In my doctoral artistic research “Children and Childhoods in Intergenerational Performance Art” I approach children and childhoods through imitation, mimicking and verbatim techniques. Since Plato, the attitude toward imitation in the arts has often been suspicious, but there is a lot of potentiality and power in imitation and mimicry. I ask, if mimicking could be an ethical way to approach the other. Can we care through imitation? Are we able to use imitation as it is used in childhood, when empathy is developed through imitating? Could we find ways to overcome the adult–child opposition and gain knowing of children and childhoods through verbatim techniques and mimicking? In this presentation I propose a more open and attentive approach to imitation and illuminate why I find it a valuable method in my research.
I present here my pre-produced video presentation for the 12th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research. It was presented on 9th April 2021. Below the video you can find a transcript of the spoken text.
A transcript of the video presentation with references:
[A child is reciting the Five Little Monkeys folk song, starting from one hundred little monkeys. After every verse their voice is cut, and an adult voice repeats the verse imitating the child’s utterance.]
One hundred little monkeys jumping on the bed
– One hundred little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head
– One fell off and bumped his head
Um… mama called the doctor and the doctor said:
– Um… mama called the doctor and the doctor said:
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
– “No more mo… no more mon…. no more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
– “No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
I remember that, when we were kids, my sister had a habit of mouthing the words I was speaking, when she got exited of something I was saying. Her eyes lit, she followed my face eagerly, and then her lips started to form the words I uttered. No sound game out of her mouth, there was just the silent formations of my words. Then I knew that I was on to something, something that would inspire her and bring things to the next level. I had managed to get her going – and soon The Play could start.
I’m a performance artist and actor, and in my artistic doctoral research project “Children and Childhoods in Intergenerational Performance Art” I use imitation, mimicking and verbatim techniques as means to approach children and childhoods. I claim that imitation techniques are a powerful mean through which artists can initiate meaningful processes. Through imitation we share, and we mimic if we care.
When I ask my fellow artists in the rehearsal studio to do direct imitation and tell that I actually want that direct imitation present in the performance, they hesitate. They come back to it later asking, if I actually really mean direct imitation. Artists are eager to go further or ‘deeper’ from the base material, leave ‘imitating the surface’ quickly behind.
Precise imitation is a laborious act, and what is the prize? In imitators work there is rigor, that unpleasantly reminds the dancer of the restrictiveness of ballet studios. At the same time direct imitation is childish, it’s more present early in the human development, and coming of age diminishes the conscious direct translation of perception into action. Mimicry appears a simple act, too simple even to be considered seriously in the arts. Mimicry is copying, and copying is an act lacking artistic originality – an important quality for the art field still. Copy-making is a lower skill, unproductive repetition of the real is not appreciated.
Plato famously had a negative approach to mimesis, he wanted to limit it, and Platonic ideology is strongly present in modern art. A scholar of ancient philosophy Alexander H. Zistakis writes: “Plato is extremely modern; or, at least, the modern artists and theoreticians of art are extremely Platonic”, (Zistakis 2017, 164). In the modern era art had to find its own truth and imitating reality or, even less, the appearance of reality, was not a way to find that truth. (Zistakis 2017, 169) Imitation would give the truth defining authority to the world outside of art. Plato wanted us to find our place and stay there. A single, well defined identity distinct from other identities, no transgressions, no hiding oneself and becoming other. One man and one, good and just model.
My aim is to create instability and transgenerational movement. To denaturalize and question the age segregation in the contemporary Western society. It’s not about revealing the hidden truth, but to disrupt the age definitions and ideas on The Child and The Adult, add confusion among the age groups, so that we start to question, re-perceive and re-imagine.
Plato did not trust our perception, and I do not trust ideas that pretend to be free from our perception. I want to perceive resiliently, persistently, I want to perform this act of persistent perception. I know that our perception is connected to our ideas and never free from them, like our ideas are always connected to our perception. I do not hope to gain pure perception any more than pure idea. I do not aim at pureness or clearness. In fact, I aim in the opposite direction: I want to connect the idea and the perception over and over again, let them contaminate each other continuously, so that no clearness or pureness has time to manifest.
