SIRENS:
PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNITY DANCE AND DISABILITY EMBODIMENT
(published in the proceedings of the Congress on Research in Dance, Tallahassee, Florida, 2005)
Petra Kuppers
Abstract
The use
of technologies in community performances create nexi
of problems around access, power, centre and periphery, background and foreground,
ownership, presence and representation. My paper aims to unwrap some of the
issues associated with collaborative working methods in a disability and performance
technology framework. Specifically, the paper will discuss Sirens, an Olimpias
performance that took place in Liverpool, UK, as part of a large Disability
Arts Conference. In this performance, a group of disabled dancers interacted
with performance technologists, and created a complex piece of work that questioned
'natural' bodies, and 'natural' sensorial access.
What are the different uses of technology in contemporary
disability performance work? What are potential relations between media technologies
used as part of dance aesthetics and (the contemporary developments of traditional)
access technologies? My paper focuses
on some of the issues associated with collaborative working methods in a disability
and performance technology framework, through the discussion of a community
dance project I led as Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series. In particular, I will
show how our show improvised with the different kinds of technologies that
surround stage practice: new media technologies of video screens, sensors,
V-Jay software and screen dance, and access technologies, like audio description,
captioning, and signing.
The Olimpias is a Performance
Research Project Series. This label means that under its banner people who
do or do not (yet) identify as artists come together to explore issues of
collaboration, (new) media, community arts and identity politics in residencies
or long-term projects. One such collaborative event occurred in May 2003 in
Liverpool, when Elizabeth Goodman and Jo Gell from
the SMARTlab at Central St. Martins, UK and Clilly Castiglia and Kevin Feeley from the Center for Advanced Technology, NYU, asked
me to work with different performance technologies that they were developing,
and test them out in a community arts setting. We all worked together with
a group of interested disabled artists associated with the Liverpool Institute
for Performing Arts and North West Disability Arts Forum. Together, we explored
how contemporary performance software/hardware solutions could interact with
disability arts approaches of empowerment, communication and access (for more
on practical approaches to integrated dance work, see Benjamin, 2002). The
resulting show, Sirens, emerged out of a fast and furious working period,
and its guerilla performance as research-in-process is the topic of this short
article.
Many of The Olimpias themes
emerge out of site-specific concerns - in previous years, we have worked with
Welsh myths in order to articulate mental health difference (in shows, videos
and photo-installations called Earth Stories, Sleeping Giants, and Dragon Stories),
or with echoes between New England beaches and other rural locations and our
fantasies of our bodies as sites (in our performance pieces Body Provisional,
Bare Bone Tune, and the workshop series/photograph exhibit Tracks).
Disability
Imagery
In Liverpool, an extremely short work period meant
that instead of a lengthy research of locations and their associated legends,
myths and stories and personal fantasies, we had to find quick access
to a unifying theme, something that would anchor our concerns with transmission,
media and disability politics. We found this core in the myth of the Sirens
– bird-bodied women-monsters whose beautiful voices lure sailors to their
death. Much of Greek myth uses different bodies as markers of extraordinary
natures, and as meaning carriers. Thus, Oedipus is already limping before
he is blinded, marking his status as traveler between two worlds, two kingdoms.
Hepaisthos, the God of the smithy who created Pandora,
the perfect woman, also limps: within the economy of the myth, supposed perfection
rises out of supposed imperfection. Tiresias is blind: the blind seer was punished by the Gods
for knowing too much, as he had lived both in a female and a male body, and
knew both pleasures. In these stories, disability is a mark of knowing too
much too fast, experiencing hubris, and undergoing change. Conceptually, there
is an interesting echo here: all of these attributes are also associated with
new technologies – ‘difference’ is emerging into the world of bodies, and
into to the world of sensory reception.
Our bodies on the workshop stage echoed these mythologized
impairments, but as disabled people, we experience them differently. If limping
is part of your way of locomoting in the world,
it doesn’t necessarily feel subjectively negative, or ‘secondary’ to some
idea of ‘normate’ walking. In the same way, the
visual information perceived by someone who is visually impaired is appropriate
and orienting, ‘normal’ to them, and not necessarily experienced as inferior.
My own, pain-related experiences induce me to move in our shared world in
a deliberate and attentive manner, and given my adaptive strategies, I don’t experience
my physical difference necessarily as a negativity – instead, it opens up
new perspectives and different sensibilities for me, which nourish my creativity
and my activism. This way of understanding disability emerges out of the ‘social
model of disability’, in opposition to a ‘medical model’, which looks for
aberration located in individual singularity and aims to adapt the ‘abnormal’
to the ‘normal’. The social model sees disability not as something that is
inherent in the specific impairment or condition of a specific person, but
sees restriction and problems predominantly in the interaction between a person and a social world that only recognizes
some ways of being in the world as ‘normal’, and rejects other ways of being.
