BODY AS PLACE: Durational Performance As Activist Practice Nala Walla December 2009 *download entire document as PDF* CONTENTS 5.1 Introduction: On Mediatization and Performance Addiction 5.1.1 VIDEO: “Nest” 5.2 Durational Performance As Activist Practice 5.2.1 What is Durational Performance? 5.2.2 VIDEO SHORT: “Body As Place” 5.2.3 What is Site-Specific Performance? 5.2.4 VIDEO: “Clay” 5.2.5 VIDEO: “de-composition” 5.3 Outside-In: Site-Specific Performance and Technology 5.3.1 VIDEO: “Outside-In” 5.3.2 Behind The Scenes of “Outside-In” 5.4 Waterhouse: Ecosomatic Movement Repatterning 5.4.1 Background Info 5.4.2 VIDEO: “Waterhouse” 5.4.3 The Mindfulness Bell 5.4.4 Goals and Challenges 5.5 Conclusion: Body As Place ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a person for work that is real.” --Marge Piercy “Beware that dance as…performance art in the theater, is a minute fragment of dance in the true sense of the word.” --Min Tanaka ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1 INTRODUCTION: ON MEDIATIZATION AND PERFORMANCE ADDICTION All across the modern world, the human being is malnourished—and I am not referring just to the poor. In Western nations, even the bodies of the obese, the rich, and the highly-privileged betray obvious signs of starvation, both physical and spiritual. We certainly have no lack of stuff to fill ourselves with, yet spiraling consumption of things devoid of nutritive value only whets our hunger. Wasn’t ‘consumption’ the 14th Century name for a disease of wasting-away? Today we are not so different: consumption is consuming us. Even culture and the arts have been commodified into an item we purchase. But the bland fare of modern pop culture is as empty of soulful nutrition as bag of Cheetos, and about as addictive. In the frenzy to sate our cravings with media, we often forget that this hunger for performance is an ancient one, a deep human need for participatory, unmediated ritual and ceremony, for cultural transformation--the original purpose of the arts. Cut to our contemporary scene: legions of the culturally anemic, voraciously consuming lonely performances on iPods and laptops, Youtube and Twitter, attempting to capture the magic on our cell phone cameras, in a collective gasp for the nutritive value of the arts . Yet, because we can never be “virtually” satisfied, the cycle of addiction rambles on. Performance scholar Baz Kershaw asks: Is drama now an unconscious addiction, a programme so deeply ingrained that we do not even recognize it as a need? And is performance becoming an addictive matrix of consciousness, a new kind of paradigm crucially inherent to human ecology?…It arrives in a very personal guise through anxieties about our own performance--in career, lifestyle, love…Or we become fascinated by the performance of people we will never meet--in the media, sports, politics. Or we are drawn to more abstract domains of performance—the FTSE, the GNP, the RAE, the hundred best of everything, the ten worst... The perfusion of performance…then generates various pathologies of perception of social process. [1] We are a culture obsessed with performance. Perhaps this fact can shed some light upon where our needs truly lie? I believe that we can remedy the addictive mediatization of society by returning per-form-ance to its roots—giving tangible and actual form to the sustainable and healthy culture we so desperately need. My own work as a embodied artist seeks to mitigate the intense flood of media and hard technology into our lives by renewing a performance tradition which truly nourishes, truly transforms our people and our culture. This video “essay” provides a view into the Bcollective’s site-specific performances in which we are invited outdoors to physical connection with people and place. We recover the art of meaningful work in the landscape, the art of honoring the body, the of art of actively building and sculpting a vision for a healthy, modern village. Love this embodied performance by Nalla Walla. And i ask what am i choosing? What am i leaning towards? How do i rest, recharge? Hiow much of my time is spent listening to my body, and being in nature? Would love to hear your reactions. In this short film, a computer weary-woman seeks solace outdoors in a bed made of sticks and branches, a nest to rest tired eyes and recharge with birdsong. youtube/watch?v=bNXAb0co-_k
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 01:36:53 +0000
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