Boy, Wind, Gilles + Félix

The north wind whips through,   
in the streets papers and leaves   
are chased with resentment.   
Houses moan,   
dogs curl into balls.   
There is something in   
the afternoon’s finger,   
a catfish spine,   
a rusty nail.   

from The north wind whips by Víctor Terán, translated by David Shook

An invitation extended, accepted and thrown back. A hand and a bristle. A sound, a gust, a shriek.

Let’s dance! Push-step-push-step-push-turn.

A boy and a wind. A series of gestures captured on daily walk with a group of preschoolers.

The choreography that ended in a retreat: a coat-cladded back calling for a crackle of laughter.

Watch the sketch play out along Deleuze and Guattari in the 1980s France, writing: “we can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things (. . .), by a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off”.

What might open up if we considered play through Tim Ingold’s (2013) proposition of the dance of animacy, the dance of correspondence:

… the mindful or attentive bodily movements of the practitioner, on the one hand, and the flows and resistances of the material, on the other, respond to one another in counterpoint. As with any dance, this should be read not laterally, back and forth, but longitudinally as a movement in which partners take it in turns to lead and be led or – in musical terms – to play the melody and its refrain…

References:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making : anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London ;: Routledge.