In Test Site 02 and Test Site 03, the technology of ‘seeing’ is brought into question. Modes of negotiating space and testing proprioception are bought into play through a process of subtraction and substitution, by forging physical limits and extensions.
The development of the performative and choreographic language has become paramount in this inquisition of reframing or destabilizing the body through the negotiation between the real and the signified. Drawing from the provenance of my own movement training, and through examining the avante-garde of dance and performance arts, fundamental concepts of Butoh dance have emerged in this practice.
This introduction of a methodology through my dance ‘discipline’ or training is influenced by a key text ‘Bursting Bodies of Thought’, by ex pat performance artist Michael Hornblow who ingeniously uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts around the body without organs and the virtual and actual body as a mechanism for examining Hijikata Tatsumi ‘s practice of butoh dance. The intersections that occur in Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the body and Hijikata’s methods for experimentation for the body offer a wealth of theoretical models for approaching notions of a butoh body as both a conceptual and physical practice. Hijikata’s intensive explorations of the butoh body Hornblow proposes, ‘creates a sense of virtual presence through an experiential interplay of matter and movement, apprehended prior to the external physical expression.’ (Hornblow 2006: 27) Here, I am employing transformative practice ‘through the use of internal imagery’ in conjunction with the prosthetic camera and screen.
Drawing from ideas from Hijikata Tatsumi’s practice which has passed on to me, mutated by time and evolution through a lineage of practitioners such as (in a chronological order) Lynne Pringle, Joan Laage, Charles Koroneho, Frank van de Ven, Tadashi Endo, Atsushi Takenoushi , Kinya Tsuruyama and Yuko Kaseki. Methods for ‘writing’ the body are devised in a manifestation of the space, through representation via the digital screen image.
The spaces in these tests are conflated through wireless networks that use radio frequency in a transmittal of image, text and motion – mediated by the performers bodies. The body is augmented through the screen image and the space enters the body through a kind of metaphrastic process from image to text. The scripting is transfigured into sound through the digital and is internalized and modulated through proprioceptive responses into the somatic expression of a virtual body. Vision is transmuted through distancing the body from the screen image and senses are transposed and reorganized.
Performers create a network of body by accessing the interstitial through limitation, space, screen image, sensing, and language represented. The reconfiguration of the body’s proprioceptive system due to prosthetic extensions and a process of substitution is harnessed in these tests to explore the potential of destabilization. Interrogation of the space, the body and representation (the screen) through dismantling and reconfiguring our sensing systems borrows notions from the established methods of Butoh which organizes itself around the virtual body.
In Test Site 03 the body, the screen and the space fold into one another in a multiple, fragmented and networked whole. The performers body is disorganized and destabilized through a very obvious shift in the sensing system and the audience experience a sense of this destabilization in the sensation of the screen image, augmented by the body, which has a live-ness, a ceaseless motility as it’s every movement, caught within a frame is amplified by the bodies ‘kinaesthetic restlessness’.
