Practice as Research in Performance symposium

PARIP

The University of Bristol Drama Department

November 10-11th 2001

Fiona Wright

Uncertain bodies III: telling otherwise

The Pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

(Barthes 1990: 17)

 

Introduction

Looking over my shoulder: a single eye in a small mirror

Beginning with uncertainty

Embodied knowledges and the academic body

Writing, documentation and other versions

Approaches: ease and anxiety

deadweight — around fifty-four kilogrammes

The movement of body memory

Other bodies and uncertain texts

kneeling down softly/And what is something to cry about then;

Bibliography                                                                                                                                                           

 

Two pairs of opera glasses are handed out to the audience to be passed around during the presentation. Before beginning the paper I turn my back to the audience and survey them by looking via a small compact mirror. Throughout the presentation visuals on overhead projector transparencies are occasionally changed. These include anatomical diagrams of the eye, early scientific drawings of theories about the workings of binocular vision and plates from Muybridge’s photographs (Woman kneeling at chair and Man Performing Standing Broad Jump). The microphone is used where the performance writings in italics occur.

 

Introduction

 

In a preface to a book of her own essays, Kathy Acker notes her ambivalence about writing about her essay writing:

 

'I'm not sure I like my essays.' (Acker 1997: vii)

 

Indeed she questions the status and validity of her essay work in comparison to her fiction writing, saying:

 

I trust neither my ability to know nor what I think I know. (viii)

She is asking questions about knowledge and she articulates some of the questions that artists often express about writing about their art practice. She also considers the place, object and time of writing:

If writing is time, as I suspect, what would writing look like outside of linear narrative or time? What does this writing look like outside of linear narrative or time?

I am thinking about the difference between history and myth. Or between expression and vision. The need for narrative and the simultaneous need to escape the prison-house of the story — to misquote. What is the essay in this situation? (ix-x)

And before releasing the reader into the collection of essays, she voices another deliberate uncertainty:

I question the works you’re about to read. (ix-x)

 

Looking over my shoulder: a single eye in a small mirror

I wait alone, on the far side of the room opposite the door, sitting on the edge of the chair, my back facing the door, holding the small compact mirror slightly higher than my right shoulder, to one side and just in front of my face. I concentrate on breathing. I keep a watch over the mirror image of the door. This is how women check their faces in order to survey the crowd in the dance hall. This is how prisoners keep an eye on activity in the corridor. Seeing around corners. I am looking over my shoulder: my eye on the reflection of the door in the small mirror. Any-body entering can see one eye in the mirror but not my face. There is the knock and then the door opens and the first person enters the space. I keep my eye on his image in the mirror in my hand as he sits down on the chair, some distance away. We observe each other. He is facing me but I have my back to him. My hand begins to quiver so that the image in the mirror is blurring and shuddering. As I perform my actions I move quite slowly and when the sequence of moves is done, I approach the observer on the chair. I stand behind my solo audience, leaning forward with the mirror in my hand, looking over his shoulder. We look together, eyeing each other in the small silver disc. The compact case is shut closed, the door is opened and he leaves the room. The performance lasts five minutes and is repeated over several hours for one audience member at a time. For the most part, the shaking of my hand wears off after that first person and then each subsequent solo audience member entering the space is greeted by the calm surfaces of my back and the mirror.

It is some months later and I am out of breath and sweating and naked and kneeling in a pile of salt on the ground in front of a group of people. When I first look into the mirror and over my shoulder at the audience this simple reflection of my eye becomes a seemingly impossible moment. Again, this rear-view-mirror-framing - conceived of as a steady look from a still, singular, disembodied, surveying eye - becomes a trembling image of the blur of the reflective surface of the tiny mirror, held in the quivering hand of the otherwise quite steady, naked body of the performer. And my own picture of the audience in the circle of mirror becomes, at times, like an image from a video camera in the hands of a runner.

I decide that I like the mirror when it won't stay still.

 

Beginning with uncertainty

Ease shot through with signs of anxiety.

Involuntary shakes.

Trembling bodies.

Unpredictable physiological responses.

Sudden lack or loss of control.

Unaccountable and unrecognisable movements.

Unexpected temperatures.

Unsure flesh, too wet or too dry.

