kellee's blog

I. Title

All Your Body Are Belong to Us

II. Abstract

"All Your Body Are Belong to Us" is a live performance piece that will use the body to drive its narrative. It will explore the ways in which we restrict our bodies, our moments of release, the memories we store, and how our lifestyles influence our body language, and vice versa. This performance will use re-appropriated interface devices to highlight the contrast between how we use our bodies and the possibilities they hold.

IV. Text

A. Motivation

Physical Performance Arts

When I studied theatre at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, I had the privilege of studying under a number of talented and passionate physical performers. These body-based actors believed that powerful performers were ones that had unlocked their physical inhibitions completely, so that their bodies could be free to express every subtle emotion that we as humans contain.

At NYU I became exposed to the philosophies of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Jerzy Grotowski, two of the first proponents for examining the actor's body as a medium: Meyerhold in the early 20th Century, and Grotowski in the mid-20th Century. Meyerhold pioneered the use of biomechanics in theatre -- a way of directing a production by examining separately the stage area, audience, actor's performance, and dramatic substance as areas of communication in the medium of theatre. In his biography of Meyerhold, Zafirovska summarizes biomechanics as it applies to acting: it is "simultaneously both a particular actor’s training and a way of an actor’s performance, whose purpose is to effect the main request made by Meyerhold on the stage . . . the flexibility of the actor to convey his own creation through his body (consciously controlled!) and his movements."

Jerzy Grotowski also pushed the use of the actor's body as his medium of communication. In order to achieve open communication between an actor and an audience, the actor must release all of his inhibitions. In his interview with Eugenio Barba, Grotowski explained, "If the actor is conscious of his body, he cannot penetrate and reveal himself. The body must be freed from all resistance. It must virtually cease to exist" (36).

Many of the exercises used in pursuit of this state of "body as medium" involve learning control over one's body as well as unlocking all physical inhibitions the actor might have when entering his training. It was through these exercises that I began to understand how our bodies hold tension as a way of protecting ourselves from physical and emotional pain - usually something our bodies learn at an early stage.

However, this knowledge hasn't only been held by avant-garde performers. Initially conceived by French philosophers such as Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, and Henri Bergson, implicit memory has been rediscovered and explored in the last few centuries. As opposed to explicit recollection, which is the mind's representation of the past in relationship to the present, implicit memory reenacts the past in the course of the body's performance. Psychologist Thomas Fuchs explains that "implicit knowing is our lived past." It appears generally in five different types: procedural, situational, inter-corporeal, incorporative, and traumatic memory.

Briefly explained, procedural memory is physical memory through repetition, such as typing on a keyboard. Even though I might not remember where every single key is, my fingers are able to create words out of my thoughts through typing. "Procedural memory unburdens our attention from an abundance of details . . . The will becomes free since the single elements of willing and acting recede into the background . . . Through moving the keys the pianist is able to direct himself to the music itself, to listen to his own play. Thus freedom and art are essentially based on the tacit memory of the body"(Fuchs). Situational memory is how full experiences are stored, such as how I felt during my last final, or when I won the big game, etc. It is a part of our memory that cannot be completely expressed in words. Inter-corporeal memory is how our bodies learn and remember to interact with others; for example, how one holds her body when speaking to authority as opposed to in relation with a friend. Incorporative memory involves the postures we have adopted from others, and traumatic memory can come in the form of chronic aches and pains as a result of some physical or psychological trauma one might have incurred and have stored in the body.

After university, I became involved in dance and improvisation. Through improv I was introduced to the philosophy of the mime Etienne Decroux, who formulated "corporeal mime" - an art of attitude achieved through harmony of the trunk limbs, thought and form. Decroux examined how a snapshot of the human body can tell a rich, detailed story without using any words. By isolating various body parts and muscles and using each one of them the way Meyerhold would use each aspect of a performance to tell a story, the human body can become a tool for communication simply on its own.

My final influence as a physical performer came from my work with a New York-based Butoh theatre company, "Shufu Theatre." The director of the company, Madelyn Kent was examining the use of Butoh exercises as rehearsal techniques for dialogue plays (typically Butoh shows have no speaking). Butoh theatre, in short, is a style of dance in which the dancer stops being himself and becomes someone or something else. In traditional dance styles, the dancer expresses an emotion or abstract idea through his body. However, in Butoh the dancer becomes something else than what he is in order to communicate a feeling. Kent used these exercises to assist the actors in the development of their characters and to create a certain rhythm to the play that was neither natural nor unnatural, but fed the emotion of the moment, the line, the word, and down to the breath. In rehearsal I would participate in these exercises, and found a certain physical freedom I had never experienced before. Some compare the exercises to "trance dancing." I could actually let go of my consciousness and move through space as a wholly different person or thing. I could let go of Kellee's body memory, and attempt to discover another body memory all together. These exercises were freeing and therapeutic.

Throughout my physical training as an actor, I have discovered how important it is for us to have moments of total release. I have seen my peers go through striking transitions as they have explored their own body memory and freed themselves of physical, and therefore emotional, burdens. Exploring one's body in this manner is another approach to therapy that unfortunately only actors and dancers are very aware of.

Play-Centric Game Design

When I came to the Interactive Media Division at USC, I was exposed to the play-centric game design philosophy held by Tracy Fullerton and Chris Swain, and embodied by Bernie DeKoven and The New Games Movement of the 1970's.

Play-centric game design looks at the play or the fun of the game as being the central aspect to design. It puts the power of game design into the hands of the people actually playing it, as opposed to one or two designers. The New Games Movement organized large outdoor events to encourage people to play with each other, participate, and create games just for the fun of it. Bernie DeKoven sees the physical release of these games as an important part of our development and existence as humans. Play can be therapeutic as it allows for people to relate to each other in abnormal ways and gives a mental and physical break from the daily routine.

Learning this play-centric philosophy reinforced my instinct that there did not need to be a strict division between people who interfaced with digital technology, and people who "couldn't." The majority of my theatre and improviser friends do not play digital games, and most of my "gamer" friends don't play physical theatre games. What is the reason for this disparity?

Instead of a divide between the physical and the digital realms, I would like to see a happy collaboration. We are finally at a unique time in which this collaboration is possible - with the right interfaces. We can make smart, forward-thinking choices in interface design to discover how it cannot only be less painful for our bodies, but possibly even help them and our emotional well-being.

B. Methodology

"All Your Body Are Belong to Us" is a performance piece that will examine these subjects of body memory, physical interactions, and the implications of modern interface design through a narrative that is driven by the body. It is a travel through space and time through the human form. As the characters unlock their body memory, they discover their inhibitions, memories, and natural instincts.

For the creation of the content, I will continue to research and explore the ways through which we communicate through our bodies, store our memories in them, and how we then use our body instrument to interface with the machine instrument. I will also examine how a narrative can be mapped onto and weaved through the body.

I currently envision one main character that is played by three or four different performers. Through the different actors one "body narrative" can be explored without limiting the representation to one body type.

While the narrative of "All Your Body Are Belong to Us," travels through the body, the tech of the piece will travel through the history of interface design. I will experiment with how I can re-appropriate old and current physical interfaces to express narrative ("physical interface" as I am using it here encompasses everything not graphic). The performance will also project how we would interface with technology if only our bodies were needed, represented through a combination of existing technology and/or pre-prepared material.

C. Proof of Concept

"All Your Body Are Belong to Us" will be a performance piece with dance, dialogue, music, and video. I project the piece will be a short one-act, lasting somewhere between 30 mins to an hour.