how to heal through the arts and the artist who addresses the social ills of society.
wild...@peconic.net
how to glue him back together...
i do think paul knows these issues.
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The Connected Body?
An interdisciplinary event
21-28 August 1994, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Reviewed by Andrew Houston, U.K.
Published in Arts Dialogue #31, March 1995.
The Connected Body? was an eight-day interdisciplinary event comprised
of workshops and a
conference with the purpose of investigating the body as a site for
cultural re-integration. The
proceedings brought together an international gathering of artists,
scholars, educators, and others to
examine the effects of various contrasting discourses and practices on
the body's representation in
contemporary 'live art' and performance.
The premise for The Connected Body? arises out of a concern to address
the problem of the
"fragmented body", which has become "an ordering metaphor which
expresses the
disintegration of society and the alienation of the individual."
Upon first reading the promotional material for this event I was
intrigued by such a project, but I
must confess, I have only recently begun to recognize the immediate
need for such an inquiry. Two
recent news items in the British press have affirmed for me the value
of pursuing a "new authenticity"
of the body in the areas of art practice and scholarship. The first
item spoke of a lesbian who, truly
believing she was a man trapped in the body of a woman, had a sex
change. After a few years in
her altered--apparently authentic--body, she left her lesbian lover of
many years and began a
relationship with a man. The article goes on to explore other
conundrums of contemporary sexual
politics, and I was amazed at the extent to which the body can be seen
as just another fashion
accessory. The other was a critique of medical technology; in
particular the simultaneous
over-exposure and disappearance of the body in the discourses of the
bio-sciences. The writer
sketched a frightening portrayal of the bio-technician as the modern
knowing subject: under his
imperious gaze the living organism, reduced to an infinitely small
scale, loses all reference to the
human form, and to the specific temporality of the human being. All
reference to death disappears in
the discourse about bio-power, which comes to mean a total form of
power over life. The
technological freezing out of time is seen as a denial of the body,
and all its various processes,
especially death.
The Connected Body? was organised by the United Kingdom-based Writing
Research
Associates. WRA is an international partnership involved in
consultancy, education, publishing and
creative work in the field of performance. With this event WRA has
teamed up with The School for
New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam.The SNDO has an
international reputation in the
field of new dance. 'New dance' is defined here as exploration and
experimentation in the area of
dance performance which is not strictly within established aesthetic
forms, rather dance is explored
in relationship to a wide variety of means of body/mind experience.
Workshops were lead by invited artists of international reputation,
who also played a part in the
proceedings of the conference. By conference standards the programme
offered an excellent variety
of ways to explore the subject. The usual presentations, panel
discussions, and discussion groups
were offset by performances, installations, 'actuations'
(performance/installation), curated film/video
showings, and wonderful food served within the SNDO facility. It was
refreshing to attend a
conference that not only catered to the mind but also considered the
well-being of the participant's
body, through good food and a balanced programme of activities.
The sub-title chosen for the conference was 'Investigating a Site For
Re-Integration'. Yet despite the
succinct sound of this heading, the body of the event--the site--was
rife with paradox. Much of the
investigation focused on developing a notion of the body's essential
experience and constitution--a
connectedness that is intrinsically within us all, awaiting
revelation. Throughout the proceedings,
however, this concept was shadowed by another: a connected body
through signification, one
mediated from without, conscious of its cultural construction. I
discovered that within one approach
the other is necessarily at work, working within yet against the given
notion of connectedness. The
conference brought together a wide array of participants, each with
vastly different languages or
narratives concerning the body. The challenge was to find an ethos of
judgement which would
explore each 'language' of connection while acknowledging a difference
working within.
The first presentation was a video extravaganza entitled Project:
Reconstruction. Using several
projectors, often at once, the work was a collage of private and
public media compiled by Johannes
Birringer. Birringer is a German theatre and video artist, who is
Assistant Professor of Performance
Studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, and the author of
Theatre, Theory,
Postmodernism (1991). His presentation integrated his experience
during the workshop week with
the theme of "border work/reconstruction". The focus of this
integration was the body, as seen
through intercultural rehearsal/intermedia practice, and the nation.
This drew upon a current project
of Birringer's that deals with notions of cultural reconstruction in
an economically and
socio-culturally devastated area on the German-Polish border.
