The Anthropologist as Ensemble Member: Anthropological Experiments with Theatre Makers

Gatt, Caroline

doi:10.1057/9781137350602_15

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In much of this field of performance practice/theory, body, affect and movement are understood to be in some way ontologically primary, and language, reflection, analysis and so on as secondary. To highlight the inadequacy of arguments based on ontological primacy for understanding voiced breath, I engage in anthropological comparison (also see Gatt, 2015, 2018a, 2018b): Other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be understood as primary in contrast to linguistic, explicit or analytic knowing. Instead of arguments based on the ‘primacy’ of this or that human activity or practice, I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Gatt

2020

Body & Society

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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.

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confidence: 99%

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

Gatt

2020

Body & Society

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“…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.…”

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Gatt

Lembo

2022

American Anthropologist

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To change settler colonial perception requires reorienting the form by which we share knowledge, the way we convey sound, song and music." -Dylan Robinson (2020, 28) This special section explores song from a fundamental but unexplored perspective: as a way of knowing for anthropology. The themes touched upon include ontological politics and their relationship with anti-or decoloniality, the other-than-human, and the senses. Feld ([1982] 2012) has long argued for anthropology to attend to the epistemic importance of songs and sound, above all in his proposal for a synesthetic acoustemology (Feld 2015). However, the question of how this could apply to anthropological onto/epistemologies beyond projects focused on sound has yet to be addressed. Much anthropological work on songs or singing is, in the terminology of Tim Ingold (2013), on or about. What we are interested in is anthropological knowing with, from, or through song. Therefore, we ask: How can anthropologists take seriously the ways of knowing that constitute different practices of singing for shaping research? Rather than considering song solely as an object of ethnographic study, what possibilities arise if song is explored as an onto/epistemic practice for the recursive reformulation of anthropological work more broadly?The ways of knowing by singing explored in this special section are relevant across anthropology for two reasons. First, they highlight the logocentrism that continues to underpin the bulk of anthropological knowledge production, despite sensory, process, ontological, and multimodal turns.

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Theater, Anthropology and

D’Onofrio

2018

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

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Theater has been a focus of systematic investigation in anthropology since the 1970s. Because of its cross‐cultural nature, theater has been of interdisciplinary interest to scholars employing ethnographic methods to analyze cultural meanings present in texts and embodied in rituals and in the social exchange of symbols between performers and audiences. Following the “affective turn” of the 1990s and under the influence of postcolonial critique, performance scholars and social scientists have begun to look at theater practices as processes of meaning making, political negotiation, and collaboration. Acknowledging theater's immediacy in concentrating on what lies at the core of what specific societies want to communicate about themselves, anthropologists have also used performances to communicate their fieldwork data in the form of ethnodramas. More recently, social research that has wished to privilege reflexivity and intersubjectivity has engaged with the actual practice of theater making, to engage participants in active and ethical processes of knowledge production.

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The Anthropologist as Ensemble Member: Anthropological Experiments with Theatre Makers

Cited by 5 publications

References 40 publications

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

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

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Theater, Anthropology and

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