Tollefson, Alan
10/24/06
UCSC DANM 247
Instructor: Catherine Soussloff
Final Paper rough draft/outline
Proposal for an Undergraduate Course in Performance
This paper is a project proposal that emphasizes theory. The project is to create an
undergraduate course in performance.
The methodologies of which, if synthesized in the student, would produce a performative
practice applicable to politicized social interactions, based on a discourse of
intersubjecxtivity, (i.e. self and other object positions, audience performer interaction)
that examines through systems of interactive contingency.
Contingency in this sense refers to the variability in time structures operating in
improvisation, conversation, ritual, and play as well as the contingency of the audience.
Contingency is also an effect to be considered in the constructions of narratives.
The course is based on methods that I’m developing for the realization of my master
thesis that could be categorized under the general headings:
Map making: the organization of words in various outlines and structures that map a
conceptual territory: webs, semiotic squares, databases, dialogues, and poems.
Performance practices: teaching, process of design and fabrication, programming,
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conducting interviews, choreographing, composing.
Discourse: engaging the works of philosophy and criticism in order to build a theoretical
framework for present considerations
Visualizations communication through images, performance as visual art -image
mediated performances.
Phonations: audio communication through sound recordings or live
voice/instrumentation.
This course development is an intervention of sorts; designed as a model for teaching
based on cooperative learning, interactivity and intersubjectivity; interventionist because
it is positioned antithetically to socialization models of teaching and teaching that fills the
“empty vessel” of the pupil; and interventionist because it is interdisciplinary in
approach.
The syllabus for the course entitled Physical Poetry at this point in its development
would look something like this:
Course title: physical poetry
Course description: students engage in performance practices and discourses in
performativity and work toward a synthesis of embodiment where the nonrepresentational artist/body is the site of expression through its visualizations and
phonations in both live and mediated performances
Course Schedule:
Week 1. Photography: performativity/document/memorial/mediated performance.
Readings due: artaud
Week 2. brush/gesture/line
Readings due: barthes
Photo and Poem due:
Week 3. narrative architecture poetry music / form of time/ form of space.
Readings due: bourdieu
Photo and Poem due:
Week 4. finger/phrase/song
Readings due: bergson
Photo and Poem due:
Week 5. embodiment intersubjectiviety
Readings due: merleau-ponty
Photo and Poem due:
Week 6. tongue/utterance/poem
Readings due: oliver
Photo and Poem due:
Week 7. machine human interaction skin/ voice/ image/ taste/ smell
Readings due: harraway
Photo and Poem due:
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Terms:
physical poetry
This statement, borrowed from Artaud, is repurposed and refers to mapping poetry onto
the body. And that this poetry is to satisfy the senses. Artaud calls for in Metaphysics of
the Mise en Scene an enactment of a “concrete language.” I take this to include if not
necessitate a presence of the performer/poet.
embodiment
All of the exercises of the course have to do with the notion of embodiment as a
nonrepresentational mode of expression. Revealing one’s presence in the world.
indexical / iconic
The primary system of physical poetry gets its energy from the tension between
indexicality and iconicity. In Semiotics for Beginners an online text, Daniel Chandler
discusses the difference.
Jakobson argues that whereas a metaphorical term is connected with that
for which it is substituted on the basis of similarity, metonymy is based on
contiguity or closeness (Jakobson & Halle 1956, 91, 95). The indexicality
of metonyms also tends to suggest that they are 'directly connected to'
reality in contrast to the mere iconicity or symbolism of metaphor...
Metonymic signifiers foreground the signified whilst metaphoric signifiers
foreground the signifier (Lodge 1977, xiv).
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Another way to think of these tropes is through the investigation of subject/object
positions. Iconicity could be thought of as the objectification of the signified and
Indexicality referring to the subjective signifier.
visualizations and phonations
Images and sounds. I chose the word phonations to include voice as well as mediated
sound as instrumentation. These are broad categories of the demonstrations of the idea.
Either through some visual medium, i.e. performance, photography, drawing or video, or
some audio event like recordings, voice or the playing of a violin, what results in these
demonstrative gestures are the iterations of the ideas, concepts or intents. (Soussloff 2000
p.88)
Topics and Exercises:
Photography: performativity/document/memorial/mediated performance.