Birringer's work leaves one pondering the various layers of
signification--video imagery--that make
up national and personal identity. He obliged us to consider the way
in which we construct these
identities, and for this purpose video proves to be an excellent
medium. Birringer juxtaposes images
(usually violent) of people in places with whom we have had no
personal contact (just like on CNN)
with images of people with whom we have had contact, doing the various
workshop exercises from
the week previous or in prior conference activities. Birringer appears
to use video as a strategy
toward reconstructing identity and thereby creating a connected body,
so long as it is used in
conjunction with other forms of experience. In his accompanying talk
he hailed the imaginary
richness and fulfilment that can be a part of reconstructing bodies,
be they personal or national, using
video representation; while offering this cautionary note:
Perhaps the future is possible, but the choices of becoming, as
positions to take on, are
impossible to occupy simultaneously.
For Birringer the connected body is viable provided a technique of
development is adopted where
each subject is at liberty to become, or, develop identity. Each
person's path is different, and in the
collective pursuit of personal paths there is connection: community.
Following Birringer's presentation came a solo dance performance by
Eva Schmale, entitled
Verlorengegangen (trans: 'Lost'). Schmale is founder of The Leibliches
Theatre, Koln, Germany
and she offered a workshop entitled Written in the Body. Her dance is
strongly influenced by Eva
Gindler, a pioneer of body-mind integration who lived and worked in
Berlin in the early part of this
century. Gindler's name is not that well known, but her students have
spread all over the world and
work in such fields as psycho-somatic medicine, psychology, and
various areas of performance.
Chief among Gindler's influence on the work of Schmale is the notion
of nature-given fundamental
laws of movement, inherent in all human beings, and how they may
emerge in an individual through a
process of meditative body work.
Where Birringer encouraged us to develop a technique of
connecting,--positions to take on--like
frames of video to be edited, Schmale uses technique so that it may
eventually be discarded in lieu
of the body's inherent movement, which the technique uncovers. Her
work moves us toward an
authenticity of being that uncovers a consciousness of the body
naturally invested in us. Her
workshop encouraged participants to become involved with one's own
body "intensively, lovingly,
and without ambition," in order to develop a broadening of perceptual
capabilities and physical
change.
Verlorengegangen showed two characters who were lost because their
impulse to live came from
without. A male character was satirized for his obsessively tidy and
ordered world, and how he
celebrated this; while a female character is seen to struggle with
piles of earth--her life's
trappings--which she carried in her dress. Schmale portrayed both of
these characters plus an
abstract 'being' who appeared to represent the female character's
incarnated soul. The latter
allowed Schmale the opportunity to showcase her incredible capacity
for contortionist movement.
Her movement was so organic, so intrinsic to her body, that you forgot
you were watching a human
being perform. This is the extent to which Schmale's process has
allowed her to transcend
conventional ways of signifying dance, connecting imagination and
body. Schmale's connected body
is achieved through technique, yet it presents us with such an
authentic form of movement that
technique is forgotten. Many participants felt that Schmale's
performance had gone a long way
toward illuminating a personal path of connectedness within the body.
Any comfort taken in such illumination was soon extinguished by
Saturday's first presentation which
offered an analysis of how dance in continental Europe has become a
celebration of the damaged
body. Entitled, innocently enough, Representing the Body: Strategies
of Dramaturgy and
Choreography in Dance/Theatre, the presentation was given by Claudia
Jeschke, an
independent scholar, choreographer and director in Munich. Her
analysis interpreted the body
within certain historical and cultural contexts, establishing
typologies of representation. After
fourteen typologies such as 'The Mechanical Body' of Ludwig XIV in 'Le
Ballet de la Nuit'
(1653), 'The Hermetic Body' of Isadora Duncan (1903), we moved to Wim
Vandekeybus's 'La
Mentira' of 1992 and the conclusion that 'The Damaged Body' was the
only authentic representation
in the age of AIDS.
Participants had an opportunity to address Jeschke's diagnosis in the
first of four panel discussions.
The panels were made up of invited artists, scholars, and other
practitioners of body-work who
were asked to speak briefly about the given topic and then receive
questions from participants and
other panellists. These forums were entitled The Constructed Body, The
Represented Body,
Process, and Healing. Often they gave rise to the most candid,
meaningful discussion of the
conference. Fortunately the panel following Jeschke's 'damaged body'
was 'The Constructed Body',
which paradoxically was a site of de-construction, but more to the
point of the participants' concern,
it became a session of grieving the damaged body and spirit of the
contemporary dancer.