The shaking hand reaching for a glass of water can often be the first sign that the pulse rate is even up. It even surprises the body that the hand belongs to as water spills from the rim of the glass onto dry lips.

A small and explicitly physical moment of uncertainty.

Embodied knowledges and the academic body

The ideas in this paper, titled uncertain bodies III: telling otherwise, point to the practice of documenting different (other) accounts (versions) of performance and the necessary presence of uncertainty in our art practices and our ideas about knowledge. The work of writing and the potential of different kinds of writing and the inter-relation of various texts provide me with different registers. These work as reflections of the different research activities.

The paper is structured around what I will call performance writings or performance texts , which have been written about, around and as a consequence of performance making. They stand, as Matthew Goulish has so usefully put it, 'in proximity of performance' (Goulish 2000) and as an outcome of a research context that is located within my own solo performance practice. It is the use of writing, as a method of research and documentation, which I am taking as a focus here today. This is a pivotal part of a research project that seeks to negotiate a movement between performance practice and the practice of theorising.

I am looking at  writing as process and writing as documentation in the context of performance — looking through, rather than at the idea of solo performance. Performance and writing are connected by the body and by their shared, though different, relationships to temporality, presence and disappearance. The image of an uncertain body, or bodies, is positioned here as a way to talk about, towards and from an experimental performance practice. Contemporary performance emanates from a range of sources found in art 'forms' and 'movements'. The work experiments with and pushes the boundaries of the established, earlier disciplines to which it is related, and the stability of which it often seeks to challenge. It foregrounds uncertainty and is concerned with the body and, almost always the particular body of the artist in question. It often features the image or images of a lone figure. This individual, independent, solo practice presents a picture of a body seemingly un-moored — lost, even — and yet, fascinated; fascinated with its own physicality.

The specific postgraduate research project I am making is concerned with what the experience of the solo might give to our critiques of the visual culture and spectacle, our ways of seeing. This is being worked into a negotiation between the life of a performance practice and the written thesis as an event. Through this  (and it is one specific area or manifestation of my current work) I am interested in drawing attention to the place and conventions of the thesis within the academic context and its relevance to the possible audiences in the University and beyond. One working title was (Seeing) the body (dancing) alone: the idea and practice of solo performance (and other choreographies of the lone figure). The current working title, Other versions of an uncertain body: writing towards an account of a solo performance practice demonstrates the necessary move of speaking from the work of research. An articulation of the movement between the inside and outside edges of the live performance work itself.

In August I gave another version of this paper at Goat Island's The Body of Knowledge symposium held here at the University of Bristol Drama Department. My presentation was called uncertain bodies: trembling figures. I also presented a short version at the Installing Dance: Placing Gesture symposium at Chisenhale Dance Space, London in October. This paper includes re- arrangements of sections of the previous papers and all three have developed in part out of a presentation on method given on the Humanities Research Practice Course at The Nottingham Trent University (I am registered in Visual & performing Arts, Art & Design). Each version has been inflected for a particular audience and context. I was interested in the image of a body, which moves between knowing and not knowing, and which is knowing about this. The experience of uncertainty is fore-grounded  because, in performance, that which we make or speak and write about constantly disappears. Some kind of loss. Writing becomes a potentially charged mode when seen as a site of engagement with conceptions of knowledge as non-linear and unfixed. In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes reminds us also of disappearance and the absence of certainty about the writer:

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

(Barthes 1977: 142)

In Richard Johnson's essay, from the collection, Mourning Diana, Exemplary differences: mourning (and not mourning) a princess, he looks into the popular demonstrations of grief, and the dismay that this caused for some commentators. He describes how Diana's death resonated with his own experience of sudden and unexpected grief some years earlier. At that time he was involved in co-authoring a book, Border Patrols: Policing the Borders of Heterosexuality and in what became 'an autobiographical commentary' he wrote:

Like all 'border patrols' grieving rituals and practices are there to police the boundaries. At the same time, even the best defended frontier guards may tremble at the perils of dwelling in the borderlands. They are dangerous places where new identities — neither One nor the Other — may arise. (Johnson 1999: 16)

Loss affects our knowledge and our certainty, throwing identity into question. The introduction to the essay also acknowledges:

As often in cultural inquiry, personal experiences provide clues to wider investigations. (Johnson 1999: 15)

This suggests a movement from the particular to the general and also a movement between different aspects and knowledges of one's life.