Barthes makes comparisons between theatre and photography in Camera Lucica and says
that the photograph is to perform three things: to do, to undergo, or to look. (Barthes
1981 p.9) The performative aspect of photography is contingent, in Barthes’ observation,
I think, on the presence of all three within the idea, concept or intent.
Exercise One: brush/gesture/line
Isolate gestures of others or your own. Document a series of up to ten gestures and
recombine the gestures to form a non-discursive poem.
Narrative architecture poetry music / form of time/ form of space.
This section deals with form on a number of levels. Narrative form, Architecture as a
macroembodiment or metonym of the body; and how this macrobody can be contacted
through sound. Musical form and musical poetry “inflates” structures in space by
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producing aural or phonetic volumes (from in time, is the division of these volumes.)
Classicism’s harmonic structures relate the correspondence of music and architecture
almost symmetrically. Harmonic ratios of vaults arches and windows derived from the
harmonies of music and the harmonic canon applied to the body presume the
mathematical underpinnings of reality. However, for the purposes of this discussion, I
would like to simply think of the effect of “overlays” where one system of form can be
applied to a different sensory set. To illustrate this I would like to mention an effect, an
affliction really, called synesthesia. This is the mixing of sensory input and cognitive
synthesis such that the hearing of colors is possible or the smelling of sounds can be
described. The novelist Vladimer Nabokov was capable of this thinking in that he saw
characters of the alphabet as specific colors (he apparently had a few other talents.)
Kandinsky, Scriabian, and Hockney possessed a version of the trait as well. (Brian Boyd,
Nabokov’s Blues http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_arph/alpco-for.htm) What
synesthesia can do for us is not affix a reliance on the senses but reveal their conditions.
Conditionality is not ‘formal’ it iscontingent. Form empties thru the “overlay” and we
focus less on the dancers as we become aware of the spaces between their steps and at
what frequency they stride.
Exercise Two: finger/phrase/song
Embodiment/ Intersubjectiviety
Merleau-Ponty and Butler are discussed in terms of the contingencies inherent in the
audience performer relationship. Phenomenological sense-mediated reality places the
author in the position of authority. Subject/object self/other is discussed in Butler.
Exercise Three: tongue/utterance/poem
Machine human interaction: skin/ voice/ image/ taste/ smell
Harroway informs this section with a reading of the Cyborg Manifesto.
Exercise Four: body/movement/dance
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Time historiography/narrative/becoming
Bergson informs this section with the sculpting of narrative and the construction of time
as a physical force. In Matter and Memory he talks about time that has to be experienced
sensually rather than cognitively in order to gain energy from the force of time stored in
memory. (guerlac 2006 p.80)
Freedom from deterministic thinking; contact and memory as a way of knowing –
Bergson contends that memory is the place to find the mind [l’espirit] if it does exist.
Bergson says we should put our intelligence in the creative evolution as the “unfolding”
rather in the apriori unchangeable principles.
Outline
Conclusion: section explains the objective of the course as mentioned in the opening
paragraph.
I methodologies
A. documentation is the mediation through which the performance is
communicated
a. Photographs produced for the purposes of the class can be from a film
camera, but because of the necessity for speed, cheap digital still camera
or cvs video camera will work better. Flatbed scanners, web cams or
camera phones
b. video, again cvs video cameras, web cams, camera phones.
c. drawing,
d.
audio recording,
e. text
II Synthesis
A. demonstration of work from the synthesis of discourse and action
III Performative practice
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A. development of methodologies
IV Politicized social interactions
A. strategy and efficacy
B. actions in the social
C. perturbations of hegemony
D. disturbance
V Discourse
A. the idea
B. rhetoric
C. interdisciplinary approach
VI Intersubjectivity
A. self and other object positions,
B. audience performer interaction
D. systems of interactive contingency.
Identity event is violent
12,600,000 breaths in a life time
Elements of poetry:
Allegory
Alliteration
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Assonance
Denotation and Connotation
Diction
Image
Irony
Metaphor
Meter
Rhyme
Simile
Symbol
Tone
Word Order
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