To mix bodies and technologies :
new perceptive
waves
Mélissa Bertrand
In his book,
Du mode d’existence des objets techniques
(1958),
Gilbert Simondon mentions a
general misreading of technical objects. According to him, our culture
praises esthetical objects to the cost of technical ones because technical
objects are misunderstood and excluded by a kind of xenophobia.
Consequently, culture encourages a complex relationship based on fear and
contempt :
La culture comporte ainsi deux attitudes contradictoires envers les objets techniques : d’une part, elle les traite comme de purs assemblages de matière, dépourvus de vraie signification, et présentant seulement une utilité. D’autre part, elle suppose que ces objets sont aussi des robots et qu’ils sont animés d’intentions hostiles envers l’homme, ou représentent pour lui un permanent danger d’agression, d’insurrection. Jugeant bon de conserver le premier caractère, elle veut empêcher la manifestation du second et parle de mettre les machines au service de l’homme, croyant trouver dans la réduction en esclavage un moyen sûr d’empêcher toute rébellion. 1
This is a real alienation issue : as men fear
machines, they want to dominate them and make them serve him. This analysis
brings one of the main problems of the era of new technologies integrated to
performative arts and helps us to understand such radical processes as those
developed by the Australian
Stelarc
who campaigns for a world in which the body erases
itself in front of the power of cyborgs and in which people crossbreed
themselves with technologies. We still can think that there’s alternatives
to this binary relationship, to this constant face-to-face. But the
questions raised goes beyond the simple notion of alienation, and we should
wonder what are the bodies of our time, what are the bodies that we want to
show. Can technologies make us feel – or perceive – bodies without erasing
them, distorting them, transforming them ?
This is one of the interrogations at the heart of
Isabelle Choinère’s process in her performance Phase 5. To begin
with, we can note that
Isabelle Choinière is an
interdisciplinary researcher, mediatic creator, choreographer and dancer.
Since 2005, she started researches on the collective, physical and sounded
body. In a very phenomenological approach, she’s looking for an harmony
between performative body and technologies as she explain in
Archée, in
november 2016 In her work, technologies are used
in the aim to emerge an immersive space that boosts the perception of the
body. We are no longer in a rationality of alienation, but rather searching
for other ways to express the body in all its aspects – organic and concrete
or malleable, short-lived and elusive.
First, we’ll notice that sensuality and sensoriality are present in this
performance that brings together five dancers, with their bodies entangled,
constituting a collective and moving organism like Louise Boisclair wrote in
Inter, 2008.
Between flesh, entrails and breathings, Phase 5
gives us the opportunity to feel the intimacy and interiority of the body.
But this body also has epiphanic dimension. It appears
and disappears, always escaping from our attempt to define it. We can
clearly perceive it and it suddenly vanishes, floating, incrustably and
uncategorizably.
In front of these naked bodies that wake up and wipe
out, move and contaminate each other, the spectator can be disconcerted
because, in Phase 5, the carnal and organic dimension is very present
even though the body isn’t distinguishable. Isabelle Choinière makes us feel
more than she makes us see. She’s challenging our cognitive analysis that
wants to bring together again what is exploded, she wants us to enter the
intimacy of a visceral form. First, bodies are naked, but not exposed, not
reified. They are tangled in a way that makes them unclear, although their
nakedness is obvious. As the researcher
Andrea Davidson
is explaining it, in
Archée, November
2016 this destabilization of the cognitive turns these naked bodies in
asexual bodies :
« In creating the conditions and a specific mediated environment for establishing an empathic sensory relationship of bodies-to-bodies, lsabelle Choinière develops strategies that both deflect the cognitive act seeking to identify a pure choreographic form or narrative mode, and temper, if not neutralize, the voyeuristic or eroticized gaze between subject and object. » 2
From
then on, the spectator enters the private sphere of intimacy which doesn’t
mean sexuality. He is in touch with a living form that is unidentified and
mysterious, that reminds him of his own body without being identified. The
fact that faces are rarely recognizable or observable blurs the perception.
