual translation is described--both prior to and during the performance of ECHO--in which observed movement first becomes choreographed dance, then material line, and finally returns to movement. The exchange-based methodology corresponds to literary translation in its dependence on interpretation, and privileges process within the contexts of both making and performance. Where ECHO draws attention to the intertwining of distinct disciplines, their identities synthesise in the second performance work, 100 metre line drawing, in which drawing and performance collapse together as dancer turns drawer through direct interaction with a material line.