Katarzyna Słoboda
BODY‑TO‑BODY. ON THE EMBODIED EXPERIENCING OF TIME iN SELECTED PRACTiCES AND PERFORMANCES

In this text, I intend to take up the issue of affirmation of the ageing body in the practices of selected performance and choreography artists: Boglárka Börcsök, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Ewa Partum, Eszter Salamon, and Iza Szostak.¹ I adopted an affirmative attitude, as it essentially provides me with motivation for research work. In artistic practices, I search for new, alternative stories about the future of the difficult art of life on a destroyed planet (to refer to the title proposed by researcher Anna Tsing).² The key question is, for me, the issue of time which I embed in the materiality of bodies. This will allow me to escape from the normative chronology of calendars and dates towards time perceived in the body as an element containing conflicting dynamics and directions of the physical ‘repository’ of memory, affections, and sensations. I embrace the concept of time as uttered by a protagonist of one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels – Shevek, a physicist from the planet Annares:

The little timelessness added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.³

In the text, I will be moving across three overlapping areas: performance, dance, and choreography. I understand dance not only as a form of expression, but also as an active exploration of the possibilities of one’s own body, the relationship of its muscles, joints, tendons, and limbs – with space. As one of the fields of art, it activates a person in the most literal way, mobilising their body and thoughts for a different kind of practice. Choreography is, in the simplest terms, composing the movement and relationship of bodies in time and space and how this network of relations is to be perceived by viewers. As for performance, I understand it broadly – as the performance of an action (for the camera or with the participation of the audience). ‘Comparing their use, we can conclude that performance means competence, the ability to perform and achieve, while choreography means dynamic patterns of complex but fluid organisation of many heterogeneous elements in motion. Choreography underlines the design of the procedure that regulates the process […]’⁴ – as Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović wrote.

For me, performing is a process of translating knowledge and experience from one body to another – both between the performers and between them and the audience. The whole power of the impact of performance lies in the tension between live action and observation as part of participation on the one hand, and memory, documentation, archive, on the other hand; between one‑offness and fleetingness and repeatability, reproduction. According to Peggy Phelan, the essence of performance is disappearance, elusiveness, happening here and now; the performance asks about ‘now’, which, however, ‘is supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera, the video archive’.⁵ Each time, the performance (live or through documentation) updates this ‘now’ at the moment of perception and reception. And this is done in and through the body, in the body‑to‑body transmission (which can take place directly or indirectly, through video recordings or photos). In the performance, the body appears as an archive and a place of personal and collective memory, updated each time. As Rebecca Schneider wrote: ‘Performance does not disappear when approached from this perspective, though its remains are the immaterial of life, embodied acts. Rather, performance plays “the sedimented acts” and spectral meanings that haunt material in constant collective interaction, in constellation, in transmutation’.⁶ The body is the only one that can activate what has been ousted from the official version of history, accumulating what Schneider calls affective remnants, for which the place ‘is arguably flesh in a network of body‑to‑body transmission of affect and enactment – evidence, across generations, of impact’.⁷

Ewa Partum’s work Change. My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman (1979) is a documentation of a performance at the Art Forum Gallery in Łódź. As part of it, the artist had the right half of her body masked with ‘aged’ makeup, while leaving the left one unchanged. The action was accompanied by posters from the action of the same title but held 5 years earlier – the posters, which the artist put up in the urban space, showed her half‑face aged – and recorded statements by artists Valie Export and Ulrike Rosenbach, as well as a commentary by Ewa Partum herself and the writing: ‘the artist has no biography’. According to Partum, the artist, through the social roles attributed to her gender, has a biography determined by her birth certificate and her appearance. This work, already iconic for the feminist art, is crucial for me in this text, as it combines two temporalities of the body in one person of the artist‑performer who yields to an alteration – temporalisation – before the audience’s eyes. In the video, we see Partum’s naked body subjected to the dynamic work of professional make‑up artists. The body, however, is not passive – it facilitates the task by changing its position, tilting the head. Both at the beginning and at the end of the video, we see the naked artist speak to the audience and comment on the action (there is no sound recording though). The artist is accompanied by her several‑year‑old daughter whose face we see in the last take of the film. Thanks to the various carnal temporalities this work proposes, it will allow me to identify two clues that I will follow later in the text. The first one is the experience of the passage of time embedded in a performer’s specific body. The other is a kind of body‑to‑body translation of experience consisting, in the works in question, in the cooperation of artists from different generations, where such corporal and kinesthetic exchange takes place.