The panel included Johannes Birringer and Claudia Jeschke, as well as
Mike Pearson, Rona Lee,
and Linda Montano--who appeared(?) astrally. Mike Pearson is
co-founder and Associate Artistic
Director of Brith Gof, a Welsh physical/visual theatre company. Rona
Lee is a visual/performance
artist based in Devon, where she is Lecturer at Dartington College of
Arts. For Linda Montano, her
'astral' appearance (meaning she was there in thought only), is part
of an ongoing project called
'Another Seven years of Living Art (1991-1997)'. She is an American
performance artist probably
best known for her projects that obliterate the distinctions between
art and life, like the performance
she completed in 1984 with Tehching Hsieh in which they were tied
together at the waist with an
eight foot rope for a year and never touched. Unfortunately, Montano's
astral appearance had
virtually no impact on me. I had trouble getting past an intentionally
humorous, yet revealing,
comment she made about her astral appearance, recorded in our
programmes: "Thanks for
believing in this incredibly exciting way of 'not working'!!"
Each panellist laid out their own processes of working with the body
using energy in space and time,
which essentially amounted to a deconstruction of the body in
performance and life: we do not move
in free and open space, our bodies are culturally constructed, and too
often culturally-bound. And
with this, the shadow of the damaged body emerged. The discussion
moved from anorexia, to
sexual politics, which explored the invasion and distortion of the
body by the spectator's gaze, and
finally to the metaphors of performance and life which we take for
granted and often suffer by. This
last issue was seen to have repercussive effects in the most important
contributions to this
conference yet to come. The idea of exploring new metaphors for
experiencing the body,
performance, and life became crucial as the conference continued.
Later that day I experienced two events--a presentation and a
performance--which got me thinking
about metaphors that shape knowledge and identity. Robert Schwarz, an
American academic, born
with cerebral palsy, gave an engaging presentation called Introduction
to Body, Space and Idea,
based on his research in epistemology and the psychology of the
creative process. His work is a
detailed investigation of the concept of space and the role that body
postures and movements play
in the processes of abstract thinking (for example, metaphorical
thought). He demonstrated that
body posture, movement (action) and manipulation (gesture) are
archetypal to human thought; that
defines a clearly articulated bridge between movement/dance and
thought processes. For Schwarz
this means that
i) the dancer has a basis on which to conceive what s/he is doing in
terms of more general ideas
which relate ii) to other disciplines, and iii) this provides the
foundation for a more precise
nomenclature for describing movement/dance activities.
Despite the fairly complex foundations to his thought, Schwarz
presented his ideas in an incredibly
lucid manner in devising a taxonomy--grammar--of movement. His aim was
to make the work of
dancers more accessible, and hoped that a taxonomy might help people
in the dance world speak
more easily to those outside this world about what they do. Schwarz's
connection between dance
and thought raised broader questions about metaphors we use to order
our lives. For example, why
is war the prevalent metaphor given to discussion, why not dance? Why
do we 'attack' our
'opponent's position' in argument when we could 'rebound' to our
'partner', utilizing the fluidity of
'great moves' instead of 'fortifying' combative positions. Perhaps new
metaphors would allow us to
view problems in a new, more productive light?
While Schwarz's project was laudable for its simplicity of purpose and
its vision of connections
between dance and other disciplines, paradoxically it seemed to suffer
for its simplicity--especially in
its conception of the body in performance. The problem with Schwarz's
narrative is that it fails to
take into account the active relationship between addressor and
addressee in communication
through the body. Borrowing from post-structural theories of
communication (in particular those of
Jean-Francois Lyotard) dance--as other forms of communication--has two
aspects: 'figure', the
event of telling or expressing, and 'discourse', the process by which
telling or expressing gives
meaning. The postmodern is marked by an awareness of the event of
narrativity (telling/expressing);
the contingent aspect of narrative that is so completely other to
discourse that it cannot be
incorporated, accounted for, or totalized by it. I have difficulties
with Schwarz's theories because
they appear to totalize dance into a discourse of metaphors. In
finding a representational meaning
for dance, Schwarz diminished the experience of dance; he did not
fully take into account the figural
aspect of performance that is a part of--yet escapes--strategies of
representing its experience.