The body of our work is always formed and informed by the presence, and absence, of other bodies. My performance work is a body of work, which has appeared and disappeared and re-appeared for more than ten years. It will necessarily carry other presences, histories and evidences. The acknowledgement of positionality and embodied experience is increasingly  explicit in academic research.

In our work our performances are demanding. We seek to overcome anxiety, control it with confidence and deliver with ease, sure of ourselves — even when giving accounts of our own tremblings. We have prepared and rehearsed and practiced. Knowledge, experience, body-memory tell us how. We know what to do. When we begin to speak we perform a physical act of 'embodied' knowledge. We ease our more or less unruly bodies into the words. The speaker organises thoughts and organises 'body' in a more or less improvised performance. How this body behaves itself and performs in the educational and studious context seems to be inevitably foregrounded and yet simultaneously denied. 'The academic body' (or the body of the academic) is charged with delivering 'mind', some kind of a solo performance, where behaviour is scrutinised by the student audience. My body for one has been simultaneously read as that of a lecturer and a student this year. My particular body has also been under scrutiny as the solo performance artist and dancer, in another particular kind of text. My body is also more than these things.

Writing, documentation and other versions

In an essay for the catalogue of last year's Diary exhibition, Tony Godfrey contexts his discussion within a recent history of art:

Broadly speaking, three things happened around the late sixties: Firstly, an interest in time; secondly, an interest in the everyday; thirdly, an interest in the uncertain status of documentation in art. (Godfrey 1999: 130)

In her book Where is Ana Mendieta?, Jane Blocker describes a piece which combines two existing texts, a performance document and a translated legend to make a new way of telling:

In 1981, Mendieta incorporated the Cuban legend of the Venus Negra (Black Venus) into a project for the feminist art journal Heresies. Along with her translation of the story she included a photograph of one of her own works…This earthwork is fairly typical of the gunpowder Siluetas she created during her career; in it, she molds the earth into an iconic female body and digs out an inner cavity, which she then fills with gunpowder and sets ablaze. This black-and-white photograph serves as the only record of the earthwork/performance. By combining this image with a hundred year old Cuban legend, Mendieta produces a text of great complexity, which gathers together rich and troubling elements from history, colonialism, exile, travel and political struggle. (Blocker 1999: 113-115)

In Performance studies we are constantly approaching the question of memory. I tend to think about the 're-telling'. In his essay Memory and Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur usefully describes the 'exercise of memory' as 'an exercise in telling otherwise'.

One response to the issue of the relationships between writing, knowledge, and philosophy has been to focus on 'textuality', experimentation, and the work and performance of writing itself. In Performance Studies the idea of performative writing has developed a strong currency. According to Peggy Phelan, in her book Mourning Sex: performing public memories:

Performative writing enacts the death of the 'we' that we think we are before we begin to write. A statement of allegiance to the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming, this writing pushes against the ideology of knowledge as a progressive movement forever approaching a completed end-point. (Phelan 1997: 17)

And for Della Pollock, in her essay Performing Writing:

writing as doing displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing (Pollock 1998: 75)

When I write I make other versions of the performance work that I do. Traces, partial views, incomplete accounts of a performance event or events, re-presented. Adjacent texts appear. Documenting, tracing, recording, accounting, saving, re-viewing, re-visioning. Re-telling in writing, which can shape some kind of written commentary on another kind of practice which the same body which wrote it sometimes does (and did sometime). Different texts laid alongside each other, the movement between them becoming part of the method, for the writer and the reader. A self-reflexive movement back and forth across the different readings and writings of the various modes of research activities. The strategy is to point out and point to the differences between the texts. Again, Peggy Phelan on performative writing.

The events I discuss here sound differently in the writing of them than in the 'experiencing' of them, and it is the urgent call of that difference that I am hoping to amplify here. (Phelan 1997: 12)

Approaches: ease and anxiety

How to make an approach to the work? Be approachable, appropriate it. Draw near to it. Draw it nearer to you. Come into relationship with. Position your self. Find a stance. Find an intimacy.