Embedded in the body

‘Be still. Respond microscopically. Dance is the breath made visible – just breathe, be still.’8 With this apparently simple instruction, Anna Halprin encouraged the participants of her workshops to explore the sources of dance, precisely in stillness. I find this crucial for me: such an approach allows me to work with the body as it is, with all its conditions, listening to its needs and desires, opposing productivity oriented towards virtuoso performance. In the early 20th century, dance was tantamount with movement. The development of dance and choreography was intertwined with the expansion of the modernist project as the latter is essentially kinetic, dictated by the dynamics of continuous development, transformation, improvement, accumulation.9 It was only the generation of dancers and choreographers starting their practice in the 1960s that introduced not only stillness, but also ordinary movement such as walking or sitting and a daily gesture, into dance for good. From 1955 onwards, Anna Halprin ran the Dancers Workshop which became ground‑breaking for such artists as Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer (members of New York’s Judson Dance Theater from 1962). During these workshops, in an open‑air studio, the participants would study anatomy as the basis of movement, built experience through improvisation, and erase boundaries between disciplines; painters, sculptors, musicians and architects would all become involved in kinaesthetic situations. As Susanne Martin notes, the generation of these artists performs to this day: their practice, based on working in harmony with the signals coming from the body, allowed them to respond to changing physical and motor conditions.10 It can be said that dancing was one of Anna Halprin’s numerous somatic practices or, in other words, it would extend to all other psychosomatic and psychomotor practices. The artist did not acknowledge the division into studio dance, associated with the stage, and its social, ludic counterpart.

Anna Halprin abandoned the predetermined choreography in favour of ‘scores’ that determined frameworks for improvised action. Her works such as City Dance (1960–69, 1976–77) and Planetary Dance (since 1981), set in open spaces, outside the building of a theatre or dance studio, involved countless groups of people consisting not only, or perhaps not primarily, of professional dancers. A particular example is the latter, held annually as a dance ritual to respond to the problems of the contemporary world. Anna Halprin believed in the transformative, even healing role of dance,¹¹ happening between bodies, between movement and stillness, abandoned meaning, openness to the unknown.

‘Philosophically, I believe that people are not the centre of the universe…’ says Anna Halprin.

On one level, I identify with my physical body. However, what concerns me the most is outside me, in the environment, and this is where I see the source of my holistic body. […] I don’t focus on my personal body. In our culture, we usually think of our body as the epicentre. And our social body is a body in relationship with others. The body in the environment is our common body.¹²

In Halprin’s practice, bodies are undivided and indivisible; consciously or involuntarily, they establish relationships with other bodies, not only human, not only material. This is best illustrated by the project initiated by the photographer Eeo Stubblefield in 1980 – Still Dance. Anna proposed her participation in 1998; in 2002; a film that traced this cooperation was made. We see in it Halprin’s nude, 80‑year‑old body, covered with the colours and textures of the environment, blending in with the fallen bough of a tree, dense undergrowth of the forest, fields of cereals, the seashore. The dancer moves, connecting with the environment, examining its properties, slowly becoming motionless, choreographing the disappearance. Whose? Her own? Of her ageing body? Of the environment? Is the gradual coming to a standstill supposed to contain or accelerate the evanescence? The stop condenses time and space in the body, simultaneously making it a cluster, a membrane that captures the subcutaneous vibrations of the environment. Such a methodology of working with the body requires redirecting the attention intensifying the presence. However, it is not based on the normatively understood fitness of the body but on the quality of this presence, and thus the possibility of building attentive relationships with the environment.

