The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819577758 ISBN 13: 9780819577757

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2018

Synopsis

All modes of human inquiry, from the artistic to the scientific, are archived as body knowledge. The Sentient Archive gathers together the work of scholars and practitioners in dance, performance, science, and the visual arts. These twenty-eight rich and challenging essays cross boundaries within and between disciplines, mediating the theoretical and the experiential to illustrate how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. In drawing connections between body and archive, the essayists consider how and why the moving body generates and stores information for recall, retrieval, or reenactment. The writers address issues of history, memory, and agency, but the knowing body, performed or reenacted, remains a focal point. Contributors include Nancy Goldner, Alain Platel, Catherine Stevens, Meg Stuart, Andre Lepecki, Ralph Lemon, and other notable scholars and artists.

About this title

About the Author

BILL BISSELL is the director of Performance at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. LINDA CARUSO HAVILAND is an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College and the founder and director of the dance program.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Sentient Archive

Bodies, Performance, And Memory

By Bill Bissell, Linda Caruso Haviland

Wesleyan University Press

Copyright © 2018 The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8195-7775-7

Contents

Foreword Paula Marincola, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Introduction: A Body Comparable Bill Bissell and Linda Caruso Haviland, xiii, 
Considering the Body as Archive Linda Caruso Haviland, 1, 
I. BODIED KNOWING, 
Introduction by Linda Caruso Haviland, 19, 
Everyone Has Something to Tell Alain Platel, 23, 
Stalking Embodied Knowledge — Then What? Tomie Hahn, 28, 
The Sensing and Knowing Body: Choreographing Action and Feeling Juhani Pallasmaa, 46, 
Use Me Meg Stuart, 55, 
A Body-Mind Centering® Approach to Movement through Embodiment Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, 58, 
Pleasure Ralph Lemon, 61, 
Slow Ralph Lemon, 62, 
II. MEMORY, HISTORY, AND RETRIEVAL, 
Introduction by Linda Caruso Haviland, 63, 
Memory Has Its Way with Me Barbara Dilley, 67, 
The Body Makes You Remember Ivo van Hove, 69, 
Touching History Ann Cooper Albright, 73, 
My Discovery of Dance Allegra Kent, 82, 
We Dance What We Remember: Memory in Perceiving and Performing Contemporary Dance Catherine J. Stevens, 87, 
The Stories in Our Bodies Emily Johnson, 110, 
III. THE BODY IN THE ARCHIVE, 
Introduction by Linda Caruso Haviland, 115, 
& We Should Live and Be Well: Five Artist Statements, 1995â&8364;"2007 David Gordon, 117, 
The Embodied Performance of Museum Visiting: Sacred Temples or Theaters of Memory? Laurajane Smith, 126, 
Sideways Glances: Painting and Dancing Sarah Crowner, 143, 
Leap Before You Look: Honoring the Libretto in Giselle and Apollo Nancy Goldner, 146, 
Body as Signifier Patricia Hoffbauer, 183, 
IV. PERFORMING THE ARCHIVE, 
Introduction by Linda Caruso Haviland, 191, 
Untitled Bebe Miller, 193, 
My Body, the Archive Deborah Hay, 198, 
Choreographing Somatic Memories and Spatial Residues Jayachandran Palazhy, 200, 
Tremulous Histories Jenn Joy, 209, 
ExitExist — Embodiment Gregory Maqoma, 223, 
V. AFTERLIVES AND TRANSFORMATIONS, 
Introduction by Linda Caruso Haviland, 227, 
Pavilion of Secrets Marcia B. Siegel, 229, 
Archiving Indeterminate Systems of Ecosystems and Improvisational Dance Strategies Jennifer Monson, 263, 
Them: Recombinant Aesthetics of Restaging Experimental Performance Thomas F. DeFrantz, 268, 
New Bodies, New Architecture Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim, 293, 
Choreographic Angelology André Lepecki, 297, 
Contributors, 321, 
Index, 327, 

CHAPTER 1

Bodied Knowing

Bodied knowing is a state of being long familiar to dancers and other performers. Historically, dancers and others who wrote about dance and movement frequently grappled with articulating the experience of bodied knowledge in learning and teaching as well as in the expressive or communicative capacity of performance. If philosophy has lost primacy of place to science in recent centuries, it still lent credibility to a suspect art; writers who took a particular interest in bodied knowing provided language and conceptual frameworks that enabled movement artists to more convincingly legitimize their experience to those who were skeptical of the cognitive dimensions of dance. The idea of body as archive must start here, at the moment that bodied experience interacts with the world and ideas, creates history, holds memories, and moves in the present and into the future.

