Terra-funga woman by Marianna Whistlecroft

Past and present techniques of the body in character gestures

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-04-29 13:51:24 UTC

Looking at the way historical literature has influenced the performativity of bodies in the sci-if genre:

Forbidden planet (1956) and the Tempest (1610)

-compare gestural snapshots from how the tempest has adapted kinaesthetically

-cross cultural (colonial notions of calliban)
- how could animism affect this? Calliban and Ariel

My writing:
Caliban is inferior as he’s ‘not honoured with a human shape’ (1:2:336-7) is questioned as the subservient class still have an agency; they are relied upon and more suited to their surrounding. Ariel’s power causes the inciting incident, bringing his bidding into action and Robby, like Caliban, is a provider and ‘even manufactures the raw materials’. This means we still question what Hazzlit refers to as the ‘superiority of talent and knowledge’ (Pask, 2002) by seeing the benefit of functional skills over the limitations of intellect.

Building a new house/ city/ nation/ family

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-04-29 14:26:19 UTC

House of Bernarda Alba

Protest- social body

Gestures of connection
Copying in a group
What does a familial language look like
Look at protests
Defiance, resistance, togetherness

What are the values
Where is the power
How is it being destabled or reconstructed?
Harold offeh- performance art, building a new place by creating space (with the body and objects)

Group task: game with the sculpture trying to pass the ball, shout or whisper when passing / people in the middle with closed eyes try to block or allow

Creating a new body - question of Testimony

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-04-29 14:29:26 UTC

Fragmented body - how to isolate body parts?

Tidying up - resource body landscape

Klara and the sun - http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1813036/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Materiality:
-problem of other bodies
Task: repeat an action without the same result by changing fabric

Is the gesture the same without the memory or intention?
What does mimicry look like without the self?

Hermeneutics

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-04-29 14:30:25 UTC

Origin of the voice
Breath
Disembodied voice
Erving goffman- minor action of resistance as ritual
Interaction theory - challenging the idea of the presentation of the objective self

Narrative/ intentions/ atmosphere

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-04-29 14:37:04 UTC

A container that feels too wide, too brittle and too shapeless

create a costume or material partner that allows the body to become these things

Character intentions

Character arcs

Audience interaction

The Economic construction of body parts

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:21:15 UTC

Stuart hall - how political intentions draw on national stories and poetry reworking them into their own agendered narrative.

What is a national story?
Dystopias: 1984, brave new world

Marx

Emancipation and subjugation

The liberal audience member applied to promenade theatre:

Questioning neo-liberal authoritarianism

Neoliberal hubris

‘Those things which we believe to be true are ‘real in consequences’

Reference plays for narrative structure/ writing and exposition techniques

-Romans
-Mary Queen of Scots
-Top Girls

Destabilising historical notions through performance:
Brecht: resettle normal concepts of time and therefore space
Epic theatre as a self-reflexive way of telling a story

Perfroming the pedagogical,
‘interstitial persepctive’ for the audience

Affective identification

Non-consecutive arrangements: prolapses and analepses

The material construction of bodies

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:24:26 UTC

Materially:
-manipulation and mutation
-hybridity- ‘overlaps and displacements of domains of difference’ Bhabbha 1994:2

Reflection
Extraction
Obfuscation
Queering
Dressing up
Boundaries
Expanding/ compressing
Viewpoints

Social constructivism- communicating interpersonal subjectivity

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:24:49 UTC

Truth regimes - Foucault

Helene never krigelbach - body relation

Inter subjectivity and sense of self (rainbow 1977, 155)

Robert Levine: ‘interpersonal communication is the medium through which we discover how individuals experience their lives and how cultural beliefs shape that experience’ (1982a, 293)

Alterity- David Graeber
- self-determination
-reform: ‘re-traditionalist’
-Mythos: reification of culture

Karen Barad : agential cut

Chocolate boxes

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:38:01 UTC

Labels on boxes of old sweets

Memory and sensation in gesture

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:40:24 UTC

Home as operation theatre

Chocolate boxes- compartmentalisation

Wheelbarrow-

Weeds

Hosepipes

Tomatoes

Entanglement between sensation and memory
Traces of memory on the body.
Marcel Mauss and bourdieu

Memories of people in positions, now animate them
She stoops, her arms hanging, legs rooted.
Action: about to pull a lamb out of a sheep’s bum.
Action: about to put a chicken back in its pen or grab an egg from its nest.
Action: putting feed in the animals trough

I care about how the images of her body are imprinted in my mind, embedded in my memories of our shared physical moments. Moments we would use our bodies to labour for the need of animals. Not for ourselves, not for an aesthetic but for a chance to be subservient to the need of something in need. To allow a presence in being part of a process. To recognise a diurnal sense of atonement for my own neediness. To hold my image of us and her in my own body. Repeat her actions with my own body. Repeat, change, adjust, amend, purge, let go, re-imagine.

