HERE I WILL PUT 3 AUDIO SCORES, THAT WILL GUIDE THE READER CAN HAVE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY WITH CLOSED EYES RIGHT BEFORE READING THE PRESENTATION.
I THINK THAT MAKING THIS CONCRETE EXPERIENCE OF IMAGINATEVELY EMBODYING A BEING BEFORE STARTING TO READ, WILL ALLOW PEOPLE TO FEEL MORE WITH THE MATERIAL
In an endeavor to transform the disembodying effect of this constantly and rapidly evolving post-modern world, this research explores the potential of imagination and dance/theatre improvisation to rewire our minds and bodies through the untangling of knots we have wrapped ourselves in in the pursuit of a disciplined and controlled society.
The aim of this work is to de-domesticate a body repressed by discipline and social control by encouraging performers to re-meet their bodies and voices and to wake up an eclipsed wildness of being in themselves and in those watching them.
This work searches to rekindle wild creativity and disclose alternative pathways than those imposed by laws, definitions, social rules, norms and acceptable behaviour.
All is too well defined, how to use our body, how to speak, what can be said, what to do or not in public, what is real, what isn’t, what is scientific, what is superstition, who is normal, who is crazy, what is valid and what is just imagination.
Imaginary Bodies looks for the potential of performing arts to engage in unhabitual states of being that unveil suppressed and unexplored movement of thought and body.
It incites a renaissance of the possibilities of movement -------- Via imaginative improvisation, full presence, attention and trance.
From a personal perspective and most relevantly to my work as a performer and choreographer, this recurring search for a space to ‘let go’ is vital – especially in light of the consistent loss of ritual from modern every day life. One of my main personal objectives is to be able to express myself – and drive other performers to express themselves through dance and theater - without limit and hindrances, creating a link with the audience that succeeds at engaging them in the same process.
Considering that in our everyday lives we usually use the same 1% of the possibilities of movement of our body and voice and that we construct our realities basing ourselves on those engagements; I ask myself whether altering these patterns would also alter our construction of reality?
This study involves two main phases or Coils; the first encompasses designing and recording experiences in which people intuitively improvise with their imagination to create - imaginary beings - hybrid creatures, gods, myths or spirits that flow from conscious and unconscious images and thoughts.
The second coil enmeshes the embodiment of these new contemporary beings and myths to induce alternate ways of perceiving, improvising, moving and sounding. While experimenting with the embodiment of these imaginary bodies, I look to coin lanes of methodology that stimulate paths for performers to discover new possibilities of movement. To my interest is to observe if this framework inspires the performer to undo familiar patterns, to reshuffle the possibilities of the body and connect with a wild freedom of inner movements and impulses. Ultimately it is essential for me in the on-going process of this research, to find ways to structure the wild states emerging into staged performances that are able to impact larger audiences by using the performer as a medium for emancipation.
This research focuses on the doing, on the practice itself. The spontaneity of this practice demands of it to be not fully defined, to keep lose ends - to be created in flexibility and modified in the doing - to understand its progression not only rationally but also intuitively.
This study is about thought and body.
It is a retracing of the Agglomerate Body.
It is propelled by the intuitive and the UNLANGUAGEABLE.
THE AGGLOMERATE BODY
The agglomerate body is what I am calling the body in its wholeness.
It includes the more and the less definable layers of the body – some of which incorporate… the physical body – the material moving body, the thought body - thought, mind, soul, spirit, brain, or the feeling of “I” , the intuitive body - the emotive part of the body, the impulsive, the instinctual, the irrational, the silent body - the unconscious movement of physical body such as organ functioning or the unconscious movement of the thought body such as repressed memories, the relational body – the blurred relations between the inner and the outer worlds, between thought and body – and between thought/body and outside world (non “I” world).
When I speak of the body in the frame of this research, I am speaking of the Agglomerate Body.
The Agglomerate body is the totality of an input and output feedback loop – receiving movement and creating movement.
Movement is physical movement (which includes body motion and vocal motion)
Movement is mental movement of thought and imagination.
