[-empyre-] Grappling bodies, differences among bodies & gestures

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

just a quick acknowledgement to the interesting thread between Sue Hawksley and Sally Jane Norman, regarding resonances between bodies, grappling bodies, and what Sue in her essay that she gave us also centrally thematizes as embodied memory as as "inhabiting" bodies,  "(and being inhabited by) the mnemonic traces of places" – a focus that emerged from ideas developed in her earlier work on "haptic_dance" (a close up, you call it, but one on one only? no collective haptic experience?).  

Sally Jane then refered to her current work on "found gestures" (can you tell us more how you understand this, and is it explicitly a reference to the work of the late Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor or can it have wider application and how?), and  and the publication, just a few years ago, of Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (eds),  Migrations of Gesture (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

That's so very interesting as I also recently found that book and dragged it along in my suitcase to the Metabody workshop, as the Madrid organizers had planned, inside the workshops, a one day symposium on "History and Ontologies of Movement-Gesture (Madrid, 11 Jul 14) - http://metabody.eu/forum-2014/ -  Along with my collaborator, designer Michèle Danjoux,  I had wanted to listen to her design concepts for wearables and costumes,  then discuss control systems/controllers and how they affect gestures and movement, especially thereby trying to sort out whether the work we do in the DAP-Lab, say our recent choreosonic performance "for the time being" [Victory over the Sun], can be examined through particular non verbal modes of action and sounding that reflect how a diverse group of performers in the ensemble  (from very different cultural performance traditions and trained in hugely different techniques) grapple similarly of differently with the technical and the design constraints imposed on them in the retrogarde futurist opera we staged: 

(documentation of the dance work is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTcm-UFk0x8    (part 1)  //  http://youtu.be/oXBW4oWyK0k    (part 2)

Indeed the work in the studio  (I never found time to read the Migrations book beyond the intro) tended to reveal that the cultural body responds specifically to "controllers" but also adapts wearables in unique ways while there were of course also similarities in how constraints are experienced as potential for movement choreography or character development (we tend to think of the actions along the lines of fictional characters we create; gestures are originated but also quoted, some are functionally related to the costume-instrument/wearable or, otherwise, dis-aligned from functional fashion and thus dystorted. To come back to the idea of protocol, the technical function of course interests us much less than the poetic manner in which a character embodies her wearable and sounds it or plays with it, carries it [further].

The "Migrations" book states, in the introduction (on postcolonial / diaspora studies of movement) , that "when gestures change location, when they migrate from one site of performance to another, they in fact confront a different reception and may even be experienced in a new way" - which seems understandable of course; then, the editors argue that "every instantiated gesture is, in a sense, its own undoing in that its displacement - from body to body, from temporality to temporality, from one medium to another, or from one cultural location to another - unfixes the gesture from its inscription in a trace structure and releases it into potentially new networks of expressiveness based not on the differences among (gestural) signs but on the differences among the bodies executing them. It clearly matters where, when and by whom the gesture is executed (p. xvi)...."  The editors then argue that the energy of the gestural can be harnessed to represent but also to construct ethnicity, sexuality, class status, etc  (probably here understood in the everyday, not necessarily in the theatre, where extra-daily gestures are of course embodied as well as doubled, signing, mimetic and constructed at the same time) - and the transmission of gestures is then mentioned, from generation to generation (something I briefly pondered on when I wrote on the funeral).

The notion of "ghosting" does show up in the book, it's in a chapter on 'migrations of cinematic gesture", and again it would make sense to argue that the camera "transforms" gestures (just as a controller, a sensor, a device worn on the body would). But what do we mean when we speak of transforming a gesture?


Memory, then, would seem to be primarily corporeal, inhabited, and particular, not easily out-sourced to an off shore account, or transfered to affectless place holders   (in terms of kinetic affect, it would interest me how Kirk, and the audience with hand-held devices,  experienced the virtual dancers and their transformed gestures off the streets of Brighton?). What would the avatar remember?   

respectfully

Johannes Birringer