November 19, 2009
Bodies of Water: A Displacement Ritual
Critical Analysis by
Jorge Luis Morejón
“Solitude as I understand it does not signify a miserable condition but rather, hidden royalty, profound incommunicability, yet a more or less somber knowledge of an unassailable singularity.” Jean Genet
Before we made water the center of our piece” there was the need for a meaningful connection, for a profound relationship with the self first, with the space second, with the work third and lastly with the audience. Yet, the space holds it all together in a bundle, so primarily there was the need for a space where Nitza Tenenblat and I, both displaced, both immersed in the solitude produced by foreign cultures, the Anglo-North-American and the academic one, could recreate a safe bubble, a sense of home in which to be creative. The Rite of Passage of Jean Genet: the Art and Aesthetic of Risk Taking by Gene A. Plunka mentions Genet’s point of view about solitude and the “other,” the name he gives to the audience. In his essay “Le Funambule“(The Funambulist), he expresses his concern about practicing art for the other, advising that instead of performing for the audience “the artist must be immersed into solitude, existing at once with his art.” (Plunka 119) As he expressed, “the desire to pine away in solitude devoid of the other enhances confidence in one’s own artistic talents, a conscious and determined attempt to unite art and self.”
Coincidentally, given our own sense of isolation during this process, our purpose was to create a water ritual in which art and self could be used as the raw material to experience the degree to which a performance can positively alter the often negative consequences of displacement. In our case our solitude was not chosen, but used as a tool in our creative process. In this critical evaluation, I share the intricate journey that took Nitza Tenenblat and me to a brief stop, the performance for our qualifying exams committee, in what we consider still a work-in-progress. First, I explain my pre-disposition to endure the emotional demands of the work. Second, I narrate the search for ways to justify water as the center piece of our ritual-performance. Then I show, through vivid descriptions of the sensual explorations that took place during rehearsals, the vast universe of poetic images contained in the body-mind archives. Hence, what follow is the actual creative propositions that came out of the process as part of the final narrative. Finally, I attempt to intersect the phenomenological aspect of the work and psychoanalytic technical explanations of it hoping to make sense out of the multiple chronologies that act as a catalyst for the displaced performer in his/her desire to make sense of a chaotic world.
The Fruits of Solitude
Genet’s advice reminds us that the creative resources reside within the self, that one must exercise one’s own voice within one’s own context, to identify and articulate who and where one is and how one relates to one’s own emotional landscape. Our solitude became the foundation or starting point, a form of “seclusion” in achieving the performance piece. (Bial 80) It is not just the solitude of the self from the other, we became aware of, but also the solitude of the specific moment of creation, the solitude of alienation. In retrospect I realize, that only one-self and the piece in gestation exist, as if the energy of solitude, purified by its own isolation, carries the unique and almost sacred force that injects the creative moment. It is from that force that, as expressed in this poem, I embody my rituals. It is with this newly defined existential phenomenological awareness that I came to embrace our work, as a stop along the way and my own existential journey as part of a continuum which started with the moment of my conception.
“I was born in this body. I was that one sperm that made it to a safe destination in my mother’s womb. Through her, I inherited centuries of human definitions of Gods and Goddesses. In this very anatomy in which survives the will of mankind, as well as the intricate array of living tissue, I host my soul. This soul is nourished only when I remember who I am.
The Old Testament, the Orishas, the flags, the exiles, the theatre, the performances and the displacements are only sacred context to a body that has found its soul in the making of rituals. I am altar, image, icon, offering and prayer in my own body’s writing of history. My soul is my point of reference, my body’s laver and leveler. When cut through its trunk, my body shows the multiple rings of time. It is ancient and immortal in its mortal returns.
My soul peeps in from the summit of my flesh, and sees so much to love and so much to cleanse, so much pain, so much blood. Stained by memory, its aging seems premature and unnatural, undeserved. My body, aware, dances to the earth, on the earth, for the water, under fire, in the wind. It is in this dance that my wombless body gets even with nature and in soulful joy delivers art.” (jorgemorejon.livejournal.com)
Our Ritual Quest
Bodies of Water, our performance piece, allowed us to turn water into an object of metaphoric worship, a necessary step in the creation of a performance ritual. Because of the focus of my dissertation: how displaced communities use the performance of rituals to assuage displacement, specifically the Cuban American exile community is South Florida, I was determined to create a ritual performance. Nitza’s collaborative approach seemed ideal, since her directorship’s agenda was in tune with the collaborative nature of ritual making a very “non-manipulating approach toward the directing and the dramaturgical aspect of the work. Added to that, Performance Studies as a field encompasses different sub-fields such as performance in ritual, performance in social context and aesthetic performance, which offered us a great deal of creative freedom to subvert any preconceived definitions about performance, even if that was not the direct purpose of our work.
As mentioned by Richard Schechner in his essay Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach, performance, “ as distinct from any of its sub genres like theatre, dance, music and performance art, is a broad spectrum of activities including at the very least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainment, and performance in everyday life.” (Bial 7) This definition however, is inadequate to express the full scope of possibilities offered by performance-as-research. The performance lab makes possible the simultaneous immersion of the performance team in the practice and the research of the piece without diminishing its artistic and creative quality. I would add that in my own personal practice, every performance is a performance-as-ritual, a ritual-as-practice and a practice-as-research (PAR). Thus, for me, ritual is equivalent to research if the purpose of the practitioner/performer is to understand the inner workings of the performance piece and its possible applications. Choreographer, educator and activist Anna Halprin often says, “a dance is a ritual if it has a purpose.”
In his chapter Legitimacy and Mystification David Kertzer agrees that through ritual, people symbolize the system of socially approved ‘proper’ relations between individuals and groups.”(Kertzer 37) Within this symbolized system one could frame Victor Turner’s idea of “the dominant symbol,” which as he expressed in The Forest of Symbols, works as a container of “the ethical and jural norms of society into close contact with strong emotional stimuli.” (Turner 30) This combination, norms plus strong emotional stimuli, are the ideal ingredients in “the action situation of ritual, with its social excitement and directly physiological stimuli, (music, singing, dancing, alcohol, incense, and bizarre modes of dress).” It was obvious to Tenenblat and I that all these arrays of artistic modalities were going to be part of our attempt at creating ritual.
In Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Sidney Tarrow refers to collective behavior in the context of Durkheim’s theory of “anomie,” in which “individuals unhinged from traditional roles and identities sought new collective identities through personal re-integration in movements.” (Tarrow 14) Durkheim argued that “through ritual, people project the secular sociopolitical order in which they live onto a cosmological plane.” Tenenblat and I found in water the potential to become a dominant symbol that could at the same time contain our attempt to re-integrate our mutual sense of displacement into an action ritual of “communitas.” (Bial 80) Water is an important element of nature. Water is essential in the survival of life on earth. Yet, that was not what we used as an engine in the process. As conceptual image, water was an ideal foundation upon which to overlay a performance piece. However, we had to relate it to a personal experience, to turn lower case water into capitalized Water. Water needed to be meaningful for the two of us. We needed to turn water into an “effigy” that could contain the “spirit” of our piece.”(Kertzer 25)
“We began to work. Nitza brought some ideas for me to work on. The first idea revolved around a body of water that I considered important for me. I was already on the floor. I felt relaxed and ready. It felt we had talked already and it felt the right moment to start. I felt supple and the floor and I began to merge spontaneously and naturally. My eyes were already closed when Nitza told me that she was to put some elements on the space and that I could begin whenever I felt ready.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Nitza related water to the study made by Masaru Emoto’s The Hidden Messages in Water. In this study he places pieces of paper with written words inside water containers, and then he freezes the water and looks at the water crystals to compare their shapes depending on the word used. He wanted to prove that water contains memory and that memory is visibly marked by the content of the written words. Words affect the shape of the crystals. Our conclusion at the time was that if we are 70% water, based on Emoto’s experiment, we are definitely marked by the words we hear and read, by the events that contain those words, by the memories that archive them and by the water stored in our brain cells, in our body’s memory. Although, the reading of Emoto’s study was a good start to initiate the creative process, it gave our work the animistic essence of his somewhat Shinto philosophy about water; rather than staying with that idea, I immediately began to think of what water meant within the Cuban cultural and religious context. I began to think about very important moments which marked my life in relation to water. Why was water important to me?
“The body of water I thought of immediately was my mother’s amniotic fluid. I was inside her body, in the water of her body, my body extending, facing up, arms folded, hands folded next to my face, the reverse of the palms touching my neck and shoulders. It felt tender and warm. I was moving slowly propelled by my feet which pressed against the floor rhythmically and continuously as if trying to make the movement imperceptible and smooth, workless, effortless. I felt I was moving in a diagonal across the stage, but I really do not know. It felt however that as I dragged myself across the floor, I was encountering a number of elements that rather than an obstacle gave my movement some important markers. It felt part of the environment and it felt good. I felt caressed by the paper and by the stones as if they had a life of their own in the most animistic sense, perhaps now that I think of it, Zen as well. The whole space seems to have been designed in that sort of philosophical frame.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Embodied Memoirs
At that early stage of our work, I was unconscious of the fact that these moments which I was retrieving from my sensual memory could also be read as important moments in the lives of others as well. In her essay Unearthing Kinesthesia, Deidre Sklar explains how the senses used to be all part of one whole spectacle where olfactory, tactual, visual, auditory, gustative, and kinesthetic experiences combined in an orchestrated attempt to enhance and heighten the very experience of “living life.” (Banes-Lepecki 38) This is perhaps the power of performance; what we do becomes a mirror off of which bounces the projections people make; what we do marks their bodies’ waters as well as our own. I think this is the key; there are universal themes that emerge through the work, whether we want it or not, which bridge all human experience, Emoto’s included, to that very moment of unfolding experiential truth we gave ourselves freedom to make visible through different bodies of water, through different containers, through movement, voice, touch and taste.
“It felt that once I had dragged myself to the corner, I began to rotate in circles in the same spot and that after a few turns I began to shift my body, finding its balance, slowly ,teasing its gravity. It felt, and that was the image I had in my mind, that I was in the water, now outside my mother’s body but in the earth’s water, in the ocean, and the posture in which I had gotten myself into was the posture of a body that surrendered to water letting itself to freely sink all the way to the bottom. There was no bottom though. All I saw was my body in those postures descending infinitely as the water caressed my outer layers, softly and semi densely. Eventually I came to a position in which I just slowly began to relax slowly, every part of my body slowly, until I felt the surface underneath by nose, my chest, my stomach and genitals, I felt my penis against the floor, my arms and legs last, my shoulders last, my face last. I really felt comfortable in that position, close to the surface and the earth. I knew Nitza was there, but I felt absolutely confident. I knew that she was holding the space and that she was protecting me.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Experiential truth marks the degrees to which a performer connects with the self and with others. In being embodied through different modes of expression, experiential truth becomes available to all. As performers, the more ways we find to bring that embodiment into an expressive mode, the more capable we are to not only feel it our self, but make the other feel it. The more one embraces a more fulfilling human experience, the more conscious one becomes about what one feels as well as the importance of finding ways to continue feeling life. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space suggests that one “must live alone in a cosmos that is not that of one’s childhood. (Bachelard 46) This is perhaps why in the absence of a place like home, where the senses first begin to awaken to living life, its substitute, the oneiric home, “the place we love,” unwilling to become permanently enclosed, blooms generously in the safety, the intimacy and the solitude of the space of creation. (53) This space Tenenblat and I created, a space which transcended its geometry with our presence, a space in which I was allowed to daydream and give birth to new images, began to also “remodel” me.
“The energy of the earth was strong. I felt a torrent of energy latently waiting to connect with me. I waited for that moment when it felt it hit me and a sound erupted through my thoughts as a result of the energy shock. My body bounced in convulsive estertores (rattles). A gradual swimming began but this movement was not soft, of the contrary it was contracted. Hands, arms, body and torso clinched as if fearfully swimming through the waters of the inferno, defensively as if afraid of being attacked at any moment. This went on for a while; I was moving like a shark, like some creature made to kill if not to be killed. Progressively, I felt the transformation, or in Nitza’s words, the metamorphosis. Slowly, I felt how my body parts began to tune into a different kind of energy. Good energy, soft energy began to soften me and my limbs began to move flowingly and lightly. I was smiling, it seemed I had found healthy waters; It felt I could swim in those waters for ever, at times I just took impulse and kept up planeando (hovering) like a bird, but under water, for long periods of time, facing God, smiling and free falling.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
For the displaced performer, it is better to live in a state of impermanence rather than one of finality. (61) In Jane Blocker’s Where is Ana Mendieta?, the Cuban American artist “sustains rather than assuages exile;” she could make exile home by engraving her body on the earth, not on a specific country, but by embodying a poetic homeland where, in Gloria Andalzua’s words, “the skin of the earth is seamless.” (Blocker 78) Yet, it is the very organization of human life, the rigidity and predictability of it that keeps the performer from feeling the whole range of emotions that a human is capable of expressing. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in her essay Making Sense of food Performance: The Table and The Stage, brings attention to the way in which the senses have been isolated from each other in very rigid and specific genres and how their separation creates disjointed perceptions. This represents a dichotomy, since it is human organization that also provides the conventions through which we channel our performance-practice and create sensual oasis. In this sort of grey zone, in this liminal area is where our practice-as-research, as advised by Genet, creates a space in which to “develop a suitable style unique to our art, to take risk, to invent.” (119) For this reason, as explained by Lynette Hunter in her essay Situated Knowledge, the telling of my story, in abstract movement, images, music, and text (mostly in Spanish,) was set to become realized only when the listeners, mainly English speakers, after the performance, “would tell the story in their own way, in their own context.” (Hunter 152)
Immersion
Is trauma involved in all of this? Is trauma involved in all performances? Why do we do it? Why has it been done since the beginning of human history? Why do we performers still do it? Is it an act of giving to oneself the opportunity to vent and let go? Is it that selfish? Why do we then need others to be present in the performance space? These questions arise during the writing of this critical evaluation, but not before. Then our concern was to immerse ourselves in the creative work.
