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.

Play Dangerously with the Body

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.