Zoë Poluch & Cara Tolmie Sensory Literacy – Researching (in/as) Motion

Sensory Literacy is a moving-into-writing-into-speaking score practiced and developed by dancer and choreographer Zoë Poluch and Cara Tolmie, artist working with performance, experimental music and moving image. The score offers a way of translating embodiment, of documenting the sensation of experience, of materializing time travel. In practicing and performing the score (it was used in the performance “Aphelion Slip”) we wonder how the sensory choreography given by the composer is a form of writing and if the sensory experience had by the receiver a form of ‘reading’. How might we see the material produced from this practice as a map of associations, of potentiality and translation? What might this tell us about the condition of our bodies both as readers and writers? What do we lose or gain through this mediation via individual interior experience? What does it mean to relate to this mediated testimony?

› A moving into writing score by Zoe Poluch and Cara Tolmie.

› A one-room, two-person, three-step artistic research practice.

› An impromptu choreography, an expanded writing practice, a performance experience, and a process of documentation.

One

› The composer conducts/generates/performs a choreography specifically for the senses of the other person. This is a spontaneous choreography, of an undetermined duration. It can involve any and every combination of object and/or sensorial experience and is intended to stimulate the feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, and tasting senses of the receiver.

› The receiver accepts/admits/experiences the choreography and commits to memorizing/documenting/recording the entire composition as it is happening.

Two

› The receiver writes immediately after experiencing the composition. They write from an entirely subjective perspective and try to transcribe/document/translate/record as much of the concrete/potential/hypothetical sensations/associations/experiences as they can recall.

› The composer may choose to play music in the room as the receiver writes.

Three

› The receiver reads their text composition out loud to the room (preferably into a microphone).

› Switch roles and repeat as often as desired.

contributor(s)

Zoë Poluch

Zoë Poluch has the unique capacity to make the most simple questions into complex investigations, and thus the format of a bio into an impossible endeavour. Her practice spans from instigating practice based collaborations to dancing poems about dance, in a detour across stage performances, sound choreographies and movements of the social life. Her deeply critical eye for the contemporary dance scene is based on a long term and practice-based interest in the moving body. As she teaches, dances, talks, writes and thinks, she does it with a precise gymnastics of the senses. Zoë completed her masters degree in choreography at DOCH, Stockholm in 2012. Since then she has not developed one distinct choreographic interest or signature, but instead experiments with the different shapes of writing, dancing, organizing symposia, performing, collaborating, choreographing, reading and talking.

Cara Tolmie

Artist Cara Tolmie (born 1984, Glasgow) works from within the intersections of performance, music and moving image. Her works probe the site-specific conditions of performance-making by finding ways to vocalise and place her body that access the political and poetic capabilities of physical, written and musical languages. Recent performances, such as Till It Feels Alright (2015) and Incongruous Diva (2016) look more specifically at the affective economies that attach themselves to the role of ‘The Singer’. These works ask questions about whose emotions the singing voice acts as a locus for and tests ways that the performing body can disrupt the flows of value that profit from this voice.