Practice and practices
This project is not built around a particular medium like dance or prose (that is, those media that might be seen as native to Marie’s or Alan's respective careers and expertise); it is built around the idea of practice and practices. The term practice, here, refers to an activity that may have a product (a work of choreography or an article, say), but that is engaged in on a regular basis and to some extent independently of its outcomes. As such, a practice is typically described using the -ing form. We made a quick list of practices that we engage in jointly or individually. The items are reproduced here in no particular order (certainly not in order of importance!).
- Doing yoga
- Writing
- Filmmaking
- Cultivating relationships (family, friends etc.)
- Commuting
- Reading
- Dancing
- Choreographing
- Improvising
- Mark making
- Evidencing and auditing productivity
- Fund-raising
- Public speaking
- Teaching
- Parenting
- Cooking
- Earning
- Being intimate (affection, sex, cohabitation)
- Feeling
- Exercising
- Coaching
- Conversing
- Debating
- Researching
- House-working
- Performing gender
- Cultivating the self
- Travelling
- Holidaying
- Managing money
- Wasting time
- Shopping
- Relaxing
- Pausing
This list was not intended to be exhaustive but was intended to offer points of departure for the design of project tasks. Plainly, most of the practices listed are mundane and would not conventionally be described as creative practices. They are listed here because the banal and quotidian are where we must start with a ‘meta-project’ like this, which is expressly ‘preliminary’ and conceived in order to develop the structures and protocols of a creative partnership. This creative partnership must acknowledge and begin from the fact that Marie and I are life partners and so this premilinary project must emerge from the texture of day-to-day existence. The practices of the day-to-day will therefore be deployed in the tasks we set and undertake.