Writing Body Stories

Gerry Tuvey’s Body Stories project maps the life journey of her dancing body through the scars and memories of illness, injury and surgery, events that Turvey refers to as ‘pauses’ in her thirty-year career as a dance artist. Through solo dance performance, visual art and video installation, the Body Stories project witnesses injury as physical knowledge, which Turvey describes as having “…impacted or changed my work, approach to movement material, and […] informed me as a dancer”. Writing from my perspective as a collaborative artist and video–maker, in this chapter I explore my experiential reflections of the Body Stories project with particular focus on the four dance videos made for projection in the performance installation. Three of the videos created for screening in the Body Stories installations accompany this publication as well as a four-minute performance video of Turvey’s Body Stories performance at Huddersfield Art Gallery (2013). The written text reflects on positive wellbeing experiences found through participating in autobiographic storytelling and further explores sites for locating wellbeing within the videos, which offer absorbing, visceral framings of Turvey’s body and close focus intimations of both her vulnerability and her physical power. The chapter describes the concept of haptic visuality and delves into the video strategies of extreme close-up, repetitive editing and ambiguous screening: processes that enhance, question and re-colour the pallet of subjective wellbeing through a fleshly connectivity with the material presence of skin and scars in a sensuous encounter with physical vulnerability and embodied mindfulness.