Author: avocadobranch

A conversation with ultra-runner and Blacksburg, VA-based physical therapist, Jordan Chang and ethnochoreologist Andrea Conger, PhD. This is the first in a series of dialogs with thoughtful runners regarding their running practices as experience.

“. . . It’s this expectation that you’ll grow up and become one of those scuttling commuters with a very large filing cabinet and nothing marvelous to say. The way to not get lost is with the body. . . . ” Oliver Bendorf. 2015. “The No Shame Theatre.” The Spectral Wilderness. Kent State University […]

“. . . performance can be understood as process — as enactment, exertion, intervention, and expenditure. . . . Performance, however, is not limited to mimetic repetition. It also includes possibility of change, critique, and creativity within the frameworks of repetition.” (Diana Taylor. 2016. Performance. Duke University Press. 8, 15.) For awhile now, I’ve wanted […]

“For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is constricted space. . . . Our attention is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the body that must accomplish it . […]

“The circle of hyper-reflection can be so finely grained, in such tiny loops, that it can be done in the midst of experience. A dancer [/runner] who interrogates her movement phenomenologically in the very moment of dancing attempts to not let reflection intervene and shape the flow of movement but knows that it will change […]

“. . . the nature and role that mimetic empathy plays in a dancer is not mere representation, but a materiality grounded in bodily experiences . . . to watch dance is to have a ‘feeling of’ the movement, simulating movement sensations . . .” (Edward C. Warburton. Of meanings and movements: Re-languaging embodiment in […]

” . . . the body of the dancer [/runner] is the site of discovery . . . ” (Susan Kozel. 2007. Closer: Performance, technology, phenomenology. Boston: MIT Press, xiv.) “. . . what we can take from this idea that the body is a source of society is that the embodied subject is possessed […]

“. . . our bodies both shape and are shaped by our life experiences.” (Ann Cooper Albright. 2011. Situated dancing: Notes from three decades in contact with phenomenology. Dance Research Journal 43(2): 7-18.)   My running practice began in an urban environment (Phoenix, AZ) about 9 months before I made a move in January 2014 […]