For many disabled people who become interested in
their particular perspective as a cultural minority, a different way of being
in the world emerges as our own, familiar, central identity (and a lot of
recent work on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes this point, as I have argued elsewhere (2003)). This split between
disability as metaphor and disability as lived experience is an important
feature of much current work in disability arts and theory.
The sense of disability as a form of different and therefore valuable
access to the world in its own right, and as a dance language, became the
core political centre of the show. In Sirens, we issued a call, a song, a seduction: we wanted to share some of the richness of our
different access points. Thus, in an intense and short work period, we collected
aspects of our different access to the world in a collaborative process, and
translated these differences into new forms of creative engagement with one
another, with the stage technologies available to us, and with the audience.
Multiplicities
Here
is what one of our technologist/artists, Kevin Feeley,
wrote about the performance in his independent study report for NYU (he participated
in our show as part of his MA work) about his experience with disability performance,
and the specific challenges of accessible work:
The performance was intense but went amazingly well. Considering that these
people had only met and begun working 56 hours prior, Sirens was a huge success
- the technology genuinely provided a rich, multi-modal supplement to the
movements of the artists on the stage. All audio cues had to have an accompanying
visual or kinesthetic cue; and all video cues had accompanying audio cues,
etc. The performance had a signer on stage, and text was used whenever possible
to describe audio assets or captions for movement. The performance was so
well received, that the audience requested a question and answer session immediately
after.
The performance technologies provided by NYU and
the SMARTLab helped to created this ‘rich, multi-modal
supplement’, and the notions of connection, nodality
and supplementation were the core theme and methodology of the choreography.
In the dance choreography and the technological
play with dance, connections and distances provided anchor points. Play with
perspective, for instance, allowed videographer
and dancers to interact in different ways, using close-ups and changing distances.
One of our videographers, Max, has a mobility impairment
that meant not only discomfort on the stage, but also the need to be flexible
with time arrangements. Traditional performance would have problems with these
access needs but our use of a more diverse theatre machine allowed for Max
to be a fully integrated artistic voice – he didn’t have to be physically
in the theatre for his unique perspective on movement and space to be part
of our show. Instead of dancing in person on the stage, the images he captured
with the video-camera, and mixed onto the video screen echoed his way of being
in the world, and made it differently experiential to the audience.
We used the software Viewhear,
which functions like a keyboard - videos, sounds, etc. can be fed into it,
and can then be 'improvised' into an audiovisual score during a live performance,
creating something akin to a multi-disciplinary V-Jay working practice. Video
material, sound clips and still images can ‘slide’ into the show with controls
similar to a lighting set (i.e., the slides you run up or down to coax light
up on the stage). Thus, we were able to feed Max’s dance video material, worked
on it short but intense moments during the workshops, into the software and
mix it into the live performance.
During the workshops and performance, we paid particular
attention to the relative power and status of different live, technological
and embodied/technological methodologies and their interplay. Important technology
we begun to work with were audio transcription and captioning. Two of the
performers were visually impaired, and two identified as Deaf. This allowed
for many interesting moments of improvisation - the vibration of the wooden
floor and a reliance on kinesthesia as information source were some of the
techniques we explored.
In one moment in our working process, a Deaf dance
artist, Ruth Gould, gave an audio transcription of a dance between two other
performers, and a camera captured in close-up her moving mouth. In a movement/Viewhear montage, these different performance moments can
now interplay, and their status as 'aesthetic objects' or 'information systems'
become undecidable and problematized.
At any moment in this show, numerous ‘representations’ of dancing bodies could
be on stage at the same time. Beyond the 'presence' of live dance, other channels
included the video-taped mouthdance of the narration
of the audio description on screen, this footage could visually interact with
dance-close-ups on screen, and all of these images were mixed with amplified
voice-overs, and with the ‘live’ sounds of moving bodies on the wooden stage.
Other forms of access could be provided visually
at multiple points – a signer occupied a corner of the stage, and put any
language used on stage or on video into an elaborate hand-dance. Using Sign
Language as an fully equal partner (to spoken language) and creatively rich
source of bodily poetics on stage is by now a well established practice for
many companies, including Graeae and Common Ground
Sign Dance Theatre in the UK and the National Theatre of the Deaf in the US.
In addition to these channels of communication and
creativity, the whole show’s audio transcription was provided live by a transcriber,
and could be fed into the whole auditorium
through the intercom system at the discretion of the sound engineer, or could
be accessed by individual audience members through am audio loop system, independent
of their impairment status. And many people did avail themselves of this audio-description,
even if those didn’t ‘need’ it, who were neither visually nor hearing impaired: it provided
another aesthetic, poetic channel of movement translation.
