Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts.

240 Pages·2010·6.38 MB·English

by  Markus Hallensleben

Performative Body Spaces
Corporeal Topographies in Literature,
Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts
Critical Studies
Vol. 33

General Editor
Myriam Diocaretz
Tilburg University
Editorial Board
Anne E. Berger, Cornell University
Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University
Marta Segarra, Universitat de Barcelona
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Performative Body Spaces
Corporeal Topographies in Literature,
Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts
Edited by
Markus Hallensleben
Cover Design: Pier Post and Anthony Incardona
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3193-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3194-4
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Acknowledgements
The scope of the international and interdisciplinary workshop Body Spaces:
Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance and the Visual Arts,
which took place at the Liu Institute and the Dorothy Somerset Studio Thea-
tre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, on March
14-16, 2008, was much wider than this volume suggests. Generous grants
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) and from the UBC Hampton Research Fund made it possible to
invite more than forty experts from Canada, the USA, Germany and Japan,
including graduate students and performers, all together representing ten dif-
ferent fields. I am also grateful to all UBC units that supported the workshop,
especially the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
(CENES), the School of Human Kinetics, the Women’s and Gender Studies
Programmes, and UBC Theatre.
The only international guest speaker whose presentation on “Health,
Wealth and Stealth: Exploring the Intercultural Body through Kyôgen and
Commedia dell'Arte” could not be included in this volume is Carol Fisher
Sorgenfrei (UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television) due to her re-
search and theatre project still being in progress. Regrettably, two invitees,
Susan Kozel (SMARTlab, University of East London, U.K.) and Lucia
Ruprecht (Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, U.K.), whose work
inspired the workshop theme (see the works consulted list at the end of my
introduction), had to cancel their presentations for personal reasons. I am
especially thankful to Sharalyn Orbaugh (Asian Studies, UBC) and Patricia
Vertinsky (Human Kinetics, UBC) for their feedback and support in organ-
izing the workshop, as well as for their stimulating presentations (see
Orbaugh 250-54).
The full workshop programme can be found on the project website
<http://project.arts.ubc.ca/bodyspaces/>, which was developed by former
UBC graduate student Christian Langenegger, who, together with Nicolas
Keßels, was also responsible for the technical equipment. The UBC Theatre
department provided further support for the two evening performances under
the technical management of Jay Henrickson, with Carmen Alatore, Marijka
Brusse, Ben Feagin, Lauchlin Johnston and Jay Taylor as technical assistants.
Henry Daniel’s performance Touched was a co-production with the School
for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and supported by the Iris
Garland Visiting Choreographers Fund, Robert Gardiner’s SSHRC Research/
Creation Grant at UBC and Henry Daniel’s Canada Council/NSERC New
Media Grant. Henriette Baur contributed the layout for the workshop pro-
gramme. Anthony Incardona thankfully did the graphic design of the work-
shop poster, which also became the volume cover.
6 Acknowledgements
I also have to thank the professional performers and choreographers
Cathy Burnett, Colleen Lanki, Julia Nolan (saxophon), Robert Pritchard,
Henry Daniel, Dawn Stoppiello and Mark Coniglio (Troika Ranch, New
York, NY), who were able to successfully embody some of the theories dis-
cussed. The concept of bringing performers and scholars together was made
complete by the participation of numerous UBC and SFU theatre and dance
students. Without them, the body of scholars would have been half as im-
pressive.
Although I sign as sole editor, the publication of this volume owes a
great deal to work done by others. My special thank goes to my research as-
sistants and workshop co-organizers Ingrid Petro and Jeremy Redlich. This
book would have been impossible without their great effort and without
Jeremy’s continuous editorial assistance. I also have to thank my colleague
and workshop participant Sigrid Schade for valuable comments on the intro-
duction, as well as Staci von Boeckmann and Stephen Starck, Munich, Ger-
many, for proofreading all articles and creating the index. Esther Roth, her
colleagues from Rodopi and the editors of the Critical Studies series have
been of great help in bringing the volume to print.
Last but not least my warmest thank-yous go to Christa Rathje as
former administrative assistant of the Department of Central, Eastern and
Northern European Studies at UBC and especially to Thomas Salumets as
department head, who has supported this project without any questions from
the very beginning. I also wish to include all my family, friends and col-
leagues from Canada, the U.S., Germany and Japan, who helped to bring the
project forward in countless conversations and discussions, some dating as
far back as a whole decade ago, when I was working at the University of
Tokyo and was a member of two multi-disciplinary research groups on the
transcultural themes Literary Representation and “Body” in German Litera-
ture (principal investigator Yoshihiko Hirano, University of Tokyo) and
Figuration (Gakushuin University, Tokyo; see Onuki and Pekar). A list of all
names would be simply too long, but I want to express my special gratitude
to my wife Judy Venable, Gaby Pailer and Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
(Dept. of CENES, UBC), Sneja Gunew (Dept. of English, UBC), Doug
Brown (University of Calgary), Gabriele Brandstetter (FU Berlin), Gerhard
Neumann (LMU Munich), Inca and Rainer Rumold (DePaul University,
Chicago, IL, and Northwestern University, Evanston, IL).
The book is dedicated to my daughter Gina Juliana, who was born in
2006 and has extended her space for the same time as the project has grown.
Markus Hallensleben
Vancouver B.C., Canada / Freiburg i. Br., Germany
Table of Contents

