This thesis set out to explore a constellation o f histories o f the b ody/ob ject on stage, and the ways in which it takes on or denies agency and presence. W e saw how the animate and the
inanimate functioned as puppet, scapegoat, armour, surrogate, body to one another. The
research revealed the increasing prominence of choreographic m ovem ent as an indication of presence, a disclosure o f absence, a strategy o f depersonalising and disguising presence as absence. Through the spectators’ speculations, attention was acutely drawn to choreographies o f agency, generating conjectures regarding what (or who) is animating who [or what), and
how. W e oscillated constantly betw een object and subject, between spectatorship and
embodiment, betw een looking and being/enacting. This brought up complications in the ways in which belief was structured and restructured, confusing choreographic agencies and interrogating boundaries. Continuities and variations emerged betw een incorrupt cadavers and tableaux vivants; relics and prostheses; articulated crucifixes, anatomical models and automata; medieval props, the chess-playing automaton and puppet-like acting techniques or costumes. Correspondingly, w e follow ed enduring beliefs in animated objects and their transformation or
obsolescence. Throughout, our main proposition has been that these beliefs survived
som ehow through theatrical performativity, on the stage. From tableaux vivants to automata to puppet-actors, theatre has proved the prime site for the animation o f the inanimate, or the de-animation of the animate.
The problem o f agency and presence has often led to issues o f control and subjection. My constant attempt has been to subvert such master-slave dynamics. For example, my reading of tableaux vivants posited self-motivated stillness against theories o f the objectifying gaze. The notion o f a puppet-like actor, as studied in chapter 6, similarly brings in the director’s desire for com plete control exerted over the subject on stage, and yet in my reading this finds solution through the self-inflicted restrictions o f Schlemmer’s costumes, which enable the actor and the director to combine control and lack o f it in one single body, albeit clothed in a second skin. Indeed, the choreography o f a single body proves one o f the most efficacious strategies for transforming the problematic dualism o f control and subjection, em powerm ent and debilitation. Through those chapters which focus on the single yet intrinsically fractured or superimposed multiple body o f the live performer on stage, I have hoped to enable a reconfiguration o f the master-slave dichotomy: the poser in a tableau, who glazes over in rigor
mortis only to return at will to fluid mobility [chapter 3); the body carrying and carried by a prosthetic limb, or simulating such alternation o f animate and inanimate (chapter 5}; the performer encased in a sculptural body that depersonalises the actor without killing him off [chapter 6). Dynamics o f vocal and choreographic agency are constantly displaced in the examples cited here. A lm ost every image or performer w e have looked at seems som ehow to choose to abdicate authorship' [rather than be a victim o f suppression), and both object and subject appear to demonstrate a marked propensity towards becoming a vessel, a container, a
body to another... in short, a relational image or a transubstantiated object.
Similarly, just as the compacted body can suggest resolutions to conflicts o f dictatorship and enslavement, the compacted body can also, to some extent, reconcile belief and disbelief. The displacement o f agency proved troubling in the history o f efficacious images due to the recurrent accusations or denials o f a second body, a hidden prototype/causal agent manipulating the object from above, within, behind, aside, etc.. Even when, as in some o f the iconoclastic attacks o f the Reformation, the allegation was that there is no possible operator, that the object is opaquely non-intercessionary, there remained the denunciation o f a hierarchical structure [i.e. Catholicism) employing such objects in order to deceive and deprive the believers. The puppet is the intercessionary figure par excellence. To recall Kleist, the suspended marionette reveals a tw o-w ay impulse: the upward pull o f the operator and its non- resistance to gravity. The mechanism o f the marionette choreographically elucidates both disbelief and belief. As w e saw in chapters 1-2, according to the mocking disbeliever, the inanimate object-idol shames its idolaters “because through them these gods are made to stand, lest they fall on the ground. If any one sets one o f them upright, it cannot m ove o f itself; and if
it is tipped over, it cannot straighten itself’ [Baruch-Letter of Jeremiah 6:26-27), whereas
according to the believer the dead body resurrects [from re-surgere, 'to rise again') from
inanimate horizontality into vertical movement. Agency and non-agency, presence and non presence within the object, can persuasively coexist on the stage, in the theatrical context, long after the age o f the miraculous object has becom e for the most part [and predominantly in the
West) obsolete. Images, idols, icons or speaking crucifixes nowadays can rarely perform
miracles without slipping into the category o f technological device or deception, yet the space o f the stage enables a particular mode o f performativity and spectatorship in which breath taking suspension can prevail.
