Spaces: Cultural & physical places, creative space & space/time foldings
Spaces: Cultural and physical places, creative space and space/time foldings
Reappropriating cultural and physical places or increasing the number of spaces inhabited by people with intellectual disability is a key aspect of Restless Dance Company’s work (http://www.restlessdance.org/) . Just as Deleuze & Guattari's (1987, p. 9) principle of asignifying rupture performs a shameless re-appropriation, Restless Dance consistently reterritorialise the politics of the spaces they work in. These acts of reappropriation are inherent in the work of integrated dance theatre. Chance (2001, p.6), former artistic director of Restless, comments on the creation of ‘disability friendly’ creative space:
"I find it interesting to invite young people without a disability to enter a creative space which they do not automatically own because it is being driven by peers with a disability -- integration in a reverse way. For Restless, this approach challenged the idea that young people with a disability want to be more ‘normal’ by copying the dance of people without a disability."
In this quote, Chance explores the reappropriation of cultural and creative space in the rehearsal room. Reappropriation of physical spaces through rehearsal and performance is just as significant a task as the cultural, political and creative reappropriation that Chance describes above.
Spaces created by rehearsal and performance venues are of key importance when rehearsing and performing a piece of dance theatre. Factors such as wheelchair accessibility, adequate space, flooring, mirrored walls and ballet barres all determine what a space ‘speaks of’ and what it holds silent. Perhaps more importantly, what a space speaks of is also a determining factor in the kind of work that happens in it.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome can be considered in relation to Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992) sociological theory of the ‘effects of a field’, as both the effects of a field and the production of a rhizome are performative acts of territorialisation. These performances are context-specific, political reconsiderations of a situation’s possibilities. Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) notion of the ‘field’ is useful when thinking about the significance of spatiality and relationships between labour and space. They (1992, p.100) suggest that:
"...we may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is exercised, so that what happens to any object that traverses this space cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic properties of the object in question. The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease."
As this citation suggests, the concept of the effect(s) of a field is useful when looking at the reterritorialisation of a space as work. Part of Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) conception of the spatial politics of reappropriation includes the construction of capital as an effect of a field. If economies of capital are considered as being the products of traversing a particular terrain, then capital, within Bourdieu’s thought, becomes an effect of a field. Restless can be regarded as a ‘field’ which accords bodies in it ‘with’ intellectual disability more cultural capital than those ‘without’, in a collective movement which constitutes a significant cultural reterritorialisation. This ‘effect of the field’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, p.100) of the Restless aesthetic is always an individual performance. Chance offers an excellent example of the performative nature of the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, an effect which is ultimately a political choice to privilege the styles of people with intellectual disability:
"Performance material is built from dancers’ personal responses to the director’s tasks. At this stage there is a free flow of ideas and possibilities leading, eventually, from the setting of material. The dancers agree on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of the imagery. Sometimes, however, the dancers with a disability make a subtle alteration of spacing or pacing. If the dancers without a disability sustain material which earlier had been ‘right’, then they are wrong, because they need to pay attention to the constant creation and re-creation of the dance" (Chance 2001, p.6).
The political awareness and choice-making which can be considered as an effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, is usually reframed as the production of difference within spaces developed specifically for contemporary dance culture. Dance spaces which are not wheelchair accessible, or which are framed by ballet barres and gymnasium equipment, suggest what dance could be and in so doing, delineate what dance cannot be. Restless rehearsal venues range from community halls and churches to professional dance spaces, depending on space availability and rehearsal requirements. The closer a performance piece comes to completion, the more physical space is required in which to rehearse it, as the performance text gradually increases in size as it is composed.
For people without intellectual disability, such as myself, the economy of work in relation to rehearsal and performance is somewhat reversed. Mediating the support needs of individuals with intellectual disability in spaces with mirrored walls, dance barres and sprung floors is a question of consistently challenging what the space suggests ‘dance’ might be. This involves performing the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, by tuning into the styles and support needs of people with intellectual disability. The effect of the field in rehearsal extends to playing the role of the director at times, in crafting the work of people ‘with’, and also producing and crafting your own work. Movement improvisation, as a creative practice, alongside the principles of mapping and tracing one’s own and other’s choreographic material, are once again evident in these processes of tuning into, dancing with and supporting performers with intellectual disability.
A more practical example of context specific processes of territorialisation can be found in the 2001 Western Australian project entitled Exile. Facilitated by DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia), Exile was a site-specific work developed and performed in a Gothic mansion once known as the Fremantle Asylum[1]. Hayden, the project’s director, discusses the power of re-appropriating cultural space through performance by referring to the Asylum’s history. In the following quotation, the feeling of incarceration that Hayden describes can be thought of as an effect of the field of the Freemantle Arts Centre as a performance space. The rhizomic qualities of reappropriation, creative connection and expansion can be seen in the way Hayden has mobilised the feeling of incarceration, inverted it and incorporated it into the performance text:
"A nice thing about this performance being so site-specific is that, just by the very nature of the environment and the fact that it is a promenade show, there are points where we imagine that the audience will actually experience the feeling of incarceration and scrutiny. So I guess the gaze goes both ways, and that’s always an interesting area for artists and audiences to explore" (Van Sanden 2001, p.13).
The notion that an audience’s gaze is site-specific is conceptually linked to the idea that different performance sites constitute different kinds of work[2]. Across outdoor performance venues, roving street theatre, proscenium arch stages, performers and audiences adjust their roles to fix their context. As such, the work of performers in delivering a text and the work of audience members in reading a text always exist in relation to a specific performance site, a space which inevitably contains certain effects of a field. The performers, as corpus and audience members, can also respectively be considered ‘fields’, often delineated or marked by effects such as the audience clapping at a performance’s conclusion, performers bowing in response to their audience’s applause, and so on.
