Posted on No Comments on 2.1 Any body? The multiple bodies of the performer

2.1 Any body? The multiple bodies of the performer

By Victor Ramirez Landron de Guevara (pp. 20-31)

  • A body always is, to a certain extent, undefinable.
  • The body is transformed into an object that comes into being only when it becomes present in one’s own consciousness.
  • The body is largely subordinated to the mind and it is precisely our minds that are “most essential to us as persons” (western “dualism”)
  • The body is treated as an object of representation. The body as a medium of representation does not mean anything in itself, it only stands for a text, a sign, a symbol or an ideological construct of something else. (Csordas 1994:9)
  • It is impossible to reduce the body to a single aspect.
  • The mind is not detached from the body’s senses. The external reality, the body’s senses and the individual’s consciousness are perpetually and inexorably intertwined (phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
  • The ecstatic (or fleshly) body is the sensorial and motor skills that mediate one’s existence in relation to the world.

ecstatic body

  • The recessive body encloses the inner anatomical and physiological constituents of the body (such as organs, bones, tissues, cells and blood), as well as the chemical and biological processes not dependent on one’s will or not present to one’s awareness.
  • The recessive character of the body (its latency) can emerge at any time (…) by a process which Leder calls dys-appearance.
  • The depth that characterizes this body only surfaces when the habitual conditions that surround it are disrupted and are “apart… from our ordinary mastery and health” (pain, discomfort).
  • The opposition between what is considered “natural” and what us deemed a “learnt behavior” is particularly important in relation to performing training techniques. The idea of a “natural” body is also a cultural construct.
  • The imagined body is the one that inhabits a performance act, usually associated with the creation of characters (Strasberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski).
  • The body is not a finished process; the body is always in a process of becoming.

 

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
 

 

Posted on No Comments on 2.2 Some body and no body: the body of a performer

2.2 Some body and no body: the body of a performer

By Wendy Houstoun (pp. 31-38)

“I learnt very early on in dance training that how I feel is not necessarily how I look,
and the journey through movement and performance practices has been
a process of aligning my own internal perception
with external commentaries”
(Wendy Houstoun, p.34)

 

Some body (me) Somebody/nobody observed (performance)
No body (dancer) “at risk” (in character)
Ageing body (The body has imprints of moves running around it that reside in another era). 

 

 
Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Posted on No Comments on 2.3 Every body: performance’s other bodies

2.3 Every body: performance’s other bodies

By Anna Fenemore (pp.38-50)

  • Perception is “something we do” (de Guevara) and “a skillful [bodily] activity” (Noë)
    (some body observed , the spectating body)
  • As well as there being some bodies that act, react and behave as singular bodies, these bodies might also simultaneously act as a body of bodies.
    Body as a group – a communal grouping that act and react, or behave as one some of the time.
  • When in action, an individual’s sensorimotor means of surveying action recedes.

 

Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Posted on No Comments on 7 Thoughts about Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic

7 Thoughts about Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic

≥ It manipulates the repetition and temporality[1]

≥ It keeps a relationship with body and architecture and performance and photography[2]

≥ It demonstrates that all understanding occurs through embodied acts of attendance, which occur in time and must be repeated.[3]

≥ Abramovic’s body becomes a metonym for the performances that she re-performed[4]

≥ It addresses duration, physical stamina, myth and intensive states of mind, such as attentiveness and focus[5]

≥ It is about re-performance , habits, ritual, deprivation, purification, privacy …[6]

≥ …and exhaustion[7]

 

 

[1] Santone, J. (2008) Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History. Leonardo. Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 147–152
[2] ibid
[3] Shalshon, L. (2013) Enduring Documents: Re-Documentation in Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces. Contemporary Theatre Review, London: Routledge,  Vol. 23, No. 3, 432–441
[4] Powell, B.D. (2010)   Seven Easy Pieces and Performance Document(ation)s. Theatre Annual 63. The College of William and Mary. pp 64-86
[5] Emerling, J. (2010). Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present: Museum of Modern Art, New York. X-tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol. 13, pp.26-35
[6] ibid
[7] ibid
Posted on No Comments on Unmarked & Reconstructing the dance

Unmarked & Reconstructing the dance

By Peggy Phelan[1] & Helen Thomas[2]

In here, I will use both of the articles that we were given to study.

They both refer to the present life that performance has. “Performance cannot be saved […]: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”, says Peggy Phelan and Sigel agrees as “[Dance is] an event that disappears in the very act of materializing”.

Maybe keeping a description of the performance, would be a good try of maintaining the work, but in that way, what really happens is a transformation of the work in the words of this script. Indeed, on the one hand, a review or a script can fundamentally alter the event, on the other hand, though, it is a way to preserve it.

“Performance’s challenge to writing is to discover a way for repeated words to become performative utterances,
rather than constative utterances”

-Benveniste

Until now dance has no retrievable past, as “[it] has been pushed to the margins of aesthetic and philosophical discourse” (Elton, 1992, p.22). So, what we have is the gap between the text and the performance, the “arrangement” of the work, as Helen Thomas wants to name it, from debates and discourses. This gap is desired, intended and logically required.

The debate for the aura, the authenticity, the repeatability and the reproducibility of the works still goes on among the theoreticians of dance.

Tomlison prefers using the term “authentic meanings” to “authenticity”, because we cannot possibly know with any degree of objective certainty the composer’s true intentions in creating the work.  In that way, we become less absolute on our conclusions on authenticity and use our beliefs and memories. These memories are a mix of every “thing outside of the work” that makes the work understandable to the audience. Again, this brings us to the second paragraph that introduced the “alteration” of the work.

Peter Kivy follows with 4 different interpretations to authenticity:

  1. Faithfulness to the composer’s intentions
  2. Performance practice and original sound in the composer’s lifetime to the performer’s own self
  3. Original way of playing
  4. (through) performance

Maybe, the writing should come from the performers and the composer themselves and then from audience and critics. Maybe, this is what Franko means when he writes about “dance theorizing” that should replace repeatability.

[1] Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London: Routledge

[2] Thomas, H. Reconstructing the Dance: In Search of Authenticity. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. pp. 121-145