Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance (review)

An increasing number of contemporary performance forms involve new technologies. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon's edited collection Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance, explores this highly technological present in the world of performance, suggesting that new technologies are augmenting, not replacing, the body in an array of experimental works. This collection tracks an emerging dialogue in contemporary performance between bodies and what science fiction writers have termed "the machines." Serving as a guide to this emergent field, Broadhurst and Machon's book shows how technologically rich performance forms explore, comment on, and, in some cases, critique the computer-integrated age in which we live.

The collection consists of fifteen chapters written by practitioners and critics alike, each of which suggests that, despite the expanding variety of technological options available to artists, the body maintains its centrality in most performance texts. Instead of understanding the body as distinct from technology, however, the contributors to the collection describe performing bodies as one of several technologies used in any given performance. Innovative contemporary artists and companies demonstrate, this collection argues, that bodies are technological, and, reciprocally, that technologies can be understood through embodied performance.

Not surprisingly, interactivity is a recurring theme here. Readers interested in how contemporary artists implement interactive digital-media forms in performance will find Troika Ranch, the Critical Art Ensemble, and Bodies in Flight particularly thought-provoking for the ways they use live relay cameras, neurological imaging, and computer software as active participatory elements in their staged work. As Broadhurst describes in the book's grounding first chapter, the New York City dance company Troika Ranch relies just as much on instrument data-interface and Open Sound Control software as it does on its dancers. Machines, in a sense, are part of the company. Performing with digitized and manipulated projections of their own forms, the members of Troika Ranch create an iterative conversation of movement: dance creates projected images, which inspire more dance. Neither dancer nor computer has primacy in this relationship, as the two reproduce each other's movements onstage.

This theme of interactivity extends beyond the relationship between embodied performer and machine to include the audience. Tracey Warr's chapter "Texts from the Body" deals with Bruce Gilchrist's installations involving neurological imaging. In her detailed study of Gilchrist's work, Warr shows how technologically mediated installations of the kind that Gilchrist creates—in one such work, the artist sleeps while gallery-goers attempt to interact with his brainwaves—cannot be reduced to simple claims about the ubiquity of computing or encroaching industrial consumer culture. Indeed, many of the contributors to this collection argue that technology is a complicated means of engaging the body as a somatic reservoir of emotion and feeling. Sensualities, as Broadhurst and Machon's title suggests, are not necessarily diminished in supposedly sterile technologized encounters with computers, but instead, in some cases, are intensified.

No treatment of contemporary performance would be complete without a nod to some of the best-known and most provocative artists of our time. Accordingly, John Freeman considers John Leguizamo's work, Josephine Machon analyzes the plays of Caryl Churchill, and Stelarc discusses his own interactive piece "Prosthetic Head." The latter is one of the highpoints of the collection, as Stelarc's three-dimensional, animated chat-bot (gallery-goers converse with the virtual head in real time) captures both the fear and the fantasy of robots as human surrogates. Broadhurst and Machon are careful to balance the number of chapters about individual artists with as many about artistic collectives, both to avoid endorsing the idea of the lone genius and to highlight the importance of collaboration in much contemporary innovative art.

In this collection, innovation is frequently identified with the technique of remix (the recombination of previously released and published materials), which is often used as a distinct form of politicized social commentary. Consider, for example, the dance...