Research Goal

Postcolonialism and posthumanism have added new transcultural and intermedial perspectives to our understanding of the human body and culturally diverse body images. From Butoh to recent Japanese street theatre performers (Kamishibai), from feminist body artists such as the Austrian and French performance artists VALIE EXPORT and Orlan, there seems to be a common awareness that the body as cultural image has a performative category. Furthermore, the shifting of identities and the alteration of the body is guided by diets, drugs, sports, media, biotechnology and aesthetic surgery. In medical terms, the alterability of the human body has never been easier to achieve than today, and in postmodern societies we have long given up on the religious taboo of altering the body. Thus we have lost the anthropological and anthropocentric signifier that the body used to be, and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, among others, has seen the human body "disappear."

Performance artists such as the Australian body artist Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), who extends his body into a cyborg-like media tool, even declared the body "obsolete," and the contemporary dance choreographer William Forsythe presents the body as “subverted and destabilized”. In his recent performances, he presents identity as part of changing political spaces, and consequently as constantly in motion. Therefore, if we neither own our body nor control it, if our cultural identities, as humans, as ethnic groups, as gendered beings, are constantly in flux, the movement of the body in social spaces then becomes a central category, not only in the sciences, but also in the humanities, and especially in gender, performance, theatre, and dance studies.

While there is substantial theory and expertise on issues of body and gender (Butler, Duncan, Haraway, Irigary), political bodies and space (Baudrillard, de Certeau, Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault), postcolonial and transcultural identities (Adelson, Bateson, Bhabha, Lefebvre, Spivak) as well as the performative representation and alteration of the human and posthuman body in literature, the sciences, and the arts (Barthes, Benthien, Featherstone, Gilman, Hayles, Latour, Schechner, Virilio), the interdisciplinary workshop Body Spaces will promote dialogue on theories of performativity, theatricality, and cultural identity (e.g., Agamben, Benjamin, Brandstetter, Fischer-Lichte, Merleau-Ponty, Plessner, Serres) that allow an open-disciplinary analysis of body images in-between technological and choreographical, textual and performative spaces.

Since there cannot be a universal definition of the body due to its culturally performative understanding, one result could be a classification of body spaces from different cultural, historical, and disciplinary viewpoints. Bodily images could be described as instances of performative and transcultural semiotic practices that are based on diverse cultural rituals and scientific traditions (e.g., within the German Cultural Studies context based on avant-garde aesthetics such as Benjamin’s corporeal topography of the image- as physis-zone).

The goal of this workshop is to foster a interdisciplinary and international collaboration around the theme Body Spaces. The workshop could lead to potentially fruitful interdisciplinary discussions of terminology used across different fields, such as visuality/corporeality; embodiment/theatricality; performance/performativity/gender; cultural identity/history/memory based on body images; motion techniques/technology; choreography (understood in anthropological terms) in dance, theatre, societal, institutional and ritual spaces.

Objective

For the interdisciplinary and international Body Spaces Workshop, scholars from ten disciplines and five countries were invited for discussing the human body and its movements within cultural spaces in terms of transcultural processes of image building.

Whether the body is seen as figurative or performative, the circulation of body images within a global and intermedial context calls for an understanding of corporeal topographies as cross-culturally and technologically built, at times creating inherited figurative images that travel through art and sciences, cultural spaces and times. The methodologies, theories and theatre practices to be discussed included

Besides its broad interdisciplinary approach, the workshop was unique within Canadian as well as international scholarship as it allowed for bridging theories and practices of body performances. Several presenters (e.g. Burnett, Daniel, Kozel, Lanki) incorporated small movement improvisations that were enacted by students and/or the participants. It was also experimental in so far as it allowed performances and theoretical papers to be discussed at the same level. Thus it invited not only discussions about the body, but also increased the visibility of theories by the possibility of performing them.

The high interest by UBC and external performers and scholars from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds showed that there is a need for collaboration that exceeds the traditional climate of academic meetings. When artists, performers and scientists increasingly share ideas and methods within projects that address body alterations, extensions and movements, interdisciplinary collaboration on a multifaceted definition of the body cannot be limited to the scientific community, since “Body Politic, the struggle around biopower – certainly, as Foucault foresaw, the great question of this century – cannot be sustained if one agrees to give science the imperial right of defining all by itself the entire realm of primary qualities.” (Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.“ Body & Society. 2004; 10:205-229. 228).