Creative space is also a key concept in my research methodology and constitutes an important component of my research method. Restless directors are responsible for creating and maintaining a creative space in which Company members can work effectively. The maintenance of creative space is about attending to ensemble dynamics, addressing issues of trust and respect and acknowledging people’s work. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) suggest a field can reach a pathological state, which they liken to a totalitarian regime. In this instance, the effects of the field cease to be performative and cease to constitute a state of play (while they use precisely this term, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) draw a correspondence between the effect of a field and the rules of a game). An illustration of such an annihilation of creative space can be found in the following example taken from my work with Restless.
Working at the Ausdance Youth Dance Festival in Darwin in 1997, Restless performed their major new work for the year, Sex Juggling. After touring regional South Australia and the Northern Territory, working in schools and community centres, the Company arrived in a new performance space, with a day to rehearse before performing as a headlining act of the festival. Negotiating the performance space was a serious challenge, one that was further impacted upon by our director’s exasperation at our dislocation. The Company’s field of play stratified to form the kind of pathological state that Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p.102) suggest is ‘a limit which is never actually reached’. Our work maintained a static quality that veritably took on a disembodied life of its own. The dynamics of the Ensemble became quite dysfunctional. Domino chains of missed cues, spacing errors and anxious performances fed into stratified Body without Organs, an unbound nothingness which consumed the Ensemble’s creative workspaces and deterritorialised the productivity such space engenders. Lack of space and time lead to a creative asphyxiation in which creative flows resisted organ-isation. The once creative Company culture, in which the effects of the field supported people with intellectual disability, was atrophied into an uncomfortable and unsupportive state.
This example illustrates the fact that, in integrated dance theatre, the work of creating and performing a layered, detailed and cohesive show cannot occur in isolation from navigating the cultural politics of working with people with intellectual disability. The role of being a dancer without a disability within Restless is one of constantly mediating the politics of working with people with intellectual disability as colleagues. This involves respecting the power differentials within the situation while creating and performing dance theatre. When the ‘work’ of the dancers without a disability is considered as being purely that of performers, the Company does not work, as performance material grounded in a specific politics becomes totally dislocated from the bodies performing it. The situation in Darwin, described above, is an example of the detrimental effects of over-writing the political nature of Company members’ work in supporting people with intellectual disability. Dancers ‘without’ in Restless work to maintain their own ‘creative space’, as well as that of the dancers ‘with’. I also constantly mediate between the needs of RDC as a whole and my need for creative space with respect to my writing and research.
Dance theatre texts, alongside language-based texts such as this study, are assemblages of space/time foldings. A Restless performance text catalogues months, and at times years, worth of rehearsal work. In a similar fashion, the rehearsal and composition of a performance text collate the embodied histories of an entire ensemble into movement phrases that are repeated until they are etched into the dancers’ embodied minds. A dance theatre text is a space/time folding, just as a movement phrase, and this study, offer compressions of a range of spaces and places into one located text.
The Restless Dance Company practice of considering physique, movement quality and styles of inter-personal relation as sites in which cultures of intellectual disability are located speaks to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of corporeality as a site of transformation and becoming (1987, 1996). Within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, the human body is an effect of its own movements and processes of connection. The body does not precede the flow of time through which it becomes. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we do not begin as fixed subjects who then have to know a fixed world. Rather, they argue that there is experience and from this experience we form an image of ourselves as distinct subjects. All life is a series of ‘foldings’. Every cell, every organism (and the human body) are folds of the milieu of life. Our bodies are the becoming-actual of all our virtual possibility, a limit set in chaos that is a resolution of infinite speeds. Subjectivity is an effect of our processes of becoming. For Restless members, such processes of becoming, of becoming subject, incorporate dance theatre work into a performer’s subjectivity. In this example and when discussing embodiment and embodied subjectivity more broadly through a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, bodies cannot be understood as solely ‘fitting in’ to a mind/body divide, within which the ‘intellectually disabled’ body will always be constructed as an embodied deficit.
Bodies, ultimately the instruments that write dance, are living testimonies to the fact that all texts are a composition of different times. Physical features, such as scars, eye colour and a person’s walk, can function as signifiers of different temporalities and other geographies. People’s histories are primarily embodied, and the histories of people with intellectual disabilities are often solely embodied, their physicality constituting the only sites where their stories are recorded. Dance texts created by people with intellectual disability are therefore unique articulations of their histories, and are in themselves, like all texts, compositions of different times.
The concept of bodies as collections of temporalities allows the practice of integrated dance theatre to be seen as people with intellectual disability theorising their histories and experiences. This is not to say that the concept of corporeality as a collection of temporalities must necessarily play a central role in the lives of individuals with an intellectual disability. Cultural histories of people with intellectual disabilities are lived out through social attitudes, lifestyle options (or lack thereof) and modes of mainstream representation, all of which fold into bodies to create signifiers of histories. Hence the histories and identities of individuals with intellectual disability are specific aspects of these individuals’ embodiment. Points of a body that tell a particular story, such as prostheses, shunts, scars, tattoos, piercings, stretch marks and corporeal brandings of various forms, create different intensities and lines of latitude and longitude across which to read life stories.
I am also concerned with temporality as manifested in the different times that constitute rehearsing and performing dance theatre. Times of rehearsal and performance fold back to compose various elements of this study, as do the different times of writing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.3) theorise books as catalogues of spatio–temporal zones, suggesting that: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.’
As an accordion-like compression of a range of different writing, performing and rehearsing times, the study incorporates different modes of writing, such as journal writing, discussion and analysis, which have taken place across a four year period. I have worked to create a text that embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, p.3) suggestion that a book is a folding of time and space back onto itself.
Interstitial places: embodying issues of inter-textuality
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25).
In a manner akin to the intermezzo position of the rhizome, the RDC methodology consists of a series of interstitial places in which issues written across dance practices, disability politics, choreographic techniques and performance texts are embodied. The first interstitial space created and inhabited by the RDC method is the creative space of devising raw material through movement improvisation.
