Nikolett Németh Dr. Noa Roei
Cultural Analysis Research Master 27th October 2016
Affect As Connections of Open Bodies
Introduction
In this paper, I am analysing the concept of affect together with the concept of the body, while unfolding several theoretical angles, as well as moving towards a practical viewpoint with the help of theatrical case studies. After giving an overview of different, interdisciplinary approaches of the topic, my focus is on two main aspects, namely, 1) the connection that is established during corporeal interactions among all the participating actors through an inter-related changing process in all of them; 2) elaborating on Spinoza’s terms of ‘joyful collaborations’ that can lead to ‘common notions’ as another theory about productive connections, of which precondition is the acceptance of the body as a vulnerable, open realm.
As important theoretical references for my idea of affect I read (among others) Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics through Gilles Deleuze (“Cours Vincennes: Spinoza: 24/01/1978” and “Cours Vincennes: Spinoza: 17/03/1981”); G. Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia and What Is Philosophy?; Brian Massumi’s Parables for The Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation; Immaterial Bodies, Affect, Embodiment, Mediation by Lisa
with such questions as the body in the process of becoming within its surroundings; the complex relation of the body and the mind; the inseparability of the private and the social in general, but also considering feelings.
For a more practical research of the concepts in question, I found relevant case studies in the field of performing arts: the performance by the Odin Teatret, titled “The Chronic Life” (2011), and its artistic creation, directed by Eugenio Barba; female directors’ and performers’ reflections (“In Transit”) about their works and preparations presented at the first Transit Festival, Women’s International Theatre Festival and Meeting, in 1992, Holstebro, Denmark. In all these cases, artistic improvisation, the openness of the body and its interactions with other bodies, such as the audience or other performers, are central issues. The mentioned case studies give opportunities to track down corporeal, lived experience of affect and to shed light on the great connecting potential of experimental, creative performance practices.
Revisiting these widely-discussed concepts of affect and the body, I search for new angles, necessary for a practical understanding of their dynamisms and encourage further research on their inherent values that are as much social as personal.
Theoretical framework
Difficulties of definition
Affect, as an interdisciplinary concept is widely dealt with in cultural analysis, as well as in psychology, often based on neuroscientific researches, sociology or geography. The ways of using the term in various fields of studies or theories differ remarkably. Its interdisciplinary usage,
together with the already complex meaning of the term in everyday language, easily leads to confusion. For instance, affect often appears as a synonym of emotion or feeling, such as in the works of Brian Parkinson, Agneta H. Fischer and Antony S. R. Manstead, who try to understand emotions on a larger, social scale, from the outside, rather than seeing it as private. Another aspect arises in the field of geography, again closely attached to body-studies, more precisely, the physical sensations, movements of bodies and their interplay in spatial affects. Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn’s introduction of the Body & Society’s special issue on affect mentions a research on how geographical elements can affect communities, for instance, a South Wales ex-steelworker community (19-20). It is argued that “affective dynamics can be spatialized in terms of the particular geography and spacing of the town […]” (20). In another article by Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey (“Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation”) about affect, as a constructive aspect of architecture, they focus on the architects’ or designers’ attempts to affect future inhabitants by trying to limit certain affects and call for others, such as peacefulness in the prayer room of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, and homeliness in the Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. In contrast to these attempts, to reach certain affects and avoid others by designed elements, the article points out that it is impossible to fully control the actual outcome of inhabitation, since that also depends on unlimited encounters of all the actors involved.
Another approach of the concept is Baruch Spinoza’s theory through Massumi on Deleuze and Guattari, in the “Translator’s Preface: The Pleasure of Philosophy,” according to which affect “is a personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experimental state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Kraftl and Adey 213). This idea of affect will be fundamental in my effort to rework the concept.
The confusion around affect can also derive from the fact that the term is taken from everyday language, where it has already various meanings. The Oxford Dictionary (Wehmeier 25) differentiates five meanings applied to ‘affect’ as a verb: 1) to produce a change in somebody/something; 2) (of a disease) to attack somebody or a part of the body; to make somebody become ill/sick; 3) to make somebody have strong feelings of sadness, pity, etc.; 4) (formal) to pretend to be feeling or thinking something; 5) (formal, disapproving) to use or wear something that is intended to impress other people. All these meanings can be considered inherent, even though, the concept of affect is shaped and continuously being reworked by theories, such as the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. A Thousand Plateaus) or Blackman (Immaterial Bodies).
Interdependency
It is important to realize that in spite of the different meanings and usages of the term affect, there is a common aspect in most of its understandings, namely an implied interdependency, a form of exchange, whether it is understood on an interpersonal or on a social level. This aspect overlaps with the first definition of the Oxford Dictionary (above): to produce change, which implies that there is always a body that is changed and another one that causes the change. In my understanding – based on the following case studies of bodily interactions in performing arts and improvisation – even the body which has caused a change (in another body) is being changed itself in the process of exchange. Therefore, affect does not appear in changing and changed bodies as divided, but it always involves both aspects in all the bodies participating (consciously or unconsciously) in the process. Thus, this interdependency of bodies is a basic, inherent point of connection among the participants, as I will argue throughout this paper.
There is a recent shift in the humanities and in social sciences, referred to as the ‘turn to affect,’ whose progress is parallel with the growing importance of body-studies (Blackman and Venn 8). Thus, the two concepts, affect and body are closely related. The ‘affective turn’ that generally takes place in contemporary humanities, brings bodily experience of affections into focus. According to this view, there is no fixed or unchanging object. This also means the end of ‘representational thinking’, and the refusal of any discursive explanation of objects (Blackman and Venn 9), as well as bodies. Emotions have become important as states of the body, including the mind as inseparable from it. Consequently, thoughts are not effaced, but conceived through the body. Since there are no fixed entities, the body is also seen as a continuously constructed organism, whose idea denies any natural or authentic sense of bodies. Rather, it is always a relational becoming (Blackman and Venn 10-11).
Becoming is an important concept too when we talk about affect, as it has been developed by Deleuze throughout his works (e.g. A Thousand Plateaus). It replaces re-presentation, “presenting the same world once again,” instead, it is a ‘becoming different,’ it “defines a world of presentation anew” (Parr 26). Following this line, the body is always ‘more than one’, not a clearly delimited, fixed form, but being shaped by dynamic processes. It is always being un-done and re-made through these processes of actual occasions (Blackman and Venn 21). This idea places the body in a milieu, of which it is not separable because of the dynamics of their encounters, through which becoming happens (Blackman and Venn 21). Thus, the individual is “the product of a process of being, rather than a starting point from which everything else is accounted for” (Blackman and Venn 20). What is fundamentally changed by the ‘turn to affect,’ is the Cartesian dualism of thoughts and emotions, cognitive and affective sensing, the separation of the body from the mind and from the world. All these have become one organism (Blackman and Venn 22).
