The Body and The Performative
"Where does the body begin…and end?"
- Chandralekha
"Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile…people are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence."
- Donna Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesto'
How do we imagine the body, the dancing body? Is it finite and singular; is it invariable? Does the dancing body bleed, scab, and grow new skin? Does it age? Does it feel fatigue? Does it die? Does it invite the audience into the spectacle of its degeneration?
What is the dancing body inspired by? How is it indented by crumbling democracies, wars, genocides, miracle vaccines, sculptures with fig leaves, sculptures missing body parts, cloned sheep and empathetic robots?
What new questions can we ask of the dancing body when we situate it in the space and time of the now? Are its extremities entirely physical and cellular, as a body that mediates its senses through technology, ‘watching’ on screens and ‘loving’ in hypertext? Can we leave this heterotopic notion of the body outside the studio space, severing the body from all its digital, social, historical, mechanical and philosophical extremities? Or is it time to disrupt our notion of the ‘body’, and ask of ourselves – where does the body begin and end, after all?
Spread over four days, the symposium Indent collates practices and ideas that enable, expand, and cluster around current notions of the body in performance, through a programme of talks and performances. The symposium marks the launch of Gati’s annual journal,
Indent: The Body and The Performative, a digital publication which in its first edition examines the ways in which the body demonstrates and deploys strategies of resistance, throwing up fresh questions about the relationship between the political and the aesthetic.
The symposium also forms the backdrop for Indent Lab, a writing workshop and laboratory space which expands the notion of ‘writing’ to include multiple possibilities of articulation, going beyond text, to consider what the act of writing adds up to in the tactile and febrile landscape of the digital interface.
Please write to Ranjana Dave: gati.ranjana@gmail.com for further information.
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