![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
In this essay I argue that whereas expert performers may perform ‘falling’, they are actually, expertly, not falling at all. In other words ‘falling’, in performance, is a complex abstraction, materially realised through its exact opposite; a symbolic construct, achieved through performance mastery. In contrast the unmastered fall, in the everyday, is an event of what Brian Massumi has called “pure senseless contingency” - the example he gives is of Roland Barthes' death in 1980, after lunch with President Francois Mitterand, when Barthes was knocked to the ground by a laundry truck. To provide evidence of pure, senseless contingency's opposite, I draw, amongst other examples, on Gildas Bourdet's staging of Claudel's Le Pain dur in 1984 with the Theatre de la Salamandre, with particular reference to the performance expertise of Christian Blanc - whose ‘fatal fall’ is dramatically staged, in black and white, on the programme cover.
Notes
1 Massumi reflects here on the curious accident with a laundry van that killed Roland Barthes in Paris, in 1980, just after his lunch with Francois Mitterand.
2 http://collectie.boijmans.nl/en/object/4340, accessed 20 November 2017. ‘The four seemingly varied poses painted by the artist in the period are in fact more or less the same pose (one leg bent down, the other raised; one arm raised, the other lowered) viewed from different angles.’
3 www.etymonline.com/, accessed 1 November 2017.
6 See Claudel (1956).
7 I use the term ‘expert-intuitive’ here while recognizing the difficulty posed for some in performance makers and writers by use of the qualifiers ‘expert’ and ‘professional’ (as in ‘expert practices’). Post-2000 research into intuitive decision making in the context of expert and professional practices has tended to be focused on Professional Studies, Nursing, Education, Psychology and a range of professional disciplines – prompted in part by what are called ‘New Doctorates’; it is relatively rare to find research into expert-intuitivity in the arts. A notable exception can be found in the work of Daniel Bangert (see Bangert, Schubert and Fabian 2014 and D. Bangert 2015). While certain ‘intuititionists’ take up the role of the intuitive in decision making (cf. Haidt 2001), they tend to continue to blur the distinctions I want to argue for between everyday-intuitive judgement, which we all engage in, and the judgement specific to and practised by professionals at work. See my ‘Running in Circles, with “Music” in Mind’ (2017).
8 Gildas Bourdet, 1984, Programme Notes (my translation).
9 http://www.theatre-et-compagnie.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79&Itemid=474, accessed 1 November 2017.
10 The cultural policy of decentralization, long of political interest in France, became a reality between 1959 and the 1970s when Malraux as Minister of Culture founded and funded regional Maisons de la Culture – the first at le Havre in 1961, followed by Caen, Bourges and Paris (Théâtre de l’Est parisien). It was judged politically useful to offer ‘interesting’ young theatre directors posts at regional Cultural Centres. ‘Interesting’ young directors tended, at the time, to be what the French called intellos de gauche, which suggested an art practice informed by theories of the Left.
11 Johnston writes: ‘I argue that Petit’s walk invites us to project ourselves into it and practice this space … in the air between the Twin Towers … ’ (2013: 31).
12 The speculative turn critiques the established tendency of continental philosophy ‘to focus on discourse, text, culture, consciousness, power or ideas as what constitutes reality. Humanity remains at the centre of these works, and reality appears in philosophy only as a correlate of human thought. … [S]omething is clearly amiss in these trends [and] it is not clear that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to’ developments such as ‘looming ecological catastrophe’ (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011: 3).
13 Documentation and Performance Conference, University of Lancaster, Nuffield Theatre, 1994.
14 Both Richard Schechner (2006) and Eugenio Barba (Barba and Savarese 1991) take up the notion of a close correlation between everyday and ‘extra-daily’ practices. The notion was widespread in the 1980s and early 1990s, developing theoretical ideas established in the work of Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and later Michel de Certeau, and resonating with the ideas of artists like Allan Karpow and Joseph Beuys.
15 www.etymonline.com/word/mastery, consulted 1 November 2017.
16 As was the case for Feldenkrais’ Awareness Through Movement (1990), much writing on performance training published in the 1990s was characterized by its association with the name of a specific, major practitioner. This situation changed to some extent in the 2000s, with writing from Ali Hodge and Bella Merlin, and others, which explored training more generally, although performance training modes still tend to be associated with the names of notorious practitioners.
17 According to Thomas D. Senor (plato.stanford.edu/) Bergson contended that we do not know our body only ‘from without’ by perceptions, but also ‘from within’ by affections. In Bergsonian terms, Senor accepts as given that ‘most of our knowledge is in memory at any particular time. What is perhaps surprising, however, is the degree to which even our current conscious knowledge typically depends on memory’. Yet memory, in my enquiry into expert-intuitive process, is central to the development of expertise.
18 Recent research into intuitive process in expert or professional decision making identifies what are called ‘dual process theories of cognition’, which position the intuitive and the deliberative as stages in cognitive process, rather than opposing processes (see, e.g., Bastick 2003 and Barrouillet 2011).
19 Quoted in Programme Notes, Théâtre de la Salamandre, 1984 (my translation).
21 C. Harteis, T. Koch and B. Morgenthaler (2008) are critical of some of the implications, for intuitive decision-making by professionals, of the notion, first proposed by G. Gigerenzer and D. G. Goldstein(1996), that intuitive decision-making is ‘fast and frugal’, hence limited in terms of the knowledge it engages with and produces.
22 The notion of ‘internalization’ is complex and rests on a spatial metaphor (internal vs. external) that may not be particularly useful to an enquiry into expertise, not least since findings in the cognitive sciences are more widely disseminated. Plainly, references to ‘the body’ as vessel, the head as cavernous, the psychological as ‘interiority’ do little to help us understand where practitioner expertise might be located. To attempt to account for it as embodied helps us little unless we accept, as does Protevi’s reading of both Deleuze and Guattari and of Damasio (Damasio 2003), that ‘affective cognition’ ‘operates in loops among brain, body and environment’, and produces ‘somatic markers’ that correlate or tag changes, in the performance set-up that we might want to call ‘characteristic’.
23 www.sfmelrose.org.uk/ just intuitive
24 When Protevi writes of ‘neuroscience’, of ‘affective cognition’ and of the ‘subjective appropriation of affect’ (2011: 395), he is drawing on research material from the neurosciences as well as the work on affect from Deleuze and Guattari; he is participating in the ‘cognitive turn’ rather than in the neurosciences themselves. A ‘turn’ tends to be a complex model and its terminology borrowed from another discipline and largely applied metaphorically, operating to one or another ‘model of intelligibility’ (or ways of seeing and understanding) brought to the subject or process under enquiry.