“Eyes closed, I started with a shape: my body squatting on the right and knee folded on the left, arms rounded over the folded left knee as if encircling it. As I traveled in that position, the left knee kept moving within that circle in both directions clockwise and counterclockwise. The movement involved the torso, the shoulders, both the rounded arms and the knee moving in circles in reference to each other. I kept on traveling and switching directions, until a beam of light coming from the ceiling began to light my closed eyes. I began to play with the beam of light, at times I could feel it on my eyes and at times I missed it. I began to search for it, my face leading my body ascending towards the light until I was completely standing. I had noticed that there was a piece of cloth near, almost under my right foot. I knew I could get it with my toes, so still connected to the beam of light; I tried to grab the cloth with my right toes and then grab it with my right hand, which I succeeded in doing.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
We were busy proposing new and exciting ideas. We thought of the Davis University U Club for our performance. The building has beautiful lines, it is made out of organic materials, it is Japanese-like in its aesthetical appearance, and the skylights in the roof allow magic beams of light to penetrate the space while rehearsing, a space which is crowned by a square ceiling bóveda (altar). The arboretum is right across the street from it so we thought of a processions starting at the water contained by the arboretum’s basin and ending at the performance space. We thought of drumming to welcome the procession into the space, we planned how to modify the space which was too big, too dispersed for the degree of energetic containment we desired for the piece, we thought of food to greet our audience at the end. But none of this happened. It was part of the brainstorming artists go through when developing new work. We even lost all access to the U Club studio and had to redirect our efforts to the accommodation of The Firehouse studio, which is not as disputed over by the department and which is scheduled for demolition some time soon.
"Then, I began to move the cloth, scarf, holding it with my right hand, through my left hand, as if purifying it with the light, the scarf in between my face and the beam of light. When the full length of the scarf was extended between my two hands, in between my face and the light, I covered my eyes with it. I wrapped it around my head over my eyes and then kept it tight and extended, crossed behind my head, extended on either side of it. I began to walk in the space. I felt totally isolated and free. An impulse took me to ask in Spanish, Hay alguien en casa? (Is there anybody home?) I repeated the phrase several times, I added the word hello, and the rest, “hay alguien en casa, donde estan todos, donde estan, hello,” (Where is everybody, where are you, hello)at which point Nitza responded from where she was, I supposed the outer edge of the space, “Estoy Aqui ( I am here).” I went to where the voice was coming from and she met me half way there. She positioned herself next to me and then I put my hand over her shoulder and began to walk through the space. I left myself be guided by her. I trusted her and followed her walking at her pace, no resistance. At one point a sudden need to cry overwhelmed me. I began to utter long and heartfelt lamentations, like a child, like a mourner. We kept walking through the space as I continue crying, no acting, real cry coming from my depth. (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Other questions emerge as I write: our professors and guests knew they were going to witness a performance, why are we willing and capable of becoming part of the human group that in a way helps to contain this type of events? Aren’t our emotions as audience and as performers tamed by convention? If that is the case, doesn’t all become false? Anna Halprin freed her audiences, and as a result her performers, of any right to judge the performance ritual by calling them “witnesses” and Eleonora Duse, before every performance, used to pray “to forget who she was in order to give it all to her performance and be free of herself.” I think the aim of the actor is to precisely let go of the conscious effort that means to act in front of an audience in order to become an unconscious instrument of expression. This does not happen easily because the performance space is always mediated by the presence of the other and the conventions of the particular context in which it takes place. However, to the degree that this is possible, it is the degree to which the artists intervention becomes memorable and influential in the lives of those who witness the performance event and the performer himself.
“I began to move the scarf and in every move I talked as if I were it. I became the scarf. Gradually it became a conversation with me the mover and itself. She, the scarf demanded me to move her and place her in very specific ways. At one point, it invited me to dance with her. So I danced to a waltz, my eyes closed. I began with the fabric close to my mouth and face as it moving with my breath and words. At another point, I placed it on the floor and lied of top of her. She, the scarf, remarked on how heavy I was. I danced with it by turning in circles and letting it fly with the movement; I forgot what she said then. At one point I began to sing, “Oh, I know who you are, I know how you feel, right here right now, in your eyes I know who you are, can you find the child that want to run with the wind?” The scarf on my face and body.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
The performer becomes the medium, the specialist, the horse, the high priest, the shaman on which those less willing to immerse themselves in the production and exposition of poetic images and text place their own projections. As a culture, we have created conventions through which those sitting comfortably on a chair, in a theatre or a performance space can experience catharsis without personally embodying the process themselves. Why is catharsis important? It heightens emotion, it channels repressed memories, it offers an opportunity to let go of hidden experiences through the bravery of the actor’s exposition. Although I agree with Hunter in that the knowledge received by the audience through the telling of the story is different from catharsis, they are not, at least in our piece, necessarily mutually exclusive. Along with the listener’s responsibility “to hear, interpret, understand and put into practice in their own specific situations” the essence of my story, the levels of embodiments of the images presented may affect them emotionally. (Hunter 152) The actor’s immersion in “flow,” the simultaneous display of action, awareness, loss of sense of ego and cognitive discrimination of performative genres, may inevitably, different from just telling a story, produce self as well as the other’s catharsis. (Turner 107)
“There were movements that sounded like the wind that goes through a tine hole or crack. There were sounds coming from my throat. There were expirated sounds that matched sharp and fast movements of the scarf. There were acute sounds that accompanied jumping throws of the scarf in the air. There were little and fast T’s and P’s that described zig-zaggy flowing moves. There was a playful moment with the stones and the scarf.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Eventually, there is a shift in the process. The solitude ends and the work begins to be shared. The repertoire of emotions, experiences, and body expressions the performer is able to manifest enlarges the range of connections to those who are witnessing a performance that could be as well for the self, what I have called a self performance, but whose value in terms of human agency relies on the ability one has to affect others through the abstract, often uniquely personal expressions of one’s existence. Soyini Madison in Critical Ethnography reminds the reader of Mikhail Bakhtin’s words about self-consciousness in relation to another. As he said, “separation, dissociation, and enclosure within the self are the main reasons for the loss of one’s self.” (Madison 9) He adds that “the very being of man/woman is the deepest communion and that to be means to be for another, through the other, for oneself.” Communion with others is articulated by Bakhtin when he says: “I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another and with the help of another.” For me as a performer, the presence of the audience during the crucial unfolding of my personal story reaffirms my place in the world, a place which like in Mendieta’s case, “crosses all borders, all territories, escapes all border guards, can be found anywhere on the planet, is tied neither to language nor to race,” but offers instead, a place for dialogue between an imagined community linked by the drinking of water and my own spirit. (Blocker 78) Bodies of Water allowed my embodiments of water to express the core relationships between my stories, my performance, the audience and nature.