Movement improvisation can be conceived of as a rhizomic connection between a body and the body’s creative impulse, as acclaimed choreographer, dancer and academic, Leigh Foster (1986, p.194) explains here:
"… the dancers choreographed the dances as they performed them. Members of the company did share a knowledge of certain movements and phrases, material from previous performances … They did not, however, know precisely what they would do at any given moment during performance, and thus their work was endowed with an unusual spontaneity and openness … because the dancers never broke from their attentiveness to the activity of the moment."
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.25) state that making a rhizome is ‘know[ing] how to move between things, [and] establish[ing] a logic of the AND’. This is closely analogous to the practice of movement improvisation which is about performing the logic of the ‘AND’, a connective, interstitial logic. Leigh Foster (1986, p.25) further explains movement improvisation as being
"another way of travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing."
Movement improvisation is often largely a practice of ‘pragmatics’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the sense that it involves being aware of the practicalities of ensemble dynamics. This involves balancing the rehearsal space, and mediating directorial concerns and one’s creative impulses.
The second kind of connective, interstitial space created by the Restless methodology is the Company’s choreographic process. Finding what ‘works’ and ‘does not work’ choreographically involves putting a tracing, or structured text, back on a map, or creative and fluid text (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the respect that firm orders and arrangements are written over improvised material, which is then performed again within the specified structure. This process involves combining the choreographer’s structurally focussed text, concerned with the logic of reproduction, with a more emotively focussed text, concerned with the logic of improvisation. This is a process of on-going mediation that involves the consistent overlaying of structure on free-form movement.
Restless Dance creates a third kind of interstitial space, through establishing connections between audience members and the performance text. This process of connection involves merging histories and experiences of the audience and the performers, in moments of rhizomic connection. Cross cultural theatre practitioner Brook (1968, p.156) describes this process of performer–audience connection in terms of a spatial envelopment, suggesting that in this liminal zone: "[t]he word representation no longer separates an actor and audience, show and public: it envelops them: what is present for one is present for the other." While I am not convinced that what is present for the performer is completely present for the audience per se, I agree with Brook’s argument that performances create spaces of connection between the audience and performers. Audience members make rhizomic connections with a performance text and when the performance text consists of material developed through performer improvisation, the connections are based upon the histories and experiences of both the performers and the audience. A director can craft a text so as to make it particularly ‘readable’, but the forging of connections is a person specific rhizomic experience. All writers ‘write’ themselves into texts, just as readers ‘read’ themselves into texts. However, there are very few texts that people with intellectual disability write themselves into, that are ‘intellectual-disability literate’, and that therefore serve as sites of projection and connection for and about people with intellectual disabilities.
I theorise the Company methodology outlined above as the ‘territory’ (1996, p.183) within which my research is located. I unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘territory’ and ‘habitat’ as they are constructed in What is Philosophy in order to discuss the work of RDC and articulate some connections between Company culture, Company processes and RDC performance material.
From body to house: an analytic re-consideration
The description of Restless Dance as territory undertaken in this section employs the conceptual tools of percept and affect, further outlined in chapter two, to theorise art as a technical skill and a revolutionary act of creation. I describe the Restless methodology as serving to extract material blocs of sensation, or percepts and affects, from a cultural territory.
I begin this section by ‘unpacking’ the ideas of the territory, and the house as a mode of embodiment shaped by lived habits, before distancing this cultural milieu from the process of creating percepts and affects. This distance is necessary in order to theorise the productive capacity of performance work, as what a Restless production ‘does’ is quite different from the way that Company culture works.
Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.183) suggest that ‘the animal … carves out a territory and constructs a house’. As this quotation indicates, the territory and the house exist in close alignment; they are part of the same habitat. A house is constructed upon a given territory. The territory and house form a nexus that is produced by the transformation of life habits, a process of change which is part of the production of ‘sensory qualities’. These sensory qualities, or notes in a territorial refrain, are compressed into a bloc of sensations, forming a plane of composition, which is a ‘compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.164).
Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of territories is inspired, then, by ‘the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.183). As such, the territory and the house exist in close alignment. This is because in being lived habits, the territory and the house are cultural habits, or habitats. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the territory–house is a site in which regulatory or disciplinary functions are often performed (such as sexual practices, thought practices and other lived, organic functions) these regulatory functions also provide the means through which the territory is created. The territory, or house, is a nexus produced through the transformation of habits of life, an alteration that occurs in the production of specific ‘sensory qualities’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183). Deleuze and Guattari describe this production of new sensory qualities as follows:
"transformation does not explain the emergence of territory and house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183).
In the space described above as the territory and house, the sensory becomes ordinal. The production of sensations denotes a territory that is then actively (re)constructed into a ‘house’; a monument that celebrates the sensory as a powerful and productive entity, opening up lines for the production of art:
"This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already in art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory. It is an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).
There are some compelling parallels between expressive sensations as points of entry to a ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) that is identified through its own refrain, or collection of sensations and the production of art via an artistic method, namely the construction of percepts and affects.
An example of this complementary relationship can be drawn from the work of RDC and as such, the notions of territory, habitat and house can be employed to articulate the political, aesthetic and cultural significances of the work of RDC. Restless Ensemble members begin the process of creating art through moving. The tasks the Company director sets for the Ensemble and the way in which the Ensemble responds to these tasks, are always/already part of what eventually becomes a RDC show.
These stages of creative development are also ‘sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184) that reside ‘not only in the treatment of external materials’ (1996, p.184) such as directorial tasks and the conceptual development of the production, but also ‘in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).
This ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) or cultural milieu, is a collection, or compression, of ‘pure sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184), ‘an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) of a particular cultural environment. As the passage quoted above illustrates, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘the refrain’; that which denotes a territory, is ‘already in art’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘art’ is a powerful singularity, an entity that exists upon its own terms, a ‘bloc of sensations’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) that has affective capacity and is composed of sensory affects.
