INTIMATE INTER-ACTIONS: Re-turning to the Body in One to One Performance
by Rachel Zerihan
This paper is a later version of the one presented at the Intimacy event, and has since been proposed for publication in the Body, Space, Technology journal.
One body to an-other. Spanning time, sharing space, marking place, blending breath, sensing touch. Inter-acting. One to One performance foregrounds subjective personal narratives that define – and seek to re-define – who we are, what we believe and how we act and re-act. Refused the inherent anonymity that structures the shield of mass spectatorship, in One to One we are lifted out of the passive role of audience member and re-positioned into the activated state of witness or collaborator.
Heightened response-ability and intensified perceptual awareness personalise the complex layers of semiology imbedded in the politics of the performance event, stripping bare and simultaneously problematizing the relation between one and other. Scheduling ‘alone-time’ with the performer carries with it the implication that the performance will be your own – a special-ness composed of sacred intimacy. Like the (felt) difference between a briefest encounter and a one-night stand, the temptation to romanticise or imagine the presence of intimacy when face to face with an-other has the potential to powerfully re-instate its presence and re-empower its affect. Who carries the intimacy, where it resides, who sustains it and who or what has the ability to destroy it are all subliminal questions that flutter at the core of this paper’s analysis. The intertwined notions of self-giving and self-losing in intimate environments are mapped onto the economies of exchange in the encounter of One to One. Negotiating this relationship involves adopting strategies of overcoming or accepting risk, succumbing to multi-farious displays of what might be considered challenging scenes through exposure to motifs such as taboo and otherness, and the (shared) creation and maintenance of levels of trust. Cultural, psychological, social, sexual and ethical ideologies are teased out and wrestled with in the phenomenological experience of intimate inter-action, exposed and explored in One to One performance.
The significant rise in One to One – or ‘Audience of One’ performance works as they are sometimes called, throws up some interesting questions in terms of our demand for together with artists’ use of this format in contemporary performance, body and live art. Over the last few years especially, live and performance art festivals as well as independent commissions are much more likely to platform One to One performance pieces. Interrogated by emerging artists and experimented with by established artists, One to One is gradually being recognised as an exciting and important development in the ever-changing score of contemporary performance practice. The trend to make it One to One – a kind of compulsive monogamy with the other, has seemingly been especially nurtured by British and European artists since the turn of the Millennium. The emergence of this ostensibly packaged, consumer-led ‘performance-for-one’ appears, paradoxically, to have originated via the art form that most disparaged the idea of art as product, defining itself as vociferously ‘anti-art-as-commodity’ – that was performance art. In One to One, consumerist formal anxieties are shot through with therapy culture’s promise of a talking cure as the politics of power between one and other are tangled and tugged upon in this live autopsy of the inter-relationship between performer and spectator. The formal politics of One to One performance are subsequently riddled through with another ‘set’ of questions that work to intensify the nature of the act both parties take part in aside from – or more frequently inter-linked with, the nature of the content.
In April of 1971, American artist Chris Burden made a performance work entitled “Five Day Locker Piece”. Created at a time of intense cultural experimentation in explicitly testing physical endurance through extending perceived corporeal limits, as C Carr explains, Burden’s act produced unexpected responses – most notably for the artist himself; …he just expected to curl up and endure for five consecutive days. But to his surprise, people he didn’t even know came unbidden to sit in front of the locker, to tell him their problems and the stories of their lives. [1]
Confining himself, without food or drink, to a two by two by three foot locker for five days established an environment his audience read as one that encouraged their communication within a secure and exceptionally intimate space. Post-structuralist notions such as Barthes’ "Death of the Author" come to mind as symptomatic of the shared ownership of the performance act that Burden‘s piece can be read as generating. In Oliver Grau’s study of Immersive Art he articulates the radical shift in performer/spectator dynamics post-Happenings whereby they:
…encouraged the trend toward dissolving the fixed spatial and temporal limits of the work, dislocating the central position of the author, and enhancing the work through harnessing the imagination of the participating spectators [2]
Re-imagining and in effect re-defining Burden’s performed role to that of priest or healer, judge or lover, audience psychology and behaviour becomes affective as their intimacies (fantasies and fears) are projected onto him and Burden is re-cast as confidant. The audience’s act of (re)claiming the space and re-appropriating Burden’s role to suit their own means can be seen as evocative of the performer/spectator analyst/analysand politics of therapeutics that shadow this confessional scene – denoting what Peggy Phelan calls “the psychic stage”.
