I write with my whole body. In fact, I can't do anything else while I write. No podcasts, dishes, text messages, or choosing the color of tomorrow's T-shirt—or perhaps unconsciously. After several hours of writing, I can be overcome by intense fatigue, and it's not from sitting and moving my hand over the sheet. It's from having raced across meadows, faced demons at the bottom of a canyon, ardently desired a certain summer encounter. From having experienced the sensation of sea spray on my skin from that boat, those doubts at the water's edge, those distant gallops. From having fought battles, pursued dreams, and sown hopes. From having flown high on the wings of a bird.
[Free flow writing, unedited, 10/21/2024].
I've gotten into the habit of approaching the questions that haunt me through free writing, simply by taking my notebook and pencil, opening a new page, and writing down words without interruption for a certain amount of time. Sometimes I launch into it without a specific theme, other times I start with the beginning of a sentence, a word or a prompt.
I try not to filter the words and ideas I write on paper. I let them come, I do not intervene. And I let myself experience the emotions and ideas evoked by the words that appear on the page, and discover a certain emotional, sensory, cognitive, and relational landscape associated with these words and ideas. It often happens that I access meaning that was already there, but hadn't been formulated until then. I learn.
In this sense, free writing is a writing-moving experience: something happens, something is written and moves me.
I write with my whole body. Some words tend to get stuck somewhere. I have one in the corner of my left mouth that won't budge. There are also entire sentences that extend from the base of my skull to my arm and fade, smaller and smaller, toward my fingertips.
I write with my whole body. My right foot dances in tandem with the pencil on the paper. I write the lines of my breathing. The story flows through the veins of my hands and transfers itself into the ink of the pen, as if the flow were truly continuous, the same liquid, the same sap.
I write with my whole body. Each of my cells has the right to speak. I try to ensure that the arrival of the words on the paper carries the same vibrations as those of the atoms that vibrate within me.
[Free flow writing, unedited, 10/22/2024].
A practice that leaves traces
A moving-writing practice, for me, is a practice that unfolds as much in physical space as in emotional space. We are in the realm of movement, which is laden with meaning, and in that of writing that dances, that stirs the world. It is therefore a zone of contact, of encounter. It is potentially a practice that connects or even blends thought and sensory experience.
It is a practice that leaves traces: expressions that we remember, movements that are revived within us, a state of being that we did not have before the practice and that emerged through it. I don't speak of "traces" in the sense of indelible imprints, but rather as indications, sensations, that are part of the vast repertoire of our individual and collective histories.
It is a practice that considers what words and movements carry, how they resonate and get inscribed in the body. Thus, it is a practice that engages the being in an experience, in the act of practicing as well as in the act of perceiving and receiving what has been written-danced, and therefore it is phenomenological. It is a practice that has a connection with the body, that feels life, that participates in the cycles of life and the breathing of the world.
Practices that reconnect
For most of us, movement and writing are opposites. We go for a walk to get moving, then we sit in a café to write. Writing is largely associated with the context of school, a form of discipline, and a work of the mind. For many, movement evokes free time, spontaneity, sport, freedom, the body. I want to make another suggestion: what if we wrote by engaging the whole body? What if our thoughts could move and be embodied, even revealed in our movements? What if the creative dynamic could break down the separation we have conceived between these spaces?
I began writing—notebooks, poems, ideas—in 2015. It opened up another space for expression, where sentences could unfold in ways other than spoken words. In writing, I found a freedom of words and thoughts, which I can express in poems, lines from my personal journal, and pages from my free writing notebook.
Dance and writing have been my two arms, the two sides of my heart. In the fall of 2022, while continuing my training at the Holistic Dance Institute, I was struck by a powerful intuition: to bring together these two modalities of expression.
I then co-founded the Moving Poetry workshops with Levi Mülhbacher, in which we experiment with variations of practices that combine movement and writing, and seek the conditions for these practices to invite our creativity to recharge and express itself.
In these interdisciplinary movement-writing practices, we awaken the inherent connections between body and mind and facilitate the flow of information within this body-mind. It's a work that reconnects (in the sense evoked by Joanna Macy), transforms, and liberates.
“Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apple and milk, tigers and celery, disappear.”
Natalie Goldberg, ‘Writing Down the Bones’.
And perhaps this connection, this flexibility, is also transmitted to the body, the body in movement, to the tissues that no longer need to be so tense, to the nervous system that regulates itself, and to the vital functions that then take their full roles. It is the intelligence of our entire system that is invited to reveal itself, whether through words, movements, and all forms of body-mind activity.
A proposition of moving-writing practice:
Take a moment to do nothing. Then choose three words that are resonant to you.
For each of these words, look for a movement that goes with it (for example, because the movement matches the meaning of the word; or because the movement resembles the sound of the word).
Rehearse the three movements you created, and string them together as a moving sentence.
Give yourself some free movement time, returning from time to time to your composition of the three movements.
If you like, complete this experience with 5 minutes of free flow writing.
Announcement: 5-days moving and writing workshop
From September 3rd to 7th, we invite you to join us in Austria for a movement and writing workshop, in a place surrounded by wild nature. Details will be available soon on www.movingpoetries.com. Feel free to write me if you already want to book your spot!
Kindly,
Clémentine