Performance Notion: Malinowski’s Diary

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

An ensemble show using as source material the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influential Polish anthropologist from the early 20th century who was well-respected for his thorough research on indigenous Melanesian culture. Malinowski was a major supporter of enduring, in-depth participant observation, and as such got very involved in the lives of the people he studied. While a contemporary reader may be suspicious of the colonialist tone and the firm belief in the possibility of objectivity, his work is still taught in anthropology courses today.

His personal record of his time doing fieldwork was recently published. Titled A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, the text reveals the disturbing thoughts, feelings, and desires previously hidden under ostensibly-objective descriptions of the world around him. He lusted after indigenous women, insulted his closest native informants, and mocked the very cultures he was there to study. Overall, the diaries paint a picture of a narcissistic, judgmental westerner with a fetishistic fascination for people that he sees as different.

This piece would be about how hard it is to understand difference and how thrilling it is to try. It would be about the potentially annihilating gaze of the so-called-objective observer, and about how any time you attempt to describe something else, you always end up describing yourself. I have a hunch that taking the time to reflect, 100 years later, on the blind spots of early anthropological discourse would result in a timely, urgent and engaging piece of theatre for contemporary audiences.

Embodied Practice as Research

Current theatre scholarship, especially in this country, is beginning to adjust to the notion of embodied practice as a form of legitimate research into questions of performance, philosophy, psychology, subjectivity, relationality and community.

The academic study of theatre and performance has historically relied on observation and analysis as primary knowledge-generating processes. Practice as research confounds this process because observer and observed are collapsed into one. How can I write objectively about my own experiences? How can I remain distanced enough to reflect upon performance and training when the heightened states they evoke seem to eliminate the very distance between the self-that-acts and the self-that-watches?

Of course, in a post-structuralist paradigm, the authority of the outside observer's objectivity is already in question. What do we lose in privileging this perspective over the inside, internal, intimate, view?

I've begun a solo training practice that I am using as part of my research into performance and philosophy. My goal is to court the void and my own fears, and to bring the questions I wrestle with in my mind into the medium of my moving body.

Writing about this kind of research is difficult. How does one transfer the information garnered from subjective experiences (many of which are non-discursive, technical, or just boring) to a larger audience? And to what end?

My current solution to this problem is twofold. I've created a separate blog which you can find here that will serve as a journal-style record of my studio experiences.

Secondly, after each session I am going to write a short text for performance (aka a "Tiny Imaginary Play") which I will share on this blog. In the spirit of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays, I'll write these brief pieces immediately after my training practice. I find transforming experiences from one form to another quite generative. Translating the non-verbal, non-linear "text" of my improvised training practice into the highly structured medium of the performance text is a form of auto-remix that I hope will bring out aspects of the research that might not be captured by video or journal-style writing.