The Dance and Movement Work of Jennifer Pike Cobbing: Economies of Effort and Vitality Dynamics

Abstract

Jennifer Pike (1920-2016) was a majorartist whose practice traversed the disciplines of painting, drawing,sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, jewellery-making, poetry andperformance. Although a fuller appreciation of the scale and range of herachievements has been recently enabled by the making of a film about her lifeand 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 stillyet to be the subject of extended academic consideration. One aspect of Pike’spractice which is of particular interest to my larger project of examining therelationships between poetry and movement (2011, 2012, 2013), is her dance andmovement work which was often conducted in the context of collaborativeperformance with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing and musicians such as VeryanWeston, Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe. This article introduces this aspect ofPike’s practice and offers some theoretical framing from Dee Reynolds’ work oneconomies of effort (2007) and Daniel Stern’s work on vitality dynamics (2010)before analysing recordings of performances in 2002 and 2007.