Movement is the action/response motion between the inside and the outside, between the performers and themselves, but also between the performers and the audience.
Movement is the shifting movements of intuition, of attraction and decision-making.
When I speak of the movement in the frame of this research, I am speaking of the movement of the whole Agglomerate Body – therefore also Improvisation is to be seen as an activity that is brought about by the whole of the AGGLOMERATE BODY movements.
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Imaginary bodies attempts to wake up dormant WILD FORCES
the wild: the full presence, the trance, the tasting of the insane, the loosing of control – the abandonment and the letting go – the courage to cross social boundaries - the manifestation of a repressed self. The loss of control – the undisciplined part of us – the child in us – It is a somatic experience, experienced in myriads of ways across all cultures, in which guided by intuition, we are moved, we lose control, we are connected, we are mad, we are centered. The moments where the wild is dominant within us, we are hypnotized, fully aware of our environment and ourselves or completely lost in them. When we experience the wild, we can become a medium, a medium for other people to experience the wild. It is a state that can be experienced individually or in a group – sometimes a group helps us to reach this state through a communal and accepting force, sometimes being completely alone allows us to reach this state by feeling unwatched. The wild is not domestic, the wild is untamed, the wild demands the de-domestication from the countless historical, social and psychological accumulations that obstacle the creative violence.
How to rethink our possibilities and our constructs, how to de-discipline and de-domesticate the body?
A de-domestication towards a wild body
A free body demands that we free ourselves from a structured and stiffly controlled belief system –Most of us humans belong to and must abide by the rules of a structured and disciplined belief system and thus are bound to remain enslaved and domesticated by it. The system (legal, religious, rational, cultural, social, geographical) dictates our lives and defines for us what is real and what isn’t, what is normal and what isn’t, what is allowed and what isn’t. We are therefore given a sort of fake freedom, in which we are free as long as we follow the rules - rules that most likely were decided prior to our birth, which we most-likely had no say in. The legal order dictated by the belief system and the power apparatus of a government or religious figure, decides what we can do with our body. Unfortunately, the current power systems that we are confined to are moved by corrupt and sick purposes. These systems embedded within us alienate and box our bodies into disciplined machines of production working for the sake of the wealthy few, encouraged to be divided and isolating the individual to destroy the sense of community.
I believe it is vital for us to keep questioning and de-domesticating ourselves to transform the path of our species. We are surfing a peculiar moment in history, an unjust world driven by consumerism and greed that seems to roll towards an environmental, sanitary and economic catastrophe. I see potential in the designing of dance/theatre experiences to invite performers and audiences of modern humans to requestion their constructs.
This experiment intends to disclose pathways towards a FREE and DE-DOMESTICATED AGGLOMERATE BODY starting from the “inner” world of the intuitive and the unconscious - of imagination, where the body uses its electric currents to reflect about itself in the wholeness – in the “outer” the environment.
INSIDE OUT
In this search of free flow, the body wants to free itself from the “inner” and the “outer” and connect in a state that expunges the binary distinctions of inside out.
Tim Ingold depicts how western thought and modern science have created a clear cut between the inside and the out, alienating humans from their environment. Ingold notes an observation recounted to him, where the material and the mental world, the imaginary and the real, are portrayed as a “two-way way traffic” without a set barrier, one entering the other, without set limits (Ingold, 2010, p. 17) This two-way traffic takes place “through the gateways of the senses” (Ingold, 2010, p. 18)
I consider improvisation to be the act where thought and movement (the imagined and the embodied) become one – a special moment where the real and the fantasy fuse. During improvisation, thought is mixed with action, at times the action is what triggers the thought, other times it is the opposite. It becomes unclear, if the movement comes from the thought or the thought comes from the movement, or if both are just happening at the same time, melting in a dance of presence. As put by Bertinetto when describing the qualities of an improvised performance, every moment is hanging on “(the recollection of) past and (the expectation of) future moments” (Bertinetto, 2017, p. 81). He notes how everything taking place in improvisation can be modified by whatever will happen next, assigning a new meaning to the whole progression (Bertinetto, 2017, p. 82). During improvisation, a flow can open up, in which language (or thinking in words), starts to fade, leaving space to movement and instant composition where the thinking is the improvisation, thinking is the movement, and the mover is improvising the imagination live. This would be the state that Grotovski defines to “free the time lapse between the inner impulse and the outside reaction” (Grotowski, 1968, p. 16; Lavy, 2005, p. 6).