Even though the body is very present, it’s not a question of
anthropomorphism anymore. However, our feeling of intimacy increases because
spectators – in a limited number – are seating very close to performers. The
sound and immersive space, of which we will talk more precisely later, is
conceived to embrace the audience. For this reason, spectators must seat
around the performers, sometimes at only twenty inches from them. Indeed,
like in some
Claude Régy’s
shows, modelled on
La Barque le soir
(2012) 3,
presented again at Théâtre des Amandiers (Nanterre, France, le 10/03/2016),
the experience can only work with a limited number of people in the audience
because they must be located in a perimeter that helps to feel us immersed.
The distance would makes this almost carnal meeting with this faceless being
impossible.
The sensible proximity is also increased by the fact
that Isabelle Choinière wants to make us feel the limit between inside and
outside. If sound and space are data that is usually perceived as an outside
interference, Phase 5 reminds us that we are in constant
communication with our internal organism. Thus, the artist-researcher
worked a lot on sounds produced by breathing, that symbolizes this constant
exchange between one and the world. To create this new perceptive space, she
sat up a kinesthetic way of learning (conscience of the position and the
movement) and a somatic one (corporal perceptions) working by stages. The
body has to learn progressively to be attentive to technologies, and more
precisely to the feedback they are offering to him, so performers can get
out of an utilitarian or enslaving relationship. Dancers develop a new
contact to their environment – the collective body and the immersive
technology – working by levels, or rather by tracing papers placed one on
the top of the other. Even if it seems obvious, the first step is crucial :
one has to feel its physical body, to make its breathing circulate, to work
on its corporal pattern. At first, it’s a work oriented on oneself. Then,
the dancer has to open to others, touch, experience and feel the breathing
of another body, the one that is the closest.
Those first work steps are thus described by the
dancer Eliza Harsson, one of the performer of Phase 5 :
« In this rehearsal, we started off with breathing in a child like pose with our partners’ hands on the back. We were breathing in different parts of our back and switching places, experimenting our partners’ breathing. From there, we tried to find a position, so we could all be connected. In the first days it was very challenging because we couldn’t find a position for us to be in. Some of us had all the body’s weight on us, some of us had none of the body’s weight on us. And so, our experiences on the first days were very radically different experiences depending on where we were in the shape and on the sensations of weight and being in contact with bodies and all the emotionality that comes up. » 4
This testimony about the method used by Isabelle
Choinière shows us how the body is explored nor as a human body, neither as
a feminine body, but as an organism experiencing its environment (space,
sound, technologies, contact with other bodies…).
Eventually, we can say that in this immersive and
sensorial space, bodies meet in kind of moving and flexible connections and
disconnections. The immersion in this sound and technological world is very
lively, we can have the feeling that this collective body is working by
urges, shivers, frictions, echoes… Contact becomes connections, impacts,
electrical tremors. If we talk about collective organism, we still can draw
a parallelism that seems at first paradoxical, with the theory of the body
without organ proposed by
Gilles Deleuze in
Francis Bacon : La Logique de la sensation
(1981). In this book, Deleuze draws his inspiration from
the work of
Antonin Artaud (Le
théâtre et son double, 1938) to allude to a body that exist in a
kind of intensity, rhythm and hysterical convulsions. The body without
organs doesn’t lack organs but we should understand that it on the level of
forces and sensations, not according to a strict and logical organization,
but peculiar to the organism. It’s an extreme vitality that embraces the
body. Organs are not anymore determined or this determination doesn’t last :
their function (mouth, stomach, anus, etc.) is visible only at the moment
they are crossed over by the wave that animates them; that is what Deleuze
calls hysteria. Hysteria expresses itself through contractures and paralysis
that responds – on a metaphorical and not medical point of view – to the
passing of a nervous wave.
Thus, in Phase 5 bodies contaminate each other.
We are in front of a ball of physical energy that contracts itself and they
release without us being able to identify it. Technologies are serving the
exploration of corporeality or of the organism in a larger acceptance of the
word, not meaning the body in itself, often associate to a certain person.
This is the reason why Isabelle Choinière encourages this reconnection to
the visceral, the intimacy, and the interior.