Performed while a student at Chicago School of Art, it is notable that less than six months after making this piece, Burden performed a dangerously radical act, the simple nature and violence of which caused extreme problems in terms of easy audience reception. The piece I am referring to in which he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm – is his now notorious performance entitled simply “Shoot”. Burden’s resistance to sharing the ephemeral liveness of this performance becomes doubled through his guarded ‘capture’ of the act on film. The corporeal and aesthetic shattering that takes place in Shoot saturates the scene of logical or easy interpretation. In this way it can be read as Burden’s response to his (previous) audience’s arguably abusive or sadistic treatment of his confined state in Locker Piece, since in Shoot he ruptures potential for any intimate relation.
Burden's interrogation of his relationship with his audience continues to be a driving force for his investigative practice. Re-cognising his explicit approach to examining intimacy in the performance space enables me to propose Burden's Locker Piece as the first – albeit accidental – recorded piece of One to One performance. Analysing the relationship between artist/performer and other in Locker Piece provides a useful analytical framework for exploring the complex politics of intimate interaction in contemporary One to One performance.
With the intention of articulating the potential states of inter-corporeality and re-embodiment that emerge from intimate encounters of ‘proximal’ or ‘presence-led’ One to One performance, I will now briefly articulate a recent experience I had that spurred my deeper investigation into the efficacy, presence and lure of One to One in contemporary female performance. Performed in February of last year at the National Review of Live Art, I would like to share with you my One to One experience of “Untitled Bomb Shelter” by and with live artist, Kira O’Reilly.
As I entered the small white room, my gaze became fixed at Kira O’Reilly’s bare back; scored, marked, and slightly bloody. Looking ahead I saw a reflection of myself still half inside the door. A huge television screen faced us, relaying the live video-feed of O’Reilly sitting on a white towel covered chair beside an empty seat, mirroring our image back to us. My clammy hands had discoloured the surgical gloves I had been told to put on before entering the room. The energy seemed electrified, my fear was paramount as she invited me to sit beside her.
O’Reilly did her best to put me at ease with vocal reassurances, the tone and syntax of her voice like that of a counsellor’s as she calmed me, making our shared psychic stage as secure and comfortable as it could be. The reason for her uber-supportive stance was to allow me to consider accepting the invitation given to me in a sealed envelope as I sat outside the room, waiting ‘my turn‘. If I wanted, I could make the one short cut on her body that the invite clearly instructed. A highly secure space for a dangerous act; the surveillance did not dilute or dissipate the tension; it felt magnified.
I sat next to her naked body, almost clothed by the hundreds of scars from incisions made into her skin by various performances since her graduation piece of ‘98. Some markings were old and left the sign of a ‘healing’ wound, others were fresh, some still stained by fresh or drying blood. A few had been covered by plasters. “Some people want to make the mark, others use plasters” O‘Reilly said. I knew I didn’t want to cover up a wound. I did not want to erase another’s (act of) marking. I also decided then that I did not want to use the scalpel I was holding to make my own mark into O’Reilly’s skin. I said I wanted to soothe them. I gently laid my fingers over the various openings. “What you’re doing is lovely” she said. I didn’t know what I was doing.
