A mise-en-corps is intended to be an ephemeral intervention, and it is not representational. It requires interaction because it is prone to enable audience participation. In the performer-audience relationship, there is a rank of power and passivity that the mise-en-corps seeks to dismantle and move from the passive spectator to the participant’s action, where the experience is enabling but the actions and decisions come from their own agency and self-awareness.
My aim is to contribute to the analysis of embodied practices and their processes to produce new knowledge, which is imbricated in the continuous exercise, implementation, and operation of body cognition. In addition, it is essential to present embodied research as a non-hierarchical procedure integrated into the academic context. In the scope of dissemination, for instance, the performative papers or video essays can be a contribution to provide credibility in scholarly ecologies.
One of my expectations is to move along Practice-as-Research to Research-Creation by prototyping a research method provisionally named mise-en-corps: puesta en cuerpo: an embodied anarchiving. Some of the initial core concepts and steps to follow during the research are body, anarchive, interpretation, and relational/participatory poetics. The reason to make this search is to change the object of study from the performer-practitioner to the participants or the performance, depending on the results this prototype results in.
To model this puesta en cuerpo, I have been going through diverse and ongoing approaches. Because of my background as a professional actress, I included training–embodied technique as a way of going deeply into practice as research. However, I am not only interested in working in a performer-centered inquiry but also in the possibility of creating participatory events where the participants’ experience is generated by their own agency. In this prototype, I combine and interact with diverse methods such as somatic practices, oral history, performance, and critical making. In the will to define and comprehend positionality, I was following the framework of doing-feeling-thinking. These inquiries explored the “Dynamic model for practice as research” (Nelson, 2015) departing from the theory imbricated within the practice. This model helped me define the know-how, know-what, and know-that of a researcher’s praxis.
Immerse into that framework, the first question was linked to the notion of the performer/practitioner’s body. Focused on Ben Spatz’s question What a body can do? and Sara Hendren’s What can a Body do? I discovered those inquiries determine the body, mainly, as a physical structure that can do things, affect things, and experience things. In that sense, I’d like to inquire into the capabilities, affections, and social interactions of the practitioner’s body. From the point of view of a practitioner-researcher, the possibilities of the body developed through technique can result in a state that affects others. The anthropology of theater has developed, during years of empirical approach, the methodology of transcultural dimension which seeks to identify the constitutional basis that arises in the scenic life: the performer’s presence. This is constituted by bios, a specific behavior acquired by the performer through the corporal and mental processes in a performative situation. Then another kind of perception is activated and this is an essential aspect in embodied knowledge.
According to Spatz (2015), embodied practices are constituted by knowledge in technique (1) which means that both -technique and knowledge- are transmissible. The concept of embodiment is a vast domain that incorporates, beyond the physical, other categories of “everything that a body can do…mental, emotional, spiritual, vocal, somatic, interpersonal, expressive, and more” (11) Undoubtedly, as a practitioner, the basis of my work has been founded on that notion and it is located between the scenic life and the everyday practice of technique as knowledge. This is the know-how in Nelson’s framework. Therefore, there is a central principle of the mise-en-corps that is refined in laboratory practice. However, it is important to notice that. in search of the practitioner/performer capabilities, Hendren’s study of disability (2020, 10-16) is relevant to point out the heritage of normalcy that rules in what is considered as a technique.
I want to conclude with two questions: How do embodied practices contemplate intersectionality? What kind of techniques are dedicated to diverse bodies and styles of embodiment?
Fall 2022
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