First I felt the need to close in, to peer, to get close. Moving started with the sensation of touching, of grabbing handfuls of meaning, measuring life force in the most objective of ways. It turned into serving, slowly offering with the hands turned in the right jurisdiction for a horses head and teeth. My hands come to the top of my head as my body bent in prayer, subservient to this beast that dictated my every move. Born again. Into the allotment. I pulled the blades of grass around me into knots and my body followed the hose getting tangled between the two.

Expression of pain, fear, serving, boundaries, self and other, giving and receiving

Medical injustices due to social location and lack of testimony

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:41:56 UTC

Where do you gather evidence of yourself
How do you measure pain, pleasure, discomfort
What does it mean to be healthy
How do we present our realities if we don’t have the words

Words

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:43:36 UTC

Who owns them
Who can say them
Where do they come from
Where are they going
Who are they for
How do we learn them
Why do we learn them
In what world do they benefit
When are they symbols with illocution?

Speech acts
Perlocution
Illocution
- what does that look like in gesture?

Places of poetry

Collette Sadler influence

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:49:24 UTC

Body- A frame

Crystal Pite influence

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:53:22 UTC

Disembodied speaking

Betroffenheit

Adrian Forty

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-02 15:56:00 UTC

Memories stored in objects

Memorialisation

Documentation and Martin Hargreaves

Gesture

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:38:56 UTC

Erving goffman
-Face
-The home as the operation theatre

Erin Manning- the minor gesture

Nancy stark smith - indetermination

Carrie Noland- Agency + embodiment

Stuart Hall

Rites of passage - Victor Turner

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:41:38 UTC

Communal activity: performance programme

Separation
Liminality
Reaggregation

-I have also been through this
-signifying to the other
- crip time
- experiential understanding

Choreography versus movement direction

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:42:33 UTC

Choreograph your body in relation to the objects around you
Choreograph the objects in relation to you

Miet Warlop sceneography

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:47:12 UTC

Rebecca Horn

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:47:24 UTC

7 ways Gemhyung Jeong

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 09:47:38 UTC

Auto-ethnography

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:00:06 UTC

Auto-didactic: self taught

How to listen to the internal processes of my body with PCOS

Interrelated as a dancer - assume I know or am in touch with the proprioceptors in my body

Truth as not this

Autonomy and self affirmation gained through a disobedience to the norms
-Thoreau
-Kants transcendental ego
-Hillel Hazaken: ‘if I am not for me, who will be?’

Digital catapult

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:01:15 UTC

Studio flow state

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:01:24 UTC

Research questions

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:06:01 UTC

What effect does testimony have on the concept of living memory?

The effect of memorialisation on the narrative testimony of bodies with PCOS.

A narrative testimony in memorialising the experience of PCOS.

Performative programmes as semi-structured sensory interviews.

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:07:01 UTC

Sensory interviews

Samudra

Notes on ‘re-choreographing learning’

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:14:00 UTC

The affective states accompanying perception also contribute to retained memories (Cerny 19) p8

Embodied cognition (computational theory)

P10 Wilder Penfield Homunculus

Actions/ gesture are a manifestation of human thought

Writing and speaking as movements of gesture into symbols of thought

P10 mirror neuron's as vital for empathy

Spinoza and Demasio

Exteroception p27 depth and viewing objects in the distance

Diana Gustafson

Interoception
MAIA

Ana Halprin

Sarah Mazke

Experiential feelings with PCOS

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-30 10:32:50 UTC

Adrienne Marie brown- pleasure activism

Mary Douglas- Purity and Danger

Sedimentation- Judith Butler

Painscapes
Sounding to locate bodily pain

Animated sculputures to explore inside, outside

Places of boundary

Physical memories

Subject/ object dichotomy

Desperation and fear or unknown and lack of bodily trust

Frantic excitement and euphoria

Preservation of energy

Lack of motivation

Desire but lack of confidence/ ability

Correspondence- means of situating yourself relationally.

Architecture and theatre

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-05-31 13:19:47 UTC

Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan
Author(s): Dominic Mciver Lopes
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 65, No. 1, Special Issue: Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics (Winter, 2007), pp. 77-84
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4622212

Parkour as exercise

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-18 15:55:05 UTC

Parkour vision:

Adopt characteristics with the body which lend to approaching set in a specific way:

-crawling
-floor is lava
-step vaults

Parkour as gesture
It seems I’m letting gestures back through. I find an ah, aha moment in every rotation, rise, extension and adduction. These movements happening more and more connectedly and automatically. My brain feels more fluid. There’s a pebble and I run around it and over it, at peace knowing the slight ripple has betrayed its affect on the surface level and the course of my actions have been nudged. I allow those nudges to come in different forms. Sometimes nudging back. Sometimes bouncing off. Sometimes riding with.