As Plato knew, imitation and mimicking are great confusion devices. Homi Bhabha saw this as well: “Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents”, Bhabha writes in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man” (Bhabha 1984, 128, emphasis in original). Bhabha is using the term mimicking when addressing a mode of colonial discourse, in which members of the colonized society imitate the culture of the colonizer. Like Indians imitating the dress, language, politics and attitudes of the British, in order to cope in the colonial society. Colonial mimicry, “is at once resemblance and menace”(Bhabha 1984, 127). The ambivalence of mimicry produces excess, slippage, difference. There is something inappropriate in these imitating subjects. Through them the normality of the dominant discourse is disturbed.
Like in Judith Butler’s performative, also in Bhabha’s mimicry there is always the possibility that the concrete act of imitation, the mime itself, shows the ‘unoriginality of the origin’ and the artificialness of the binary structure. It reveals something of the constructed structure of the naturalized, like the original Englishness or maleness. Or childness. Mimicry is a strategy through which the ambivalence gets in to the assumed original.
Through mimicking I approach others. I try them out, like children do when they learn. Adults mimic as well, all the time, sometimes purposefully, but more often unconsciously, in an effort to belong and connect. Behavioral scientists have shown that mimicry creates a connection between individuals, and humans also unconsciously try to prevent mimicry in cases they do not want to bond with the person in question – as when afraid of social stigmatization, or if they do not value or like the individual and the things they represent for some reason. (Van Baaren et al. 2009, Van Baaren et al. 2004; 2383; Johnston 2002, 18-35). Behavioral scientists Van Baaren et. al. sum up: “We do not just imitate everybody all the time. We imitate more when: we feel connected to others, others are important, we want to affiliate with others, we are socially oriented or have an assimilative cognitive style.
Furthermore, in addition to these more general mimicker characteristics, the characteristic of the mimickee also moderate the mimicry. A priori evaluation of those targets predicts our subsequent mimicry.” (Van Baaren et al. 2009, 2383, emphasis in original) We imitate persons we like, persons we care for. And we spread this care and affection through imitation, as imitation has a strong effect on the imitated, and when a person is imitated, they are prone to liking the imitator and also to act in a more pro-social way in general – also towards others, not only towards the person imitating them. (Van Baaren et al. 2009, 2384). “[B]eing imitated makes people feel more attuned to and connected with others.” (Van Baaren et al. 2009, 2385)
There are intra-individual as well as affective and emotional aspects in mimicry. Mimicry is not a simple act if we consider the ambivalence and destabilization it is able to generate. It affects the imitator and the imitated, but its effects also reach beyond that.
Imitation is currently a subject of interest in a wide range of fields: neuroscience, cognitive science, psychological science, behavioral science, developmental science, ethology, robotics… But are we in the arts so afraid of the mimetic, readily attached to our operation since Plato, that we do not dare to imitate?
There can be so much power in mimesis, imitation, mimicking, that Plato had to banish artists, those professional imitators, from the republic. There is so much potentiality that Bhabha writes how mimicry, through the gaze of otherness turned back to the colonizer, “shatters the unity of man’s being” (Bhabha 1984, 129) and “rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence” (Ibid., emphasis in original). If mimicry is this great disturbing force as well as connecting bond and affective asset, shouldn’t we artists be more eager to work with it, claim it ‘ours’, research its ways? More eager to say ‘yes, mimicking and imitation is what we do, it’s our specialization’.
Mimicking and imitation is for me an act of care and dare; I care, that is why I dare to imitate.
Nin… ninety nine little monkeys jumping on the bed
– Nin… ninety nine little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head
– One fell off and bumped his head
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said:
– Mama called the doctor and the doctor said:
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
– “No more mo… no more mon…. no more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”
– “No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”…
References
Baaren, Rick B. van, Rob W. Holland, Kerry Kawakami, and Ad van Knippenberg. 2004. ‘Mimicry and Prosocial Behavior’. Psychological Science 15 (1): 71–74.
Baaren, Rick van, Loes Janssen, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Ap Dijksterhuis. 2009. ‘Where Is the Love? The Social Aspects of Mimicry’. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 364 (1528): 2381–89.
Bhabha, Homi. 1984. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’. October 28 (Journal Article): 125–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/778467.
Johnston, Lucy. 2002. ‘Behavioral Mimicry and Stigmatization’. Social Cognition 20 (1): 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.20.1.18.20944.
Zistakis, Alexander H. 2018. ‘Mimēsis — Imitation as Representation in Plato and His Modern Successors’. In The Many Faces of Mimesis, edited by Heather L. Reid and Jeremy C. DeLong, 3:159–72. Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Western Greece. Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbj7g5b.16.