Captioning (spoken text running as subtitles) also
functioned in an complex way. Text Rain was another
software solution brought by the NYU team. We fed various pieces of creative
writing created by workshop participants in response to the Sirens theme into
the program, and mounted a sensor to capture movement on stage. The resulting
material shows text scrolling down on the projecting screen. Where
moving bodies are captured by the sensors, the text-color changes.
The text seems to flow around the bodies, it moves with them. Image and presence merge and divert in interesting
ways in this circus of meanings and input devices.
As I am writing this, I know that this montage and
mélange of sensorial access, some translated and transformed through visual
or audio media, sounds like a circus, a spectacle, a mass of too much information.
And it was, in some ways, but the resulting show was always anchored back
in the movement material – its translation into language, image, presence,
sound, smell and kinesthetic nearness provided the focal point. Many of the
audience members were well used to elaborate communication set-ups – they
were disabled people, like ourselves, and were willing and happy to grant
time and space to serious reflection about inclusion and access. At disability
culture events, many of us wait while the speech paragraph we’ve just given
is typed out and appears on a screen, we interact respectfully with the ASL
transcriber, and ensure that there is good lighting on our face and mouth
for those in our audience who read our lips. We shuffle wheelchairs, seats
and move guide dogs to ensure that we can all participate. This spatial and
sensory awareness of difference has always been a delight (and necessity)
to me, and is significantly different from the atmosphere at most non-disabled
events I participate in. This multi-layered access provision and play with
technologies emerges therefore seamlessly out of a disability aesthetic,
or at least more seamlessly than it would emerge from (some) non-disabled
dance viewers’ sense of stagework as relying on
an ‘invisibilized’ or naturalized technology. In Sirens, we aimed
to foreground our sensorial differences, and therefore to thematize difference not just in the choreography on the stage, but also in the choreography
of the stage, and the audience/dancer
interaction.
The
performance was the opening evening of the Effecting
Change: the Future of Disability Arts conference at Liverpool Institute
for Performing Arts, and thus the audience was filled with fellow disabled
people, and non-disabled allies. As Kevin described, once the performance
ended, the audience wouldn't let us get off stage: in a world where access
issues often play second fiddle to aesthetics, it was very refreshing for
many to see a dance performance that deliberately plays with the call and
response of video, audio, and human bodies. We had a great conversation.
Conclusion
In
the hope embodied in productions such as Sirens, disability as a socially
assumed lack vanishes, and the body/technology stage instead bodies forth
a richness, the pleasure of difference in collaboration. No
one's access is (only) privileged (although the visual remains the potentially
strongest draw - our common theatre machine and its audience seems to require
more training to the seduction of sound and touch). But of course, this stage
description presents a longing, not a state: this is work-in-process, pursuing
a stage methodology that allows difference to live. Sirens
emerges as a cauldron of experiments. The purely spectacular, objectifying
the performers and disembodying the technology, is one of the dangers encountered
by the work. But the stage presence of the
performers seemed to hinder their vanishing behind the multi-media light show:
they were very present, very focused, and remained the core of the performance.
The reduction of the literal, fixing participants
into certainties, is another – taking either ‘normate’ viewing, audio-transcription or sub-titling as full
representations of dance as an event that can be wholly captured. The sensory
overload and multiple access channels, all providing slightly different information,
and often slightly shifted in time against the action occurring on stage,
aimed to undermine this kind of fixity. Sirens was
a process, an intervention, a shifting of foreground and background, performance
technology and access technology. It wasn’t designed to ‘succeed’, but to
set thoughts in motion. To me, engendering and playing with a balancing act
is thus the play mode for different bodies and different performance technologies
that want to work together in a political realm.
The
show relied on collaboration: the technologist-artists went with the flow,
improvised just as much as the dancers did, and the audience was happy to
engage with the resulting experiment, overlooking technical difficulties,
and engaging very nimbly with their audio loop gear. To me, it was very exciting
to see where we can take things, how far improvisation can flow, and how generous
performers and audiences can be with one another. Video and audio technologies
were here not used to 'supplant' the dancing body, but to engage with it,
partner it. Access technologies, often seen as supplementary to the ‘actual’
performance event, became here exciting dance partners, full participants
in the multi-nodal collaboration. I learned that new dance technologies AND
access technologies can play important and creative roles in the future of
community dance performances, and I am looking forward to playing with them
some more.
Books mentioned:
Adam Benjamin (2002) Making an Entrance. London and New York: Routledge.
Petra Kuppers (2003) Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on
Edge. London and New York: Routledge.
© Petra Kuppers, 2004
Author’s Note
P.S. Having researched the Sirens for Liverpool, I am still haunted by them,
and a different kind of Siren performance took place in Rhode Island, on a
beach, in September 2004. We had sand, water, rocks, wood, food, voices and
bodies. The only other technology in sight and earshot was a Tibetan singing
bowl. Our main access technologies were proximity and kinesthesia, and the
pleasure of a communal picnic - in these close quarters, we communicated in
different ways, accessible to everyone present.