Breathing beyond Embodiment: Exploring Emergence, Grieving and Song in Laboratory Theatre

Abstract

<jats:p> Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. </jats:p>

Gutting fishy empathies off the Shetland Islands, Scotland

“…For example, https://www.uphellyaa.org/. 2 https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/.3 Scottish seine netting employs the force of tidal currents to force shoals of fish into a long net, weighted at its bottom edge and buoyed by floats at the top.4 See alsoGatt (2020) for the correspondence between sounding and listening.…”

Introduction

“…The Crafting Anthropologies project was a subproject of “Knowing from the Inside” (ERC 2013‐2018, Tim Ingold PI), in which Lembo was research assistant and collaborator. See also Ang and Gatt (2018a) and Gatt (2015, 2018, 2020, 2022) for other publications arising from this project.…”

On Breath and Breathing: A Concluding Comment

“…With breath, the muscular movement of breathing, in the heave of the lungs, merges with thinking, with the voice, with speech and song. All are together on the same plane of being, in the torments and the ecstasies of the soul (Gatt, 2020).…”