In suggesting that a bloc of sensations has an affective capacity or ordinal power, I am arguing that art has the capacity to re-work a body’s limits, to reconfigure individual arrangements of structure/agency, to augment what a body is or is not able to understand, produce and connect to. As such, creating new senses allows for the construction of new thought. This enhancement of subjective limits is the process I refer to in suggesting that art has the capacity to rework a body’s limits.
I would like to elucidate the differences between a bloc of sensations (a work of art) and a terrain (or cultural habitat). As I have suggested above, the territorial refrain is not art by virtue of its own creation; a collection of bodies moving is not necessarily dance. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996, p.185) terms, the production of art is contingent upon opening up to chaos, a line of deterritorialisation which opens up a territorial refrain (acculturates sensory vocabularies) and connects it to other spaces (rhizome) and other melodies, forming a chorus:
Every territory, every habitat, joins up not only its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections: a posture and a song for example, a song and a colour, percepts and affects. And every territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species, or intercepts the trajectory of animals without territories, forming interspecies junction points (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.185).
These ‘junction points’ (1996, p.185) are created through artistic methods, specific and technical material workings. These practices draw on already acculturated material and craft compounds (blocs) of sensations. These are quite distinct from a general collection of bodies or, for example, an unstructured dance, or the singular bodies and choreographies that are worked together until they pass into a sensation. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that it is artistic method that serves to extract the materiality of art, blocs of sensation, percepts and affects, from a territory. It is this distinction between territory and a bloc of sensations which becomes crucial to theorising the cultural significance of the work of Restless Dance Company. Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.167) illustrate the productive nexus between embodied subjectivities and the production of sensation, through arguing that:
By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition of one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.167).
I now explicate the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of percept and affect offer important opportunities for theorising the work of Restless Dance Company. This discussion of the process or labour of constructing artwork exists only in the context or territory of pre-eminent political and physical labour that constitutes the Company’s very existence. This labour folds in on itself in comprising the territory or habitat of Restless and it is this specific terrain which is crafted and opened out through the production of sensation.
A key aspect of the method of thought proposed by Deleuze and Guattari through the ideas of percept and affect is thinking about a work of art as being an autonomous reality. The miniature universe created in a work of art can perform a pedagogic function, in that it can remain with a viewer and expand their personal capacity after the artwork has been experienced. In suggesting that the viewer or hearer only experiences an artwork “after” it has actually been observed, Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting that art can create and imbue new milieus of sense; new methods for knowing; a new ‘reality’ that in atmosphere and rhythmic flow is unique to its individual consistency.
Elements of difference that are created through art can be retained by the viewer and integrated into what the viewer “is”, what they can or cannot do, how they work as a body. This method of thought focuses not on where the artwork comes from, but where it goes, what its affects are and what it can produce. For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is useful to consider a work of art as being ‘independent’ from its creator, in order to focus upon the future possibilities opened up through the artwork and the ways in which this process of opening up occurs. These methods of thought hinge upon the ideas of percept and affect, and allow me to focus upon the ways in which the work of Restless Dance Company (RDC) creates and presents sensory differences. Ensuing theorisations of the Company’s work, particularly in chapters five and six, explore the technical production of percepts and affects within RDC’s work. As I have suggested above, this process of crafting sensation occurs upon a territory or habitat that in itself requires a substantial amount of labour to produce.
The territory of the Company is the physical, cultural and political spaces it creates and inhabits. It is a field (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) that is defined by specific methods of behaviour and social beliefs. Viewed from a subjective perspective, this field or territory is a habitat, an environment in which the RDC members live. Habitats produce habits, embodied ways of acting and reconstructing one’s own subjectivity. Theorised from the perspective if a specific territory the bodies that populate the cultural landscape in question continually perform and reconstruct a territorial refrain, a collection of embodied habits. A territorial refrain is a multiplicity of embodied ways of acting, feeling and thinking which aligns its actors’ subjectivities in particular ways.
The refrain or multiplicity of embodied actions of RDC constitutes the raw material from which Company choreography is crafted. Choreographic material is then compounded with sound, light, the colours and textures of design and certain spatial locations in order to produce the sensory landscape that is a performance text. The concepts of affect and percept open up opportunities for theorising the ways in which processes of creating sensory landscapes or blocs of sensation occur.
Notes
[1] The Fremantle Arts Centre was known as the Fremantle Asylum from 1864-1909.
[2] For example, a culturally marginalised workspace may engender practical uncertainty regarding its on-going usage and an accompanying labour of hope and trust in order to keep the dance practice alive. AusDance (SA) has recently relocated the primary site for dance work in South Australia, after the Madley Dance Space at Adelaide University was closed down. At the same time, the World Dance Centre, the home of more marginalised dance communities was sold, and the future of leasing arrangements is uncertain. Practitioners displayed great faith in times of uncertainty, in continuing to plan programs for upcoming performance seasons and search for new lodgings.
[3] There are three possible meanings given to the term ‘Body without Organs’ although this is not a concept which can be definitively understood. The first of these is: matter resisting organ-isation. Here the Body without Organs (BwO) is a principle of immanence which has no structure. Desire resists organ – isation because it’s fundamentally anti-hierarchical. Potential meaning number two: immanent possibility. BwO is also the immanent possibility of matter – it’s an egg before any formation has happened yet. It’s unstructured possibility. Here the egg is fertility and freedom. The third meaning is: the outside. As soon as two desiring machines connect, a BwO forms. A BwO is present from the first connection you make and the total BwO is the end of all social connections – it’s the outside of everything. Because the BwO is the ‘outside’ of everything, the unformed mass we can never consume, there are infinite numbers of BwOs. They are constantly forming. Machines cling to BwOs. Here I use BwO in the first sense I have outlined.
References
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 232 - 309.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1996. What is Philosophy? London, Verso.