To extend the argument and critique of the body-mind dualism, it is interesting to consider Drew Leder’s seemingly contrasting idea about the absent body (The Absent Body). Instead of immediately rejecting Descartes’s theory, the doctrine of limited mind-body interactionism, Leder researches what could lead to the separation of the ‘immaterial mind’ and the ‘material body’ in the first place. Leder’s approach takes lived experience as a starting point. He argues that we constantly experience the disappearance of the perceiving body, except in case of disorder or pain. For him “the body is a tacit and self-concealing structure” (108) that leads to the idea of the immaterial mind. His starting points are phenomenological investigations, bodily perception and the way how the body perceives itself, referring to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology and
The Visible). The body is taken as the source of perception that dissolves itself in the process of
perceiving because of the proximity to the source, and this quality is a necessary requirement for the ability to perceive. For example, we have a very limited sight of our bodies, as “the body naturally limits attempts to get a new angle upon it” (Leder 12).
Leder gives special attention to the brain as a central, yet ‘invisible’ organ; “the organ which subtends embodied consciousness is itself unavailable to conscious apprehension” (Leder 113). For Leder this character of the (embodied) way as we perceive our body is a crucial explanation of the ‘immaterial mind.’ “My brain, as that which I exist from within, manifests no physical presence for me directly to know. I cannot get a distance on it, render it visible, for it is at the very hidden heart of me wherever I go. Human mentality can thus seem immaterial, disembodied, as if of another order of things. An experiential disappearance is read in ontological terms. Yet, as I have previously indicated, this disappearance arises from the embodied nature of the mind. The body’s own structure leads to its self-concealment” (Leder 115). Later in this paper, I will deal with
different theatrical practices, which aim to gain an extensive perception of one’s body, while maintaining the intake of the surroundings, with a shift of focus that alters daily experience.
Another definition of the body by Massumi emphasises the inherent connection of movement and sensation (The Parables for the Virtual 1) that involves change itself. He highlights the body’s indeterminacy to point out its dynamicity of being alive. Therefore, we can only think about it as being in process, in constant transition; in other words, transitional immediacy means the body’s “openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now” (Massumi 5). This idea rejects the predetermined positioning on the cultural grid1 that seems to obstruct change
itself, or allows it only within a pre-constructed framework. With this limitation of change we can only talk about a “discursive” body that excludes sensation (Massumi 2) and direct life experience. About the body-mind distinction Massumi argues that “mind and body are seen as two levels recapitulating the same image/expression event in different but parallel ways, ascending by degrees from the concrete to the incorporeal, holding to the same absent center of a now spectral – and potentialized – encounter” (32). This seems to correspond with Leder’s theory about the absent body.
By dealing with the concept of affect and body studies, the issue of the displaced human body arises as well. Recent body theories focus on features such as, multiplicity, process,
1 The grid is an abstract system, made of culturally constructed labels and scales of social positions. It is a way of
applying systematic structuring to local cultural differences. “The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed significations: male versus female, black versus white, gay versus straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a “site” on the grid, defined by an overlapping of one term from each pair” (Massumi 2). Although, in some cases, it is possible to move from one term to another, for example, from child to adult or from poor to rich, the possibility of change is very limited. It is a rather fixed system with fixed and externally created categories that constructs predetermined subjects, since it seems impossible to change the grid itself from inside (Massumi 2-3). “How does a body perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very ‘construction,’ but seems to prescript every possible signifying and countersignifying move as a selection from a repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms?” (Massumi 3).
movement, interaction, relationality, openness and the ability to affect, instead of social aspects of the body (Blackman 2, 8). For example, according to The Deleuze Dictionary (Parr 35), “A body is not defined by either simple materiality, by its occupying space (‘extension’), or by organic structure. It is defined by the relations of its parts (relations of relative motion and rest, speed and slowness), and by its actions and reactions with respect both to its environment or milieu and to its internal milieu.” Blackman in her book, Immaterial Bodies, gives many examples from scientific fields, such as biomedicine, immunology or cybernetics, where the body-as-organism2 is being
replaced by a fundamentally new view of the body (including the human body), where it is seen as informational3 (6-7). Instead of a closed biological, living system, a singular human body, it is
“seen to always already be subject to technological mediation,” and the conception of life becomes delocalized and mobile (Blackman 2, 7, 8). Becoming happens only through relations and not beforehand, therefore, “entities do not pre-exist their relating” (Blackman 8). However, Lisa Blackman emphasises the importance of the lived, human body that is not reduced to an informational state, and insists on the importance of the terms ‘psychic’ and ‘psychological,’ “as they identify something about the status of the human” (10). She argues that rethinking of the human status and the question of subjectivity, instead of displacing them, is necessary for understanding affect (2, 10).
2 The body-as-organism refers distinctively to human bodies in opposition to the concept of human/machine
assemblages (where living and non-living, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial become undistinguished) (Blackman 5).
3 On one hand, this new way of understanding the body has the advantage of demolishing the boundaries between
self and other, such as the idea of considering bodies as symbionts, communities, instead of closed individual entities. Intra-action is introduced instead of inter-action – the latter presupposes self–other distinction (Blackman 6). On the other hand, it intends to dismiss psychic perspectives considering society and subjectivity (Blackman 8). In terms of affect, this can lead to a total exclusion of questions around intentionality and subjectivity that can obstruct a precise and complex analysis. Blackman argues that “the non-subjective nature of affect requires, however minimally, a theory of subjectivity, and these mechanisms are still very much the subject of debate and contestation” (24).
The concept of body-schema arises as a possible solution for a complex understanding that refers to bodies always in movements, and “an intensity generated between bodies” (Blackman 13). Although, the concept does not exclude dealing with visual elements, the focus is on haptic phenomena, how bodies feel within certain intensities. Fundamentally, it brings along a non-representational and non-visual conception of the body, which keeps the attention on psychic factors that transcend the individual (Blackman 12). “The more non-visual, haptic dimensions of the lived body distribute the idea of the lived body beyond the singular psychological subject to a more intersubjective and intercorporeal sense of embodiment. This is embodiment as intercorporeality” (Blackman 12). Intercorporeality is important to emphasise, because it takes us back to the point that embodiment, such as affect that happens in bodies, are never private matters (Blackman 13).
