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PARIP 2003 NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September WELTON:
MARTIN © Martin Welton, 2003, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, m.welton@qmul.ac.uk ABSTRACT In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world’; that is to say, that a point of view is always someone’s, and that someone is a part of the world at large. Even more so in practice-based research, the position of the researcher as both the object and interpreter of study, means that questions of the interventions of the body in the world, and of the quality of experience, and how these are ‘viewed’ are inevitably brought to the fore. This paper will suggest that performance allows the accessing of certain kinds of knowledge not privy to conventional academic practices of reading and writing which privilege ‘viewed’ over ‘felt’ experience. I will argue that academia must thus engage with this knowledge on its own sensory terms (of ‘feeling’) and not vice versa. The paper, and the performance and the long term project it describes are a reflection on the status and quality of knowledge 'in' performance of the ‘terms’ on which academia might engage with performance — terms dictated by its practice, and not those of academic discourse.
I want to describe to you three instances of pratice which I have been involved in over the last eighteen months, which are connected as part of a wider project. What connects them is ‘me’ quite simply. This wider project, loosely titled Where the Hand Leads the Eye Follows is concerned with embodiment, one of the buzzwords of the current debate on practice as research. What and how exactly ‘is’ the body — or in this case my body — at the point of performance? To save argument here, I am suggesting definitively that I am my body. I am not various kinds of bodies, only this one. I am not concerned here with what it represents, but with how it is — and thus I am — as a thing amongst things in certain kinds of environment. I choose the word ‘embodiment’ to describe this, although I could perhaps just as easily have employed ‘corporeality’, or ‘somatics’. However I want to avoid suggesting that body is another category of mind. When we get the ‘psycho-physical’, emotional intelligence, somatic knowledge and so on, bodily properties are re-imagined, and re-explained in the terms and terminology of the mind, which is to say, of thought, that apparently ‘higher order’ level of functioning. I want to try and avoid reducing the experiences I describe to a set of mental categories, which can be absorbed by the intellectual paradigms of academia. I want to argue that to reduce the experience of performers to critical paradigms which are extrinsic to it is to reduce performance. Post-structuralism in particular, which despite its posturings over ‘performativity is, in its obsession with language, by and large inimical to the act of performance. And it is crucial that we maintain a difference between understanding the act and understanding its interpretation. My point is neither to maintain a binary distinction between mind and body, nor to suggest that the distinction is irrelevant, but to develop an epistemology from the materiality of performance itself, and this epistemology I suggest is sensual. Where The Hand Leads the Eye Follows is a project which examines the body and its sense of self, not in a single instance of practice, but in progress, across a range of them, for example, in the work earlier this year in a theatre in the dark performance TWPotW, in my ongoing investigations into notions of self and expression in the South Indian martial art kalarippayattu, and in the performance project I’m currently involved in, again as a performer, Remember to Forget, a dance theatre project with the choreographer Emilyn Claid, discussed earlier by Valerie. Taking its cue from Sanskrit theory on acting ‘Where the hand leads the eye follows’ refers to an ideal state of performance, which we might choose to consider as a state of ‘being’, or ‘consciousness’, but a state which is defined in physical, rather than psychological terms. ‘Defined’ is almost certainly the wrong word, as it suggests that the knowledge of the state is extrinsic to the occupancy or experience of it. My suggestion is that this knowledge occurs within, and not after the event. Certainly, it is only after the event that we can point to its occurrence, but this does not make this act of reflection the same as that which it reflects upon. To be in possession of knowledge about something does not necessarily also mean that one has knowledge of it in terms of how best to apply it. What so often baffles performers themselves about those who choose to study them is precisely this preference for knowledge 'about', rather than knowledge 'of', for what can be stored, archived, an obsession with ‘traces’, rather than doing. I’m not going to make particularly grandiose claims about myself as a performer, but having spent a lot of time working with professional performers recently, their puzzlement about the purpose of research is something I take very seriously. If we are to claim, as I am, that performance entails a particular state, or way of being, then it is from the actuality of the point of performance, and not the abstractions of theory