' The puppet is emblematic of this tendency. Shershow examines the trope of authorial sovereignty with reference to the puppet as embodiment of the theological authorship o f the author/creator/director (20, 54). This follows Foucault’s notion of the “author function,” which can exceed the individual to encompass “several selves... several subjects.” Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (Middlesex: Penguin, 1984), 101-20, 113. Foucault adds “The author... is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which w e fear the proliferation of meaning.” (119) This relates to the subversive function of puppetry, whereby the puppet can say what its ventriloquist cannot.
The object-subject amalgam w e have looked at serves as mediator, and this mediating function splits it into tw o bodies or entities. Only when the living actor willingly takes on the role o f the statue or puppet, does the body collapse back into “one,” or rather, one part mediates the other in constantly shifting patterns of control. Hierarchies are collapsed and belief is self induced. There is no fixed dynamic o f control and subjection. Animation and de-animation flit across both the body and the stage in mercurial patterns of evanescence and presence.
The potential o f this study opens out to new areas and questions which I hope to be able to
address in the near future. The thesis ended with Schlemmer, just after world war II, but
there is much scope for further research focusing on Tadeusz Kantor (briefly referred to at the end of chapter i], who was active between 1944-1990.^ A potential chapter on his work would bridge the historical gaps, bringing the trajectory through world war II into the present. Furthermore, Kantor himself cited several o f the references and authors examined here, in
particular Kleist and Craig. More importantly in light o f the above conclusion, some o f
Kantor’s plays, such as The D ead Class (1975), split the actor into tw o coexisting,
interchangeable bodies on stage: the live performer and his inanimate replica. This sculptural
object is at once imitation o f the actor, body cast, double, descendant — as well as model for the
actor, ascendant, progenitor. Double-vision is here a deliberate theatrical strategy.
In some ways, the fascination with puppet-like acting is in fact a fascination with the pre-
cinematic or cinematic equivalent on stage. As with Kantor’s sculptural doubles,
contemporary performance often plays with the actors’ cinematic doubles on stage, alternating dizzying fast-forwards and rewinds, flashes forward and flashbacks.^ Scenes can be repeated, endlessly, without variation. Digital editing techniques render the live performance even more malleable, not only in terms o f potential illusion, but also in terms o f choreographies. Cinema loops movement, and sequences can be spliced into ever smaller fragments which can becom e trapped in minute tics and repetitive acts, thus dictating choreography and timing."* The role o f marionettes in late twentieth-century theatre significantly posits “issues o f living, dying,
disintegration, and disappearance”® that are also played out in much recent performance. The
twentieth-century’s obsession with a depersonalised actor is parallel, perhaps, to the
^ The most comprehensive book on Kantor in English to date is A Journey Through O ther Spaces: Essays and
M anifestos by Tadeusz Kantor, 1944-1990, trans. and ed. M. Kobialka (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1993).
^ For example Roadm etal Sweetbread, performed by Stationhouse Opera, at ICA, London, 1999; or To You, the
Birdie, performed by The Wooster Group at Riverside Studios, London, May 2002.
'• I am thinking of the artist Mark Dean's microsurgical editing of old footage (exhibited at Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, 2002), or my own piece Brujeria,' not included in the attached videotape.
^ Heidi Gilpin, “Lifelessness in Movement, or how do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance for Movement Performance,” Corporealities, ed. S.L Foster (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1996), 106-28, 116.
contemporary fascination with the dual vision o f the live and the virtual performer, which alternate, mimic, prefigure and lapse behind one another.
Appendix
A.
Videos
Together with the written com ponent o f the dissertation, I have included several extracts o f my ow n work, some based on performance or performative acts, others which play more specifically on the medium o f video/film /photography. Whereas the thesis circumvents the domain o f film studies, my position as an artist is inevitably aligned with video and therefore indebted to the history o f cinema. All the same, even when the work uses the medium o f
video to create illusion, I would still claim that my work prioritises the sculptural
metamorphosis of the body-in-motion, which can be conveyed either in live performance or in
film ed/docum ented/m anipulated documentation o f performance. It becom es hard to
disentangle the live performance from the lens o f the camera documenting it, the eye o f the witness, as it were, and I deliberately play on the ambiguity betw een these layers.