Consequentially, affect should not be reduced to personal feelings and emotions, neither should we exclude considering thought or mind while analysing the body. It is important to mention that I do not refer to thought as a bodiless, singular cogito but as inseparable from the body, of which individuality can only be seen within the social field. Therefore, thought appears through bodily encounter; it is “a social act emerging in combination” (Ruddick 28), meaning that no one exists only by themselves, but only within the uncounted encounters with other bodies (human and nonhuman). Therefore, one’s knowledge of oneself and the world can be imagined only through within these encounters, and not by any other way. Neither emotion is completely separable from thought, since they all appear through the body or in the body.
As an attempt to clarify the connections between thought and emotion, or more precisely, to differentiate between reactions to emotions, I look at Spinoza’s terminology and differentiation between ‘common notion’ and ‘inadequate ideas’ (Ethics). According to this, affections produce
‘inadequate ideas’ that are forms of thought or rather imagination. They are inadequate because they are not necessarily logically graspable, but such that “understand[s] the interaction with external bodies simply in terms of the effect of the trace,” indicating the presence of the external body and its effect on us, while locating the human subject as the centre (Ruddick 27-29). This is a passive reaction on emotions. ‘Common notion’ replaces inadequate idea, when there is an active will, a motivation to understand affection, (although, it might not be fully possible). It is a social act of interaction, instead of passively experiencing affect: “a state of becoming, not being” (Ruddick 27-31). Common notion is a bodily knowledge, since it is closely related to its context and experienced by the body. So, neither bodies nor thoughts exist prior to each other. The kind of result of this ‘knowledge’ or experience is the potential that brings about pleasure of empowerment, the capacity to act and joyful encounters.4
Susan Ruddick in her essay, “The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze,” searches ways of rethinking the political subject and reconstituting the social body with engaging difference as otherness. The fear of alterity arises as an obstacle. Ruddick reaches back to Spinoza’s Ethics to suggest that investigating our fears of otherness and being open to discomfort is a requirement for a new political subject (Ruddick 24). Spinoza writes: “…the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same necessity and efficacy of nature; they answer to certain definite causes, through which they are understood, and possess
4 Spinoza uses two different terms for power: ‘potentia’, the power to act that can be enhanced through collaboration
and that creates a collective advantage. It is a form of empowerment. On the contrary, ‘potestas’ is a form of domination and alienation that results in obstruction (Ruddick 24-25). A fundamental requirement of ‘potentia’ is the ability of being open to discomfort and investigate its properties, as this may dissolve discomfort itself and help connecting to each other. ‘Potestas’ on the contrary, only raises discomfort and fear with blocking collaborations, and limiting the abilities of the individuals within the social field, from which they are inseparable.
certain properties as worthy of being known as the properties of anything else, whereof the contemplation in itself affords us delight” (III).
All in all, one of the key points, coming from Spinoza and Deleuze reworked by Susan Ruddick, is the importance of deeply investigating our passions whether negative or positive. In other words this is a process of ‘becoming active,’ which is in contrast of mere ‘being’ (Ruddick 30). It involves the replacement of the self within the social field as a social act, and co-production. However, it involves the acceptance of temporary discomfort coming from the replacement of the self that might challenge historically and culturally constructed habits. This is what can lead to common knowledge and social revolution: “the challenge is not to avoid the sad passions but to
engage them actively, to uncover the role they can play in the production of thought” (Ruddick 35).
The effort to understand discomfort or fear, as well as happiness, leads to a social knowledge and pleasure on a long term. Complete understanding might not be possible, yet I would say that the effort made to understand these passions require, on the first place the acknowledgement of their appearance and the fact of us being affected by others and the world. This acknowledgement is a kind of acceptance that opens possibilities to connect. Thus, in the core of the capacity to act there is precisely this acceptance.
It has been stated that the affective turn contrasts the Cartesian model of body-mind, reason-emotion dualisms that prioritize thinking over feeling. Instead of a transcendental conception of thought, coming from outside the body, thought should be understood as a social act that emerges from the dynamics of collectivity (cooperation and co-production) (Ruddick 25-28). According to Spinoza and his reading by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), thought is a shared possibility of humans that emerges in a practice: “the capacity to be affected – from which adequate
ideas may or may not arise” (Ruddick 27, 37). Consequently, emotions coming forth through affect cannot be only individual, private matters.
Personal as Social and Social as Personal
At this point, I would like to discuss Sara Ahmed’s concept of collective feelings (“Collective Feelings”). She shows how the love of some and the hate of others, as collective feelings, delineate the borders between human communities. Rather than individualizing emotions as “psychological dispositions,” it is important to examine what they “do” as mediators between psychic and social, individual and collective (Ahmed 26-27). Emotions can create collective bodies and define their surfaces: “the collective takes shape through the impressions made by bodily others (Ahmed 27). For Ahmed, emotion does not mean the inside getting out or the other way around, neither can we locate it in the personal nor in the social. It is exactly what is in between these realms, as she argues, “emotions work to create the very distinction between the inside and the outside,” the social and the personal, while it “involves an interweaving of the personal with the social” (28). So, what makes the separations is that what unmakes them too, since emotions also involve openness towards the world and others. The surface, such as the skin, does not only separate but also allows impressions to take place (Ahmed 29). Rather than conceiving the surface (e.g. the skin) as already there, we can think about it as only being felt through encounters with others, “only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ by others (Ahmed 29). Here the concept of ‘becoming’ returns in the idea of the individuals being shaped by each other, for example, by creating the surfaces of separation and contact through the touch. This is very important in my analysis of the concept of affect, where I emphasise the intertwining of vulnerability of the open body and the potential of human connections.
Ahmed does not share the views of Massumi (Parables for the Virtual) on separating affect and emotion, based on the personal overtone of emotion on one hand, and the conscious recognition of a feeling or the lack of it, on the other hand. Whereas, she admits that there is a difference between emotions consciously conceived and sudden impressions, sensations that appear before or without mental recognition, she argues that even unconscious sensation is mediated by ‘bodily histories’ (Ahmed 39). The body always contains memory of past experience, either conscious or not. Therefore, instead of thinking about ‘direct’ feelings, it is important to consider sensations as being mediated by bodily memory. They are mediated not only in the sense of the process of recognition, but in the very process of feeling, since that is also tied to memory in a personal and a collective sense (as inseparable). “Not only how we read such feelings, but also how the feelings feel in the first place may be tied to a past history of readings, in the sense that the process of recognition (of this feeling or that feeling) is bound up with what we already know” (Ahmed 30). Here “readings” are affective responses: the reading of the bodies of others, according to certain characteristics attached to the other through encounters (and the cultural history, memory of encounters). Therefore, Ahmed avoids separating affect and emotion, in order to stay closer to “the lived experiences of being and having a body” (Ahmed 30, 39). Although, I acknowledge the importance of considering feelings as mediated, as well as taking bodily experience as a starting point, during my analysis, I refer to affect not as a synonym of emotion that can be delineated (even though vaguely), but more as a generator of emotions.