“I was seated on the floor, Japanese position, and I began to gather the scarf along with the stones, dragging them towards me. I extended the scarf in front of me, parallel to my body’s front and then began to pick the little stones one at a time and as I dropped them on the scarf, I produced different sounds” that brought me back to my childhood, to my home’s playground, to Cuba. (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Dancing with Theory
Gustavo Perez Firmat’s Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition has offered me important insights for use in trying to analyze the reasons why I perform a ritual in the context of a personal displaced existence. Perez-Fermat’s chapter, Carnival and Cure more than a revelation has become an epiphany. He engages in the detailed academic analysis of Luis Martin-Santos’ Libertad, temporalidad, y transferencia en el psicoanálisis existencial (Freedom, temporality and transference in existential psychoanalysis) in which he analyses his own novel Tiempo del silencio departing from a realistic style, using three narrative characters, the inner monologue, the second person and the indirect freestyle. I have never used psychoanalysis as a tool to understand my work. I think the performance work is in and of itself capable of creating its own theory. However, through Martin Santos’ psychoanalytical theories, Perez-Firmat has brought my attention to an aspect of Freud’s psychoanalysis which rather than engaging with psychoanalytic theory, engages with Freud’s papers on psychoanalytic technique, seemingly an almost unknown if not neglected part of his work.
In this critical evaluation of Bodies of Water, I moved psychoanalysis to the forefront after realizing that Freud’s ideas represent one of three schools of thought which tried to explain the origin of ritual in society. The myth and ritual school represented by Sir James Frazer, the sociological school led by Emile Durkheim and the psychoanalytical school represented by Sigmund Freud. Perez-Firmat use of Martin-Santos’ writings as a point of departure in his analysis of "carnival" resonates with my own theorizing of Bodies of Water. Carnival and the liminal frame it offers for those who, like me, deal with post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD), an uprooting of the self, the rupture of the emotional and psychological fabric of one’s own embodiments, becomes a perfect case study through which I can explain not only Tenenblat’s and my own performance Bodies of Water, but Performance-as-Research as a valid field of studies.
The same affinity Perez-Firmat finds between Martin Santos’ two literary works I find between Perez-Firmat’s chapter Carnival and Cure and my attempt to explain the emergence of a piece like Bodies of Water. For Perez-Firmat, Martin-Santos’ novel (“no longer a fictional case story”) and his essay, which dissects it and then analyzes it, “share a jubilant border or festive fringe;” for me the performance of Bodies of Water and this critical analysis, its theorization, become “a substratum of carnival illusions” underlying both works. (141) The performance can be used to “gloss” my essay in the same way that the essay can be used to gloss the performance. In this case, just as in happened with Martin-Santos’ works, I am involved with both as if they were “twins.” Thus the theoretical aspect of this work, as aspired by a performance-as-research approach to academic articulation, in the making of its own, “loses its position of interpretative privilege with respect to the fictional work” Tenenblat and I have created (142)
If I were to say that: “in Bodies of Water, I, the performer, becomes the narrator of my own process and that the end of the piece when I throw the water out the door, “marks the culmination of the “cure “for displacement,” I would be engaging in a kind of “too imprecise, too sloppy” theory unable to offer any real insights into the performance piece. (142) If my purpose in this essay is to construe the performance of Bodies of Water as a psychoanalytical cure for a displaced individual, I have “to ignore the fact that the basis for such a cure is the intricate interaction” of performer and self, performer and collaborator, and performer and audience “within a highly rarefied setting” as well as within a very specific type of performance practice.
“Nitza was truly moved by the result of the exploration. She remarked on my hands, she called them child’s hands. She said that she had never realized my hands, that my manly presence made her imagine manly hands and not a child’s hands. She said that she saw me as I am, without the armor. She liked the song almost whispered. At one point she saw me dancing a tango with the scarf. When I was finally swimming freely, my face was the face of a child.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Because of the intensity of the performer’s delivery during this performance-ritual the encounter with the audience cannot be equated even with the analytical encounter between, in Freud’s terms, "analyst" and "analysand" during a session. Using Martin-Santos’ psychoanalytical theories one can infer that “a cure depends less on the body of psychoanalytical theory than on the dialectics’ of the performer-audience confrontation. “ (143) Thus, the concrete interactions that take place during the performance event are much more important than the theoretical superstructure that the practice-as-researcher could impose on it.
“Today we started with the creation of a sequence of movements related to water during the day. • At 6:00 AM, urinating, flushing. Brushing teeth, Drinking water • At 7:00 AM, washing hands, water on my face, washing my face in the sink • 8:00 AM watering the plants • 9:00 body water moving through my system with yoga • 10:00 shake washing and mixing fruits • 11:00 Showering • The water in the atmosphere, outside, through the glass door • The water in the humidity surrounding my body • There are many that I do not remember now.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
What Martin-Santos refers to as the “technique of the treatment” (in performance terms nothing more than the process through which the performer creates his/her work), is “more fundamental than the theory” that could explain the process itself. (143) If in Perez-Firmat’s terms, “technique relates to theory as base to superstructure,” in my own terms, process relates to theory as practice relates to research. As long as the process remains uncompromised, “the theoretical superstructure can be modified almost at will without thereby endangering” the performances aesthetic, therapeutic or healing result.
“Out of all these movements or actions a sequence was created, only those movements that resonated with me remained, urinating facing the back; turn around and focus in the horizon; walk towards the front. Gesturing moving fingers, arms extended to either side of the body, describing a semicircle as the move to the top, then move down, my arms and hands meet in front of my pelvis and move upwards (hands together shaping a container) parallel to my stomach, chest, and face, passing my head, arm extended to the max, feet on relevé. Bring hands to my face and squat, drink. Arms rounded move away from the center, body rise, torso concave, head tucked towards chest, feet asymmetrically positioned. Landing on the floor, extended X shape. Fetal position. (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Perez-Firmat explains how the subordination of theory to technique responds conceptually to Martin Santos’ adherence to existentialist thinking, a type of “existential philosophy I had become acquainted with, through Vivian Sobchack’s use of the tools of “existential phenomenology” in her book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Her reference to Don Ihde’s material hermeneutics "gives things voices where there had been silence, and brings to sight that which was invisible."(ws.cc.stonybrook.edu) His visual hermeneutics attached to the idea of a perceptual hermeneutics further enhances the philosophic underpinnings of our process. These hermeneutics includes texts and goes beyond texts to extend to “the thingly.” (ws.cc.stonybrook.edu) These tools, in Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological and philosophical technological terms, resemble Donna Haraway’s idea of true objectivity through "partial perspectives." (Haraway 187) This being conscious that knowledge is always limited and specific to certain locations/situations, allows for the interpretation of exilic “experience” through embodied performance-work and its signification, through the different bodies of water present and absent from the studio/lab and those embodied by and within my own performing body. (Sobchack 1, 2)
“This same sequence was repeated, and the focus was then made more present, three points of focus were added to the walk from the back to the front. It was done three times super fast, non-stop. Then it was done very slowly. • The voice was added: urinating/acute [u], rounded lips and small opening of the mouth; turning around/open throat/breath expirated; I walked forward; front/arms extended/fingers moving/semicircle/gibberish/high pitch; ascending arms and hands, low voice/chant; whispering/lower hands/squad/pause; drink from hands/acute cry; pause/transition to rounded arms/concave torso/operatic soprano voice/landing; turning to right/rolling slowly/suspension on the right side of hips/roll/ suspended on pelvis/roll/suspended on left side of hip/; fetal position/gibberish.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Sobchack’s allusion to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ways of looking at the “animation of the body” and the body as “the body of the spirit” puts my own body in the context of Thomas Csorda’s methodological approach, in which “embodiment is the existential ground of culture and self.” (3, 4) These methods of analysis bring my attention back to Bodies of Water and my insistence on immersing my body in a playful exchange with water metaphors, a type of performative poesies which falls within the scope of Victor Turner’s concept of ritual in the Anthropology of Performance, the “performance of a complex sequence of symbolic acts.” (Turner 75) As in happens in Bodies of Water, these acts of “transformative performance” seem to reveal “major classifications, categories and contradictions of cultural processes,” that I associate with the grounding effect of exilic rituals.
