[Facing, East?] emerged from a gesture phrase developed with choreographer Sarah Chase on Jericho Beach, Vancouver, in August 2018. It derives from Sarah’s longstanding gesture-phasing practice that has been the foundation of many choreographic works she has made for herself and other dance artists.

This quite simple phrase combines a series of 4 gestures of the right hand with 5 gestures of the left, generating a sequence of 20 different gesture combinations. The practice involves not a rote repetition of the movement shapes, but a meditative engagement with the processual experience. I have been working with the sequence outdoors on a regular basis and in different locations when I travel, distilling its somatic phenomena (including what I call “proprioceptive parallax”) through my writing practice. I only realized after almost a year, that every time I practiced, I always faced east without intending to. When I became aware of this, I recalled that the phrase was originally created facing east off a little curve of the beach.

It seems that there is an orienting practice embedded in the movement and activated by my body in relation to land and place. I call the phrase [Facing, East?], allowing the question mark to invite the possibility of both orienting and failing to orient. The fact that “orient” also refers to “the East” is not lost on me and in fact this phrase has become a part of my overarching practice-as-research endeavour: the disorientation project. I created this particular video excerpt from 3 different sessions at McGillivray Pass, BC at different times of the year, always in the same location, facing east of course.