Introduction: Performative Body Spaces (Markus Hallensleben) 9

I. Biopolitical Choreographies:
Performing the Body as Racial and Political Space
1. Metaphors of Dancing and the Human Body in Nazi
Concentration Camps (Bożena Karwowska) 31
2. From Dance under the Swastika to Movement Education:
A Study of Embodied Culture (Patricia Vertinsky) 43
3. Political Body Spaces in the Performances of William
Forsythe (Gabriele Brandstetter) 57
4. Reading Skin Signs: Decoding Skin as the Fluid Boundary
between Self and Other in Yoko Tawada
(Jeremy Redlich) 75

II. Transcultural Topographies:
Transgressing the Body as Gendered and Cultural Space
1. The Body in Space: Layers of Gender in Japanese
Classical Dance (Colleen Lanki) 91
2. Counter-Narrativity and Corporeality in Kishida Rio’s Ito
Jigoku (Yasuko Ikeuchi) 105
3. The Absence of Voices in the Theatre Space: Ku Nauka’s
Production of Medea (Eiichiro Hirata) 117
4. Staging Culture – Staging Nature: Polynesian
Performance as Nature and Nature as Performance in
Hawaii (Sabine Wilke) 131
III. Corporeal Mediations:
Visualizing the Body as Private and Public Space
1. Moving through Fashion in Nineteenth-Century France
(Sima Godfrey) 143
2. Reading Bodies: Female Secrecy and Sexuality in the
Works of Renoir and Degas (Kathryn Brown) 157
3. Corporeal Topographies of the Image Zone: From Oskar
Kokoschka’s Murder of Metaphor to Georges Bataille’s
acéphale (Rainer Rumold) 169
4. Somatechnics and Makeover Reality TV: The Symbiotic
Viewer/Participant Relationship (Beth Pentney) 185

IV. Controlled Interfaces:
Imaging the Body as Research Object and Artistic Space
1. The Body as Object: From Body Image to Meta-Body
(Robert Pritchard) 203
2. Touched: Organization, Control and Emergence in
Choreographed Performance Systems (Henry Daniel) 217

List of Contributors 233
Index 239
Introduction:
Performative Body Spaces
Markus Hallensleben
I
The performer functions as an activator/
manipulator of the space and its objects,
almost machine-like and as a completing
particle of the installation metaphor. The
changes in the space and the traces left are
what describes the essence of life.
(Penelope Wehrli, New York 1986)
In medical terms, the alterability of the human body has never been easier to
achieve than today, and in postmodern societies we have long since cast aside
the religious taboo against altering the body. Thus we have lost the anthro-
pological and anthropocentric signifier that the body used to be, and the
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, among others, has seen the human body
“disappear.” Therefore, if we neither own our body nor control it, if our cul-
tural identities, as humans, as ethnic groups, as gendered beings, are con-
stantly in flux, the movement of the body in social spaces then becomes a
central category, not only in the sciences, but also in the humanities, and es-
pecially in gender, performance, theatre, dance and literary studies.
At the same time, while the (living) human body has finally lost its
integrity, the artist’s body has become part of the artwork and thus part of
public space. After the invention of the X-ray the Futurists no longer believed
in the “opacity of bodies” (Boccioni et al. 150). In their first manifesto, they
consequently put the “spectator in the centre of the picture” (151) by with-
drawing the opaque line between their own bodies, the artwork and the
viewer’s perspective; and when the first human made it safely back from or-
bit, the French avant-gardist Yves Klein staged his body as a living sculpture
(Un homme dans l’espace! Le peintre de l’espace se jette dans le vide!).
More recent post-avant-garde body artists, such as the Australian body artist
Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), who extends his body as a cyborg-like media tool,
have taken up the idea of performing the human body in and as political
space, as in Stelarc’s City Suspension performance in Copenhagen on 28
June 1985 when he connected hooks to his skin and was suspended over the
Royal Theatre. Later Stelarc went even further and declared the human body
(Leib, zoē) “obsolete.” In the meantime transcultural and interdisciplinary