Affect and Emotion
In contrast to Ahmed, Massumi emphasises the differentiation between the two expressions. For him “an emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (28). Affect, on the other hand, is
equated with intensity5 as a static emotional state, “a state of suspense, potentially of disruption”
(Massumi 26). It is neither passivity nor activity: it is dynamic, “filled with motion,” but this motion is not yet directed “towards practical ends in a world of constituted objects and aims” (Massumi 26). The main difference for Massumi between affect and emotion is that emotion is consciously conceived and qualified, therefore, it can be named and reacted upon, while affect as intensity is unqualified, and does not necessarily involve consciousness: “it is like a temporal sink, a whole in time, as we conceive of it and narrativize it” (26).
In the previous paragraphs, I was arguing that emotions are as much social as personal, and I keep this viewpoint despite Massumi’s definition of emotion as personal. In my view, emotions evolve through affect, within a dynamic, interconnected world of humans and non-humans, through the countless chains of interactions. This is not far from Massumi’s distinction, where emotion is a type of ‘capture’ of affect (35). Affect is described as autonomous, simultaneously involving the virtual and the actual, being infinite and limited at the same time: “affects are virtual synesthetic
perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that
embody them” (Massumi 35). It is synesthetic because it appears through all the bodily senses, while allowing the body to transform the senses into one another (Massumi 35). So, rather than a synonym of emotion, I see affect as an always and everywhere present, dynamic mesh of potential events. This ever-moving and ever-changing mesh escapes any analysis through modes of form and structure, as Massumi argues (28, 260), therefore, there should be other ways found to be able to make it tangible.
5 Massumi notes that further in his work (Parables for the Virtual) the use of the term ‘intensity’ is changing along its
Conclusion
As a conclusion of the current chapter, I revisit the main aspects of the theoretical overview and analysis of the concept of affect and the body. The key points were: 1) the body as an open realm that is in a constant process of becoming through interactions within the social field; 2) the mind is not separable from the body, instead, thoughts are conceived through it; 3) I differentiate between emotion and affect based on the concreteness of emotion that is registered in particular bodies, in actual situations, on one hand, and the potentiality of affect that escapes the actual embodiment, on the other hand; 4) I emphasise that affect can only be understood as in-between-bodies, while all the actors involved are changing; 5) neither emotions nor affects nor bodies can be seen as only private, since they arise from and within the social field; 6) I consider individual and social as inseparable.
In the following chapters, I turn to theatrical case studies in order to approach affect more practically, through the living body. I will mainly focus on two basic aspects of the concept: 1) its relationality, the fact that it can only be understood as in-between-bodies, where all the bodies (affecting and affected, hardly separable from each other) are changing or being changed by the encounter; 2) affect involves the potential of joyful collaborations, of which requirement is the acceptance of temporary discomfort of the open body, of being exposed to other, unknown bodies.
Firstly, by analysing the Odin Teatret’s performance, “The Chronic Life” (2011), directed by Eugenio Barba, and some aspects of its creation process, I give concrete, embodied examples of encounters between actors, the director and the spectators, where all these participants go through a change. This change is a direct result of their encounter within the framework of the performance, however, it can exceed the limited time and space, as we will see. To support my
analysis, I read Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter, “Percept, Affect, and Concept” (What Is
Philosophy? 163-199), in which my main interest is the definition of the work of art and its
material, in our case, the body. This resonates with Massumi’s idea of the ‘sensible concepts’ (89-109) that I will deal with as well.
Secondly, in relation to joyful collaborations evolving through common notions, which is connected to Spinoza’s Ethics, I turn to theatrical improvisation as an open form of artistic creation, and experimental directing methods that include improvisation as a fundamental element. I will look at several women director’s working processes, who were participants of the Transit Festival, Women’s International Theatre Festival and Meeting, in 1992, in Holstebro, Denmark. My goal is to show that joyful encounters require the acceptance of the vulnerability of the open body, the risk of temporary discomfort, and to do this in a practical way, through concrete bodily examples. If controllability comes into question in relation to affect, it can only be about the acceptance and awareness of constant change, and an active engagement, an effort of understanding feelings whether they are considered positive or negative.
In-between-bodies
In this chapter I emphasize a specific aspect of affect, namely, that it can only be understood as in-between-bodies, where all the actors involved are constantly changing. As an attempt to track this encounter in its details, I analyse the Odin Teatret’s production, “The Chronic Life,” directed by Eugenio Barba and first performed on 12th September 2011, in Holstebro, Denmark.6 I elaborate
6 I saw the performance two times in Albino, Italy, in April 2016, as a part of the program of the XV ISTA
on the body as the essential material of theatre by reading Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter, “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” (What Is Philosophy? 163-199). The human body, as the material of performing arts goes through a transformation: “all the material becomes expressive,” it becomes “pure sensation,” the percept of affect (Deleuze and Guattari 167). In this way, the body of the performer ceases to be the human body belonging to an individual, it becomes non-human and enters a different time-frame that is delineated only by the performance. This transformation of the performer’s body automatically expands onto the audience by its common biological nature and participation in the same sensations through the so called ‘mirror neurons.’ Massumi’s notion about the ‘sensible concepts’ (89-109), the direct, physical embodiment of ideas as a lived experience, provides further information about the body’s possibilities as such, and as the material of performing arts.
According to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition (What Is Philosophy?), a work of art is “a being of sensation” that exists in itself, it exceeds any lived, preserves and is preserved in itself, “a block of sensations” that is “a compound of percepts and affects,” which “stands up on its own” (163-164). It is interesting to apply this to the art of theatre, where the audience is involved by sharing the same space with the actors and the ‘artwork on its own’ unfolds in front of them, or partly within them. There is immediacy here: the spectator is taken care of by being composed into the artwork (that exists in itself but includes the spectator) by the artists, while the actors are composers and materials of the compositions at the same time. Percepts here are not to be confused with perceptions: “they are independent from a state of those who experience them” (Deleuze and Guattari 164) – both the spectator and the actor. The spectators’ individual and collective state, and the actors’ corporeal state become parts of the artwork on its own as constructive elements of the sensations and percepts.