The focus o f my artwork tends to be on the effects o f one body upon another: gravitation, levitation, mesmerism, immobilisation, entrance. This affected body becom es soft and pliable, merging with the other body; expands kaleidoscopically; retains the memory o f a previous body [a phantom or prosthetic limb]; retracts or hardens in defence. I try to make visible the surrounding forces that emanate from the body, show them as both empowering and debilitating, acting as a protective barrier or as a site of entrance for manipulation. I draw attention to the ambiguity and irresolution o f controlling power dynamics, of violence and o f subjection.
Over the past year and a half I have been working on an umbrella project entitled The
Conjuror's Assistant, which looks at the ways in which the female body functions in magic as a figure to be animated, disjointed, reconstructed, entranced, levitated, boxed in, puppeteered or ventriloquised. This has involved performance projects, videos based on performative actions
and/or manipulated archival footage, and photographic works. Many o f these explore
conventional magic tricks “turned on their head,” as it were, providing a glimpse into the underside of magic and deconstructing the power structures (choreographic; gender-based; reversing the roles o f the one who 'knows' and the one who ‘shows’; etc.] o f magician/assistant.
Many o f the works toy with flimsy illusion which only just sustains itself, transparently revealing its mechanism so that the viewer is at once seduced whilst remaining critically aware. Other works reflect more directly on the technology o f the moving image as an instrument
which produces as well as critiques illusion.
The extracts included here have been exhibited in varying dimensions as projections or on a monitor, as a looped installation or a one-off screening, in the following exhibitions:
Con-Art, Site Gallery, Sheffield [2002]
I put a spell on you, Bezalel Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel [2001) A rt in the Bar, Chapter Arts, Cardiff [2002)
N ew Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre, London, and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland [2001)
LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) club, HMS president, London [2001} East End Collaborations, Platform 2001, London (2001)
Onedotzero uncut, ICA, London (2001) A.A. Silver Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel (2001) G-niale filmfest 2001, Stralsund, Germany [2001)
Synopses:
7 Put a Spell on You' (2001), 04:07
Reversing the stereotypical suspension trick where he 'stands’ and she 'lies,' archival footage is digitally manipulated to show a magician suspended horizontally whilst his female assistant is vertically upright. As he moves his hands in sensuous theatrical gestures over her abdomen, luring her forwards [as opposed to upwards), she slowly drifts, advancing towards his abdomen. His gestures are distorted to appear almost liquefying, sexualising the grid their intersected bodies create. Gradually her stomach swells and appears almost impregnated by the caress his magical fingers, which appear to be manipulating invisible strings. The interest in magic [cf. chapter 4 and appendix B) stems from the particular gestural rhetoric o f showing, demonstrating, as opposed to psychological acting.
'E clipse' [2001), 04:04 [extract from longer loop)
T w o figures appear naked and blindfolded in an almost sub-aquatic blue circular room. They seek each other, and in a blink o f an eye exchange positions to becom e the other they were groping for. One body is sucked into the other body with a sharp gasp o f air, to evoke the
breathing each other in, colliding into the same body. Power dynamics o f scale, visibility [seeing and being seen], passive/active, are constantly shifting.
'Torso' [2000], 02:07 [extract from longer loop]
A disembodied female torso, reminiscent o f a classical statue, flickers on the screen in quivering movements to the soundtrack o f a chorus o f hyperventilation, oscillating between the erotic and the hysterical. Although throughout the dissertation fragmentation is viewed in a positive, non-threatening light, here it is challenged and contextualised in relation to gender. The dismembered body experiences panic as it cannot hold itself upright, lacking verticality or the surrogate for verticality which is the pedestal.
'The Uhennarionette' [2001], Part documentation, part reworking o f a performance- installation devised and directed by Aura Satz with Sam Birt & Marie-Louise Flexen, performed at the Garage in Novem ber 2001. [edited and digitally manipulated extract, see appendix B. b elow ].
'C uriouser & Curiouser' [2001], tw o framed photographs [30x20cm], reprinted on video jacket, with thanks to Ruth Blue.
Two figures are eclipsed behind a tailor's dummy, legless as if wedged in the floor or magically
levitating. The bewildered facial expressions evoke the metamorphic body o f Alice in