“In the case of Cuban Exiles who have escaped the island through the straits of Florida, how have the presence of their bodies in the water affected the water, how has the experience of surviving the water passage affected them? Can the re-enactment of this experience through a ritual performance reconcile the exiled body with the water body used as a vehicle for displacement? Can this ritual assuage displacement?” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Exilic rituals, those rituals revolving around the theme of exile, performed by exiles, for exiles, within the exiles’ enclaves and Diasporas, are transformative cultural performances. These performances, in tune with Martin-Santos’ rejection of the “determinism “of Freudian theory, (“the instinctual drives and infantile complexes which exert a powerful influence on behavior”) provide the opportunity for community and individual re-grounding, re-embodiment and regeneration. His argument in favor of “the margin of indetermination” provided for instance by the process of creating a performance, allows the individual to choose freely “a certain stance toward his or her biological and environmental determinants.” (144) In our case, these determinants were aided by an avalanche of self reflective questions:
1. Specificity of what I am doing (the experiment). PAR emerges because this is the way I work. 2. Why am I doing it? I am trying to understand the conditions of exile/home and how it manifests through water. Am I doing this work to engage with these questions? 3. Things we know and things we do not know. 4. The effect response of drowning. 5. Who am I entering a conversation with …? What conversation are you entering with this performance? 6. How is the performance of a ritual going to (heal) change things? 7. Water created the wound (how can we talk about its nature in a way that Perez-Firmat cannot). 8. What languages of self-realizations are present here? (Jung) 9. Create a performance genealogy of ritual practices to contextualize the ritual, the PAR aspect of the ritual. 10. Examples of water rituals or the notion of ritual healing practices that involve water as a healing medium. (Example, Oshun, Yemaya) 11. Investigate ritual in water in Ancient Societies in order to recuperate water as a sacred object. 12. Acknowledge the argument which opposes the view of ritual and performance as the same thing. Instead of those who argue that rituals are two different things think that ritual is sacred and that once turned into representation it loses its secrecy, meaning and healing powers. 13. If I defend the universalized view of ritual then I have to acknowledge all of the different arguments and defend my own, by stating it, is spite of… 14. When talking about ritual within theatre and performance (Grotowsky, Artaud, Triana, and Schechner) acknowledge the questioning arguments that arise from these practices. (Issues of appropriation, exotization of the other.) (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
The performer’s freedom is most tangible during performance where these questions are explored through the knowing of the body. Eva Le Gallienne in her biographical book The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse attests how “there was no hiatus between the thoughts and feelings of the characters [Duse] played, and herself as their interpreter” (149) She had succeeded in getting rid of “all trace of self-consciousness” to be free to exist in the character. Her freedom was manifested in her use of silence, “a silence made electric by unspoken thought.” (152) In performance-artist Leandro Soto’s own words, the main difference between theatre and performance is the latter’s “free frame.” Bodies of Water, as opposed to theatre by the process of creation, by the process of collaboration with Tenenblat and later by the process of sharing the performance piece with the audience, constitutes what Perez-Firmat categorizes as the “condition of possibility of the cure.” (Perez Firmat 144) This critical analysis I am writing contains an implied narrative, Bodies of Water, in which I, the protagonist is at once the narrator and the subject of analysis, a condition of possibility for healing.
Bodies of Water’s plot steps, Calentamiento con los cuerpos de agua (Warming up with Bodies of Water), Tres Atejes (Three Atejes), Quasar y gota de sangre (Quasar and Drop of Blood), Lagrima (Tear), and El pie del niño (The Child’s Foot), can be seen as stages of a “cure,” of a cleansing, of the metaphorical transformations of the water in my body and the water outside of my body. Yet, what makes possible “the regeneration or renewal” of the performer during this process is the unique relationship with the audience, a relationship totally dependent on “the peculiar spatial and temporal characteristics” of each performance event. (145)
“Walking with two containers and metamorphosis getting heavier. Gets weaker and fails to embrace image of strong/Power. Goes to corner and pinico (becomes weapon. - Need of moment of silence & use water for that (pouring water in 4 objects ao fundo) - objects marked space in warm up – embodying space and creating energy for space. - Conch as tié - final ritual - final ritual (effigy) – ‘burial ritual’ felt like closure. At end of performance one can read the objects/installation that is left. - The drumming with the urinal/marching band type of atmosphere. - urinal on head.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Martin-Santos agrees with “psychoanalytic thought” in recommending the analysand to lie or recline with his back to the analyst, for in his view, submitting to this position the patient signals that he/[she] “will acquiesce in the analyst prying. “ (145) The contemporary performer’s work contradicts this recommendation. By embracing poesies as a mode of expression, as postulated by Plato in The Republic, the performer, rather than appearing quiet in the presence of the audience, “appeals to and arouse the most dangerous part of his own human personality, the sensual part.” (records.viu.ca) However, as opposed to Plato’s diagnosis, instead of resulting in an additional stressor of the human psyche, an “incitement to the lowest part of it (the emotions),” a threat to “psychological harmony and thus the balance necessary to virtue and happiness,” in my own experience, the performer finds peace.