Kueppers, P 2003 Disability & Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge Routledge,
Reappropriating cultural and physical places or increasing the number of spaces inhabited by people with intellectual disability is a key aspect of Restless Dance Company’s work (http://www.restlessdance.org/) . Just as Deleuze & Guattari's (1987, p. 9) principle of asignifying rupture performs a shameless re-appropriation, Restless Dance consistently reterritorialise the politics of the spaces they work in. These acts of reappropriation are inherent in the work of integrated dance theatre. Chance (2001, p.6), former artistic director of Restless, comments on the creation of ‘disability friendly’ creative space:
"I find it interesting to invite young people without a disability to enter a creative space which they do not automatically own because it is being driven by peers with a disability -- integration in a reverse way. For Restless, this approach challenged the idea that young people with a disability want to be more ‘normal’ by copying the dance of people without a disability."
In this quote, Chance explores the reappropriation of cultural and creative space in the rehearsal room. Reappropriation of physical spaces through rehearsal and performance is just as significant a task as the cultural, political and creative reappropriation that Chance describes above.
Spaces created by rehearsal and performance venues are of key importance when rehearsing and performing a piece of dance theatre. Factors such as wheelchair accessibility, adequate space, flooring, mirrored walls and ballet barres all determine what a space ‘speaks of’ and what it holds silent. Perhaps more importantly, what a space speaks of is also a determining factor in the kind of work that happens in it.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome can be considered in relation to Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992) sociological theory of the ‘effects of a field’, as both the effects of a field and the production of a rhizome are performative acts of territorialisation. These performances are context-specific, political reconsiderations of a situation’s possibilities. Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) notion of the ‘field’ is useful when thinking about the significance of spatiality and relationships between labour and space. They (1992, p.100) suggest that:
"...we may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is exercised, so that what happens to any object that traverses this space cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic properties of the object in question. The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease."
As this citation suggests, the concept of the effect(s) of a field is useful when looking at the reterritorialisation of a space as work. Part of Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) conception of the spatial politics of reappropriation includes the construction of capital as an effect of a field. If economies of capital are considered as being the products of traversing a particular terrain, then capital, within Bourdieu’s thought, becomes an effect of a field. Restless can be regarded as a ‘field’ which accords bodies in it ‘with’ intellectual disability more cultural capital than those ‘without’, in a collective movement which constitutes a significant cultural reterritorialisation. This ‘effect of the field’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, p.100) of the Restless aesthetic is always an individual performance. Chance offers an excellent example of the performative nature of the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, an effect which is ultimately a political choice to privilege the styles of people with intellectual disability:
"Performance material is built from dancers’ personal responses to the director’s tasks. At this stage there is a free flow of ideas and possibilities leading, eventually, from the setting of material. The dancers agree on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of the imagery. Sometimes, however, the dancers with a disability make a subtle alteration of spacing or pacing. If the dancers without a disability sustain material which earlier had been ‘right’, then they are wrong, because they need to pay attention to the constant creation and re-creation of the dance" (Chance 2001, p.6).
The political awareness and choice-making which can be considered as an effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, is usually reframed as the production of difference within spaces developed specifically for contemporary dance culture. Dance spaces which are not wheelchair accessible, or which are framed by ballet barres and gymnasium equipment, suggest what dance could be and in so doing, delineate what dance cannot be. Restless rehearsal venues range from community halls and churches to professional dance spaces, depending on space availability and rehearsal requirements. The closer a performance piece comes to completion, the more physical space is required in which to rehearse it, as the performance text gradually increases in size as it is composed.
For people without intellectual disability, such as myself, the economy of work in relation to rehearsal and performance is somewhat reversed. Mediating the support needs of individuals with intellectual disability in spaces with mirrored walls, dance barres and sprung floors is a question of consistently challenging what the space suggests ‘dance’ might be. This involves performing the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, by tuning into the styles and support needs of people with intellectual disability. The effect of the field in rehearsal extends to playing the role of the director at times, in crafting the work of people ‘with’, and also producing and crafting your own work. Movement improvisation, as a creative practice, alongside the principles of mapping and tracing one’s own and other’s choreographic material, are once again evident in these processes of tuning into, dancing with and supporting performers with intellectual disability.
A more practical example of context specific processes of territorialisation can be found in the 2001 Western Australian project entitled Exile. Facilitated by DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia), Exile was a site-specific work developed and performed in a Gothic mansion once known as the Fremantle Asylum[1]. Hayden, the project’s director, discusses the power of re-appropriating cultural space through performance by referring to the Asylum’s history. In the following quotation, the feeling of incarceration that Hayden describes can be thought of as an effect of the field of the Freemantle Arts Centre as a performance space. The rhizomic qualities of reappropriation, creative connection and expansion can be seen in the way Hayden has mobilised the feeling of incarceration, inverted it and incorporated it into the performance text:
"A nice thing about this performance being so site-specific is that, just by the very nature of the environment and the fact that it is a promenade show, there are points where we imagine that the audience will actually experience the feeling of incarceration and scrutiny. So I guess the gaze goes both ways, and that’s always an interesting area for artists and audiences to explore" (Van Sanden 2001, p.13).
The notion that an audience’s gaze is site-specific is conceptually linked to the idea that different performance sites constitute different kinds of work[2]. Across outdoor performance venues, roving street theatre, proscenium arch stages, performers and audiences adjust their roles to fix their context. As such, the work of performers in delivering a text and the work of audience members in reading a text always exist in relation to a specific performance site, a space which inevitably contains certain effects of a field. The performers, as corpus and audience members, can also respectively be considered ‘fields’, often delineated or marked by effects such as the audience clapping at a performance’s conclusion, performers bowing in response to their audience’s applause, and so on.