We are on different sides of the border and we are talking about the weight of our bodies. On the telephone we talk about heavy bodies. We usually weigh about the same. I am in a studio making a performance and I tell her about trying to move my own body weight. Sara is at home and pregnant and she tells me how heavy she feels. Moving around is different now. She feels other bodies moving around. She is carrying twins (lots of scans, lots of measuring) but by the end she is only 3 stone heavier than either of us usually are. She tells me that the weight of each of their bodies has been calculated. I think about her new relationship to the plural. I think about my singular activity in the studio. We are on different sides of the border and we are talking about the weight of our bodies.

deadweight — around fifty-four kilogrammes

The performance space is almost completely empty apart from me and a black holdall bag containing 54kg of cooking salt. Approximately my own equivalent body weight, around 8 1/2 stone (119 Ibs). About as heavy as my adult naked body gets, or has ever been, so far in its 35+3/4 years. I drag the bag of salt along the length of the performance space. I can't lift it. How to move it? How to go at  it? How to approach it? If this was a duet, then I would consider the most efficient lift would be one where my centre of gravity, the mass of my pelvis was aligned and in contact with that of the other dancer. But this wasn’t possible with the salt. It was deadweight. Simply leaning back with my own weight didn't shift it. Needed to engage muscle and a physical strategy to move it. An action with a technique of leaning towards it and away from it was developed. I think I am applying some sort of leverage with my own actual body weight. I am moving the weight by travelling backwards. There seemed to be a kind of swing to it, a strange rowing action. Reminds me of the jump. I was looking at Muybridge's 'Man Performing Standing Broad Jump'. I couldn't do this as the forward jump that it is in the photographs, though I tried for some time, so I imitated the man's positions and interpreted it as a backwards jump, travelling backwards. This way it works better for me. Working in this way, but without leaving the ground, I moved the salt by some kind of momentum, (is it 'latent energy'?), a slow progress of stepping backwards away from it and then pulling it towards me. I feel my body weight being rocked forward. This labour is what might be described in performance terms as 'real effort' in 'real time', functional, if not utilitarian. Not acted or pretended, but still, performed. When I have reached the other end of the space with the bag of salt I empty it out onto the floor. The visual mass of the soft pile of white is surprisingly small. Or so it seems to me after feeling the effort of moving it, and so others remark afterwards about their view and sense of that effort. I am out of breath and I am sweating. I get naked and some salt gets on my skin. I get my body dirty with something clean and cleansing.

A deadweight (~weight) is an inert mass, or (fig.) a debt not covered by assets. It is the weight of cargo, fuel, crew, and passengers carried by a ship.

The movement of body memory

Kira O'Reilly sends an email which contains the rhetorical questions:

How many bodies worth of salt?

How to sweat that much salt?

We write to each other about 'ease' and 'anxiety' and the pull between them in a performer's body. We exchange thoughts on watching each other perform, on seeing each other with identification and, what we have loosely agreed to describe as, (embodied) re-cognition and how this flickers with seeing each other as unrecognisable strangers, somehow foreign and other. This is part of a conversation we have been having for several years now. Recognising, witnessing, each other's uncertain bodies and the work that we make, its live performances, remembered traces, documented versions and imagined, planned, projected new manifestations. Our bodies are also more than these things.

On the telephone Kira is talking about a sense of body-memories triggered when watching 'video' me (Fiona on the video) moving. It also reminds her of something else. She says suddenly:

'There's a movement that I need to discover but I don't know what it is yet — as if it's just to the side of me or something'

 

Amongst all our talk of unspeakable performance moments already past, this feeling of 'finding' a (new) movement speaks of reaching into the future, into an, as yet, unknown body-memory. But Kira tells the sensation as if the idea of the movement is on the tip of her tongue, like a half-remembered dream, like a memory of something that already happened, something lost.

I think again of Kira's illusive, imagined movement gesture when I am reading Adrian Heathfield's essay on Goat Island's work, Coming Undone in which he observes:

It's no accident that the performers occasionally seem to be moving like puppets, or rehearsing a set of moves they do not yet know. The movement is exposed as repetition. We are watching them learning how to move. That the performers only 'half-inhabit' the movement is crucial to the work since it creates a question over the source of the movement and the performer's volition. Their physicality seems to originate simultaneously from outside and inside the performer: from some notional instruction, pattern or plan, but also from a psychic force, which grips the performer within a repetition of a gestural form. This unresolved ambiguity opens the question of the cause of human action, poised between interior (psychological) drives and exterior (social or cultural) determinations. (Heathfield 2001: 18)

Making the interior and exterior sources of physicality manifest in performance has always seemed to me to be a key approach to disrupting our expectations of what  'Dance', 'Theatre' or 'Performance' even is. The residues of not knowing and uncertainty seem capable of lingering on in the grain of our efforts and our new versions.