Alternative notions of cognition as more fully embodied and situated in the world were reflected in the work of early theorists such as William James and John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as dance physiologists and educators such as Mabel Elsworth Todd and Margaret H'Doubler. If you search the Internet today for "body" and "knowing," you will get hundreds of hits for essays, monographs, books, lectures, symposia, institutes, and university departments featuring "embodied cognition." This robust field of study challenges the more traditional approach to cognition, which — developing from the emerging sciences of experimental and empirical psychology as well as neurobiology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and strongly influenced by parallel research in computer science and artificial intelligence in the 1950s — focused almost exclusively on brain function.

Science-based critiques of traditional cognitive theory increased in numbers, and by the 1970s empirical research in the developing and interrelated fields of situated, embedded, enactive, and embodied cognition confirmed that the body as a whole is integral to cognition and the acquisition and processing of knowledge, and that this knowledge is influenced by the body's sociocultural context. These scientific advances coincided with a renewed interest in phenomenology, gender studies, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, and any contemporary discussion of the body as an archive must take all these developments into account. Despite variations in theoretical approaches, there is growing acknowledgment of the "bodily nature of cognitive agency." In a culture that primarily lends value to phenomena that can be verified objectively and scientifically, this attention to embodiment as a new paradigm is welcome.

In this section of the book, Alain Platel locates the performer's body as a site that knows more than it can say, asking dancers to dig deeply into the archive of their own or others' bodily movements to create new and shared movement that in turn augments their own repertoires of movement action and memory. Tomie Hahn turns her eye on the performances of individuals' embodied archives and on both the structures that transmit this knowledge into the world and the reciprocal shaping of these structures of transmission by the outside world. Juhani Pallasmaa writes that architecture, like dance, moves outward from the body in acts of expression, constituting a sphere of externalized order and memory. Meg Stuart contributes a warm-up plan that asks performers to not only be physically vulnerable but also to draw on their own archives of memory to become more cognitively aware, responsive, and imaginative. The research and practice of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen focus on the systematic deepening of awareness about all that the body remembers and archives, starting in the womb and tracing through the development of human movement patterns. Ralph Lemon's two brief pieces of writing invite us to consider and experience his processes of living, dancing, and making, beginning with pleasure as biology or memory and moving to the tension between the insistent memory of the trained body and the creative act.

— Linda Caruso Haviland

ALAIN PLATEL

EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO TELL

When I graduated from university (Ghent, Belgium) in the early 1980s with a master's degree in psychology and educational sciences, my ambitions were clear: I would become a good remedial educationalist in one of the cerebral palsy centers where I had worked as an intern. Now, thirty years later, I realize that I have spent most of my active life as a dance theater director in a company called les ballets C de la B. What started out as a small group of friends and amateurs making short dance theater performances has evolved into a professional dance theater company performing on stages all over the world.

Personally, I like to speak of the history of les ballets C de la B as a joke that got a little out of hand. Still, it has become clear to me that my education as a remedial educationalist has had a great influence throughout my career as a dance theater director. As a remedial educationalist, I was already particularly interested in the functioning of the "wounded body." Physical disabilities and the way in which people try to compensate for them were extremely fascinating to me. Their beauty was unique, I thought, and I remember how people around me could be shocked when I pointed that out. It is my belief that people with a disability have some kind of advantage over the so-called normal people, as if the disability has made them aware that there is no time to waste to make something special out of life. Finally, it is my long-held conviction that there is no such thing as "normality." Working as a director has really taught me that.

As I already mentioned, the company started more or less by accident. We were a group of friends hanging out together, ready to change the world, drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes. And we also liked to go and see young and experimental theater. That's how we discovered Pina Bausch's work. Her work was very different from all other modern dance theater performances (which on looking back were rather neoclassical). The dancers that Pina put on stage did not look like dancers. What's more, she introduced a special way of creating: she asked questions of her dancers and used their answers to create the performance. She gave her dancers back their name, and after having watched some of her performances, we really felt as if we knew the dancers personally: Mechtild ... Dominique ... Jan ... Nazareth ... Malou.

Pina worked with virtuousic, trained classical dancers, yet they looked like ordinary people who just happened to be in her dance performance. "I'm not interested in how people move but what moves them." That had become her motto.

And that is why we became so inspired by her work. It made us believe that everyone can have something to tell on stage and that every movement can lead to a little dance.

At first, les ballets C de la B was a nice hobby. The original group consisted of a cheese maker, a medical doctor, a criminologist, a student in communication sciences, and me. None of us had any dancing or acting experience whatsoever, and we had no professional ambitions. None of us was good at speech, so our performances had little text. None of us had any dancing skills, but we liked to move, so we created a sort of dance theater, called physical theater. We could only create performance material based on the personal history and physical capabilities of the participants, and that was rather limited at first. Only much later, when professional dancers took an interest in our work, did the physical potential we could work with increase.

The first turning point in the career of les ballets C de la B proved to be Bonjour Madame in 1993. It was a performance about "manhood." I recruited ten boys/men ranging from eleven to thirty-three years of age. Some were professional dancers with classical or contemporary dance training; others were amateurs (meaning dance lovers with no professional training).

When the rehearsals started, I was very well prepared, as usual. But every single day the most amazing and interesting things happened in that studio, things that required no organizing or "directing." It did not take long for me to understand that my preparation was of no use at all. These men simply wanted to find out how they could share their talents and skills.

I created exercises to boost that process. For instance, I would ask the dancers to turn personal experiences into dance phrases. The ballet dancer would create a typical classical dance phrase and the hip-hopper would make a hip-hop phrase. When I would ask the hip-hopper to learn the ballet phrase and add his personal experience to it, something really interesting would happen with the classical phrase. The continuous passing on of these reworked phrases that were reinterpreted over and over again resulted in a kind of dance beyond classification. I called it the "bastard dance," and we made it our trademark.

It was even more fascinating to see how the professional dancers tried to create dance phrases that could be performed by children without making too many concessions on the level of difficulty. And vice versa, I would also ask the children to create phrases that the professionals had to learn.

This way, a unique repertoire of movements was created, based on the personal history of each participant and adapted and reinterpreted by his colleagues. During rehearsals, it was mainly my job to suggest themes to inspire the participants, themes that would go beyond the purely personal level to address a wider audience.

It was obvious that the dance/physical language created by the participants was inspired by their own physical abilities, their training and experience in movement, their roots, and their personal history.

The social body determined the form and content of the work. And ever since Bonjour Madame, when I started working with an international and multicultural cast, people have been looking for a political message in our work. We were not aware of that at first, but gradually it became one of the themes we worked around during rehearsals: the social body as a political statement.

The second turning point came along while creating vsprs in 2006. For this particular performance, I was inspired by short films made by Arthur Van Gehuchten, a psychiatrist who filmed his patients at the beginning of the last century. These old films show people making fierce involuntary movements, as if the body wants to express what words cannot say. Anyway, I did not see sick people in these films. I prefer to call them people who are hypersensitive toward life. And that was something that the dancers recognized immediately when I showed them these films: as if examining this physical language enabled the dancers to dig deeper into themselves and their peers, as if they were able to tap into layers of (collective) sub- and unconsciousness.

Now that I know that the term "choreographer" is derived from the medical term "chorea" (which is a collective term for disorders of the nervous system that manifest themselves by involuntary movements), I can reconcile myself with the idea of being called a choreographer. We have come full circle, so it seems, and my training as a remedial educationalist has proven to be a good preparation for what I am doing today.

In one way or the other, dance will always be a language that is trying to physically express the "big emotions." Of course there are thousands of dialects, and they differ according to time and place. But all these dialects are one big family, I like to think.

TOMIE HAHN

STALKING EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE — THEN WHAT?

PART 1: STALKING EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE

In slow motion
a woman on the bleachers meticulously applied lipstick.
I could only see lips in her tiny mirror.
Cherry red.
"Check ... it ... OUT!" a teenage boy hollered from the chain-link fence
as the demolition derby cars paraded into the arena.
Tires kicked up dust
joining the plumes of engine exhaust.
Chaotic, unnatural energy.
These engines, carefully crafted from old parts in the heat of summer,
would be re-sculpted in seconds by impact.
High gloss.
Let's get ready to rummmmm-ble!

For many years I have been stalking the ephemeral: how we come to embody cultural knowledge. The very process of comprehending embodiment appears to dissipate the closer I get. The embodiment of knowledge presents a paradox, a perpetual loop that teases me. Although the body stands as a very real, physical entity in the world, the flow of knowledge into and from the body is not always discernible, or clear. That the body changes once it learns and embodies information continues the paradoxical loop. At first glance the notion of the body as archive appears to address the body as a stable corporeal object, yet the reality of how archives are created and reside within the body winks to the ephemeral paradox of change and growth that characterizes that very body. In different cultures and in different time periods, the relationships between the body and mind have been philosophically and scientifically diverse. The study of mind, cognition, and embodied cognition have shifted the examination of the mind-body relationship to a point where the dichotomy fades and we can consider embodied consciousness. Can embodiment be a process of archiving knowledge?

When we observe human activities, such as movement, that outwardly display the embodiment of knowledge or knowledge transfer, we are provided with abundant opportunities for understanding knowledge acquisition over time. Because repetition of movement reinforces the retention of embodied knowledge, there are numerous opportunities for us to observe an ephemeral, time-based process that literally presents the moment of knowledge transfer.

One of the aims of this essay is to heighten our awareness of how movement is learned, or embodied, through observation. As a result of that expanded awareness we can ask: Then what? What can we create from observations of an experience? I see the body as a site of emergent knowledge — as a wonderfully dangerous zone, encouraging or maybe discouraging experimentation through creative practices. I offer the demolition derby vignette that opened this essay as an example of experimentation. While it does not provide a strict Geertzian "thick description" of the derby, which has its place in other kinds of texts, I believe it reflects a particular sensibility and perspective of my experience.

Practicing Moves

As an ethnographer and as a performer, I am trained to observe, but in different ways and for different purposes. In playing these dual roles, I feel strongly that theory and practice inform each other. The crossroad where theory and practice meet locates a surreal yet rich context for understanding embodied cultural knowledge. The juxtaposition of creative art making, practice, and research within this crossroad provides insights not normally revealed through the practice of just one of these disciplines. Some people assume that research and creative practices related to the body can be isolated from each other or even consciously separated, while others find them inseparable. In this essay I focus on observation and experimentation not only as two methods that link theory and practice, but also as methods to identify the structures that help us to develop creative expression and research (or prevent us from doing so). It is fortunate that movement is an outward display of energy and exists as an observable display of embodied knowledge.

Because observing embodiment engages me as both a dancer/mover and scholar, I find it useful to (re)connect the research and creative aspects of my everyday life and to draw attention to the perspectives of both movers and observers. As a mover, I ask: What value is there in knowing structures of embodiment and transmission (the cycle of teaching and learning)? As an ethnographer, I ask: What does observation reveal? From the perspectives of both mover and observer, I ask: What is interesting about movement? Why move? How does moving or observing movement assist in our cultivation of embodied cultural knowledge, memory, or creative expression?

First, let's agree on one thing: the body is a medium of expression. How we express ourselves through the body reveals a great deal about our personal, cultural, and social backgrounds. When the body outwardly displays knowledge — while speaking, moving, touching — we have opportunities to observe the elements of an individual's embodied "archives." The various modes of communication emphasized during such outward displays are important to note: spoken or written word, touch, movement, or gaze, to list a few. The sensory experience of movement expression is rich, but in this essay I focus on enactive knowledge (knowledge gained through action) and display. How does movement reveal embodied knowledge?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Sentient Archive by Bill Bissell, Linda Caruso Haviland. Copyright © 2018 The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819577758
• ISBN 13: 9780819577757
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Bissell Bill, Haviland Linda Caruso