Empathic Kinesthetic Perception

“Empathic kinesthetic perception suggests a combination of mimesis and empathy. Paradoxically, it implies that one has to close one’s eyes to look at movement, ignoring its visual effects and concentrating instead on feeling oneself to be in the other’s body, moving.”

--Deidre Sklar, “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance”

Paradoxical Body

"The dancer does not move in space; rather, the dancer secretes, creates space with his movement."

"The body must open itself to space, must become, in a certain way, space. And interior space must acquire a texture similar to the one of the body so that gestures may flow as easily as movement propagating through muscles. The space of the body--as exterior space--satisfies this demand. The body moves in it without facing the obstacles of foreign, objective space--with all its objects it density, its prefixed orientations, its own points of reference. In the space of the body, it is the body that creates its own referents to which all exterior directions must submit themselves."

-José Gil, “The Paradoxical Body”

Habitus

"Individual and group histories bear upon the cultural practices of a community, which in turn incorporates that history into itself so that it becomes forgotten, that is, perceived as natural rather than conditioned. Habitus is produced and it is second nature....I cite habitus as a set of bodily practices that can be studied in order to understand both the history that produces those practces and the ways in which a community responds to those objective conditions... But how do we study habitus? How do we perceive the collective movement practices of an entire community? When I describe movement in a certain city, can I rely on just my own somatic perception as information? In other words, is my body enough?"

-Sansan Kwan, "Jagged Presence in the Liquid City"

Leigh Kotsilidis

Before Meteorologists

With rain we gauge the split rail's give
and take, the shimmy-shake of a chair leg,
power lines that wheedle, break. We take
it to the limit, risk high points, follow birds paths,
circle just once before landing.

In the way robins seize mayflies passing
and gliders dissolve into flittering bees,
we are swollen crowd fraying, flyways faltering,
snow-struck and wind-strung. The only space
is the space collapsing space creates.

It comes down to this: final drop, a single flick
of finger lightning. At this elevation our last
comforting thought is a spontaneous generation:
a transubstantiation of horsehair to snake,
clump of mud to snail, hailstone to whooping crane.


--from Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis

Selection of Performance Lecture on Every house has a door's performance

Below is the introductory section from my performance lecture that I delivered at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, by invitation from Matthew Goulish of Every house has a door in response to their performance "Let Us Think of these Things, Let Us Speak of Them Never."

Talking Heads and Speaking Bodies

[All section headings are to be sung according to their melody in the original Talking Heads song “This must be the place (Naïve Melody).”]

Part 1. Hi Yo I’ve Got Plenty of Time

Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never opens with Stephen Fiehn’s voice on the loudspeakers announcing the events that will soon occur on stage, promptly followed by the entrance of Selma Banich, Mislav Cavajda, and Matthew Goulish, but before I talk about the piece, I should let you know that the four sections and one epigraph of this paper are framed by text derived from the love song by the Talking Heads, entitled, “This must be the place (Naïve Melody).” Several of the framing devices in general for the composition of this paper, also, come from appropriated text and writing strategies that Every house has a door employs in their performance. I should also let you know that there will be a brief dance interlude in the middle of my lecture.

At the start of the performance, Stephen explains over a loudspeaker that they will talk about the Swedish Film director Ingmar Bergman and Yugoslavian film director Dusan Makavevjev. The two directors’ films serve as the basis for much of the gestures in Every house has a door’s performance, and the American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s essay on Makavejev and Bergman acts as source material for the spoken text. In 1978 as part of an academic conference at Harvard, Makavejev had re-edited the nonverbal sequences from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s films, and ended the screening with the scene of Persona (106-7). Stephen continues to describe a cake that they will supposedly prepare at some point in the performance with “apples, cocoa powder” and “flavorings such as food dying coloring red number 40.”  He describes looking through the theater’s refrigerator to find milk, only to find a carton that expired on April 2002. This announcement anticipates the performance’s playful testing of the boundaries of theater, as in the last section of the piece in which Mislav and Stephen go outside of the theater space to yell Selma’s name, in order to see how far outside the theater they can go and still be heard. This approximates the limits, or the “end” of the theater, according to Stephen. Behind Selma is the image of a table covered with white cloth, recalling the image of covered corpses at the end of Makavejev’s Sweet Movie.

Stephen tells us exactly what to expect when all the performers take the stage. In a sense, this makes the stage a somewhat overdetermined space. While Makavejev’s re-edits of Bergman films are stripped of any verbal content, Every house has a door’s performance space is full of words that announce the coming action, or else retroactively describe actions that have happened earlier in the performance. Plus, we never really see a cake, at least in the traditional sense. Their reconstruction of Makajavev’s montage inverts Makavejev’s nonverbal approach to Bergman’s films as the performers stand back-to-back describing the action of these sequences. The performers take turns wheeling around a spotlight to frame each other as they describe details of scenes from the montage, while the other performers intermittently adopt the gestures from these scenes. They use this strategy later as well, when they reconstruct the feast at the commune headed by Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl from videos on laptop screens. I will return to this feast later on in the paper.

Some process notes for Troupe

My project began with my interest in P.T. Barnum. My research has led me to focus less strictly on him and more on his relationship with certain people, exhibits, and animals in his shows.  I have been using text from his autobiography to create songs that will come to be associated with the persona of Barnum. Compositionally, the singing will come to represent a place where the voice is linked to the body. I derived additional text for the piece from the language of Barnum’s world and disciplinary techniques for children. I sing the Barnum text from one side of the performance space, so that it resonates distinctly with Barnum’s voice and the voice of authority. 

My questions have become: In Barnum’s shows, who is doing the speaking? For whom and for what purpose? In a sense, I learned that the acts of Barnum’s world did not have the chance to speak, vocalize, and move for themselves. However, I am not necessarily trying to speak for them because I would be doing the same thing that Barnum had done. My fragmentation of the different modes worked as modes of resistance to standards of language and to a privileged position of speaking. The piece has become a reconstruction of language of text, voice, and movement based on the dynamics of the relationship between Barnum and the acts in his shows. Barnum was their voice in the media and their choreographer in the hundreds of sold out shows. He spoke for them. He positioned and moved them. It was this speaking and choreography that framed the audience’s perception of them. This understanding of language as a frame helped me structure the various announcements that introduced different movement portraits. 

A Start

Start from the outcome's first desire,
now about-face. Go where the jugular
diced like a worm in effective pieces,
places your fingers just so:

how faintly felt, how nervous capsule
bleeps like a star ought to exist,
then sequences like fungus
choir through my valley unrestrained.

--from the poem "The Star's Predicament" by John Wilkinson