To continue with this definition of the work of art and its material: “It is only the act by which the compound of created sensations is preserved in itself…” (Deleuze and Guattari 164); “It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created” (164). What is created is independent from the artist, the receiver of the artwork, and it is beyond the daily characters of objects. To put it another way, the sensations/percepts that come alive in the artwork have no references; they do not refer to an object (different than perceptions). Instead, “sensation refers only to its material,” as if the material had its own gestures, “the percept or affect of the material itself” (Deleuze and Guattari 166). Resemblance between the artwork and objects is possible but only through a unique method and work with the material (Deleuze and Guattari 166). This resonates with the ‘principle of equivalence,’ which is emphasized by Euganio Barba (The Paper
Canoe 30-32), the director of Odin Teatret, as one of the ‘recurring principles’7 of theatre and dance of various traditions and styles. The principle of equivalence refers to the transformation of information into different forms that is, considering the performer, the transformation of daily actions into performative actions (my notes of Barba’s lectures at the XV ISTA session). As a result, “the body,” (the material) “no longer resembles itself,” and it is freed from its own automatisms, existing in a changed (created) rhythm and in a set of new (created) connections with other bodies (Barba 32). It is by the act, by which the performer “recreates the life of the action,” instead of reliving the action (Barba 32), that the compound of sensations is preserved. The material of the art of performance, the body, is not only a human body anymore, since its extra-daily existence means “to remove what is obviously the body’s daily aspect” (Barba 32), and “by starting from precision and concreteness, one does attain abstract meanings” (31). Therefore, the creator,
7 These principles are about the transformation of the human body’s daily qualities into extra-daily qualities that
break up with the familiar, automatic functions, by physically challenging, forming and recreating them through several techniques and practices. Although, these techniques vary greatly, resulting in different forms of creation, the means of transformation recur.
here the actor, whose body is also the material of the creation, transcend the daily character of his/her own body.
Barba’s principle of equivalence is fundamental for every performance style, and it involves a process of estrangement from the daily body-functions. This estrangement can happen through the combination of different techniques, for instance: changing the body-balance and posture; alternating the rhythm and mode of breathing; setting oppositions in action (such as opening and closing, accelerations and sudden pauses, showing something and negating it at the same time); inventing obstacles in order to use the maximum effort for a minimum result8 (Barba, The Paper Canoe 15-16). Applying these techniques through a long-term and regular practice (guided by
traditions or structured experiments) leads towards the unique method of forming the material, the body.9 “The various codifications of the performer’s art are, above all, methods to break the
automatic responses of daily life and to create equivalents to them” (Barba 32). The created equivalence contains the information of the daily life, the physicality of the body, but it exceeds it, moving towards an abstract presence, a sensation.
The separation of the material of the artwork and the sensation is hardly possible, in fact, the material becomes part of the sensation (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 166). The special case in theatre is that its basic material is the human body that is by its same nature and biological functions identical with the spectator’s body. The transformation of the actor’s personal,
8 Barba distinguishes between the daily and the extra-daily body techniques on the basis of minimum or maximum
effort one makes in order to execute an action (The Paper Canoe 15-16). The principle of the minimum effort is reaching the maximum result with a minimum engagement of the body for useful purposes in our daily life; whereas the extra-daily actions follow an almost opposite principle, a kind of wasting of energy, to get a minimal result with the maximum commitment. This is important for the performer’s powerful presence even in a motionless state.
9 It would be interesting to see in an extended research, what these bodily techniques would add to Leder’s theory
human body into the composed, scenic, non-human body, affects the body of the spectator in a way that it undergoes a corporeal, extra-daily, experience too.10
The performing body is non-human and impersonal because it gives up the individual habits, undergoes a transformation and enters the scenic bios. Yet, this new, experimental way of existence involves life experience (outside of the artistic realm) and corporeal memory, within the dynamics among all the bodies (living and non-living) in the shared performance space. However, the corporeal memory of the performer has been altered by years of training, by a serious working process of body-explorations. The body’s capacity thus extends: it is capable of emanating movement from immobility11 (Barba, The Paper Canoe 54), multiplying, transcending the
boundary of life and death, fuse with objects, and give life to them. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the material is a necessary bearer of the work of art, but what is preserved is the percept or affect in itself, while the material passes into the sensation (What Is Philosophy? 166-167): “Even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration. So, long as the material lasts, that sensation enjoys the eternity in those very moments” (166). In the case of theatre, it is the human body that passes into pure sensation, therefore, ceases to be human, merging with the performance space, the present objects, costumes, sounds, movements, and other bodies, including the audience. It enters and it is preserved in eternity, coexisting with the short duration, momentary and ever-changing nature of the live body-performance. It is preserved but never reproducible in the same way.
10 Later in this chapter I will examine the ‘mirror neurons’ and the term, ‘kinesthetic empathy’, that refers to the
human body’s automatic, physical reaction on seeing another body’s action.
11 This is called the ‘sats’ that is an important aspect of the performer’s preparation. It is to learn how to suspend the
bodily forces in immobility. “The sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire organism, which reacts with tensions, even in immobility” (Barba, The Paper Canoe 55).
In order to give an example of the artistic transformation of the human body, as the material of the artwork, into a non-human or extra-human scenic body, I analyse the Odin Teatret’s performance, titled “The Chronic Life” (2011). I am especially interested in the sensory connection established between the actors and the spectators, and how the audience is dragged into the created world of the performance. These observations provide concrete examples of processes of affect, encounters in-between-bodies, where all the participants are being changed by the encounter. The participants are the affecting and the affected bodies, in this particular case, the former would be the actor and the latter would be the spectator, however, there is not a clear line separating the two. From time to time, they seem to be transposed by each other.
Entering the room where the performance (“The Chronic Life”) takes place, the spectator finds the auditorium divided into two halves facing each other, rising on both sides of the oblong stage. The stage is also divided into the middle part, which is heightened by wooden planks and the surrounding space of the original floor. On one side, there is a black wall, and on the other side, a wooden construction has been built with hanging metal strings attached to it, ending in hooks placed in different heights. Altogether, the performance space resembles a ship, as a common vehicle for the audience and the performers. According to the given information in the programme book: “The action of the performance takes place simultaneously in different countries of Europe in 2031, after the third civil war.” The characters have different cultural and social backgrounds, such as a Colombian boy searching for his father (Carolina Pizarro, previously: Sofia Monsalve), the widow of a Basque officer (Kai Bredholt), a Danish lawyer (Tage Larsen), a Chechnyan refugee (Julia Varley), a Rumanian housewife (Roberta Carreri), a rock musician from the Faroe Islands (Jan Ferslev), an Italian street violinist (Elena Floris), and without national identification: a Black Madonna (Iben Nagel Rasmussen) and two mercenaries (Donald Kitt and Fausto Pro). Another
character that is not mentioned in the programme book is a human-sized puppet, which is dressed exactly in the same way as the Columbian boy.
