The dance and movement work of Jennifer Pike Cobbing : economies of effort and vitality dynamics

Thurston, SD

Abstract

Jennifer Pike (1920-2016) was a major artist whose practice traversed the disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, jewellery-making, poetry and performance. Although a fuller appreciation of the scale and range of her achievements has been recently enabled by the making of a film about her life and work by Holly Antrum (Catalogue, 2013) and the publication of two volumes of selected works by Veer books (The Conglomerization of Wot and Scrunch, both 2010), her work has still yet to be the subject of extended academic consideration. One aspect of Pike's practice which is of particular interest to my larger project of examining the relationships between poetry and movement (2011, 2012, 2013), is her dance and movement work which was often conducted in the context of collaborative performance with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing and musicians such as Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe. This article introduces this aspect of Pike's practice and offers some theoretical framing from Dee Reynolds' work on economies of effort (2007) and Daniel Stern's work on vitality dynamics (2010) before analysing recordings of performances from 2002 and 2007. An earlier draft of this article was presented as a paper at 'Outside-in / Inside-out: A Festival of Outside and Subterranean Poetry' at the University of Glasgow, 5-8 October, 2016. See Ellen Dillon's conference report in JBIIP 9.1. This article is dedicated to the memory of Jennifer Pike.

Citation

Thurston, S. (2021). The dance and movement work of Jennifer Pike Cobbing : economies of effort and vitality dynamics. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 13(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.3401

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 14, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jun 24, 2021
• Publication Date: Jun 24, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jun 28, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 28, 2021
• Journal: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
• Publisher: Open Library of Humanities
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.3401
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.3401
• Related Public URLs: https://poetry.openlibhums.org/