ABOUT ME
Throughout the years, my work has been a reflection of my context and surroundings. Living in Beirut, a small yet complex city brimming with contradictions and constant change, my performances (both the themes and choreographies) have focused on technological development, which imposes a rapidly changing reality on the human body and mind. Through dance and theater, I have delved into the concept of this constantly and rapidly evolving post-modern world, with focus on my city, which poses significant stresses and challenges, as it requires relentless and fundamental adaptations, transforming the practices and behaviors of large part of the global population.
I started my performative journey through the exploration of street clowning, in which I found a way to express myself poetically and freely on the street. With the help of the red nose, a kind of “passe-par-tout mask”, I unearthed an opportunity to be whoever and however on the street. As a clown you are allowed to be senseless, to roll on the ground, to speak to anyone, to sing loudly….. you have a special freedom, you are not “crazy”, you are just a “clown”. My practice slowly shifted to the theatre where I wanted to dig deeper into these states of freedom.
I believe that our time is revealing the weakness of our current social systems and our political powers, giving agency to people all around the world to question themselves. I feel that this research is resonating with the human need to give meaning back to the body, to the community and to the primal needs. More and more people are looking for ways to be in touch with themselves, through somatic work (yoga, meditation, dance, etc…) and through artistic expression.
The proposed research tackles themes and realities which are universally familiar and relevant, transgressing national and cultural boundaries. At the root, the current multiple crises - economic, political, health, environmental, etc. - are the result of a dominant culture and system that are largely disciplinary and individualistic and have significantly neglected a sense of community, solidarity and authenticity. The research tackles humanity's need to go back to something different, and challenges a dominant system governed by police, money, surveillance, which has alienated the individual and reduced all other systems to very little, as well as the ability of humanity to feel and fight for each other. We witness uncontainable pain and injustice, and yet we are numb. We are afraid for ourselves, our future, our lives, and yet we are numb and we do not take action. More specifically, the study addresses the idea of the medium, the community, the healer, as examples of this solidarity that has been lost.
I seek to look for the possibilities of other directions, other systems that have been crushed but could flourish, and most of all, that humans at the core are collaborative beings, able to care for one another, and able to be part of a real community.
Increasingly the whole world has been going towards a trend of increased individualism which clashes with communal societies and which happened through shock, colonization, media, etc., instead of through a gradual shift and evolution. Consequentially, the world is particularly affected and torn, and one could say it is going through an existential crisis. Now more than ever, through the lens of the pandemic, we are able to see the fragility of our world and the need of re-questioning everything in it.
frames
In growing up and dealing with society, the initial wild layers of imagination are often regularly and rapidly repressed. Side by side with the suppression of imagination, goes the repression of the body. The body educated to move and perform in set rules and regulations according to context, culture and society, loses some of its faculties of creativity.
The playful discovery of the body is usually abandoned in going towards adulthood. Once we start to copy what the adults around us are doing, the functions of the body are defined in a way that leaves little space to play and exploration. A disciplined society, functions on a binary division of sane-insane, dangerous-inoffensive, normal-abnormal (Foucault, 1978, p. 217); this division into positive-negative leaves little space for in-between exploration.
Swedish Butoh dancer SU-EN encourages experiencing the body with “the innocence of a young child in investigating the physical limits of each separate body part and its function” (Sweeney, 2012, p. 75). SU-EN engages his students to “de-familiarise” their body and forget the habitual movement patterns and “physiological functions”, to find a process of re-learning, in which everybody part is questioned anew, and learns its actual limits and boundaries (Sweeney, 2012, p. 76).
Coming from a diverse line of thought that nevertheless touches on parallel matters, Greek theater director Thedoros Terzopoulos, also pushes his actors to perform “seemingly bizarre and unfamiliar actions” (Müller, 2019, p. 19) in order to disorient their bodies: allowing them to arrive at “a condition of controlled ecstasy”.
