Katrina Phillips
This paper came about as a result of the combination of a recent pregnancy,
the birth of my second child, my continuing practice of dance performance and
reading Drew Leder's The Absent Body. Its aim is to share with the reader
my current approach to dance and raises the question of how it might be reflected
upon. It is influenced by Leder's discussion of bodily disappearance and the
key role that the body plays in experience and perception.
5 weeks with newborn Charlie. I vaguely remember being this way with Stirling and yet I cannot prepare myself for the onslaught of these fierce, new sensations. I experience postnatal anger, helplessness, resentment and despair for the loss of the self I knew for a while.
For the past 3 years I have been changing fantastically. From the relative solidity and security of a body without children to a pregnant body, a body in labor, the antenatal body complete with nursing instincts and ideals to the pregnant body, the laboring body and the nursing, leaking, seeping, shimmering body of a mother of two. My body is my self - which includes my dancing self. Throughout this process of metamorphous I have continued dancing, making work that attaches me to a world partly constructed by my current physical and emotional state and partly anchored by the presence of the women I work with.
I am breast-feeding
Charlie, who when awake, rarely appears content. He is either windy or farty
or experiencing the sharp pangs of a stomachache. This means loud crying. The
crying devastates me. Even if someone else holds him, I am still affected badly.
The cries cut to the core of my being. I panic, tense up, my heart-rate increases.
I am unable to focus my eyes on anything in particular. I am with my child in
a way I can't explain yet.
My breasts produce so much milk that the poor boy gags by the force of their
flow. The excess drips down onto my stomach. If I miss a feed they tingle, hurting
me. There is no pleasure as yet in this activity. Sometimes I am alright.
I feel formless now. Leaking, seeping, shimmering, creating new boundaries that define my outer shell. My two-year-old needs me more than ever. He is afraid of everything. He panics and searches for me. I am giving and giving and giving.
Days can be endless. I drift. I don't know what day it is. My dance (not a precious thing that you can't have access to but the dance that I practice everyday and share when able) anchors me. It is hard to focus the way I used to. I find I need to concentrate but do so in a more relaxed, open way. I improvise around the game of practice. Today when I practice, I don't hold on to formula. I stretch and articulate, wrapping and unwrapping, folding into myself and opening from the inside out. My hands and wrists have a new way of holding themselves. This is connected to the way in which I wish to interact with the immediate space. They don't reach beyond themselves, seeking to extend into infinity. They only wish to taste the air around them. They are more flexed and spread-eagled than before. I don't try to be delicate. My hands are not refined ornaments or instruments for expression. They are base, organic, raw.
In my practice, I seek an ultimate moment. In this moment my body is fluid, my senses alive. I seek to perceive a whole environment, not in terms of static space and time, but a moment which contains in it an active weaving of past, present and future. I notice the ripples in the space around me. The kinetic energy creates the rifts in the space, causing me to continually adjust my bearings and my relationships to where I am, what I am doing and how I am doing it. There is a willingness to forfeit control, to be a part of a universe or a reality rather than determining every detail.
My body, once whole and solid in its pre-pregnant state, swollen and transformed in pregnancy is now more fluid than ever before. As a nursing mother, I am elixir, invisible, indivisible, fading in and out of reality. Just thinking about performing can bring about the state I describe, but the effect is not as pronounced. It is just as profound but not as large. I seep into my environment. I become one of the ripples in space and time. My consciousness does not only belong within my body. It flies out my ears, eyes, mouth, nose and more especially out of the pores of my skin. I think now of Deborah Hay's molecules interacting in space. Trillions of cells to-ing and fro-ing from the body.
The birth experience emphasizes the fact that we never stay the same. Our dance also reminds us of our inherent nature to shift and change our form within a landscape of things-in-flux. To ignore this fact is to miss out on a very exciting and enriching aspect of lived experience, one that is gained once we acknowledge the human physiological and psychological inconsistencies in ourselves.