“I look into the urinal. Try to see myself in it? I scream “Morejón!” I fit and adjust hat (urinal) on my head. Pick up buckets. Hold body up tight and walk in space (find directionality). It gets heavier and heavier. Diagonal to the front? I hide in corner. I pronounce malicious whispers. I grab pot. Bang urinal against pot. Threats loudly, screaming “Morejón.” Hitting pot against urinal several times, later with the spoon as he sings the International Anthem. I put on the tie. I transition from seriousness of walk/dress into clothes. I dance with the spoon and hit my body with it. The spoon moves within the pot. I try to catch the pot with the spoon. I put the spoon on my middle finger and try to balance it. I act like a military man. Kick the pot with his boot as I walk. I take long steps.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
By breaking away from Martin-Santos‘“asymmetrical disposition,” the hierarchy exercised by the analyst over the analysand, the performer balances the cognitive superiority otherwise exercised by the audience. Instead of exposing him/herself physically and psychically to an audience that remains in the darkness of the auditorium, as it happens in psychoanalysis sessions with the analyst and in the theatre with the public, Bodies of Water takes place in daylight, avoiding at once the “predicament “often faced by actors of “being seen and not seeing.” (146) In Bodies of Water, performer, director/dramaturge and assistants (the way we decided to call the audience since they also participate in the ritual) are not only in view, but in company of each other.
"Morejón wears urinal as hat, adjusting it to fit properly on the head. (He becomes fully dressed for school). Hat transforms you into strong, hefty, macho, socialist man of the future. As you walk towards the back you speak the ‘rules text’. Holds left hand up then slowly pulls it down on the elbow (as description of arms in text), grabs the spoon (cue: Três Atejes), turns and speaks “el reflejo condicionado…(the conditioned reflex...’) facing forward and letting body and spoon come to the ground. Standing besides window speaks “Cada dia, a las seis de la tarde...’ (Every day at six in the evening (text), grabs wet rag and squeezes water out of it as you speak the text. [Create more movement as if cleaning window obsessively]. “Recordarlo es volverlo a vivir.” (Remembering is living it again.) (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
This is one of the important differences between actual ritual performance and traditional theatre. With its dark stage, theater encloses an alien, somewhat mysterious space that makes the performance “unhomely.” Ritual, on the other hand, takes place, just like our performance, among people from a specific community, in this case our professors, colleagues, friends and significant others, and because of it, the performance of Bodies of Water, became part of our “intimate surroundings.” The Firehouse, the space in which we performed, became our temporary home, and different from theatre, it “contained no dark spots, no hidden presences.”
“…runs to corner, as if living that moment again. Starts uttering Morejón as if cornered. Transition into whispers – the self trying to regain power. Hat becomes escudo (shield) and pot becomes potential weapon. Become more aggressive /defensive and bangs both objects. Sound accentuates the name. Stands on top of pot, sings march. As you describe Débora (text), you become her, swaying tie representing a female movement. Homeric Laughter (as Débora) to the ladle, which now becomes Morejón. Play with the ladle on the tip of your middle finger. Try to fetch the tin cup with the ladle and Débora becomes the sergeant that enjoys the Delegada Del Grupo (leader of the group) position. (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
I agree with Perez-Firmat’s explanations about the intended effect of the perceptual asymmetry created by the unfamiliar surroundings, a dark stage, facing an “impassive, essentially unresponsive audience.” This unfamiliar stage becomes for the actor a place to surrender his/her usual patterns of behavior which do not work under these unusual circumstances. “Being unlike his/[her] quotidian surroundings, [the stage] gives [the actor] a forum, a medium in which to evolve a new self.” As concluded by Perez-Firmat, this unfamiliar and unfamilial space sets the stage for an eventual cure.”
• The fluid shift hypothesis suggests that space motion sickness results from the cranial shifting of body fluids resulting from the loss of hydrostatic pressure....• Regulation of body fluid volume and electrolyte concentrations in spaceflight by: SM Smith, JM Krauhs, CS Leach• During altitudes beyond normal, sipping small amounts every 15 minutes prevents fluid consumption leading to potential yin deficiency. • It is a myth that you can "sweat out the germs and toxins". Low levels of exercise increase endorphins and benefit your body, but an intense workout that creates high levels of endorphins can wear down your immune system.• Dehydration occurs when too much fluid is lost from the body.• It's important especially during times of sickness to increase fluid intake since we are ridding our body of so much of it while we're sick. (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Different from a stage, The Firehouse allowed for a different kind of transformation where the need for a homey space became an imperative. It was dirty, seemed abandoned, was full of unrelated stuff, but we made it ours. Besides its marginality, the inaccessibility to other performance spaces on campus resembled our own marginality and isolation. Instead of dwelling on the peripheral positioning of our performance, we embraced a sort of Grotowskian sense of Poor Theatre, what I call a precarious performance environment, highlighting instead the possibilities to turn the space in to a special container itself. Our art, born out of the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of a displaced team, the performer and the director/dramaturge/witness, needed a safe spot to spring out freely. In tune with the difficulties of the setting, our work’s focus was on the work of art and not necessarily on the perceived hierarchical asymmetry between center and margin, between audience and performer, between process and finished product.
Tenenblat and I agree with Ian Johnston’s belief that “the work of art is enough“to interpret, through metaphor and story, the relationships between ourselves and the unknown, linking, as often as not, the divine with the world familiar to us.” (records.viu.ca) My bigger project, to explain how displaced communities, specifically the Cuban-American exile community in South Florida, assuage their displacement through the performance of exilic rituals, entails precisely how symbols and metaphors inherent to art-making channel the pain and anguish caused by separation.
"The bodies of Water I have gone across: • El arroyito del muerto• Cuba and Cayo Conuco• El rio Camajuani• The deepest site in this sea is the Cayman Trench between Cuba and Jamaica at 7500 m below the surface• Between Jamaica and Haiti• Between La Espanola and Miami• Between Miami and New York• Between NY and Puerto Rico• Between PR and Dominican Rep. ( La Mona)• Between PR and Miami• Between Miami and Spain/ Between Spain and Ibiza/ Atlántico/ Mediterranean• River somewhere in Spain• Between Spain and Miami• Between Miami and France• Between Miami and Switzerland• Between Miami and Saint Martin/ between S.M. and Antigua/ Saint Bars• Between Europe and Denmark• River in Krumlov/ ZC Rep.• Between Miami and Toronto/nieve/lluvia/lagrimas, the water always in between." (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
According to Johnston, “Homer represents--the tradition which insists that poets, far from being misleading distant imitators of the truth, create works which embody that truth.” Performance plays an important role “in shaping and preserving the community's understanding of itself in relation to the entire cosmos. “ Not surprisingly, “the preservation, editing, and creation of poetic works are often (perhaps usually) linked directly to the religious elements in those communities” still relying upon poesies to coordinate people's understanding of themselves.” Bodies of Water is a sample practice, a rite of passage, a microcosmic ritual performed to understand the macrocosmic liminal plane of those living away from home. Its power, its rebounding effect, may come from the fact that at one point or another we have all felt displaced, often from our own skin, in which case a ritual sounds like an ideal place to find, in the making of poetic images, just a postulated by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, the “space we love,” a place to belong to. (Bachelard xxxv) Our welcoming of the audience, the collective cleaning of the room, the eye-to-eye contact as I was performing elicited their own individual resonances with the piece, which were revealed to us after the performance.