True to the established custom of this conference, in contradiction to
Schwarz's pursuit of meaning,
Deborah Hay's performance that night was an expose of her aesthetic
which explored the gaps
between meanings we ascribe to dance. Hay presented a re-worked
version of her latest dance
entitled Lamb at the Altar. Beginning her career in the 1960s as a
founding member of the Judson
Dance Theatre in New York City, she later worked with the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company,
and ever since has moved away from conventional forms of contemporary
dance practice. Believing
that "to identify dance as flow, line, technique or beauty in motion,
is to minimize it." Hay
seeks chaos, meditation and madness in her work.
Similar to much of her best known work, Lamb at the Altar, was
initially choreographed for a
large group of trained and untrained dancers, and its performance at
The Connected Body? had
become a solo piece. Also of note, Hay decided not to use music in
this performance, and so we
had a pure experience of her unique quality of movement and body
awareness. Hay has spent the
last 30 years 'undoing' the technique she learned from Merce
Cunningham. Basically this is a way of
unlearning how to move. As she said in the panel discussion on
process, "I play tricks on myself
to get out of technique. If this works, I'll see it and so will you."
It is difficult to do justice to the experience of Deborah Hay's dance
here. In contrast to Robert
Schwarz, her work pursued a language which can not be translated
meaningfully without diminishing
its impact. These perspectives shadow each other. While Schwarz's
theories aim to simplify through
meaningful representation, Hay's performance lacks a representational
framework to draw us into
the abstraction of movement she explores. Her movement attempts to
express the unconscious gaps
between choices to 'move'. Her body convulsed from one movement to the
next. Her performance
was more to do with showing an altered sensation of the body than
presenting a dance for an
audience's entertainment. In this respect, her work lends itself to a
fuller exploration than that
afforded by the experience of a single performance. Perhaps I was
influenced by the workshop she
gave in the previous week, but it would appear that Deborah Hay's
'project' as an artist has taken
her past the representational limitations of professional performing
and on to other (dare I say
'meaningful'?) ways of exploring her work with the public.
By the final day of the conference, the focus of inquiry intensified
around connections between body
work--be it in arts, medicine, or academia--and the public. Enzo
Cozzi, a Lecturer in Drama and
Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University
of London, was
instrumental in pushing forth meaningful dialogue here, especially the
role of institutional and cultural
frameworks on such connections. On Sunday morning he gave a
presentation entitled The
Interconnected Body: Sacred Dances and Therapy in the Modern Andean
Deserts, based
upon current research undertaken in his native Chile exploring the
transformation of consciousness
during socio-religious healing through dance and public ritual. Using
video and slide projection,
Cozzi gave a detailed analysis of a yearly ritual where thousands of
city dwellers from the big urban
centres of northern Chile converge on remote sanctuaries to carry out
devotional dances and to cure
themselves. This ritual is predicated on a holistic understanding of
life that comes from remote times;
it demonstrates what Andean aboriginal communities call parallelism.
Choreography is used here as
a way of expressing a holistic understanding of the world,
intermeshing the organic body with the
community and the landscape through a theatrical act.
The video footage of the event demonstrated clearly the immense
popularity of this annual event. Its
contemporary Christian purpose (celebration of the alleged birthday of
the Virgin Mary) as well as
its historic pagan form (the journey, the dance and celebration) bring
together a wide cross section
of the population. The variety of people made for an incredible array
of dance and costume--from
the sophisticated to the commercial, the purely formal to the
apparently flippant. This freedom of
interpretation, however, does not detract from the social contract of
the ritual; while people are
given licence to push themselves to extremes, there is an overriding
collective purpose to their
mediation and expression. It is a year-long investment in time and
energy to prepare for a week's
worth of dance, a week's worth of devotional expression that cures.
Further reflection reveals that the Chilean sacred dances also raise
the issue of re-thinking
metaphors by which we live, and to this end, Cozzi offered this to
ponder:
To be born, to live and to die are theatrical acts that enmesh the
organic life with the
communal life and the life of the landscape. To be infirm is to be
forced to live with yourself
as a spectacle.
The cosmology created by dance, the environment it travels over, the
people and their spiritual
devotion outlines an impressive sense of social and cultural
connectedness. Cozzi believes this
cosmology offers an important challenge to social and cultural
divisions in industrial nations. For
example, between urban/rural, religion/art, and high/low cultural
expression.