The action unfolds around the boy’s searching for his lost father, going through several doors without finding him, while the people around him want to convince him to give up trying. The connection between the characters creates paradox: they all seem lonely and ignorant towards each other, staying in their individual realm filled with desperation, lacking deep interactions and sharing. However, they are, by the given conditions, furled together in the rather small space. A sense of hope comes through music, rhythm and the constant continuation of searching, the assurance of always finding another door opening, even if it leads to something unexpected and far from the original aim. In “The Chronic Life” this goes on even after death, as the performance ends with yet another opening door.
Reading Eugenio Barba’s writing about the work and understanding his main motivation for creating it, I find the simile of a ship that escapes the capture of ice referring to theatre (Det
Kroniske Liv 4-6). Barba mentions the expedition of the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, whose ship was imprisoned by ice in the North Pole. Instead of giving up trying, he let the ship be taken by the ice that was slowly changing position. Preparatory sketches of the stage and the auditorium structured as a boat complete this image. I draw the connection to what I have experienced as a spectator, the relatively closed, narrow space where the whole action takes place, which instead of separating, involves the audience. The short distance between the stage and the audience is a characteristic of the company’s shows, as a conscious decision based on the immediate bodily effect, generated by the actors in the spectator’s body through the kinaesthetic sense within about 10 metres (Barba, On Directing and Dramaturgy 23).
The performance and audience space altogether resembling a boat has several connotations. It gives the frame of a journey, which is now the performance itself; it is a rather closed place, where the travellers – although, they may have diverse individual goals and histories – are dependent on each other in their common interest of a safe trip and reaching the destination. There is no escape if something goes wrong. One can witness how the personal intertwines with the collective, while facing the issues raised by the performance, such as, the life-long searching, being threatened by death, experiencing vulnerability, dealing with violence, loss, and an evolving, faint hope that might turn out to be stronger than anything else. These aspects are also outlined towards the end of the show, when the characters are joined together, forming a choir, singing lines of Leonard Cohen’s famous song, ‘Everybody Knows,’ which contains lines, such as, “Everybody knows that the boat is sinking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / Everybody's got this broken feeling / Like their Momma or there dog just died.” In the meantime, the spectators are sitting tightly next to each other in three lines on both sides, being observers and observed at the same time, while probably going through confusion, maybe annoyance caused by the often wild rhythm of parallel scenes, being confronted with suffering, loneliness, human beings abusing each other in desperation, accompanied by an emotional rollercoaster rising and dropping through musical interventions.
The revealing lives of the characters are miserable, and the only way to escape from the pain is through the transformation of the senses. This also means a kind of takeover of the senses, or occasionally, the lack of them (as in the case of the blindfolded characters, or the momentary silence after the potpourri of sounds), evoking a different sensory experience than what is habitual. Often, there is a contrast between the performed, seemingly hopeless actions, and the connected musical material, as Annelis Kublmann also points it out in her article (60-61). For example: the
Rumanian housewife repeatedly attempts to kill herself without success and sings the gospel song, ‘I wanna die easy, when I die…,’ followed by ‘What a wonderful world’ by Louis Armstrong, and later the other well-known gospel song, ‘Amazing Grace.’ In all these songs, there appears the relation to vision, which is, at first sight a lost quality of the Columbian boy, who appears the second time with his sight lost and his eyes covered by cotton patches. Later there is a moment, when all the characters have their eyes covered in different ways (e.g. with dark sunglasses or bandages). This implies a tragic disability, the lack of perspective that they all suffer from, on the one hand, but it changes the overall bodily perception directing the look inside, on the other hand. In the mentioned songs, there are lines (even though they cannot be heard in the performance), such as “I once was lost but now I’m found / Was blind, but now, I see;” “I’m gonna see Jesus when I die;” “I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do / But they’re really saying I love you.” Music has a fundamental role in the conclusion of the performance too, when the Italian street violinist appears, playing with covered eyes, identifiable with the Columbian boy (both played by female characters) who in the meantime gained back his sight. We are beyond life, over death, the boy escapes the coffin where his body was pushed into, and leaves with his alter ego, laughing together, followed by the melancholic but calming tune of the violin. This is the result of his search.
“The Chronic Life” is hard to grasp rationally. It is rather meant to open up the senses, trigger empathy of the spectator, posing questions to which the answer is as personal as collective: a shared experience of learning how to see differently. In a brochure about the performance, issued by the Odin Teatret, Eugenio Barba points out the “gift of ambiguity and the experience of not grasping everything” (Det Kroniske Liv 7). This gives the possibility to a deeper understanding or rather experiencing of feelings that are non-rational, the acceptance of things that
are not graspable by voluntary knowledge but have an impact on our bodies, or the constant dynamism of asking questions and searching. He defines his commitment as “to give form and credibility to the incomprehensible and to those impulses that are a mystery […]” (Det Kroniske
Liv 7). The spectators are pushed into incomprehensibility, the rational thoughts are challenged by
the cavalcade of senses: a composition of different, often opposing qualities of movements, voices connected to different languages, sounds and visions. There is a multi-lingual mixture of texts, and the intentional usage of poetic lines that, by its nature, takes time and effort to understand.
Incomprehensibility characterised the long working progress too (almost four years intermittently) as the performance took shape. In the beginning, there were only images gathering around hope, the empathy towards other’s suffering, joy and compassion (Det Kroniske Liv 9). There was no pre-fixed dramaturgy or text but research and propositions by the actors, considering songs, texts, props, costumes, and so on, which they started developing individually (my notes of Barba’s lectures at the XV ISTA session, 2016). Therefore, the creation of the performance was already the searching process that is one of the most important aspects of the resulting, fixed12
work, as it leads the spectator through a path of associations.
