Motion harmony and deviation

“For all of us, movement is the great link between ourselves and every other form of life. Natural elements, plants, animals and human beings, move in a ceaseless process of change, but each according to its own nature. Gravity is the force which pulls everything towards the centre of the earth. In order to move, this force must be overcome by energy, and so in all orders of life we see a rhythmic cycle of waxing and waning energies. In all natural forms of life, deviations and disturbance may occur, but the underlying rhythmic harmony continues from day to day and from season to season.”

Jane Winearls, Modern Dance: the Jooss-Leeder Method, 1978;17

 

.

.

“Make sure the reader knows who is speaking”, wrote William Strunk Jr., in his “little book”, The Elements of Style (2005;111):

“Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is. In longer dialogue passages containing no attributives, the reader may become lost and be compelled to go back and reread in order to puzzle this thing out. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader, to say nothing of its damage to the work.”

.

.

This morning I realised I have been guilty of obscurity in Dummy run, and have therefore changed the words in the opening narrative from the third person singular to the first. It is “I” telling you the story, not “her”. I may recruit a visual persona (the dummy), but the written persona is only confusing.