Embodying emotion:
where do we feel it?
On
Wednesday 3rd
June 2015, I performed Myrrha,
with Malcolm Atkins playing live, at the Body and Being Network's
event 'Embodying Emotion' at St. Hilda's College, University of
Oxford, on the kind invitation of co-conveners Karin Eli
(University of Oxford) and Anna Lavis
(University of Birmingham).
The
Body and Being Network is a research initiative that aims to
develop innovative interdisciplinary dialogues about the body. It supports collaborative encounters between scholars and
performing artists, and challenges participants to develop analyses
that involve their own embodied experiences. 'Embodying emotion'
aimed to explore a range of questions about the embodied expression
of emotion. Where does emotion reside? How do we share it? To whom
does it belong? Our performance of Myrrha would act as a
springboard for further discussion of these and other questions such
as, why use a mask when conveying emotion? Where is emotion located?
Where is it held? Where does it come from and what boundaries
does it cross? Who shares in emotion?
More than anything,
during this event, I was struck by the notion of performance as a
shared experience of emotion between character, performer and
spectator. Last Wednesday's spectators were in fact, to borrow
Augusto Boal's term, 'spect-actors', responding to our performance in
a rich exchange of emotions. In the generous discussion that followed
our performance, audience members revealed how they physically 'felt'
the performance : as tension in the neck and arms, or of being drawn
forward from their seats so much so that they wanted to 'leap' into
the performance space to save the harrowing drama from taking place,
or in 'feeling' the weight of Myrrha's emotion – the burden in her
viscera, the burden in her womb. I realised that Myrrha is
indeed a visceral piece in the truest sense of the word.
We spoke too of the
resonance of emotion in the body, the resonance of sound, music,
text, and feeling, of how emotional energy resonates through the
body. With each character I play, I deliberately start work by
choosing an energy source that is clearly located in some specific
part of the body from which a character's energy radiates out. It is
this energy source located in that centre that leads the rest of the
body through space. Emotion is not excluded from this process but is
at its very core: I try to make an emotional as well as physical
commitment to that centre. Myrrha's centre is unsurprisingly located
in her womb – and it was interesting to hear the audience say,
without knowing about my process of working from movement centres,
that they felt the energy of the performance resonate in their
viscera too.
However, the fact that
I perform Myrrha with the neutral mask means a constant negotiation
back and forth between this off-balance centre to the neutral,
'centred' body. So, why use this mask when conveying emotion? The
neutral mask has no expression which means it is capable of every
expression. It depersonalises (what Peter Brook calls that 'sense of
liberation when liberated from your own subjectivity') and
essentialises the wearer – you discover what is uniquely you. The
neutral mask is not designed to be performative, but I have
increasingly felt that for Myrrha, it works. Denied of emotion
to be read in facial expressions, the mask puts the emphasis on the
embodiment of emotion in different parts of the body, which
paradoxically seems to make audience 'see' a range of emotions
flicker across the masks face – passion, shame, despair, Myrrha's
first and only smile at her newborn child – even though these
facial expressions cannot, in reality, actually be there. As well as
revealing the extreme (someone described it as 'alien') physicality
of the piece, the mask also expresses Myrrha's very human
vulnerability. I have tried to play Myrrha without the mask in
rehearsal and when I did, I felt very vulnerable as a performer: in
putting on the mask, I am able to let go of my own (the performer's)
vulnerability and allow the character to be vulnerable.
Interestingly, to this
audience made up not only of classicists, but of anthropologists,
medics, dance therapists and neuroscientists, we performed the piece
without giving any prior synopsis of the story. This was partly
because Mal and I were keen to use the experience as an experiment to
see how much of the narrative was 'readable' on its own, with the
newly added layers of text recited in both Latin and English which
are now part of the score. What was interesting in the discussion
afterwards was that those who didn't know the story beforehand
responded with key 'things' that they had seen which were all linked
to an recognition of the emotional states played out. They claimed to
have seen (forbidden) passion, shame, despair, a pregnancy, birth,
maternity – in fact, they had pretty much seen the whole story. The
audience recognised and responded to everything that is human
emotion in this piece. The only thing that was not immediately
'readable' to them was Myrrha's transformation into something
inhuman, the tree. And yet one audience member described this moment
as a death. The way in which I have worked in this section on the
embodiment of the material in the physical (blood turning to sap,
marrow hardening, bone turning to wood) rather than on the emotional
content / playing a state, as I do throughout the rest of the piece,
then reads as death, which I suppose in one way it is...It is
Myrrha's letting go of human life, her resignation, sinking into
the wood as it rises to meet her...
Sketches
of Myrrha reproduced
by kind permission of the artist Imogen Foxell.
