Embodying emotion: where do we feel it?

Embodying emotion: where do we feel it?

On Wednesday 3^rd 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.

Imogen is an Oxford-based lexicographer, classicist and artist: www.imogenfoxell.com

Disantiquating Antiquity

[reposted from http://dancingconvolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/disantiquating-antiquity.html]

It all started with a call for dancers to participate in an academic project from the University of Oxford in May 2013. The project is called Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers (ADMD) and its aim is to investigate through practice-based research what Ancient Roman Pantomime might have been like. The ancient evidence available to us is sparse and mostly textual. Ancient Roman Pantomime was a solo narrative dance form, performed with a closed mask (no declamation) to music at festivals. It recounted episodes from the Greek and Roman mythology.

The ADMD researchers were looking for dancers to participate in a workshop where each dancer was paired with a classicist. Each pair was given an excerpt from Ovid's Metamorphoses put to music by Malcolm Atkins, a list of choreographic terms (gathered from ancient sources), and three hours to draft up a danced interpretation of it in the style of Ancient Roman Pantomime. (Susie Crow reports on this initial workshop here)

I signed up and took part. It was a strange experience for me. As an academic, I have been doing ethnography of Classicists in the context of them deciphering papyri, wooden writing tablets, and such difficult to read documents. But there, I was involved as a dancer, as a subject in an ethnographic enquiry into the process of (re-)creating an ancient dance form. 

The presentation below sketches my experience of it all - as I reported upon it at the ADMD colloquium later in October 2013.

It was a bizarre and slightly split-personality experience, but also a fun one. And Susie, Malcolm, and I were so intrigued by all the ideas that the May 2013 workshops had turned up that we decided to carry on this work from an artists' point of view - an artistic research-based practice if you will, as a pendent to ADMD's academic practice-based research. 

This is how Avid for Ovid was born as a group and as a performance project. It runs in collaboration with the on-going ADMD project. 

In May 2014, ADMD (with support from DANSOX) ran three fascinating daylong workshops to further their research and feed Avid for Ovid's creative process. The first workshop was a Kathak workshop, led by Anuradha Chaturvedi. Kathak seems to be, in today's landscape of varied dance forms, the dance form that resembles the most what ancient roman pantomime might have been. Its extremely precise use of rhythms, space, gaze, and gestures lends it a high-definition quality that enables and supports storytelling. The second workshop was a butoh-inspired workshop, led by Yael Karavan. That workshop was more geared towards character building, introducing us to the intricacies of body qualities (water, earth, fire, air) and how different body qualities inhabiting/propelling different body parts in combination (eg water in the knees, fire in the upper body) can help generate richly textured characters, lending them very readable yet unique traits of character. The third workshop, led by Marie-Louise Crawley, was centred around the use of the neutral mask. That workshop introduced us to the notion of the body as a tuning fork. All emotions impact the body, resonating through it like vibrations; so before entering into performance mode, and engaging in masked (e)motion, it was essential to explore the notion of the neutral body. 

As we're now ramping up to a showing of work-in-progress on 28th August 2014, it all seems to be slowly coming together; the textual ancient dance testimonies, the techniques and methods we were introduced to in the workshops, and the richness of the texts of Ovid's Metamorphoses are constantly (although not always obviously) supporting and informing each other in all of our rehearsals. At each session we seem to stumble upon something new, and the discoveries we are making range from the span of the incredible skill that ancient performers must have mastered (physical as well as technical and emotional), to questions of relevance of the greek myths to today's world and society(events, human nature, etc...) and of universality of expression of emotions.

Here are some of the more specific questions we're grappling with:

1. How does character-switching work in narrative solo dance forms? And how do we signal a narrator? Can the dancer express two different characters simultaneously, and their interaction?
2. What are today's equivalent of the Ancient Myths, known by all? What kind of unconscious collective knowledge can we draw upon to tell danced stories that today's audiences can relate to?
3. For lack of precise knowledge of ancient dance technique and vocabulary, how do we negotiate our use of our own technique(s)? How much do we improvise? How much do we blend some of our own styles?
4. Isn't an exercise in reconstruction of an ancient dance form futile? Is this an exercise in contemporary reception of the culture of Ancient Rome? And what might it say about our own society?