The performance is structured, on several levels, by circulating elements, and the oppositions of inside and outside. For instance, a strongly moving scene, soon after the beginning is, the cyclical running of the Columbian boy while holding a huge block of ice. He runs desperately, and eventually, falls out of exhaustion. Even though, the spectators do not know the exact reason of this act, it triggers immediate emotional reactions, and it probably evokes different associations, connected to personal memories. The block of ice is needed fast to bring down a sick
12 By the word ‘fixed’ I mean the precision of the performers to execute the actions with the same impulses and
according to the same, complex structure of the work each time, still considering that it can never be repeated exactly in the same way.
person’s fever, and any delay can be crucial. This has a biographical connotation, regarding the director (Det Kroniske Liv 32), however, the audience does not have this information. Another series of circles are created by the returning lines of the already mentioned song, ‘Everybody knows’, sang by the characters, as a kind of comment on the happenings (Kublmann 60) from a more distant point of view. Yet another circulation is the interchangeability of the figures of the boy and the puppet. They look identifiable (same size, same costume and same hairstyle), and both are treated by the others as ‘the boy,’ sometimes abandoning or giving attention to one or the other. In this way, an underlying tension arises between the living and the non-living entities, while they exchange qualities.13
The other structural frame, the oppositions of inside and outside appears through the opening and closing of different doors. It is never quite clear, on which side of the doors is the ‘inside’ and which one is the ‘outside,’ since there seems to be no protected, save place. However, the middle part of the stage, covered by planks, operates as a kind of inside: a house or maybe a country. The space around it functions more as an external space, a margin, mostly inhabited by the Chechnyan refugee. The third dimension of the stage is the coffin, in a central position, that is covered in the beginning, being used as a dining table, that transforms into one of the doors that opens and closes during the play. All these circles and oppositions are parts of the overall orchestration of the different levels, carefully composed into an intense, pulsing rhythm of vitality, embracing suffering, loss and death.
One leading concept of the work was not to let the audience master the whole play (my notes of Barba’s lectures at the XV ISTA session, 2016). To remember, they are sitting on a “ship”
13 Furthermore, the repeated suicide attempts by the housewife, the speeches of the lawyer about a new
beginning, and the threats by the two mercenaries, construct circles too, together with some reappearing objects, such as, cards and coins (both thrown in the air at certain points).
that takes them to an unexpected place together with the actors. The stage is transparent for the spectator, however there is the obstacle of simultaneity of actions on different sides of the longish stage that means that the spectator needs to give up seeing everything. Another aspect is the lack of silence that transforms the play into a kind of mantra, a flow where one does not control his/her thoughts. Obviously, the rhythm involves pauses, when the almost silence is created by different sounds, such as the drops of the block of ice that is hanging on one of the metal strings above a soldier’s helmet. This is a very strong sensual affect as well, allowing associations of time, as if a clock was ticking, drops of blood of a victim or the threatening melting of the polar ice caps.
The final image is an empty space terminated by a tape, similar to the ones used by the police to cut off crime scenes from the public, with the strong presence of the coffin in the middle. This is what the boy manages to escape and leaves the scene with the identical violinist through yet a new door that has opened. Where are they going? – that is a question left for the audience. This is the time now to digest and deal with all the questions that have been triggered. There is a moment created for the spectators to face each other while clapping without the actors’ presence. Something has changed irreversibly in them too: returning to the convenient rational senses is not so easy after the recent experience of losing this kind of control.
As a compensation for the non-graspable content of the play, there is the “being of sensation,” “a compound of percepts and affects” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 164) that is vivified and preserved in the work of art, even if the access to it lasts only for the time of the performance. During this time the body is transforming several ways, as the material of the artwork. Once the ice melts, something will be changed irreversibly: the disappearance of a form into another. The end of the performance leads beyond the human body, beyond death and life, where time and vision are perceived differently, and one meets the inner self through another.
On a biological level, the phenomenon of transcending one’s body through an exchange is revealed by the researches on the ‘mirror neurons,’ such as, the one by Vittorio Gallese. The neurobiological term refers to an implicit, automatic and unconscious mechanism in the body that allows one to understand other’s actions through internal simulations of them (Gallese 173-174). This is an embodied understanding, a pre-established social connection that precedes conscious recognition: “enables the observer to use his/her own resources to penetrate the world of the other without the need of explicitly theorizing about it” (Gallese 174). Eugenio Barba, as the director of the Odin Teatret, aims to consciously incorporate the operation of the mirror neurons into the group’s work, and by that, to generate kinesthetic effect, as a reaction of the spectators (Barba, The
Paper Canoe 25). Namely, the visual information of another performing an action simultaneously
activates motor circuits in our body, as if we were acting in the same way, but without the reproduction of the action (Gallese 174). In this way, we are bodily involved in the same situations of others that we are observing, as well as others in our environment involuntarily and unconsciously participate in our actions.
It is important to point out that the motor system is not activated in the same way when the observed action is mimed (Gallese 173-174). Therefore, imitation of the action does not recall the same response of the body. There is a great importance of this fact if we consider theatre (and “The Chronic Life” performance), where the connection established between the performer and the spectator depends on the creditability of the actions performed by the actors. Actions that are perceived as real (not imitated or mimed) establish “a direct implicit link between agent and observer,” (Gallese 174) between actor and spectator. To mention a few examples, there is a direct sensorial connection established between the bodies of the actors and the spectators’ bodies, when the Columbian boy is running around the stage embracing a block of ice, or when the Rumanian
housewife takes a bite of the glass (made of a resembling material) from which she has been previously drinking. These are actions with real, physical motivations or effects, such as breaking a hard and sharp material with the mouth, or the cold of the ice on the skin. Through the sensorial connection, the audience can ‘feel’ the pain or the cold resulted by these ‘real’ acts. This is essential for a better understanding of the relationship between actors and spectators.
Another interesting fact about the mirror neurons is that they are activated even by actions with so called ‘hidden conditions:’ interactions with objects (e.g. grabbing something) which are hidden from the observer’s view. In these cases, the crucial parts of the actions (e.g. hand-object interactions) are invisible; they can only be inferred (Umiltà, et al. 160-161). This means that the goal of the observed action executed by another can be predicted by the observer without conscious calculations and without seeing its result. The scientific experiments with monkeys, which I am referring to here, by Gallese, Umiltà and others, have also shown that the reaction is different, so the mirror neurons are not activated, when there is a movement without a real goal, for instance, when there was no object at the hidden place towards which the movement was directed (Umiltà, et al. 160-161).