This impermanent body which finds itself in constant flux complicates how I reflect upon my dance. In phenomenological terms, the body I experience and experience with is never the same. It is never constant. As one state appears to the foreground, another recedes or disappears to the shimmering mass that makes me who I am. And yet a sense of bodily permanence is necessary if I am to consciously be and interact in the world. Indeed, the study of phenomenology reveals the self as the key reference point in all human experience. The body is conceived as a measuring tool. It is an "orientational center in relation to which everything else takes place."i It is an ecstatic body, a lived body that allows us to attend to our experience in very particular ways. The ecstatic body stands out, giving us spatial, temporal and intentional positions from which we can depart.
The body always has a determinate stance - it is that whereby we are located and defined. But the very nature of the body is to project outward from its place of standing. From the "here" arises a perceptual world of near and far distances. From the "now" we inhabit a meaningful past and future realm of projects and goals.ii
Leder positions the body as the center of its perceptual universe. The body he describes is marvelously and endlessly adaptable, experiencing many alterations and fluctuations as part of its regular existence - not as a departure from the norm. Further, not only is the body in a perpetual state of flux but so is its relationship to the outside (fluctuating) world. This is appropriately described as the fluidity of "body-world relations."iii The shifting body has a dynamic reciprocal relationship to the outside world. It shifts the perceived nature and constants of the world(s) we inhabit and in turn it is changed by those changes.
Dance performance highlights this most delicate interaction. In a space and time where moment and position are charged with potential, dancers conduct a dialogue where the "words" are "continually entering in and passing out"iv of the shimmering body.
I have no one determinate stance, but rather multiple stances and these change continuously to allow me to explore my world. This world often appears to me as though it were a mirage. There but not there. How can I possibly talk of my adventures in this Wonderland? If there are no constants how do I communicate my experience?
Leder suggests that there is a relative security in the structural consistency of the body itself. My height is 5 foot 2 inches, my shoe size is 5, and I can reach the front door from the wall in 15 comfortable paces.
Only the structural stability of my body allows it to be an assumed bases from which I respond to an eventful world. This relative stability is true not only of my anatomical structure but of the mass of skills and functional tendencies I incorporate. Only by virtue of my habitual action patterns can I tacitly inhabit the world.v
But for a performance practice which explores the instability of all things, especially of perception, structural stability of the body is a conceptual ideal. My experiences are measured against that ideal. Each day space and time take on new dimensions and densities, incurring different resonances and meditations. My 15 paces are sometimes fewer, sometimes more. My pregnant body takes the journey in an entirely different way, often diverging from the directness of the linear path. My steps are smaller because to take large steps means pain in my groin, for the tendons and ligaments have loosened in preparation for the birth. My nursing breasts engender a new appreciation of the force of gravity. I don't bound to the door. But the truth is that this lived body, this changing body is not an aberration from any ideal state. I never was in that state. I am always evolving. I accrue experience. My body changes form. The ideal body, the one I use as a yardstick for measuring experience, becomes a symbol in a semantic process realized through language. In order to discuss my experiences I authorize approximation and inaccuracy. However, I trust that, though the signs chosen are deceptive to the point of suggesting bodily permanence, my audience is tacitly aware of the illusion and recognizes the inherent instability of both body and moment.
My dance, another aspect of corporeal existence is also masked by the illusion of consistency. One performance is better than another, measurable to the ideal performance of that dance. When I cease to apply the standards of the ideal, my performance becomes a series of rare and irreplaceable moments. I am able to appreciate the current changes in body-world relations, enjoying my body as it is and as it converses in space and time with other dancers.
The antenatal-natal-postnatal process has resulted in my exerting less control over the dance that I now practice. For the Western world in which control and discipline are virtues, this may not appear to be such a good thing. But for me it is liberating to experience perpetual change through my dance. It is now a conscious part of my practice to wonder at the richness of an instant and to work with what I can perceive at any given moment. I taste change and find it delicious.
i) Leder, Drew The Absent
Body The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990 p21
ii) ibid p21-22
iii) ibid p34
iv) ibid p30
v) ibid p88-89
Katrina Phillips is a graduate of The Australia Ballet School (1986) and continued her training to include a Bachelor of Letters in Dance & Drama, a Bachelor of Letters in Dance and is currently working on her Ph.D. in Dance with Deakin University. She has worked in a professional capacity as a dancer with The Australian Ballet, Northern Ballet Theatre, Dancersí Company, The Victorian State Opera and with numerous contemporary independent artists.
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