The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

The Subject of Semiotics

Prima donnas, or the circus of women dead women family affairs, or the \"parents terribles\" the girls who leap into space furies and gods, or wanings of the moon madmen, negroes, jesters, or the heroes of deception the tetralogic of the ring, or the daughter done for in praise of paganism.

Opera, or the Undoing of Women

At a time of life when the body is often dematerialised, decentred and fragmented and our natural and cultural world seems exhausted on a global scale, this creative research investigates the potential for choreography as a strategy for recovery and coming together. My research is situated at the intersections between spatial design, somatics, sound art, site-based performance and social choreography. A creative practice that thinks through doing, it interrogates the potential of a choreoauratic site-based performance practice to bring attention to the politics of public places, somatically, architecturally, and socially. A series of participatory headphonic events shifts between the expanded field of choreography, critical spatial practice and theory. The participatory delivery of these test-events target a return to listening, sensory attunement and respons(able) encounter. A new term choreoauratics is cultivated out of this creative research. It argues for the convergence of prosthetic listening and somatic choreography as a critical spatial practice. Tuning into the philosophies and politics of performance research, the language of the threshold offers a theoretical context for thinking through the dispersed, disembodied and accelerated social conditioning of digital infrastructures. Choreoauratic test-events intervene in public spaces, working poetically towards a recovery of the imperceptible and the disappearing. Performing in the margins, the practice orchestrates an emergent form of public activism. Core concepts in this research are; The nomad, the chora, the witness, and the threshold. These concepts stem from the following key theorists; Rosie Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze and F??lix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben and Elizabeth Grosz and are re-evaluated as they intersect and comingle through writing and praxis. The harmony of praxis and writing engenders a vibrant middle space, like Deleuze and Guattari???s rhizomatic territories, a heterogeneous space that is performed as intensities of speed (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Through praxis the theoretical is embodied in the sensate which brings writing into the choreographic, and as Kristeva suggests into the body, activating the poetic imagination. Choreographies for the ears affect and politicise the way we inhabit and incorporate spaces. A new kind of subjectivity emerges through ubiquitous sound technologies and choreography. This activates the subject and the city in collisions and convergence, coming together in the striated, dispersed virtual space of listening prosthetically. Engaging in the unspectacular, the practice treads lightly, tuning into the intensities of the poetic, sound, the voice, place and the moving body.

Choreoauratics: Social Choreographies for the Ears

Western dance theatre performance, and specifically UK independent dance, provides the context for this writing. I teach the MA module in Performance Making: choreography at the University of Surrey. Students attend the course from different cultural backgrounds and also bring different physical skills and knowledge. Teaching the module is challenging in that it interweaves my experience as a performer, choreographer and artistic director with my role as an academic. One ongoing interest for me, which connects practice to theory in the teaching, is that of a performer's presence. Standing Still … Looking at You might appear as a microscopic momentary image between performer and spectator. Embodying the action through tasks offers students the opportunity to blow open and investigate the notion of presence. I am writing about these tasks to illustrate how, in teaching, performance practice and post-structuralist theory can influence each other.

Standing Still...Looking At You

ion in dance performances and to the necessity of rooting the concept of erotic androgyny in the site of real performing bodies. Consequently, figurations of erotic practice are characterised, to emphasise how erotic practices have deep ontological histories on the one hand, but can become horizontal surface-constructed figurations for performance play on the other (Braidotti 1994). Kristeva's concepts of the semiotic and symbolic (1984) set a psychoanalytical contextual framework in which to consider erotic practices. Drawing on De Lauretis (1984), Bataille (1962), and references to my own history as a ballet dancer, erotic practices of the Oedipal narrative are described. Illustrations from ballet, physical theatre performances of DV8 and LaLaLa Human Steps, Eurocrash, body art performances of Franko B., Orlan, Ron Athy serve to expose and subvert the `bataille-esque' erotic practice, which is so much a part of a ballerina's life. Feminist practices of eroticism are the next to be identified, which react against Oedipal and bataille-esque scenarios, encouraging the erotic expression of internal semiotic drives ofjouissance. Lorde's famous essay on eroticism (1984) sets a theoretical context for female erotic practice. 4 With references to French feminist Cixous (1981) and Deleuze and Guattari (1988), Venus Hurtle (Sue MacLennan 1990) is described in order to illustrate how the erotic force of jouissance finds its expression in dance language. Drawing on Juno and Vale (1991), who suggest anger as an erotic force for political change, early feminist performance work at X6 Dance Space is discussed. Laughter, as an erotic force, combined with anger, can be considered to express itself through feminist stereotyped figures of parody in performance (Kristeva 1984, Lorde 1984, Freud 1905). Parody in dance often refers to ballet, and BleedingFairies (Claid 1977), Raw Hide (Claid 1984) and Laid Out Lovely (Claid 1994) are sketched, in order to illustrate the erotic practice of parodic performance. Following a description of Grace & Glitter (1987), a performance piece which offers a range of feminist erotic figures, Chapter 6 acknowledges that identifying and defining specific figures does not necessarily evoke seductive relations. Pausing to identify them at this point in the thesis is to recognise their interior depths and their performing potential. 11 Chapter 7 identifies lesbian erotic practices, exploring the masquerade with binary models of gender and sexuality (Butler 1991, Hart (1997). The erotic figures of butch and femme are used to argue that lesbian erotic practices play between these two identities (Case 1988). Witch One (1992) and Le Flesh (1995) illustrate the erotic play in one body between identifiable lesbian desiring roles. Freud's `Fort/Da' (1920), manipulated by Derrida (1985) for a game of deconstruction, is abstracted and reappropriated as a parallel analogy for the throwingtretrieving of lesbian gaze in performance. Analysis of these performances suggests once again that performing identifiable positions and images from any one erotic figuration does not necessarily evoke illusions of erotic androgyny. Consequently, Chapter 7 applies Deleuze & Guattari's motif of `becoming' (1988) to consider how the figures from Oedipal, bataille-esque, feminist and lesbian narratives might become shadows, points of reference between which the illusion of erotic androgyny can be imagined. Describing Did I Speak? (Claid 1996) from the position of performer, The Millenarium (Wayne McGregor 1997) and We Set Out Early ... Visibility was Poor (Bill T. Jones 1998) from the position of spectator, reveals the seductive potential of erotic androgyny as a practice of illusion.

Emilyn Claid

Papers

Yes, no, maybe : the practice of illusion in dance theatre peformance