Creative space is also a key concept in my research methodology and constitutes an important component of my research method. Restless directors are responsible for creating and maintaining a creative space in which Company members can work effectively. The maintenance of creative space is about attending to ensemble dynamics, addressing issues of trust and respect and acknowledging people’s work. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) suggest a field can reach a pathological state, which they liken to a totalitarian regime. In this instance, the effects of the field cease to be performative and cease to constitute a state of play (while they use precisely this term, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) draw a correspondence between the effect of a field and the rules of a game). An illustration of such an annihilation of creative space can be found in the following example taken from my work with Restless.
Working at the Ausdance Youth Dance Festival in Darwin in 1997, Restless performed their major new work for the year, Sex Juggling. After touring regional South Australia and the Northern Territory, working in schools and community centres, the Company arrived in a new performance space, with a day to rehearse before performing as a headlining act of the festival. Negotiating the performance space was a serious challenge, one that was further impacted upon by our director’s exasperation at our dislocation. The Company’s field of play stratified to form the kind of pathological state that Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p.102) suggest is ‘a limit which is never actually reached’. Our work maintained a static quality that veritably took on a disembodied life of its own. The dynamics of the Ensemble became quite dysfunctional. Domino chains of missed cues, spacing errors and anxious performances fed into stratified Body without Organs, an unbound nothingness which consumed the Ensemble’s creative workspaces and deterritorialised the productivity such space engenders. Lack of space and time lead to a creative asphyxiation in which creative flows resisted organ-isation. The once creative Company culture, in which the effects of the field supported people with intellectual disability, was atrophied into an uncomfortable and unsupportive state.
This example illustrates the fact that, in integrated dance theatre, the work of creating and performing a layered, detailed and cohesive show cannot occur in isolation from navigating the cultural politics of working with people with intellectual disability. The role of being a dancer without a disability within Restless is one of constantly mediating the politics of working with people with intellectual disability as colleagues. This involves respecting the power differentials within the situation while creating and performing dance theatre. When the ‘work’ of the dancers without a disability is considered as being purely that of performers, the Company does not work, as performance material grounded in a specific politics becomes totally dislocated from the bodies performing it. The situation in Darwin, described above, is an example of the detrimental effects of over-writing the political nature of Company members’ work in supporting people with intellectual disability. Dancers ‘without’ in Restless work to maintain their own ‘creative space’, as well as that of the dancers ‘with’. I also constantly mediate between the needs of RDC as a whole and my need for creative space with respect to my writing and research.
Dance theatre texts, alongside language-based texts such as this study, are assemblages of space/time foldings. A Restless performance text catalogues months, and at times years, worth of rehearsal work. In a similar fashion, the rehearsal and composition of a performance text collate the embodied histories of an entire ensemble into movement phrases that are repeated until they are etched into the dancers’ embodied minds. A dance theatre text is a space/time folding, just as a movement phrase, and this study, offer compressions of a range of spaces and places into one located text.
The Restless Dance Company practice of considering physique, movement quality and styles of inter-personal relation as sites in which cultures of intellectual disability are located speaks to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of corporeality as a site of transformation and becoming (1987, 1996). Within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, the human body is an effect of its own movements and processes of connection. The body does not precede the flow of time through which it becomes. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we do not begin as fixed subjects who then have to know a fixed world. Rather, they argue that there is experience and from this experience we form an image of ourselves as distinct subjects. All life is a series of ‘foldings’. Every cell, every organism (and the human body) are folds of the milieu of life. Our bodies are the becoming-actual of all our virtual possibility, a limit set in chaos that is a resolution of infinite speeds. Subjectivity is an effect of our processes of becoming. For Restless members, such processes of becoming, of becoming subject, incorporate dance theatre work into a performer’s subjectivity. In this example and when discussing embodiment and embodied subjectivity more broadly through a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, bodies cannot be understood as solely ‘fitting in’ to a mind/body divide, within which the ‘intellectually disabled’ body will always be constructed as an embodied deficit.
Bodies, ultimately the instruments that write dance, are living testimonies to the fact that all texts are a composition of different times. Physical features, such as scars, eye colour and a person’s walk, can function as signifiers of different temporalities and other geographies. People’s histories are primarily embodied, and the histories of people with intellectual disabilities are often solely embodied, their physicality constituting the only sites where their stories are recorded. Dance texts created by people with intellectual disability are therefore unique articulations of their histories, and are in themselves, like all texts, compositions of different times.
The concept of bodies as collections of temporalities allows the practice of integrated dance theatre to be seen as people with intellectual disability theorising their histories and experiences. This is not to say that the concept of corporeality as a collection of temporalities must necessarily play a central role in the lives of individuals with an intellectual disability. Cultural histories of people with intellectual disabilities are lived out through social attitudes, lifestyle options (or lack thereof) and modes of mainstream representation, all of which fold into bodies to create signifiers of histories. Hence the histories and identities of individuals with intellectual disability are specific aspects of these individuals’ embodiment. Points of a body that tell a particular story, such as prostheses, shunts, scars, tattoos, piercings, stretch marks and corporeal brandings of various forms, create different intensities and lines of latitude and longitude across which to read life stories.
I am also concerned with temporality as manifested in the different times that constitute rehearsing and performing dance theatre. Times of rehearsal and performance fold back to compose various elements of this study, as do the different times of writing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.3) theorise books as catalogues of spatio–temporal zones, suggesting that: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.’
As an accordion-like compression of a range of different writing, performing and rehearsing times, the study incorporates different modes of writing, such as journal writing, discussion and analysis, which have taken place across a four year period. I have worked to create a text that embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, p.3) suggestion that a book is a folding of time and space back onto itself.
Interstitial places: embodying issues of inter-textuality
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25).
In a manner akin to the intermezzo position of the rhizome, the RDC methodology consists of a series of interstitial places in which issues written across dance practices, disability politics, choreographic techniques and performance texts are embodied. The first interstitial space created and inhabited by the RDC method is the creative space of devising raw material through movement improvisation.