For all that, we can’t say that Phase 5 is only
making us feel the corporeality. The artist-creator is also presenting us
with what we can call epiphanic bodies. We are endlessly put out of our
tentative to define or to understand – physically and intellectually – this
corporal and technological form. We can have the feeling that bodies are
escaping, vanishing before reappearing clearly.
This sensation is linked to the use of technologies to
manipulate sounds but also the fact that technologies are not visible. The
mike that all the dancers wear, sticks to their nose and can’t really be
seen. The sensors that give the wifi signal to the technicians are also
hidden behind a black headband that hold the dancer’s hair. Thus,
technologies are used to create an access to a new perception of the body
but they are not the main subject of the performance and the way they’re
disguised let us face our sensations. We are sort of excluded of the process
of sounds transformation and we only see the result, that is to say this
imbrication of flesh bodies and “bodies of sounds”, an idea invented by
Isabelle Choinière.
To understand this concept, it’s interesting to
analyze more precisely the approach developed by the artist/researcher.
While the dancers all wear a mike that receives the signal of their
breathing and all the other sounds they are producing, five speakers are
placed in the room: one above them, at the center of the roof, the four
other surrounding it. The space is marked out by the sound projected by the
speakers that create a sort of virtual dome. Isabelle Choinière starts by
working with the dancers’ body, then uses the technologies, and eventually
goes back to perceptions, all this includes a very developed notion of
space. To make this process successful, dancers first have to be in a state
of insecurity, loosing their landmarks in a sensorial haze. Even though
there’s a pattern of creating a temporal evolution, the performance works
mainly with research and improvisation based on multi-sensorial principles
of auto-organization, which is described by Glenna Batson, in her article
L’éducation
somatique dans le milieu de la danse (2009)
6.
Dancers must constantly leave the comfort of a steady choreography to make
physical and sound experiences. Hence, the classic idea of choreography is
abandoned in favor of an explorative and freer pattern, including movements,
production of sounds, and an emotive and psychological dimension. It’s an
interdisciplinary; contemporary and performative conception of choreography
that also implies the realm of neuroscience and physiology.
Since 1994, with her show
Communion
Isabelle Choinière is working on the emergence of this perturbative space
linked to sounds. She already mentioned her concept of "corps
sonore ”, that is analyzed, in collaboration with her, by Enrico Pitozzi
about
La Démence des Anges another show by the searcher/artist :
« Ce corps sonore n’était pas un double, mais bien une nouvelle
manifestation issue d’un apprentissage proprioceptif – donc fondé sur ses
propres sens – amené par l’influence de la technologie comme élément de
déstabilisation ». The aim of this approach, that guides
the work of Isabelle
Choinière, is to put an end to repetition, to let unexpected phenomena
happen, to make us aware of our sensations. With the bodies of sounds we
evolve toward a wider conception of the body as the physical and
anthropomorphic one. The body becomes corporeality, spatial projection and
movement; it’s presence is evanescent.
Let’s expand a little bit more on the effect produced
by this body mediated by technologies, this sounds, swaying, elusive body.
