Choreographing Thought in Comics

• In Event: Facilitating Collaboration Through Movement and Mark-Making

Abstract

We arrive in the world in motion – primed to move, to act. It is through this movement – reaching, grasping, always seeking – that we learn about our environment and come to know ourselves and our capacity for movement. We have been thinking through our bodies since before birth. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011) claims, movement is our original mode of thinking (xxv).
 
At the outset, movement was a struggle, hampered by gravity and the limits of our developing bodies, in much the same way that our earliest sensory experiences were perhaps what William James described as “blooming buzzing confusion.” Over time, we gradually became habituated (Hepper, 2005 & 2015), parsing the jumbled movement and sounds we experienced into separate and connected elements, as we could increasingly coordinate our movements with greater intentionality. From infancy, we perform a kind of choreography, which Alva Noë (2015) defines as a way of organizing our world that we are always in the act of doing (p.15). We can think of choreography in two intertwined ways: as analysis of the underlying patterns in what we observe and as orchestrating our own movements to act in new ways.
 
Reflecting on his ABR dance practice, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones (2016) defines choreography as “a way of awareness” (p. 326). I see my practice of comics-making as inquiry as a kind of choreography – a way of making sense for myself and embodying ideas through the interaction of the separate elements and the overall composition of the page (Groensteen, 2007). And that’s exactly what I want to instill in my students. Although they tend to be self-described non-drawers, I watch students quickly learn to use comics as a space for self-reflection and discovery. When we get beyond the perception of comics as being defined by a particular genre or drawing style, at their core, comics are fundamentally about the organization of time and movement. If drawing is a way of preserving our ephemeral gestures, comics offer a site for choreography – conveying the experience of time in space (Author, 2015a), not unlike sheet music, or perhaps architecture as Art Spiegelman and other cartoonists suggest (in Witek, 2007, pp. 176–177). It is the reader’s movement through this static almost-architectural space that animates the experience. From this perspective, comics have much in common with diagrams, as comics historian Thierry Smolderen (2014) notes, “The purpose of the diagram is not to transmit visual information (in the realistic, photographic sense of the term) so much as to stabilize visual signification” (p. 9). Erin Manning (2008) suggests that diagrams “move thought” (p. 217), and comics, this flexible platform that allow for a wide range of means for spatially arranging marks, words, and other diagrammatic gestures (Author, 2015b), are particularly well-suited for moving thought. 
 
For this presentation, I will share process examples from my own comics-making practice alongside examples from my students, to set the stage to lead participants in non-representational comics-making activities alongside my dance and drawing collaborators. 

Author

• Nick Sousanis, San Francisco State University