Movement improvisation can be conceived of as a rhizomic connection between a body and the body’s creative impulse, as acclaimed choreographer, dancer and academic, Leigh Foster (1986, p.194) explains here:
"… the dancers choreographed the dances as they performed them. Members of the company did share a knowledge of certain movements and phrases, material from previous performances … They did not, however, know precisely what they would do at any given moment during performance, and thus their work was endowed with an unusual spontaneity and openness … because the dancers never broke from their attentiveness to the activity of the moment."
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.25) state that making a rhizome is ‘know[ing] how to move between things, [and] establish[ing] a logic of the AND’. This is closely analogous to the practice of movement improvisation which is about performing the logic of the ‘AND’, a connective, interstitial logic. Leigh Foster (1986, p.25) further explains movement improvisation as being
"another way of travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing."
Movement improvisation is often largely a practice of ‘pragmatics’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the sense that it involves being aware of the practicalities of ensemble dynamics. This involves balancing the rehearsal space, and mediating directorial concerns and one’s creative impulses.
The second kind of connective, interstitial space created by the Restless methodology is the Company’s choreographic process. Finding what ‘works’ and ‘does not work’ choreographically involves putting a tracing, or structured text, back on a map, or creative and fluid text (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the respect that firm orders and arrangements are written over improvised material, which is then performed again within the specified structure. This process involves combining the choreographer’s structurally focussed text, concerned with the logic of reproduction, with a more emotively focussed text, concerned with the logic of improvisation. This is a process of on-going mediation that involves the consistent overlaying of structure on free-form movement.
Restless Dance creates a third kind of interstitial space, through establishing connections between audience members and the performance text. This process of connection involves merging histories and experiences of the audience and the performers, in moments of rhizomic connection. Cross cultural theatre practitioner Brook (1968, p.156) describes this process of performer–audience connection in terms of a spatial envelopment, suggesting that in this liminal zone: "[t]he word representation no longer separates an actor and audience, show and public: it envelops them: what is present for one is present for the other." While I am not convinced that what is present for the performer is completely present for the audience per se, I agree with Brook’s argument that performances create spaces of connection between the audience and performers. Audience members make rhizomic connections with a performance text and when the performance text consists of material developed through performer improvisation, the connections are based upon the histories and experiences of both the performers and the audience. A director can craft a text so as to make it particularly ‘readable’, but the forging of connections is a person specific rhizomic experience. All writers ‘write’ themselves into texts, just as readers ‘read’ themselves into texts. However, there are very few texts that people with intellectual disability write themselves into, that are ‘intellectual-disability literate’, and that therefore serve as sites of projection and connection for and about people with intellectual disabilities.
I theorise the Company methodology outlined above as the ‘territory’ (1996, p.183) within which my research is located. I unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘territory’ and ‘habitat’ as they are constructed in What is Philosophy in order to discuss the work of RDC and articulate some connections between Company culture, Company processes and RDC performance material.
From body to house: an analytic re-consideration
The description of Restless Dance as territory undertaken in this section employs the conceptual tools of percept and affect, further outlined in chapter two, to theorise art as a technical skill and a revolutionary act of creation. I describe the Restless methodology as serving to extract material blocs of sensation, or percepts and affects, from a cultural territory.
I begin this section by ‘unpacking’ the ideas of the territory, and the house as a mode of embodiment shaped by lived habits, before distancing this cultural milieu from the process of creating percepts and affects. This distance is necessary in order to theorise the productive capacity of performance work, as what a Restless production ‘does’ is quite different from the way that Company culture works.
Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.183) suggest that ‘the animal … carves out a territory and constructs a house’. As this quotation indicates, the territory and the house exist in close alignment; they are part of the same habitat. A house is constructed upon a given territory. The territory and house form a nexus that is produced by the transformation of life habits, a process of change which is part of the production of ‘sensory qualities’. These sensory qualities, or notes in a territorial refrain, are compressed into a bloc of sensations, forming a plane of composition, which is a ‘compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.164).
Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of territories is inspired, then, by ‘the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.183). As such, the territory and the house exist in close alignment. This is because in being lived habits, the territory and the house are cultural habits, or habitats. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the territory–house is a site in which regulatory or disciplinary functions are often performed (such as sexual practices, thought practices and other lived, organic functions) these regulatory functions also provide the means through which the territory is created. The territory, or house, is a nexus produced through the transformation of habits of life, an alteration that occurs in the production of specific ‘sensory qualities’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183). Deleuze and Guattari describe this production of new sensory qualities as follows:
"transformation does not explain the emergence of territory and house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183).
In the space described above as the territory and house, the sensory becomes ordinal. The production of sensations denotes a territory that is then actively (re)constructed into a ‘house’; a monument that celebrates the sensory as a powerful and productive entity, opening up lines for the production of art:
"This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already in art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory. It is an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).
There are some compelling parallels between expressive sensations as points of entry to a ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) that is identified through its own refrain, or collection of sensations and the production of art via an artistic method, namely the construction of percepts and affects.
An example of this complementary relationship can be drawn from the work of RDC and as such, the notions of territory, habitat and house can be employed to articulate the political, aesthetic and cultural significances of the work of RDC. Restless Ensemble members begin the process of creating art through moving. The tasks the Company director sets for the Ensemble and the way in which the Ensemble responds to these tasks, are always/already part of what eventually becomes a RDC show.
These stages of creative development are also ‘sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184) that reside ‘not only in the treatment of external materials’ (1996, p.184) such as directorial tasks and the conceptual development of the production, but also ‘in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).
This ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) or cultural milieu, is a collection, or compression, of ‘pure sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184), ‘an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) of a particular cultural environment. As the passage quoted above illustrates, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘the refrain’; that which denotes a territory, is ‘already in art’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘art’ is a powerful singularity, an entity that exists upon its own terms, a ‘bloc of sensations’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) that has affective capacity and is composed of sensory affects.