The results of the scientific researches by Gallese, Umiltà and others (“The Roots of Empathy;” “I Know What You Are Doing”) about the operation of the mirror neurons resonate with the various notions of the ‘open body’ that I dealt with in the first chapter: the body understood as ‘becoming different,’ ‘always more than one,’ inseparable from the milieu, and ‘being in process’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus). Returning to The Deleuze Dictionary (Parr 35), the body has been defined also by its actions and reactions, within its environment (including other bodies in certain proximities), as well as considering its internal milieu. Accordingly, in the ship-like performance space of “The Chronic Life,” created by the Odin Teatret, the bodies of the spectators
and the actors can be seen, as being defined also by each other. This relational definition is partly traceable by the operation of the mirror neurons. Although, the mirror neurons refer mostly to the change that happens in the body of the spectator, in case of an action with a real inner motivation (not imitation), the reaction of the audience recoils upon the actor. This is a process of becoming, within this particular, non-repeatable, momentary relation between actor and spectator: “[…] becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. […] Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes” (Deleuze and Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus 272).
The activation of the mirror neurons leads to the notion of ‘kinesthetic empathy’, one of the major aspects of Eugenio Barba’s artistic work (including directing “The Chronic Life”). Performative physical actions are created by the actors with real impulses that are artificial but believable, so they have an immediate kinesthetic effect on the spectators (Barba, The Paper Canoe 25), for example, when the Rumanian housewife takes a bite of the (fake) glass. Kinesthetic empathy refers to an embodied commitment to others present in our environment, by experiencing their movements as if they were executed by our bodies. This happens through the perception of other bodies experienced as something alive, “something analogous to our own experienced acting body” (Gallese 176). The notion of empathy arises through the “common experience of action” and intentions (Gallese 176). Accordingly, the relation between the observer and the observed can be seen as a dynamic, reversible system established by an automatic, embodied, interindividual link (Gallese 176). The visual information, as well as the sonic repertoire, of a performance produces an automatic bodily reaction in the spectator, according to their own capacity and
corporeal memory. This will be an unconscious, immediate part of the interpretation of the performance (Barba, On Directing 23) that generates meaning. To involve the audience into the kinesthetic commitment, the actors must execute ‘organic actions’ – a term used by Barba for convincing sensorial actions that construct the ‘organic dramaturgy’ of the performer (On Directing 23). The term, organic dramaturgy refers to the primary level of organization of the performer’s presence itself, including all her/his gestures, vocal actions, bodily transitions, dynamics with the others: the “body-in-life” (Barba, On Directing 25). The theatrical body-in-life functions according to the ‘principle of equivalence,’ which, once again, means that the real dynamic information is retained, while it appears in a different form. Its reappearance is possible because the real impulse of an action contains the same information as the executed movement. The result is a sensorial persuasion of the observer (Barba, On Directing 26).
We can relate all this to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea (What Is Philosophy?) of the work of art and its material: “By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perception of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a block of sensations, a pure being of sensations” (Deleuze and Guattari 167). This definition implies that the objects which are parts of the performance, e.g. props, costumes or elements of the set design, also become the materials of the art of the performance. They take part in the transformation into pure sensations that happens through their direct or indirect encounters with the actors’ bodies (and through the bodily connection between the actors and the spectators also through the encounters with the audience). These performing objects cease to be the original things, and instead, they embody newly forming functions. For example, in “The Chronic Life” there in an equivalence of the cards, possessed by the Chechnyan refugee (Julia Varley), and photographs of lost family members; other times this equivalence
changes, and the cards contain the information of tears falling from her eyes. So, the principal of equivalence can appear through the actor’s body, but also through objects as extensions of the performer’s body. These objects also become endowed with extra-daily qualities, which escape their daily functions and characteristics.
Besides generating kinesthetic effects, the performers’ actions – including their pure scenic presence – need to catch and keep the audience’s attention in every moment of the show. This happens by the transformation of the daily body-qualities into extra-daily qualities, as was stated before. “Transforming the natural bios into scenic bios” (Barba, The Paper Canoe 55) implies the reformation of the performer’s body and the challenging of the corporeal memory. It is important for the actor to surprise the spectator again and again. We have learnt that with the activation of the mirror neurons one can predict the result of another’s action. Therefore, the actor’s task is to play with the kinesthetic sense of the spectator, to cause ‘subliminal surprises’14 and prevent
predictability (Barba, The Paper Canoe 55-60). To avoid foreseeable actions implies the previously discussed transformation of the actor’s body, a kind of estrangement of the familiar, yet remaining believable.
In the affective realm of the performance space all the bodies make changes, whether it is voluntary or not, and through the very same process, in the same time, all the bodies are changed. The characters of “The Chronic Life” are brought into being by the actors through a direct, corporeal, creative process. Introducing their entities to the audience, letting their qualities unfold and interact, produces a unique opportunity for a specific, dynamic exchange of affect, for experiencing the interdependency of all the bodies that are sharing the same space. Once again,
14 This term is to indicate that here surprise does not refer to an evident scenic action, something that the spectator
is necessarily aware of, but instead, to the microscopic aspect of the action, which is bodily sensed but not thought of (Barba, The Paper Canoe 57).
this is the process of ‘becoming different,’ and the ‘presentation anew’ (Parr 26), both for the spectators and the actors. For the actor, the only possible way to surprise the audience is to be surprised herself; to pass into the material of the artwork, which is the becoming of “compounds of sensations and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 166-168). This is how the body, the actor’s and the spectator’s body, is being undone and re-made. The Columbian boy’s desperate running with the block of ice and his fall, the suicide attempts of the Rumanian housewife, the blindfolded singing of the choir, or the sounds of the violin, change all the participants, both those who act and those who perceive the acts. The shared experience of the performance, during which the spectators’ bodies are activated as if they were executing the actions, automatically infiltrates into the corporeal memory. The performers’ body is present in a vulnerable state, with open senses, exhibited for observation and judgements. “The Chrocic Life” is a great example of how deeply personal life-experience merges into a shared, collective, social experience, which then circulates back with alternations into the personal.
It is interesting to read Julia Varley’s sincere report about her difficulties during the preparation of the play, such as her initial refusal of dealing with the theme of death, marked by painful memories of loved ones recently passing away, and her oppositions with Barba (the director) in several issues (Det Kroniske Liv 37-53). She gives an account of the enormous effort she put into developing her character, which often seemed as a waste of energy afterword, because of changes in the concept made by the director.15 However, eventually all of these, together with
impacts of colleagues and collaborators, had given life to the Chechnyan refugee. The formation of the character started with personal memories of mourning, it included stories of others she was moved by, and then alternated by the dialogues of the other actors, who had been parallel working