which it must be articulated. My point is that the value of this knowledge is its occurrence and application at the point of performance. This is why my use of my own experience is important, as the philosopher Robert Solomon has written: ‘what my world includes that the world does not is value’ [1977:67]. Value in this instance is pleasure, and not reflection, something which is ‘felt’ as much as thought about. This is important, because knowledge in practice is part of lived rather than conceptual experience. Whilst the wider project is concerned with both hands and eyes, owing to limitations of time and space, I’m mostly going to talk here about hands, and the importance of the hand as a locus of touch, of feeling and the felt. Practice, I want to suggest, at least in terms of Bourdieu’s notion of its having a ‘logic’, is significantly concerned with the awareness, ordering and manipulation of feeling. In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world’; the visual analogy is problematic here as it might suggest that he were somehow disembodied looking at himself, but what if one were to suggest that ‘I feel my body, which is part of my feeling of the world, as one of the objects of that world’. Think about this in terms of hands– of the hands as objects in the world. Thus not only are they sensed and sensing things in the world, giving me information about the environment but they are also objects within it, which I make meaningful to myself, through their inclusion within practical schemata. The vicissitudes of professional performance mean that the shift from one project to the next often changes the demands of practice quite radically. As my research is concerned with an ongoing notion of ‘process’ a significant point of reflection is thus the relationship between not only these differing instances of performance, but also their connection (or otherwise) to an ongoing training — in this case the martial art kalarippayattu, which whilst not a performing art in itself, is nevertheless, another instance in which a certain kind of self is crafted. As a system, kalarippayattu is far more complex than just ‘hands and eyes’, but they are important means by which one senses not just oneself as a body in space, but importantly, oneself as a body in space relative to other objects — weapons, teachers, opponents. In cerruvadi, or short stick practice for example, before the sequence proper begins, the student and teacher carry out a rhythmic exchange of seven blows. This sets the pace of both the attack and the defence which will follow, but also allows both practitioners to feel the relative amount of force which will be used. The student follows the teacher in this. There is no discussion of it and it is in no way like a conversation. It is not thought about. It is immediate, felt. The student feels the pace and force of the blows through the hands grasping the weapon, and the teacher vice versa. The teacher can feel whether the weapon is ‘live’ or not — the way the student is using it — from the way his own weapon feels in his hands. A ‘live’ weapon has a certain kind of ‘bounce’, it makes contact with full force and weight but is immediately ready for the next blow. This can only be achieved by hands which are not gripping the weapon too tightly, and which are part of a dynamic and ready whole body state. The hands are thus a crucial locus for a sense of self at the point of practice. This sense of self is a certain kind of feeling — for both student and teacher there is a feeling in the hands of whether the blow or its defence is ‘correct’; the feeling has an affective value. From mid-April to mid-July this year, I worked as an actor with Sound and Fury Theatre Company. For those of you who sadly missed the production let me describe it to you a little. Sound and Fury, as their name might suggest, are interested in the theatrical possibilities of sound. For this reason, their last two productions have been performed in complete darkness. Total darkness, in studios sealed for light. Inspired by Moby Dick, and loosely based on the accounts of the survivors of the whaling ship which inspired Melville, The Watery Part of the World tells the true story of a craft sunk by a giant sperm whale, its crew cast adrift for 97 days in barren seas, and driven to the awful choice of cannibalism. In a fully blacked-out studio the audience sits in two facing banks of seats whilst a company of five actors moves around them in the darkness, both narrating the story, and taking up the voices of the characters. Having only ever experienced it from the performer’s point of view I can’t speak too much for the spectator’s experience, but (and forgive me for blowing our own trumpet here) it was described by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian thus:
The critic’s focus on skin is an interesting one. In wondering about theatre, we are so often referred back to the ancient Greeks and the theatron, or place of seeing. But the very liveness of the theatrical event would seem to suggest that such a mono-sensory definition is at best limiting, and at worst, ludicrous. We, the actors, entered the space in darkness. After a short safety speech, the lights were lowered, and we made our way into the space. In the space, usually a rectangular studio, the audience sat facing one another on two banks of seats. We moved around the space by feeling our way hand over hand on guide ropes suspended overhead, and a taped down rope on the floor under our feet, sometimes even sprinting around the space, and having to effect quite complex passing manoeuvres. Our affective memory of the space was more important than our visual memory. Each performance was an attempt to recover what it felt like. Roaming around in the dark, the eye piques the sensation of vision because of its loss, and in so doing arouses the other senses. Vision seems to provide a stable and consistent idea of the world which we occupy. In the absence of vision therefore, attention is switched to anything else which can reach towards this sense of consistency. In terms of Where the Hand Leads the Eye Follows my participation as an actor in The Watery Part of the World allows for reflection on how different environments present possibilities for action in terms of performance, not in terms of what to make it about, but how to do it, and importantly, how best to do it. How to see, how to touch and so on, thus become not merely (or even) ethical questions, but concerned with the capacity for, and nature of, action. Holding the rope, and how one held it was one of the most important features of acting The Watery Part of the World. A sense of the length of the rope passing through my hands and underfoot, and of feeling the central marker points in it, gave a sense of distance and of timing. In addition, in the absence of vision, the contact of hand to rope was one of the only ways of achieving a sure perception of the environment, the kind of engagement which the rope afforded my hand was therefore a crucial question in terms of both how to act, and how to be. As several actors moved around the space, the guide rope suspended on bunjees bounced and flexed, what it afforded therefore was not a stable contact, but one which was moving and dynamic, and one’s interaction with the rope had to be a response in kind. Whilst environments themselves afford the body certain possibilities for action, what possibilities does the body itself afford, as a feature of the environment? These possibilities may appear to be limitless, but each new instance of performance presents a new series of restrictions. These restrictions are what performance affords. I now want to show a memory [show hands in NBB perf] The movements which my hands make in this performance are quite meaningless in terms of signification, but in order for this section of the performance to be right they have to ‘feel’ right. They move within a small area defined by the length of my forearms; they are improvised, but as much as each gesture is new and unknown each time, I try to give each one precision. They are meaningful to me the performer, because they feel right. As we’ve heard from Valerie, this performance, and the current project which is attempting in some way to recover it, is concerned with ‘embodying ambiguity’. At the point of performance however, and in order to be able to perform, the act of embodiment, for the performer, is one of certainty, the body feels right. What it means might be opaque to the spectator, but it feels right. I’m currently trying to remake and recover this character as Valerie has described, but interestingly, even though the new performance is with entirely new performers, there are certain physical elements remaining from the first, and its almost as if these are forcing the old character back into my body. The actualities of performance ‘afford’ a certain kind of embodiment, and this is what I am rediscovering. By placing certain restrictions on the hands (the body position, the arms tight to the chest etc.) a certain kind of environment is created. Current rehearsals concern how to be in this space; it’s a question of how to feel in it, to literally feel into it. This, and other acts of embodiment mean something in terms of how they are done and we have to look to acts of embodiment themselves in order to understand this, rather then to pre-existing interpretive strategies. The danger otherwise is that interpretation comes to be seen as being more important than its subject, as Paul Feyerabend has suggested:
I want to argue, and I’m not sure that it is all that controversial outside of this conference, that practice and theory are often necessarily quite different. In order for practice to be considered relative to research in any sense (whether 'as', 'through', 'by' or whatever) it requires supporting theoretical constructs. This kind of 'thought' I suggest is really quite different to the experience of practice. Attempting a reduction of one into the other, whilst convenient for the justification of activities within academic space, is not really bearing much responsibility towards its supposed subject. My suggestion is that a mutuality does, and can exist, but that it is a) far from necessary, and b) is best interrogated, at least initially, from within practical, rather than academic space. This requires a responsible questioning of what that practical space is, and to whom it properly belongs. I have not yet heard ‘the public’ mentioned this weekend, nor that overwhelming majority of practitioners who do not work in academia. What are we doing for them?
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