Priming the Body: Breath as a Foundation for Exploring Ethical Performance Practice

Abstract

This article contemplates how the cultivation of breath through specific body awareness techniques might be understood to support a dialogical and ethical relatedness between collaborators constructing a performance through an open-ended process. The article introduces a teaching experiment based mainly upon exercises drawn from strands of body psychotherapy that took place within a larger experimental and cross-artistic workshop and performance project. This project aimed at enhancing the collaborative, creative, and critical skills of MA students in dance and theatre pedagogy of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. The article discusses the overall artistic project as well as the kind of bodywork the teaching experiment involved, and it makes a phenomenologically oriented reading of the written interview material gathered from the students. The specific theoretical perspective taken on the topic draws from two phenomenologically inspired thinkers, namely, Luce Irigaray’s and Timo Klemola’s views on the influence that cultivation of breathing can have on subjectivity. The article suggests that exploring and cultivating breathing through compassion can support the evolution of ethical collaboration in open-ended performance processes.

On Processing the Texts in The Air Journey

“…On my part, The Air Journey is indebted to my lengthy involvement with different approaches to somatic breathwork and continues my exploration into embodied relatedness, breathing, experimental forms of writing and phenomenological inquiry into artistic research (e.g. Rouhiainen 2015Rouhiainen , 2017. In contrast to my previous projects, in The Air Journey my interest was to acknowledge the impact situation-specific moments of breathing and being in contact with air have on our immediate embodiment.…”