Topography
every pattern is a map...
With Topography, we look at the environment. The movement patterns made in the space we are in. I love how Tina Landau and Anne Bogart frame this in “The View Points Book”, they ask us to imagine there is paint on the bottoms of your feet. The patterns and layers that you create as you move about create the topography of the work at hand.
This makes me think about my own home. The well trodden paths from the living room into the kitchen. The pattern I make upon the floor as I make my bed. These routes and patterns form a rhythm, or a private choreography, that tells the truth about where I linger, what I avoid, and how I move through transition.
Some days just for the sake of change. I walk a different way. I move through the hallway closer to the wall in the space that normally goes unoccupied. Even a small deviation beckons my awareness to return.
Suddenly the environment speaks back.
Suddenly I am in conversation with my own patterns.
We can create through duration + tempo with this view point. How quickly or slowly we retrace or redefine… how many times we re-visit, and when we choose to break free.
The patterns we make reveals the meaning we create through where we place ourselves.
It also reveals where we go without thinking.
What happens if we allow kinesthetic response to inform our patterns?
Am I following an impulse to be close to something or someone? Or am I being repelled to move in an opposite direction?
Is my pattern a seeking or a repelling?
As we approach the close of the year, the long arc toward winter.
Days are shorter. Movement slows.
Indoor pathways become more familiar, more worn.
This is a season where topography naturally thickens.
Our patterns reveal what we are ready to shed — and what is asking to stay.
This week becomes an invitation to map what has been unconscious.
Until soon….
See you at the next threshold,
Kirstin