I see this like a parkour course. The structure of the city is there but your encounter with it is an emergent process due to where you’ve come from and where you are going. Whether I lazy vault, crawl, step vault or roll depends on my footing, my balance, my weight distribution. In my improvisation, these structures exist as vision, music, touch, and they create an impression in my mind which is remembered physically, somatically.

Contact is a moving parkour course with another, you are navigating where they have come from and guiding and helping them go forward, your surfaces must change constantly.

Bouncing: upward against downward

Shaking: inward against outward

Gesture as thought vessel
Emergence of gesture as emergence of thought

Thought as an assault course

Gesture as my bodies interaction with my thoughts

Allowing thoughts in and out allows gesture to be in cohesive

Gestural sentences
Gestural sequencing
Gestural phrases

My relationship with the world is still not quite equally agential. Why do I need another’s eyes, arms and viewpoint to sustain me? Who is it that I feel I am, what is it that I want, how do I express myself in the limitations of my own site specificity. How do I recognise and deal with lack of fulfilment, disappointment, deception and why are these things coming from myself? How am I holding myself back and why am I blaming the structure around me? What is the fear? Where will I come home to if I step out too far? Where is my landing strip? It’s on a knife’s edge. But I have balance.

Place building

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-18 16:01:50 UTC

Sara train set:

Use the things around you to make a scene
Play with the things as they are
See what movements these predispose
Take the things away and rely on the mime

Speak about a place you are very familiar with, habitually situate yourself in

Talk about what you do there
What you can see there
What you sense and feel there

Move around the place you are in as you do so.

Tie yourself down
Re describe the place
See how it changes the atmosphere and your connection to it

Mirror exercise

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-18 16:03:01 UTC

Collaboration
-reflection
-kinaesthetic response
-curtain
-muffled soundscape
-eye SITE (isolate body part)
- own hands to manipulate sight
-breathe

Start with breathing
Allow small movements and inflections in the face
Let it flutter over your face

Focus on a part of clothing in the mirror, allow movements to change how this part of clothing evolves.

Change orientation of body to allow a different relationship with self.
Touch elbow to mirror
Touch top of head to mirror
Touch the side of the head to the mirror

Stay in a cross leg position but move from the relationship between hips, ribs and shoulders

All contractions and extensions in its fullest expression in the movement which has your focus

Allow the movement to evolve into a moment between yourself and your ‘image’

Come back to the face if it’s too much

If sitting becomes uncomfortable hug your legs in tightly and release

Use any tension and bind in the body to stretch and release.

Record and emotional response or a tribute to the experience to someone. A sense of other in the self.

Ie.
Saw the hairs on my neck, felt the shared experience we have of the world. I know any home you are the harbourer of will be warm and safe. To Alara I wish you all the experiences of love, care, trust and happiness that this family can offer you. I hold the start of life for you with my inner innocent child; protected, nourished and fed by the same spoon.

Coming back after a time of distrust and disconnection

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-18 16:09:06 UTC

Move from a place of comfort

To moving from a place of belonging

To moving from a place of community

To moving from a place of joy

To moving from a place of physical challenge

To moving from a place of autonomy

To moving from a place of fear

To moving from a place of boundary

To moving from a place of knowledge

To move with trust.

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-21 15:58:52 UTC

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-06-27 10:18:11 UTC

Transferring historical gestures

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:12:45 UTC

How can we hark back to historical framing of female bodies in a postmodern lens, with a new materiality?

Mannerism

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:16:15 UTC

Movement direction to pre-recorded speech

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:26:08 UTC

Pleasure activism

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:28:09 UTC

Using pleasure as a means of liberating the pain in the body.
Finding a method of control in how we dictate our interactions with situations and the experiential outcome.

A mechanical viewing of the internal workings of the body

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:38:16 UTC

Breathe score

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:43:06 UTC

Hair inspired fragment of movement

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:49:58 UTC

Gestural movement with sensations of inside outside

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:50:50 UTC

Emergent form in site specific location with pre-existing lights

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:51:47 UTC

Hair curling voice note

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:55:36 UTC

Materiality of mushrooms

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:57:33 UTC

Notes on pain

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-01 07:58:21 UTC

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-05 10:28:34 UTC

Theatre and its double

P18

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-05 13:42:51 UTC

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-15 18:40:11 UTC

Veins/ hose pipe body

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-15 18:53:59 UTC

Where do you gather evidence of yourself?

mariannawhistlecroft3 — 2024-07-18 12:23:30 UTC

Exposure

Leading

Tricking

Obscurification

Obscure fixation