After this exchange she asked if I would hold her in a stylised pieta pose as we both looked at the mirror image of our scene. The meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘sufferance‘ was indelibly written into this scene, however much I tried to remove it – like the cuts in O‘Reilly‘s skin, I could not ‘cover-up’ their signs of trauma, as I searched for something in my presence that I hoped relayed healing. This moment was extremely tender, broken up by my restless hands looking for a place to rest, not covering the scars yet intuitively drawn to them, acknowledging their presence with the warm trace of my hand. When our eyes met, both looking, both surveying, the intimacy was sliced through by my inability to transcend the cuts' representation of the pain and suffering inflicted into her body. The act of marking became, for me, inextricably fixed to the process of wounding.
(FIGURE 5)O’Reilly’s extraordinary performance works have been fuelled by her desire to:
..make things that felt real rather than a kind of representation…to make work about things that I didn’t have words for…like language failed me…or words are failing me… [3]
Her commitment to playing out this gap in verbalization – a possible rejection of the (male) constructs of language – can be seen figuratively throughout her process-led enquiry into body art works, formally through her liminal performance practice and literally via her performance ‘trade-mark’ of breaking through the fabric of her skin in performance to ‘make a hole’ from which such meanings might emerge. However, the opening of this gap reveals O’Reilly’s (abject) display of hysteria, a dis-ease once considered “much ado about nothing”. This “gap” filled with “nothing” is evidently far from empty. The rupture of the body spills a complex collection of disparate meanings and consequences that contribute to the cultural politics behind the sign of the cut and that which it might reveal. Anthropological, sociological, religious, psycho-analytical and political histories and narratives are all heavily invested in this mark and in the making of this mark in performance, demanding analysis and articulation of these threads of knotted meaning.
O’Reilly’s use of the One to One format in this performance allows her to (metaphorically and literally) bring you face to face with your own thoughts and contemplations about the opportunity she affords you with. The account detailed above was my own personal response to our unique encounter. The invitation to cut is an intensely personal moment that forces you to re-consider your own attitude toward your body and the skin that contains it, drawing on subjective and collective responses to a myriad of references that might include religious iconography, the practice of scarification, cultural appropriation of aesthetic notions of beauty and politics of trace, of wound, of memory together with the myriad of other feelings and responses your narrative would call you to reflect. Some consider O’Reilly’s invitation as a gift, others use pathological manifestations of what Victoria Pitts terms ’the Western psychiatric gaze’ to spill accusations of self-harm, judging it a horrific and disturbed act.
My evident caution and difficulty in separating the act of marking from the (imagined) harm it would inflict is a common response, a realisation that only came about through the opportunity O’Reilly provided me with. Having devised a performance several years ago in which the skin on my back was cut by a fellow performer, my fear at the prospect of cutting O'Reilly made me re-consider the complex politics of power between one and other in terms of economies of exchange; I had no issue with being marked but felt unable to mark an-other. Sado-masochistic undertones surface as pain and pleasure become inextricably inter-twined.
Lyn Gardner, Arts Correspondent for the Guardian writes of a later One to One she encountered with O’Reilly in which she observes;
The breakdown of the barrier between audience and performer may create feelings of anxiety and uncertainty – but it also inspires a sense of risk and opportunity. [4]
O’Reilly’s refusal to ‘fix the meaning of her work’, reaffirms her desire to allow the ‘shared moment’ between her-self and other to ‘be’ the performance, so that ,as she describes it ‘A highly stylised, highly structured, heightened social interaction’ might take place; this undoubtedly occurs. The One to One in O’Reilly’s ambiguous and challenging works re-asserts and re-questions our desire to be in the space, in the environment that considers the tracing of an act.
O’Reilly’s reference to Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon as her demonstration of heightened surveillance as focal agent together with the presence of a shared scopophilia is seen through her continual playing out of the abjection of her-self, exploring where she ends and where she begins. In turn, we are re-minded of our physical, emotional, inter-corporeal endings and beginnings, ruptures and unions. This space of mutual surveillance, acute watching and witnessing, immediately situates the performance event in an intense immersion of corporeal intimacy. O’Reilly’s (hysteric) refusal to define the border between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ combined with her design of risk-filled intimacy within this shattered frame (of meaning), further pushes responsibility of the readability of this act onto the witness / collaborator. Issues of surveillance, inter-action with other-ness and the visceral nature of bodily states continue to feed demonstrations of abjection, compulsion, rejection and transgression that mark and re-mark the shared experience of inter-corporeality of these intimate acts.