Simone Forti, one of the participants of Anna Halprin’s workshops, shares this kind of intense relationship with the environment. In one of her texts, she wrote:

When dancing, I somehow return to the memory of the source experience and become what I feel or see or hear, even what I think. These impressions animate me. In my feelings, I lose the distinction between the things I felt out there, my perception of them, and indeed myself. I return to the humidity in the air, and the rich scent of white clover blossom s thickens the cells in my body, while my hands re‑experience the coolness in the shade under the squash plant’s umbrella leaves.¹³

This ‘animation’ constitutes the central point of Forti’s practice pursued in the News Animation series, i.e., improvised practice in relation to current media news on politics, social relations, climate‑related extinction, etc. Zuma News (2013) is a video work showing one of the views of this practice, held on Zuma Beach on the Pacific coast in Malibu. As it was written elsewhere:

In the first sequences, we see Simone Forti carrying a stack of newspapers and soaking them in the waves, while preventing them from being taken away by the tide. The newspapers are washed by successive waves, they become softer, blending with sand mud and seaweed. The artist meticulously shuffles them, embraces them, [lies on top of them – note by XX], covers herself with them – her gestures are not just gestures of hands, they involve the effort of the whole body.¹⁴

We hear a strong sound of wind and waves, we guess that the sand and the wet newspapers are heavy. The effort that the artist puts into her work reflects the materiality of the struggles with everyday life on a micro and macro scale, thus showing a complicated, but very strongly embodied relationship of personal problems with the global ones, despite the different temporal and spatial registers being covered.

Body‑to‑body.

The Art of Movement¹⁵ (2020) is a film by choreographer and dancer Boglarka Börcsök, created in cooperation with Andreas Bolm. We see Börcsök’s dialogues with three dancers, Éva E. Kovács, Irén Preisich, and Ágnes Roboz, representatives of the dance avant‑garde in Hungary. Börcsök asks questions, investigates, listens to their memories, to the stories about history and dance techniques while simultaneously dialoguing physically with their gestures, which inspires them to embody memories through more generous movements. We see them in private spaces of their apartments and onstage in theatres. In an extremely evocative and moving way, the film shows the body‑to‑body transmission of knowledge and experience. It also captures the dynamics of action and transfer of situated knowledge (following the term proposed by Donna Haraway), which keeps ‘sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’.¹⁶ We see a choreographic update of memory, different temporalities condensed in specific bodies and transferred from one body to another. Éva E. Kovács, one of the protagonists of the film, talks about her relationship with the past and the time that has passed:

It is a strange, multi‑layered thing to me, a part of me is 18 years old and another is 120 years old. And there are different layers in between. The 18‑year‑old thinks the same way she would do back then. But only for a moment… then she disappears.¹⁷

In the film, we also see how memory is evoked through gestures, how strongly it is located in the body; this does not necessarily have to be followed by a verbalised memory of facts, events, names, or dates. Time written and read in the body appears as full of glare and flashes, but also blind spots, denials, and omissions. It was precisely the breach of continuity, the return to the history of dance after decades of the communist regime in Hungary that interested Boglarka Börcsök so much. The title of the film is a reference to the liberal dance movement, which, inspired by artists from Germany, Austria, or France and practiced in Hungary from 1912, broke with the strictness of classical ballet arrangements or folk dance traditions. The movement, after being banned as an artistic practice by the communist authorities in 1950, began to function as part of the sports discipline of rhythmic gymnastics.

From the beginning, I wanted to propose an inter‑generational exchange as a way to address the silences, traumas and ruptures in the life trajectories of the dancers in relation to some of the main social and political transformations of the past century. I was fascinated by the physicality of the elderly dancers, but I was even more intrigued by how their experiences, their resilience, or their silences were inscribed in their bodies and movements’¹⁸

as Boglarka Börcsök commented on her motivations in one of the interviews. The artist continued her work with performing embodied archives in her next performance installation, Figuring Age (2021). The artist plays the characters of the film The Art of Movement. Her body appears to be haunted by the experience of older bodies, she speaks in their voices, moves in their rhythm and, at the same time, it is noticeable that the work is very strongly embedded in her physical experience. Her body, attracted by gravity, evoking the weight of the touch of their hands (from the moments of filming) or multiplied by the experience of pain or discomfort, is very strongly present, becoming a sort of membrane for the rhythms of memory and parallel, overlapping dynamics of temporality.