This controlled trance-state, which is present in Butoh and in the work of Grotowski under the name of the “total act”, is the state that I am aiming to explore through my research and my work as a choreographer.
Through the research I am looking for methods that stimulate paths to these states, starting from the activation of the imaginary, subsequently conquering the body. To my interest is to observe how this state is transformational to the performer – and consequently, to the audience.
Through the creation of new myths, new magical “beings”, I am looking for routes to reshuffle the possibilities of the body to arrive to this state. I am considering how the embodiment of a new body that improvised its way consciously and unconsciously in someone’s mind, is able to create new myths, novel ways of moving and original ways of exploring one’s own being, in full engagement.
According to Terzopoulos, the body reaches such states through reenacting primal actions that have been forgotten (Müller, 2019, p. 20). The actors bring back to light latent archaic memories through trance, in a sort of revival of myth (Dreyer, 2013, p. 08). Terzopoulos seeks to induce the actors on the trail of rebirth, which accordingly shakes their present (Dreyer, 2013, p. 08) and bring forth “a state of being outside themselves, of delirium and subjection”. The audience experiences humans on stage goings towards the “very limits of their existence” (Dreyer, 2013, p. 06) I believe that being witness to such an experience is transformational, the actors, as mediums, spill their experience onto the audience.
Dyonisos seeks to ‘break the chains’ and according to Walter Otto, Dyonisos allows tumult to erupt to the surface from the innermost recesses of being and “this attends all moments of creation, constantly changes ordered existence into chaos, and ushers in primal salvation and primal pain – and in both, the primal wildness of being” (Otto, 1965, p. 143). Similarly, Nietzsche describes the Dyonisian state, as one where the common limits of existence are destroyed (Nietzsche, 1995, p. 40).
In my opinion, this blur between imagination and reality is essential in performance-making; by smudging the line between the inner and the outer world and reconsidering the view that concepts are locked inside the mind and the movement improvisation is locked out in the material world. It is important to see how in this “smudging” exists a mixed state which is not in or out, but both at the same time, where thinking in the action takes place and where improvised imagination takes place, where one is fully present, in a trance of spontaneity.
We can see this notion of a blurred gap between “the real and the unreal”, in an example from a Butoh exercise in which the mover is asked to imagine an insect crawling on their body. The teacher verbally guides the mover to imagine more and more insects until the amount of insects is infinite and the body surrenders and is eaten by all the insects, leaving behind an empty body. As dancer Carlos Fittante claims: “the most difficult part of this exercise was that one had to be it, not merely imagine it.” (Fittante, 2016, p.9). Here again, we realize that at some point the barrier between the real and the unreal is open, the effect on the physical body is as if the insects were actually there and the movements are not premeditated but actual reactions to the insects that one starts to feel inside one’s reality.
This haziness between the controlled and the mastered and the unknown is what I am interested in. Between the choreographed and the improvised. Between the domestic and the wild.
How to create containers, where the unknown manifests – in a performance - structures that do not fall into chaos. How to design trainings that give space to the uncontrolled - in balance with what is controlled, and how does the control, allow the unknown to manifest. Creating skeletons, to hold the uncontrolled, the trance, the manifestation of pure dance, the wild, the madness, the improvised, the transformative.
Imagination has been a key instrument in the creation of movement material and theatre. The embodiment of imagination allows performers to explore infinite possibilities and spaces, often between the four walls of a studio. Multitudes of techniques have been developed through exercises whereby one transforms one’s self or environment with imagination.
-- In imagination lies the potential for total freedom, even in prison, one can imagine. The capitalist system, through psychological repression, has almost controlled our thoughts.
Yet despite this repression, the imagination continues to wonder into forbidden places, places that the system defines as deviant, as criminal. And imagination, remains uncontrollable , a most importantly – unpunishable, creating a world of freedom, that no system can completely destroy.
To conclude, this research is a tool for shaking ourselves, take back meaning, and open possibilities to play differently.
