We (Jess Humphrey, Leslie Seiters, and Eric Geiger) each wrote abstracts on shaking, touching, and queering, respectively, and applied to present them in a themed formal session at the Arts Practice Research conference at Texas Tech University in October of 2015. This particular constellation of verbs does not alone represent our work, but our orientation to each reveals an emerging value system over our 8-year history of collaborative dancemaking praxis. These words are methods, descriptors, and inroads to each other. till your eyes water is a solo (performed by Humphrey and directed by Seiters and Geiger) that was made by folding our writings back into a dancemaking process. Humphrey performed this dance/paper presentation hybrid that blurs the lines between academic analysis of dance and fully embodied dancing at the conference, and again in San Diego in a formal, theatrical setting for a dance audience. The different contexts of these performances created new questions around authorship, appropriation, and responsibility, particularly since the dance includes embodied readings by Humphrey of material written by Seiters and Geiger. Continued dialogue between the writings, the dance, and its makers, and the questions from the 2016 CORD+SDHS (Congress on Research in Dance+Society of Dance History Scholars) conference informed another version which Humphrey performed there. In particular, “how is the transmission of movement between bodies, and across apparent boundaries, framed in terms of rights, property, propriety, or in some other manner?” shape the solo in both process and product?
