Design Notes

For Issue #62 of Movement Research Performance Journal, we continue our research into choreographing reading by proposing a new set of paratextual gestures that attend to questions of territory, voice, and address. Understanding the journal as a space of rehearsal, the design of this issue attempts to present the page as a negotiated territory between languages, translation and tone. The design of Issue 62 foregrounds the page as a spatial and political infrastructure. The placement of folios shifts vertically throughout the journal, functioning as border zones, renegotiating the spaces of each spread. These movements introduce a tension between inside and outside, host and guest, centre and margin. This proposition becomes particularly charged in relation to writing produced under censorship, exposing it in the same place it is challenged, while addressing an outsider readership. The layout holds these simultaneous conditions together, allowing multiple realities to coexist on the page.

Language and orality are central to this inquiry. Vietnamese, as a language with a strong oral tradition, does not mark tense through verb conjugation, relying instead on context and aspect to situate time. This allows past and present to remain relational rather than fixed, requiring meaning to emerge through attention, tone, and inference. These qualities become visible in two primary ways. First, through oral interjections, where shifts in type size and tracking register moments of whispering, loudness, or shouting within the text. These oral interjections interrupt the visual rhythm of the page, making vocal intensity legible. As noted by the contributing editors of the issue, shouting suggests here a rejection of censorship against silencing. This approach resonates with Nora Turato’s articulation of language as operating on multiple levels. As she notes, ‘Much of our communication is not made by the words themselves, but by what we gather from tone, from body language, from facial expressions. We read into words and interpret them through our bodies. There is another layer to language, like its subconscious, the underbelly of language, and how much we actually breathe from there with our bodies, how much is gut feeling (1).

The design attends to this affective layer, allowing tone, rhythm, and volume to shape how meaning is produced and received. Second, orality also surfaces through the treatment of diacritics. Vietnamese diacritics are drawn by hand throughout the issue, foregrounding both their expressive function
and their frequent absence in contemporary typefaces. This absence points to a broader colonial legacy embedded within typographic infrastructures. Although Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, its full tonal and phonetic range is often unsupported or marginalised by Western type design conventions. Rendering diacritics manually becomes a way of reclaiming linguistic specificity and resisting typographic erasure.

Finally, colour operates as another paratextual layer. The use of purple ink references the history of mimeograph printing, widely used during the 1960s and closely associated with antiwar publishing during the Vietnam War. The purple and bluish inks of the mimeograph were both economical and politically charged, so much so that in Spain the process became colloquially known as “the Vietnamese press.” This material reference aligns the design with a lineage of improvised, collective, and resistant forms of dissemination. Across Issue #62, design functions as a practice of positioning. The page enforces structure as much as it records dissent, and at times speaks back. Reading becomes a choreographic act shaped by borders, tonal shifts, and material memory. Rather than resolving these tensions, the design stays with them, treating the journal as a space where language, politics, and form remain in active relation.