In suggesting that a bloc of sensations has an affective capacity or ordinal power, I am arguing that art has the capacity to re-work a body’s limits, to reconfigure individual arrangements of structure/agency, to augment what a body is or is not able to understand, produce and connect to. As such, creating new senses allows for the construction of new thought. This enhancement of subjective limits is the process I refer to in suggesting that art has the capacity to rework a body’s limits.
I would like to elucidate the differences between a bloc of sensations (a work of art) and a terrain (or cultural habitat). As I have suggested above, the territorial refrain is not art by virtue of its own creation; a collection of bodies moving is not necessarily dance. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996, p.185) terms, the production of art is contingent upon opening up to chaos, a line of deterritorialisation which opens up a territorial refrain (acculturates sensory vocabularies) and connects it to other spaces (rhizome) and other melodies, forming a chorus:
Every territory, every habitat, joins up not only its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections: a posture and a song for example, a song and a colour, percepts and affects. And every territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species, or intercepts the trajectory of animals without territories, forming interspecies junction points (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.185).
These ‘junction points’ (1996, p.185) are created through artistic methods, specific and technical material workings. These practices draw on already acculturated material and craft compounds (blocs) of sensations. These are quite distinct from a general collection of bodies or, for example, an unstructured dance, or the singular bodies and choreographies that are worked together until they pass into a sensation. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that it is artistic method that serves to extract the materiality of art, blocs of sensation, percepts and affects, from a territory. It is this distinction between territory and a bloc of sensations which becomes crucial to theorising the cultural significance of the work of Restless Dance Company. Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.167) illustrate the productive nexus between embodied subjectivities and the production of sensation, through arguing that:
By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition of one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.167).
I now explicate the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of percept and affect offer important opportunities for theorising the work of Restless Dance Company. This discussion of the process or labour of constructing artwork exists only in the context or territory of pre-eminent political and physical labour that constitutes the Company’s very existence. This labour folds in on itself in comprising the territory or habitat of Restless and it is this specific terrain which is crafted and opened out through the production of sensation.
A key aspect of the method of thought proposed by Deleuze and Guattari through the ideas of percept and affect is thinking about a work of art as being an autonomous reality. The miniature universe created in a work of art can perform a pedagogic function, in that it can remain with a viewer and expand their personal capacity after the artwork has been experienced. In suggesting that the viewer or hearer only experiences an artwork “after” it has actually been observed, Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting that art can create and imbue new milieus of sense; new methods for knowing; a new ‘reality’ that in atmosphere and rhythmic flow is unique to its individual consistency.
Elements of difference that are created through art can be retained by the viewer and integrated into what the viewer “is”, what they can or cannot do, how they work as a body. This method of thought focuses not on where the artwork comes from, but where it goes, what its affects are and what it can produce. For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is useful to consider a work of art as being ‘independent’ from its creator, in order to focus upon the future possibilities opened up through the artwork and the ways in which this process of opening up occurs. These methods of thought hinge upon the ideas of percept and affect, and allow me to focus upon the ways in which the work of Restless Dance Company (RDC) creates and presents sensory differences. Ensuing theorisations of the Company’s work, particularly in chapters five and six, explore the technical production of percepts and affects within RDC’s work. As I have suggested above, this process of crafting sensation occurs upon a territory or habitat that in itself requires a substantial amount of labour to produce.
The territory of the Company is the physical, cultural and political spaces it creates and inhabits. It is a field (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) that is defined by specific methods of behaviour and social beliefs. Viewed from a subjective perspective, this field or territory is a habitat, an environment in which the RDC members live. Habitats produce habits, embodied ways of acting and reconstructing one’s own subjectivity. Theorised from the perspective if a specific territory the bodies that populate the cultural landscape in question continually perform and reconstruct a territorial refrain, a collection of embodied habits. A territorial refrain is a multiplicity of embodied ways of acting, feeling and thinking which aligns its actors’ subjectivities in particular ways.
The refrain or multiplicity of embodied actions of RDC constitutes the raw material from which Company choreography is crafted. Choreographic material is then compounded with sound, light, the colours and textures of design and certain spatial locations in order to produce the sensory landscape that is a performance text. The concepts of affect and percept open up opportunities for theorising the ways in which processes of creating sensory landscapes or blocs of sensation occur.
Notes
[1] The Fremantle Arts Centre was known as the Fremantle Asylum from 1864-1909.
[2] For example, a culturally marginalised workspace may engender practical uncertainty regarding its on-going usage and an accompanying labour of hope and trust in order to keep the dance practice alive. AusDance (SA) has recently relocated the primary site for dance work in South Australia, after the Madley Dance Space at Adelaide University was closed down. At the same time, the World Dance Centre, the home of more marginalised dance communities was sold, and the future of leasing arrangements is uncertain. Practitioners displayed great faith in times of uncertainty, in continuing to plan programs for upcoming performance seasons and search for new lodgings.
[3] There are three possible meanings given to the term ‘Body without Organs’ although this is not a concept which can be definitively understood. The first of these is: matter resisting organ-isation. Here the Body without Organs (BwO) is a principle of immanence which has no structure. Desire resists organ – isation because it’s fundamentally anti-hierarchical. Potential meaning number two: immanent possibility. BwO is also the immanent possibility of matter – it’s an egg before any formation has happened yet. It’s unstructured possibility. Here the egg is fertility and freedom. The third meaning is: the outside. As soon as two desiring machines connect, a BwO forms. A BwO is present from the first connection you make and the total BwO is the end of all social connections – it’s the outside of everything. Because the BwO is the ‘outside’ of everything, the unformed mass we can never consume, there are infinite numbers of BwOs. They are constantly forming. Machines cling to BwOs. Here I use BwO in the first sense I have outlined.
References
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 232 - 309.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1996. What is Philosophy? London, Verso.
Kueppers, P 2003 Disability & Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge Routledge,
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