Yesterday I attended a football game, a highly rare occurrence for me. I still don't understand the rules of the game (and seriously, don't bother trying to explain; what I don't care about just doesn't stick), but I enjoyed the pageant and virtuosity of all the performances: the players, the coaches, the referees, the cheerleaders, the band, the fans.
In honor of the game (and Stanford's crushing victory, ahem, "Go Cards!"), I offer forth some of Richard Schechner's words on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the body through performance training:
"In preparing performers to perform, rigorous exercises reshape their bodies. This is as true of kathakali as it is of football, of ballet as it is of shamanism...Each genre deforms and reforms the body by introducing disequilibrium, a problem to be solved by a new balancing specific to the action: ballet's way of unbalancing-rebalancing is not football's is not a Huichol shaman's is not noh drama's and so forth. But each form needs to play dangerously with the body, to deconstruct and reconstruct it according to its own plan of action. The body is deconstructed--opened, made provisional, uncreated, enters Brahma's night--so that it can be recreated according to plan. The plans are not fixed. They change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Ballet's body, and football's, and so on, are each a maya-lila of possibility. And as many genres as exist, untold others could exist: of natural balancing there may be limits, but no such limit hinders the invention of new unbalancing-rebalancing cycles according to not-yet-known codes." (The Future of Ritual, p. 40)
The bodies created by the practice of football training and competition are beautiful and graceful in their own right. But I'm even more excited about the forms of embodiment that await as we continue to invent new ways to unbalance and rebalance ourselves against the weight of the ever-shifting world.