My particular passion for engaging performance works clearly rests with the unsettling and provocative experience of the moment of corporeal and psychological inter-action with an-other; another body intimately displaying physicality and viscerality, potentially lured by this other mind’s agenda. The essence of my attraction to this nearness is framed by non-verbal communication that gestures to the human experience of inter-action in a similar way to what Vivian Sobshack describes as “…the carnal, fleshy, objective foundations of subjective consciousness as it engages and is transformed by and in the world” (5). Bodily presence in terms of embodied corporeality and proximal closeness mark important strategies for continuing to interrogate the politics of the gaze in performance, fuelling my refusal to allow the corporeal body to “become obsolete” from contemporary performance works. For me, made explicit in the phenomenological experience of One to One performance, immediate, sensory, responsive relations are tested and re-evaluated through our body’s physiological impulses and reflexes together with our mind’s cognitive and considered reflexive consciousness, producing a desire to connect, engage and discover an-other.
Rather than polarising experiences of proximal and telematic, intimate and collective encounters into binaries of real and artificial, actual and artifice, my article seeks to elucidate contemporary culture’s intense and specific concern with our relationship with intimacy as exemplified in the current trend to make it One to One . At this time of acute political unrest and infused as we are with a sense of global fear, it seems that the cultural interest in exploring states of embodiment and disembodiment offer pertinent matter for demonstrating the human desire for and re-assessment of the nature and strength of intimacy and closeness with the other. Strengthening our human relation to the other, One to One performances have the ability to establish a unique corporeal and psychological connection with an-other, the ‘foreign body’ marked by an invitation to respond.
To close my overview of the lure of the One to One Performance experience, I would like to touch upon the most therapeutic piece of performance I have ever taken part in, a feeling echoed by many participants in response to Random Scream's piece performed at Riverside Studios, London, entitled "Reflection". Called to have your photograph taken a short while before your performance "slot", at once your own significance in the piece is exposed. On entering the darkened performance space, soft lighting on an armchair and free-standing lamp guide you to take a seat. When you do so, you find yourself facing a reflection of an identical chair and lamp at the other end of the space; the mirror image is set. From the opposite corner of the room that you entered, a man gingerly appears. His movement is considered and gentle, tenderising the fact that he is wearing a photograph of your own face.
For five minutes, choreographer Davis Freeman’s acutely sensitive movements and gestures gradually moves himself/yourself closer towards yourself/other, resting to include a brief moment of touch charged with inexplicable sensory electrification. Displayed and freed my own sense of cognitive self, the fixity of Cartesian duality was released and with it all responsibility. Faced with my-self as other, a re-connection began that had – to the best of my knowledge and setting aside Lacan’s Mirror Stage, never happened before. Responding to gentle, simplistic movements and gestures, an extremely safe environment played host to the most intimate and liberating performance experience I ever encountered. My senses were liberated and simultaneously stimulated through his non-threatening adoption of my (corporeal) self. The opportunity to re-embody ones own corporeal sense of self is a rare invitation that re-establishes our awareness of our mind/body, the self/other. Freeman's gift of a form of corporeal catharsis provided the opportunity for an intimate self-sharing and self-discovering that, I believe, ties the core at the heart of the lure of inter-action in One to One performance.
Endnotes
[1] p.18, Carr, C (1994). On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. London & New York, Routledge.
[2] p.205, Grau, Oliver (trs Gloria Custance) (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion Massachusetts, MIT
[3] O’Reilly, Kira, Personal Interview, Bristol, 03/11/04
[4] Gardner, Lyn (2005) "I didn't know where to look" in The Guardian, 3 March
[5] p.2, Sobchack, Vivian, (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles