Dialogues: The State of the Body
- Dialogues: The State of the Body
- Introduction
This roundtable was created as part of a symposium called “The Performing Body in Theory and Practice” held at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, on March 28, 2009. As the curator of this event and a faculty member in the Department of Drama, I had witnessed many missed connections between scholars in the Department of Performance Studies and practitioners housed mainly in the Experimental Theatre Wing, where physical- based theater and postmodern dance have been at the center of actor training over the last thirty years. What intrigued me was that in both these locations, and in the larger communities that they create and reflect, isolated discussions on the body had remained central and even crucial to disciplinary development. The “body” was continually referenced as metaphor, as identity; it stood in for technique and became shorthand for a panoply of cross-cultural influences. Thus, the symposium as a whole, and this roundtable in particular, endeavored to reveal connections between these different communities and to build upon diverse ideas of embodiment.
This discussion is an edited version of that original conversation. In it, dance scholars Randy Martin and Barbara Browning are joined by Awam Amkpa, a scholar of postcolonial theory and theater studies as well as a filmmaker. In the original event, Karmenlara Ely Seidman and Nathan Flower, faculty members in the Department of Drama, spoke as well. Leading into the event, I had framed numerous questions for participants, the responses to which can be seen in some of the interwoven threads that appear below. In particular, the body as metaphor was repeatedly affirmed as an idea that both exists and unravels itself, in precipitous balance. This doubling parallels the discussions of “rupture” that ground Martin’s opening comments. Any theorization of the body is faced with the lived experience, what Browning eloquently references as the “technique” of lived experience. The body is messy, boundaried and porous, historicized, contextualized, simultaneously individual and culturally embedded. Ultimately, in a manner that reveals the most intriguing connection to performance, the body demands and creates an engagement between that which lies within and that which lies beyond any membrane of thought or experience.
I would like to posit one such engagement: a disciplinary reckoning between dance studies and performance studies. In the creation of performance theory, the word “performance” was chosen due, in part, to its flexibility, omnipresent usage, and wide-ranging possibilities for theoretical and practical impact. It would seem that “the body” is another such term, one that plays at the limits of performative theorizations and the materiality that dance scholars must face. Indeed, it has been scholars of dance who have most consistently brought performance theorists back to the centrality of the body on stage. The “body” is also a potent term because it extends this disciplinary meeting point to other conversations from continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, postcolonial theory, trauma studies, feminist theory, and somatic disciplines (the list could go on) in which the body is returned to amid the philosophical dilemmas of agency, ontology, [End Page 76] and perception. In short, “the body” gathers its own set of interdisciplinary preoccupations that reconstitute lines of training and theorization in necessary ways.
The speakers below have a long history of moving between performance theory and dance studies. Barbara Browning’s Samba: Resistance in Motion was first published in 1995, while Randy Martin’s Performance as a Political Act: The Embodied Self came out in 1990. Yet it is perhaps now that we are beginning to see more institutional shifts that have emerged from such work. The focus on somatic training at the newly created M.F.A. in contemporary performance at Naropa is an interesting example. The various practice-based research models in England also theorize and practice through the body as a central text, a key example being the PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance) project at the University of Bristol. Phillip Zarrilli’s work, both independently and at the University of Exeter, also provides an important example of embodied methodologies. The recent publication of...