Eszter Salamon invited her mother Erzsébet Gyarmati (biology and physical education teacher, dance instructor and educator) to cooperate on the choreography of Monument 0.7: M/others (2019).¹⁹ In the work, the performers act as if in a mirror reflection, emphasising parallelly the similarities and differences of two bodies. Salamon, often working with feminist genealogies and intergenerational relationships, created here a dictionary of the movement of two bodies in a constant tender relationship, leaning beyond identities. However, it was not a question of representing these differences and similarities, mainly based on kinship and age difference, but of examining the impossibility of pinning the identity of the movement itself (When does it end? When does it start?). Their actions are slow and thus we feel as if this relational choreography was composed in real time before our eyes. This rhythm condenses time, introducing a sort of common denominator for noticing the temporality of both bodies. Knowing that the performers are mother and daughter, we notice even more the intimacy of their bodily interactions and the gentleness of their touch. In the case of this work, this body‑to‑body transmission takes place simultaneously towards the audience: in the fusion, the dancers form, as it were, a common, multi‑temporal, multi‑layered body.

Gentleness is a quality I also find in the latter of the works I mentioned: The Glass Jar Next to the Glass Jar²⁰ (2012) by Iza Szostak. The choreographer invited an elder amateur performer, Monika Morawska, whom she had met during another project within the framework of the Body /Mind Festival (Festiwal Ciało /Umysł). On the stage, we see a whole spectrum of relationships guided by the delicate language of movement: the women hug each other but also act independently, in different rhythms, as if each of them spoke in a body language not completely incomprehensible to the other. After a sequence of dance jumps, Morawska shouts while moving, with her back turned to the audience, towards the wall in the back of the stage. We feel the authenticity of this anxious tension, but after a few moments, but Szostak runs up to her partner and hugs her, calming her down. In the embrace, she leads her towards the front of the stage, holding her hands, shows her slow movements of the arms in space, which Morawska continues already without her partner’s closeness. In the final part of the work, the music gets more dynamic, and the performers’ movements become dancy and spontaneous, in response to the frenetic rhythm of the sounds. Their dialogue intensifies, but it is conducted in a snatchy way, without eye contact, at some point using groans and inarticulate noises. Monika and I were learning from each other. I did not know what would come of it as she was unpredictable, she has memory problems, she is lost in thought, she lives in her imagination. I am fascinated by the lack of hypocrisy in her approach to the movement which is sincere and true. The body cannot be dyed, you always carry everything you have accumulated since you were 10 years old; it has been taught and trained.²¹

– as Szostak would say. The starting point for work on the performance was the Alzheimer’s disease that the artist’s grandfather struggle against for a decade. Experiencing its various emotional states, slow loss of contact with the environment, but also the accuracy of his seemingly absurd and oneiric observations became, for Szostak, the reason for creating space and time to meet the otherness of different states of consciousness which affect the people’s way of establishing relationships with the environment. This deviation is classified using disease entities, often associated with the ageing process. Lurking beyond the classifications, however, there are fears, lack of understanding from the environment, pain, acceptance of one’s own limitations, waiting for death or fear of it, and all the states in the middle.

Through the strong embeddedness in following body variability, Anna Halprin’s or Simone Forti’s practices all1owed them to continue both studio and stage work, in the case of Halprin until she passed away in 2021 at the age of 101. In the second part of the text, I cited works in which artists younger by birth certificate invite elder people to cooperate. I would like to trace this body‑to‑body dialogue, the performative practices’ power of conveying experience, to empathise with different states of being in the world. The emancipatory power of choreographic practices lies precisely in the processual and careful study of the relationship between bodies. As Judith Butler wrote,

The body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materialising of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well. […] As an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention.²²

This processuality of embodiment is not so much the subject’s freedom to self‑determination, but a series of cultural and social dependencies to which his materiality and sensuality are subject. The body is subject to historical processes but, at the same time, it participates in their interpretation; it can creatively transform cultural schemes, transcend or overturn the limitations of social conditions relating, for instance, to roles assigned to specific genders; it can also make the boundaries between them more fluid. The emancipatory power of thinking with the body means taking into consideration its specific historical materiality, its limitations and potentials, displaced fluidities and sources of desire, recognition of the consequences of differences as rightful drivers of social and cultural compositions.

The body only establishes my own perspective; it is also what displaces that perspective and makes that displacement into a necessity. […] No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise, happens only ‘between’ bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s,23

Judith Butler wrote.

The practices I referred to in this work show the multidimensionalities and multitemporalities of bodies, in constant relationship with the environment. They do not level the differences between bodies: they seek and celebrate them. They confront them with the inevitability of passing at the intersection of various scales – from intimate to global. They teach how to become grounded in self‑acceptance without forgetting about the suffering of others, as

[…] staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.²⁴