During a discussion period scheduled on Saturday, Cozzi had been one
of a few conference-goers
who objected to the presentations given by participants of Marina
Abramovic's workshop earlier
that day. He protested that the personal self--exploration
demonstrated by these peoples' work was
not appropriate for presentation to an audience, and should have
remained within the privacy of the
workshop process. Much of the work shown from Abramovic's workshop
dealt with personal
trauma, and I suspect that for Cozzi this was an example of the
personal 'infirmity' spoken about in
his presentation; dangerous for the way it forces people to become
spectacles. Interestingly, though,
in many ways Abramovic's body work paralleled the connections between
life and art articulated by
Cozzi's analysis. One might say that Abramovic's perspective, as
demonstrated by her workshop
participants' performances, marked a kind of personal, unconscious
'other' to the popular, public
experience of the sacred dances studied by Cozzi's.
Marina Abramovic is an internationally celebrated performance artist
currently based in The
Netherlands. Since the early 1970s her work has explored pushing the
body to extremes, exploring
the boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness. Through the
action of engaging the
limits of the body and consciousness, she attempts to bring
audience/viewer to transcendence. Her
recent work has engaged more with objects, installations, and
environments. While not believing that
artists can change the world, she is convinced that art can serve as a
bridge enabling people to
experience their inner self more fully. She radically opposes art that
responds to art and not the
needs of society.
Her vision for the 21st century is one in which
...artists and the public will be able to communicate with each other
on a higher mental plane
without the intermediary of the art object, using only their energy.
Abramovic's workshop was entitled Clean the House; where she adapted
an exercise which
would normally take eight days, in a rural location, for the
facilities at the SNDO. Similar to much of
her performance, this workshop established intensive and stringent
conditions in order to inspire
participants to make a deeper contact with the mental and physical
self. During the five day
workshop period, other workshop participants regularly witnessed
Marina's group enduring
blindfolded tasks, heavy physical exercise, fasting and other forms of
abstention. Each participant
kept a diary and was asked to make a single artwork on the final day.
All decided to show their
work to conference goers as part of a presentation about Abramovic in
the conference schedule.
The work was presented by Abramovic's workshop participants was an
offering of intensely
personal material; we witnessed people putting themselves through, at
times, nightmarish enactments
of the unconscious. While their bravery is to be respected, Cozzi's
objections are valid in the sense
that this kind of exploration may be unhealthy if not within a social
context--one which gives it
significance beyond the individual. In terms of making connections
beyond the realm of performance
art, in order for the public to reach Abramovic's envisaged 'higher
mental plane', we need a context
to connect with this energy and thereby enrich it with our own.
The conference came to a close with what was likely the most
significant exercise of the event: the
Healing panel. Many positive and important strategies were presented
that engaged deeply with the
experience of the past three days. Perhaps one of the most profound
contributions came from
Alastair MacLennan, who had played the role of artist-in-residence for
the previous eight days. He
presented pieces called actuations, which questioned the framing of
'worth'--its place and
displacement--and attendant exchange value(s) in contemporary culture.
He referred to the
commodification of shock and violence in contemporary culture, and
likened this in art to banging
one's head against a wall. As an alternative he described a process of
connecting bodies, beliefs,
and cultures through alternate strategies of negotiating these walls.
That is, we climb the ones that
are climbable, burrow under/around those that we can, etc. For
MacLennan, there is justice in all
approaches where connecting is the objective.
Like so many of the other participants in the conference, MacLennan's
personal commitment to his
work gives his words weight. Born in Scotland, he has worked as a
teacher and artist in many
locales, and his integration between life and art has brought him to
live in the devastated city of
Belfast. The theme of MacLennan's contribution to 'The Connected
Body?' is one he brings from
Belfast: "the demonstrated wish and will to resolve conflict through
action." He says,
My work provides metaphors of hurt and healing brought about by
conflicts between
humanity's ill-conceived ideals and this actuality we all find
ourselves in.
The connections we seek with our bodies and between ourselves and
others are journeys for which
we must each find our own way. Provided they are not seen as answers
in themselves, metaphors
are useful maps, artists are useful guides. As the conference came to
a close I pondered the
importance of these guides for exploration, and felt that the truly
connected body is the one open to
(i will finish this up)
an open belief system is very helpful to growing in spirit...
like the don juanian one and the bahai faith.