Phrases Towards A Kinepoetics by Scott Thurston

Description

Scott Thurston’s poetic documentation and theorising of dance and movement is an essential exploration of (inter-)subjectivity and performativity from within their processes. Phrases toward a kinepoetics is a renovation of the lyric’s pre-fabricated house of rituals.

When metaphors and images arise in these poems they are no longer the desiccated fruit of the poetic eye’s old ways of seeing, of grasping. This ‘I’ is moving, processual. Its language meets us on the ground, in our bodies, regarded and regarding, limited and limitless, repeating but never quite repeating, separate and together, whole and fragmented, danced and dancing, and finally, phrased, which means to put into words.

– Kimberly Campanello

In this inspiring, challenging and original book Scott Thurston develops his own distinctive form of synaesthetic experimentalism. The volume intertwines the dance of language and the language of dance, giving new meaning to the idea of writing the body. It stimulates us to think about balance between different kinds of awareness, of the body and of words, and itself sways gracefully between philosophical meditation and immersive metaphorical dissolves. But the book is also about having the courage to be off-balance, and to live creatively with the uncertain, the ethically ambiguous and a shifting, even spliced, sense of self.

That which cannot easily be verbalised, and that which cannot be fully understood, are both never far from Thurston’s vision. Consequently, there are glimpses of anxiety and self-doubt as he continually brushes against the personal without ever being consumed by it, and courts affects before they solidify into recognisable emotional states. But there is also a longing to relate to others positively that brings with it a strong sense of an incipient community created through dance partners, collaborators and audiences. It is a poetic community to which we as readers are warmly welcomed, not as mere guests but as  flexible, engaged participants.

– Hazel Smith