“Experiencing Bodies of Water, I feel them again, for the first time, I think, since those days in the Netherlands, and I realize that no where I have been since then has given me the same utter certainty of belonging and comfort, Not just acceptance, but “of course I am here.” No where have I felt as sure of my right to exist—I had not yet learned to question that certainty. The voices of the teachers and those around me indelibly understood, no question, a soothing background to the delicious sound of the water magically filling any shape it is poured into, and when poured out, returning to blend effortlessly and invisibly with the main pool, no way to identify which molecules were removed and experienced a different world before rejoining the rest.” (audience member)
More dramatic and traumatic than displacement, dis-spacement is (for the exile) not only the physical removal from the place of birth, but the physical and forceful removal without return from the place he/she loves, a place he/she can re-imagine in its absence, in the distance, in the re-enactment of his/her memories of it through what I call exilic rituals.
“The pain of the mixing of the two inks. So beautiful as they swirl together while maintaining their integrity. A sadness coming over me as I see the performer take up a spoon (was it a spoon?) and mix them into uniformity. Then also, though, there is the pain of the need to keep a thick shell, to stay separate, protected, to keep up defenses… in the face of the crumbling of one’s expectations of welcome. There was pain watching that transformation take place and pain realizing how familiar it is. -- since the pain will not go away, then one converts it to the triumph of building one’s shell successfully—so that it transforms the desire to belong and be accepted into a fierce independence, saying aggressively, I’m glad I don’t belong, and then keeping everyone out. Where then, trust? That simple, “of course I am here.” is a precious gift, and I had not been aware of how complete one can feel until watching Bodies of Water flooded me with sensation & the long forgotten state of being one with instead of one apart.”(audience member)
This place of belonging harvests temporally, “imbrications of multiple chronologies” where the “pass of time,” in Matias Montes Huidobro’s terms, is no longer a threat to the creative temporal milieu, where “past and present interpenetrate.” (Perez-Firmat 146) Morejón, the character that narrates these interpenetrations and at the same time the actor who plays them, elaborates through his ritualized performance the equivalent to four lines of narratives described by Perez-Firmat as the analysand’s discourse. During the exploration process his story is stored in his memory in the way in which it really happened. With Tenenblat, his story shifts to the order in which it is recounted during the beginning interviews. The story then changes through the modifications they suffered through movement explorations, metaphors, images, poetry and songs; that which Perez-Firmat refers to as “the modifications in the ego structure”. These changes are also a product of the interactive nature of the Tenenblat-Morejón team when his story begins to intertwine with her direction and dramaturgy. Finally, during the performance, the process of transference and counter-transference that takes place between the performer and the audience seals the ritualized narration of the stories.
“La escuela imponía reglas cada vez más absurdas. Después de haber sido habituado a extender el brazo para contestar preguntas en el aula, en esta escuela en el campo, en Tres Atejes, solo se podía apoyar el codo sobre el pupitre con brazo doblado y esperar a que el profesor le diera a uno la oportunidad de hablar. El reflejo condicionado de levantar todo el brazo me trajo graves problemas.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
“The school imposed rules as ever absurd. After having been accustomed to extend your arm to answer questions in the classroom, in this school in the country side, in Three Atejes, one could only place the elbow on the desk, the arm bent, waiting for the Professor to give one the opportunity to speak. The conditioned reflex of lifting my arm caused me serious problems.”
From a performance point of view, the process contains four lines of narrative. The first line of narrative, the first version of the story, corresponds to “the fable, the events in the subject’s biography in their actual sequence.” The second line of narrative, the second version of the story “contains the same material as” the first story, “but it is emplotted according to the syntax of the performer’s creative process. Both narratives share the retrospective quality of “their hidden associative connections.” The third line of narrative, the third story, “registers the modifications undergone by the narrator in the act of narration,”while the fourth line of narration, the fourth story, registers the evolving relationship between the narrator and his audience, including the director.
“Cada día a las 6 de la tarde, la inspección de los dormitorios pasaba revista. A cada uno de los sesenta estudiantes del albergue le correspondía la limpieza de una de las ventanas del albergue. La comisión de alumnos chivatos pasaba sus dedos por las tablillas de las persianas y si estaban polvorientas, chequeaban el número de la ventana y gritaba, ventana numero 56, apadrinamiento sucio y entonces reportaba al susodicho padrino de la ventana. Nosotros mientras tanto permanecíamos de pie en atención junto a nuestra litera, mientras la comisión de aguanta patas miraba si nuestra camas estaban bien tendidas, si nuestros closets estaban bien arreglados. En fin…. Recordarlo me hace vivirlo de Nuevo.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
“Every day at 6 p.m., the dormitory’s inspection would take place. To each of the sixty students corresponded the cleaning of one of the windows of the dorm. The commission of snitching students would pass their fingers through the windows’ wooden boards and if it was dusty, they proceeded to check the number of the window and shouted, window number 56, dirty buddying and then reported the so called window’s Godfather. Meanwhile, we stayed in attention alongside our bunk beds, while the aguantapatas (adulators) Commission check to see if our beds were either well made, if our closets were well fixed. In the end, remembering it is like living it again.”
These different chronologies, besides penetrating the performers discourse, interfere with the different stories and at the same time reciprocate them. Since the fourth line of narrative, the transference, involves the projection into the performers biography, narratives one and two, on the one hand, and narrative four on the other, repeat each other.
“The group’s delegate’s name was Deborah López. She was from Trinidad, Cienfuegos and behaved as if she had God grabbed by his beard. Her black curly hair, her big eyes, almost Black and round, her red lips and small mouth, her fair skin in contrast with their her hair reminded me of Betty Boobs. She a despot, she was ruthless with their own classmates. In spite of her reports and cold shoulders in front of my classmates, I liked her. She was so beautiful, but at the same time I hated her arrogance and despotism.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
As explained by Perez-Firmat, the fourth line of narrative is nothing other than the first one “encoded and displaced.” (148) Yet, what is most important about this four line of narrative is that the “exposure and exegesis of the transference mechanisms” allow the performer “to gain new insight into his/her past; it allows to shape his/her ordering of his/her biography, it throws light on the virtual raw materials of narrative one, the very source from which the narration has been rebuilt.