Other bodies and uncertain texts

Bodies keep on joining this writing and my awareness. Bodies I never met but know someone else who did. Bodies carrying and letting go of other bodies in different ways. Friends who are pregnant, or pregnant again or, astonishingly, even carrying more than one new body. While other bodies carry alarming news of becoming sick and changed and partial in unfamiliar ways through surgery. The bodies next to them keep watch, keep on watching over. Keep a look out, keep on looking out. Keeping an eye on them or watching them go.

Bodies different from our own, far away from our own, continually touch or ghost our material. I consider them and what I know of them as I read and as I write. And all of them make me think of other bodies. People feature in the text and I consider them and what I know of their embodiment as I mention them. And all of them make me think of other bodies. I find them in my writing and I mark my writing, deliberately with traces of them [1]

I am in the studio looking for something. Waiting and preparing for my body to be looked at. I decide that the performance will again use the opera glasses and the compact mirror as visual instruments. On the telephone I am listening to her telling me about the eye operation. Waiting and preparing for theatre. Recovering from theatre. I am reading about vision and visuality. Seeing bodies and bodies seeing. I sit in a late night bookshop looking at anatomical diagrams and drawings of the eye. I work on a piece of writing I know is important to the work but I can find no place for it in the performance. My relationship to the text becomes uncertain.

kneeling down softly/

And what is something to cry about then;

Writing and eyes:

she avoids the first person and she gathers together quotations, always quotations — we can only write over and on top of each other and ourselves, so know your history, she thinks (but which one?). And know your body, she writes, especially the blood, sweat and tears. No such thing as a dry eye. Unless she counts pictures. The eyes in books always look straight out at her, the small upside-down image hitting the back of her own eye. Her dreams are the right way up already, seen from behind closed eyes, from the inside. And when her eyes are open she can always see pieces of herself, around the edges, until something comes in close-up, right up against her.

Salt and skin:

she dreams of being away at sea so long that the salt builds up in layers on her skin. And the question she tries to answer for the whole length of the dream is not 'how much salt is carried inside a body?' but 'how much salt can a body carry outside of itself? — that is, beyond itself?' She can't lift her own weight in salt. This much is true, and although it wouldn't look like much it would be a deadweight and hard to get a hold of. But she knows she can lift a woman her own size. A woman who is alive and awake that is. A faint, sick or drunk, irresponsible or dead woman would need a different kind of attention.

Crying and dancing:

she once wanted to be a sailor; now, she sits at the bar drinking like a sailor, surrounded by the women in the bar mirrors. And someone says; 'but that's not something to cry about is it?' And she is kneeling down softly. And what is something to cry about then? She thinks to herself. And then it's nearly over. Just one more slow dance. You can dance for me. (You do the dancing in my place, I'll just watch, with my body arranged around the edges of the picture.)

Then it's over.

Bibliography

Acker, Kathy. 1997. Bodies of Work. Essays. London, New York: Serpent’s Tail

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press.

   1990. The Pleasure of the Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

   1993 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Howard, Richard, trans., London: Vintage

Blocker, Jane. 1999.  Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exhile. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

Godfrey, Tony. 2000. Diaries, or why I can't write them. In: Margot Heller, ed., Diary, exhibition catalogue, Cornerhouse, Manchester, pp.125-135.

Goulish, Matthew. 2000. 39 microlectures: in proximity of performance. London, New York: Routledge

Heathfield, Adrian. 2001. Coming Undone. In: Goat Island's It's an Earthquake in My Heart reading companion booklet.

Johnson, Richard. 1999. Exemplary differences: mourning (and not mourning) a princess. In: Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds., Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. London, New York: Routledge

Phelan, Peggy. 1997. Mourning Sex: performing public memories, London, New York, Routledge

Pollock, Della. 1998. Performing Writing. In: The Ends of Performance  Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., New York, London: New York University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1999. Memory and Forgetting. In: Questioning Ethics, R. Kearney and M. Dooley, eds., Routledge