Tracing,
Drawing shapes.
Considering what is held,
Letters, words contained;
Explored through a body’s terrain,
Chosen to be expressed.

Flesh carves thought into empty space,
For the witness to perceive.

The letter e;
How many different times,
How many different ways,
Can it be imprinted?
Gesture shifting to reform and reframe,
Again and again.
A fragment,
A constant refrain.

Muscles stretch as a limb curves to find
The outline of a sentence yet to be.

A hierarchy in the capital letter form,
It is upheld or disrupted by what comes after.

The choice to punctuate.
A fierce gaze,
A body in stillness,

A definite full stop.
Or possibly an ellipsis.
Intended meaning protected, encompassed by parentheses,
Kept safe in the momentary space between
The end of one movement and the beginning of another.

Moving and swaying, the body scribes;
Articulated fingers etching with care.
A sweep of the arm and the writing is erased.
Yet echoes of past syllables remain,
Retained in the memory of the body
And the history of the space.

The body is fluent in this language of lines,
Though it still finds delight in the construction of letters.
Experimenting with the many ways a truth can be expressed.

Lineages and pathways of physical language unfurl,
Retraced to embolden,
To reinterpret for personal evolution.

Hands upturn and fingers spread to scatter
Semblances left to dissipate in inert air.

A choice is made to leave.
Underscoring embodied sentences left hanging, incomplete.
Letters and phrases shared a fragment,
A small piece of that being
Constantly generated and flowing beneath the fingernails.

About The Author: Alex Craig

Alex Craig is a Queer Blind dance artist and maker. Exploring belonging, connection, identity and place, Alex works collaboratively, opening and holding space for a collective experience of dance and storytelling beyond the visual.

Alex utilizes choreography, poetic and score based texts, sound and creative Audio Description to create live and digital works. Most recently, they have been working at Critical Path, collaboratively researching Blindness centred dance methodologies.

Since 2019, Alex has been an ongoing collaborator of Fayen D’Evie. Alex first worked with Fayen during a residency at Abbotsford Convent Melbourne, developing ‘Mobility
Geometries’. They then collaborated on Fayen’s ‘We get in touch with things at the point they break down // Even in the absence of spectators and audiences, dust  circulates…’ (West Space Gallery, 2021) and ‘With Cane in Hand, I Dance a Duet for One, for Two, for Three, for Four…’ (MCA, 2020-22).