"One day, the Professor left her in charge of the Group and left us alone. We were supposed to stay in the classroom until the end of class time. She tried to be cool by letting us leave twenty minutes earlier. I ran to the teacher’s office, her name was Mercedes Madrigal and said "Deborah let us to go early…" At the time I felt the satisfaction of snitching on the snitcher, and although my classmates felt betrayed, I knew that there are times when to do justice must become the enemy of all, and so I took it. [Part of the story is share with the audience.]” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)
Exeunt
According to Kertzer, one of the most distinguishing features of ritual performance is its standardization. This quality of ritual, along with its repetitive nature, gives it stability. It is within a stable container that connections with strongly felt emotions, connections with the community which harvests them and connections with the ritual itself end up merging. These ritualized experiences seem to mobilize and integrate into collective movements which, like those of Cuban-American exiles for instance, recur to the use of ritual as a type of orderly affiliation in the face of chaos. While psychoanalysis too often situates the passions in the century, “the passions simmer and re-simmer in solitude,” a space the performer knows is “creative.”(Bachelard 9) The use of Perez-Firmat’s suggested analytical setting and subsequently the imbrications of multiple chronologies that emerge as a result of the performance process, act as a container for the displaced individual to organize the disarray caused by forced displacement, ‘not through an orderly progression of clock time,” but paradoxically, through the “confused, equivocal temporal milieu” where past and present collide, intertwine, and re-emerge. (Perez-Firmat146)
“Fluidity. Not understanding particular words but not needing to. Sensing meaning, invitation through shared action—some familiarity—take this wine cup for a toast. The water mixing—amazingly powerful image. Extremely Powerful: The offering and the cutoff motion: rise with me, then the brutality of the severed connection, created so intensely. Regret in the face of the performer even in the moment of the violent motion. Playing with the very things that happen repeatedly in life, giving hope that here perhaps are one’s people, only to be dropped. Yet finding it ok, b/c the performer so clearly must sever ties. Also the idea that cutting off, letting go—despite the sorrow of losing one’s potential for belonging--might be utterly necessary to survive. But does one choose to cut off and let go of the self, or cut off and let go of those outside?(audience member)
The first story is all about the chronological narration of what really happened in the life of the displaced person. The second story becomes the expression of that narrative as it unfolds through the explorations of different artistic modes of poetic image production – the improvisation. The third story accommodates the changes undergone by the narrator as he/she performs the actual piece. The fourth story welcomes in the emerging relationship between the performer and those who are witnessing and/or participating. The new insight gained by the displaced individual into his/her past through the performance process is informed by the multiple chronologies he/she becomes a part of.
As postulated by Bachelard, regardless of the “confusing passions” that may trouble performance, the need for separating the sublimation that takes place during the creative process and performance through the writings on psychoanalytic technique by Luis Martin-Santos and Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s phenomenologist interpretations of them, has been a necessity of method discovered during my critical evaluation writing process. I have put the piece under the grid of both intersecting systems of analysis to be able to cope with the limitation psychoanalysis has when studying performance in its exalting reality, that is, its focus on art as a clinical case study and its antecedents. By using phenomenology as a performance resource, I subvert psychoanalysis lack of interest on the performance piece itself, to emphasize my interest in the temporality of the work, its ephemerality and newness, in the life of the images and symbols, in the living moment of the piece, in its performative quality.
This performance ritual allows the re-shaping of the performer’s experience as it reveals new insights about the virtual raw materials of the past, both the source of the trauma of displacement and the foundation on which the performance narration is rebuilt. Furthermore, during the final performance, the process of transference and counter-transference that takes place between the performer and the audience seals the ritualized narration of the stories as well as the temporal liminality of the performance space. The contrasting demarcations of past and present interpolate to “engender a therapeutic high, a certain state of ecstasy comparable to those induced by drunkenness, religious meditation, or intense work.” It is during this trance-like experience, this cathartic exchange, after losing sense of time and place, that the performer lives free from his/her reality. The dominant symbol, in this case Water, in Turner’s words, “should replicate in its structural and semantic make-up what are coming to be seen as key neurological features of the brain and the nervous central system” (Turner 175) Its meanings, as in Emoto’s water crystals, rooted deep within us, deep within our bodies of water, may have found in our performance, a place for restoration.
The sensing of the possibility for a “renewed existence,” although contained within the temporal spatial frame of the performance piece, makes possible the creative illusion of what psychoanalysts call transference, but that I call hope. Often the rigidity and unproductive hierarchical power relationships of most theater production create inhibitors to the possibility for true process. Ritual-performance and consequently the performance of hope, is nevertheless a “creative illusion” which unfolds in a liminal zone between art and life, fiction and reality where the need for a meaningful connection, for a profound relationship with the self, the space, the work and the other assuages displacement and exile. (Perez-Firmat150) It is my belief that through the performance of Bodies of Water, Tenenblat and I, both devotees of embracing art as a way of life, have modestly contributed not only to “the transcending of all premises of sensibility,” but also, in the living of the creative moment, to “an increase of life.“ (Bachelard xxxiii)
“Justicia o traicion? Justice or betrayal? It was part of learning how to stay afloat. More than just to fit in. Stay alive.” (Jorgeluismorejon-bodiesofwater.blogspot.com)“
Survival. What also struck me in the piece, aside from this, were the lines spoken to indicate the need to keep the integrity of the self in the face of unwelcoming, nasty, malicious or ignorant surroundings. Self, the strength of self, the movement of self through time and geographic space—parts of the room, the windows, the walls containing, keeping in but also protecting, keeping out.”(audience member)
Bibliography
Artlander. The Ritualized Body. May 28th, 2007. November 13, 2009.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How Experience Intimate Spaces. Orion Press, 1964.
Blocker, Jane. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile. Duke University Press, 2004
Dick, Bruce Allan. "A Conversation with Gustavo Pérez Firmat," Michigan Quarterly Review, 40:4 (Fall 2001), 681-692] November 18, 2009.
Emoto, Masaru. The Hidden Messages in Water. Beyond Words Publishing, 2004
Halpring Anna. Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line. Tamalpa Institute and Media Arts West. (Video)
Halprin, Ana. Empowering Creativity through Dance Workshop. Tamalpa Institute, Mountain Studio, Kentfield, California. June 26th, 2008
Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives. Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599. Feminist Studies, Inc. March 9, 2009.
Hunter, Lynette. Situated Knowledge. Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2009
Ihde, Don. Expanding Hermeneutics. Ben Hale. 11/14/2009. November 14, 2009.
Johnston, Ian. Lecture on Plato's Republic. Literature and Liberal Studies. Vancouver Island University. November 4, 1997. November 11, 2009.
Kertzer, David. Legitimacy and Mystification. Ritual Politics and Power. Yale University Press, 1988
Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, Barbara. Making Sense of Food in Performance: The Table and the Stage. The Senses in Performance. Routledge, 2007
Le Gallienne, Eva. The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse. Ambassador Books, Ltd., Toronto, 1966
Morejón, Jorge Luis. Bodies of Water. Wednesday, November 4, 2009. November 14, 2009.
Perez-Firmat, Gustavo. Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition. Duke University Press, 1986
The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
Sklar, Diedre. Unearthing Kinesthesia. Grouping Among Cross-Cultural Models of the Senses in Performance. The Senses in Performance. Routledge, 2007
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imaginations and Visible Evictions. University of California Press, 2004
Soto, Leandro. Redefining Displacement Project. Interview. Phoenix, Arizona. August 11, 2007
Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987.
Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. Cornell University Press, 1967.
No comments:
Post a Comment