First, there’s a consciousness of the body by the performers thanks to the
distribution of sounds in space, because the sounds are produced by
themselves even though they drift in the space. The passing through
technological interface – specially created for this research/creation –
helps them to consider their body in a different way. This interface, is
composed of two I-Pads and a program allows the technicians to select, to
group or to separate the sounds, which works in WIFI. It also serves as
spatialization of sound giving us the feeling that it’s coming from one spot
and going to another one. Sounds can also be amplified, reduced or modify
directly. This movement of sound on the stage produced by the interface make
us feel that the body isn’t only material and concrete, it also fills space,
it can spread away and create connection with other people without the
physical contact, almost by vibrations. Our senses increase in this round
relationship between body, space, sounds and technologies. There’s no more
conflict but a common quest because technologies reveal the virtual. They
underline the fact that perception is this tiny and vast crossing point
between one and the world, between inside and outside, between the real and
the virtual which are tangled. This experience reminds us of our
relationship to the world that can be thought of a multitude of transitional
areas that overlaps and echoes. This method is invented by Isabelle
Choinière and so synthetized according to her words in
Archée, novembre
2016 :
« Le corps sonore sur lequel je travaille est donc une émanation, une dilatation du corps réel qui en constitue une vibration à laquelle les performeuses se réfèrent sensoriellement pour composer la partition. J’insiste sur le fait que ce corps sonore n’est pas un double, mais bien une nouvelle manifestation du corps physique issue d’un apprentissage kinesthésique amené par l’influence de la technologie comme élément de déstabilisation extéroceptif. » 7
This epiphany of corporeality concerns mainly the
performers that are trained by Isabelle Choinière to define their different
perceptive steps. The empathy developed during the first exercises of
position and breathing – that we mentioned at the beginning of the article –
allows a first wave of intercoporeality, that is to say the possibility to
project oneself in a stranger’s body, to enable echoes between different
bodies. The dancer feels her body and the body of one of her closest
partner. The point is not to forget one’s body but rather to expand one’s
perception. This work goes further to form a collective organism with the
group. Eventually, the last step is the acceptance of the mediated body, of
the transformed body and of the body revealed by new technologies.
The dancer Tahni Holt talks about a “thickness” of the
performance because of these multiple sensorial layers:
« The addition of the level of the stimulation of touch, the level of choreography, the level of the feedback of sounds that I’m receiving, it all creates a thickness that I haven’t experienced in other performances. It’s thicker because there are more stimulations happening at the same time. Being touch by myself on the floor, and by four other people, the reverb of sounds and the kind of movements that I’m suppose to make create this thickness. » 8
The
dancer Tahni Holt talks about a “thickness” of the performance because of
these multiple sensorial layers:
This thickness is linked to the sudden understanding
of the various forms of the body that makes it moving. The all work on sound
and space enable the creation of an area that is disconnected from the daily
life and in which our body can extend itself, making unclear our usual
perception of the body. The environment produced by sounds that link bodies
and technologies helps the appearance of this perceptive shift. This
extended body, this “mediated one”8 as Isabelle Choinière described it in
the class she was giving this autumn in UQAM, is compatible with the flesh
body. We can remind us that the flesh, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a
meeting point and that, in this context, it’s all about the meeting of the
real, physical body to the mediated one. The two of them are complementary
because dancers should feel their physical body at the same time they feel
their body extended in the space, tangled with other’s in a wider
perception.
This loss of landmarks also affect the audience.
Spectators, seating close to the performers, are also covered by the virtual
sound dome. The proximity of bodies and the fact that it’s hard to
delimitate them make the spectator able to project himself, to create links
of intercorporeality with dancers, and even with some other members of the
audience as one of them, Oscar Velasco Schmitt, explains it :
I started to feel that I was breathing with the person next to me. Not only I could hear the sounds that were coming from the speakers but also the sounds that was coming from the humans that were near me. I definitely felt included and at some point I was also losing my sense of self, as I was watching this. 9
We can feel in those words that a phenomenon of
projection and empathy is developed during the performance and that it’s all
about experimenting corporeality for one’s own. As the primary source of
sounds (the performers) is as close to the spectator as the second one (the
speakers), he goes back and forth between his physical body and his virtual,
immaterial, extended body. Hence, he should lose himself and disconnect from
his habits to be part of the performance in his own way.
Another spectator, T.S. Flock, art critic, tells us
about the perceptive turn offered by technologies in this Phase 5:
I would say it make more accessible perception that we could have. I think we are capable of having that awareness of this different ways of being even though we’re might not be able to empathize with a single organism – I mean we can barely empathize with other people… So we can personify other organisms but often, when we use that term of “personification” we’re assuming they’re not like aware or even that they are not organic. It’s silly because even if you’re personifying a tree, or a tower, or any static object, they are all things that are changing in time and they are also containing so many things that are living and changing with themselves. So, as long as we’re a being that evolve in time, we can all have this awareness. Unfortunately, because we’re even just a little aware of our emotional and physical being, it becomes more difficult for that. But the technology facilitated that. 10
Thus, it’s a return to sensations, to a more primary
self that is closest to the body and its perceptions. In this performance
technologies are far from being non-organic. They have us to return to this
initial “awareness”. This is precisely this sudden understanding of a body
different from the material one allows us to speak about epiphanic bodies.
