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The idea that performance work is based on a “vocabulary” of movements or gestures may be useful in some contexts but is also problematic and fundamentally misleading.

Technique is not language. Technique shares some similarities with language, but using language as a metaphor for embodied technique (as many people do) leaves out a huge aspect of technique and collapses the essential differences between performance and writing.

I am not blind to the advantages of the language metaphor and I think I can see why so many theorists (and even artists) have described their work with living bodies in terms of vocabulary, signs, and text. But like any metaphor, this only goes so far.

Language is a specific area of embodied practice. The essential power of language is that it is physically easy to produce very complex differentiations in symbolic meaning. In other words, a very small difference in embodiment produces a very large difference in signification. This is the defining feature of language and what makes it so powerful.

Embodied technique can be said to “signify” in a related way, but there is a huge and crucial difference in that the actual physical production of the signs varies tremendously on a material level.

Illustration: It is not more physically difficult to say the words “ten feet” than to say the words “ten miles.” It is simply a question of moving the lips and tongue in a slightly different way. Anyone who can say “ten feet” can also say “ten miles.” This is why those phrases can be called “signs” or “words” in a “vocabulary.” Precisely because they are easy to produce.

The difference between running ten feet and running ten miles is of a completely different order. Not everyone who can run ten feet can run ten miles. Furthermore, a dance in which a performer runs ten feet is completely different from one in which a performer runs ten miles, not just at the level of “signs” or “text” but also at the level of material reality, the body of the performer, the training and stamina required, the experience of the action, and the physiological results.

This is an elementary example. But the performing arts is fundamentally based on hundreds of details of embodied practice that are much more physically demanding, and physically demanding in different ways, than the articulation or writing down of words. The metaphor of language reveals a certain aspect of embodied practice, its symbolic aspect, but it is absolutely unable to account for all those aspects that have to do precisely with the materiality of embodiment.

Language may be a type of embodied technique, but embodied techniques do not fall within the purview of language.

Ben Spatz
Artistic Director
Urban Research Theater
MR-AIR 2010-2012

Tomorrow is the symposium on Masculinity and Embodied Practice. Apart from a problem with the digital projector, everything is going smoothly, and I am looking forward to an extremely interesting set of paper, presentations, and performances.

In my academic work, I am trying to re-theorize “technique” as something much deeper and more complicated than is usually assumed. Given how fundamental technique is in the performing arts, it is surprising how little it has been theorized. As far as I know, Foucault is the only major theorist to have written extensively on bodily techniques, and that from a perspective of domination and social networks of power rather than on the craft developed by practitioners of embodied forms.

A word, then, about masculinity as technique.

Let us compare masculinity with ballet. There are many iconic images of ballet, but ballet is not fundamentally an image. Nor is it fundamentally a language, even though some aspects of ballet seem to work like semiotics. Once upon a time, in Euro culture, ballet was dance and dance was ballet. Ballet, then, is the name for what people used to do when they danced. It also names a complex legacy of teachers and students, performers and choreographers, painters and royalty.

What if masculinity is not a single role or image, not a biological category, and not a universal signifier… but rather, like ballet, a powerful historical and formerly hegemonic lineage of embodied technique?

Ben Spatz
Artistic Director
Urban Research Theater
MR-AIR 2010-2012

intensity
that the body on stage is a different body. that rhythm on stage is a different rhythm. basic principle of performance: that it must be of interest, it must entertain. always something more, something different. not real life. not the mundane. not boring.

transparency
that the body on stage is the performer’s body. that rhythm on stage is the rhythm of that individual in that moment. the performance is life. it may be of interest, it may entertain, it may be mundane, it may be boring. honesty. truth. performance as an embodied practice. done simply in order to do.

This is a question we are working on now in Play/War. Is there a baseline of energetic intensity or hyper-presence below which the performer onstage must not fall? Or are there moments within a virtuosic performance structure when the actual mundane body of the performer can be allowed to appear?

In the past few days we have been exploring a kind of middle zone: Avoiding both the hyper-contrast of “show mode” (almost cinematic in its cuts and edits and discontinuities) and the hypo-kinetics of “plain old Ben and Max” (not cinema, not even theater, just a kind of blink, stop, and we-are-just-a-group-of-people-in-a-room, and then, simply, “the artists are present“).

In this middle zone, a new level of genuine contact suddenly seems possible between the two of us in the act of performing. I wonder if, as time goes by, this contact may extend further into the extremes of intensity and transparency, risking boredom and overstimulation, but perhaps making possible an even more full event to be seen…

Ben Spatz
Artistic Director
Urban Research Theater
MR-AIR 2010-2012