Drawing Release

This paper sheds light on an episode in the beginning of release technique in contemporary movement practice, firstly situating it within the context of its emergence in visual art and experimental dance after the Judson Dance theater and the 1960s counterculture. In particular, the paper pays close attention to the visual world of embodied practices: the common use of visualization techniques among practitioners and the materials, such as drawings, that resulted from the movement modalities and exercises used in pedagogy (with much of the pioneering and teaching work done by women practitioners exploring alternative approaches to the healthy body with feminist awareness). In and of themselves the images look like abstract drawings, such as layers of circle drawn repetitively with a crayon, but they resulted from the dancer's moving--or drawing with the body--in circular motion on the ground paper, in this case through an exercise that centers on imagining and embodying the pelvis as a bowl containing fluids. Rather than seeing these works as only traces left behind after the physical movement and teaching exercise, however, I explore how the somatic, pedagogic, and visual take place in tandem, while also opening up new ways of thinking about these visual materials in relation to post-1960 art, and the broadening of the parameters of drawing, notation, and score around this time.