This use of technologies underlines the existence of a larger definition of
the body than the one we’re used to. But this new awareness still elliptic
and it’s linked to our capacity to escape from our logical search of the
defined and the known forms.
In Phase 5, the undetermined shape of bodies
enables us to perceive their limit. Thus, our attention is drawn to the way
in which they affect each other, in the manner the voices echo each other
and the muscles are either bound or released. Everything seems to be ordered
by a phenomenon of repercussion. There’s almost something viral in the
relationship of contamination of a part of the body by another one or by a
sound. More than the bodies themselves, what we care about is their
unexpected assemblage according to a new perceiving logic. There is a
ontological shift : the body isn’t anymore a simple physical one, but it
also has something moving, elusive, dynamic, extended, and one that embraces
the multitude of potentialities. One could say Isabelle Choinière and her
team succeed to create an immersive environment in which technologies and
body are revealing to each other in a positive relationship of perceiving
discoveries. Earthly body (physical, material, anthropological body) and
corporeality (projected and virtual body) complete each other thanks to the
phenomenological relationship developed by technologies. Poetry, digital
technology, connected body and wifi connection are working together in a
logic of exploration of our link to the world. The organic and intimate
aspect is also felt as the evanescent dimension of what we called epiphanic
bodies.
Notes
1.
Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques,
Paris, Aubier, 2012, p.11.
2. Andréa Davidson, « Mediated bodies and Intercorporeality: Isabelle Choinière's Flesh Waves », revue l’Archée, consulté en ligne le 18/12/2016
3.
Claude Régy, La Barque le soir, d'après Båten
om Kvelden de Tarjei Vesaas,
créé en 2012.
4.
Eliza Harsson, artiste et danseuse basée à Portland, danseuse
dans Phase 5 d’Isabelle Choinière, interviewée au cours
d’une répétition au Suyama Space, le 18/11/2016, par Leïla
Cassar et Mélissa Bertrand.
5.
Giles Deleuze, Francis Bacon – La logique de la sensation,
Paris, Edition du Seuil, 2002, p.48.
6.
Glenna Batson « L’éducation
somatique dans le milieu de la danse » In: International
Association for Dance Medicine and Science (I.A.D.M.S.), 2010,
consulté en ligne le 17/12/2016. Publication originale en anglais en
2009.
7. Isabelle, Choinière, (2013) ‘For a methodology of transformation: at the crossing of the somatic and the technology, to become other…’,In: Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, vol. 5, n° 1, Bristol, Angleterre, Intellect Journals: 95–112. En français et en ligne.
8. Tahni
Holt, danseuse basée à Portland, danseuse dans Phase 5
d’Isabelle Choinière, interviewée au cours d’une répétition au
Suyama Space, le 18/11/2016, par Leïla Cassar et Mélissa Bertrand.
9. Oscar
Velasco Schmitt, 39 ans, ingénieur dans les technologies, basé à
Seattle, Etats-Unis, interviewé après la seconde présentation de
Phase 5 par Leïla Cassar et Mélissa Bertrand.
10. T.S. Flock, 35 ans, critique d’art, Seattle, Etats-Unis, interviewé après la première présentation de Phase 5 par Leïla Cassar et Mélissa Bertrand.
Biography
Mélissa Bertrand is a master degree student in Theater
at La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris), in exchange at the Univesity of Mondreal
(2012-2017). She also assists as an unregistered student to some class given
at University of Quebec in Montreal, where she met Isabelle Choinière.
Directed by Josette Féral, she’s working on the way body and technologies
affect each other on the contemporary stage and how they create new
textures, sensations and perceptions. After two years in “classes
pérparatoires aux grandes écoles”, she obtains a bachelor degree in Modern
Literature and in Theater Studies. At the same time as her studies, she’s a
stage director in her own company and cares about contemporary writings.
