My Name is a Blackbird: release, transparency, and agency

Abstract

This essay traces the author’s embodied practices toward the creation of an evening-length, spontaneously composed solo. Specifically, the author focuses on her work to release superficial and deep abdominal musculature to discover a new movement vocabulary, and greater access to the mobility of the pelvis/belly, ribs, and spine. The author reflects on the process through the overlapping lenses of her study of the works of Moshe Feldenkrais during the creative process and her contemporaneous engagement with Michel Foucault and feminist theorists Iris Marion Young, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler.

Keywords:

• embodiment
• release
• belly
• abdominal
• Feldenkrais
• Foucault
• creative process
• embodied knowledge
• Iris Marion Young
• vulnerability in performance
• transparency
• intrinsic awareness

Notes

1. I wish to clarify the various uses of quoted or reflective text included in this essay. First, I have included phenomenological observations of watching rehearsal and performance footage in italics, without indentation; these are always in my voice. Second, I have included quotations from the film My Name is a Blackbird: A Dance Film by Nadia Oussenko. These are also always in my voice, unless noted in the case of a brief section of dialog between me and the dramaturg I worked with during the project.

2. Martin Nachbar writes about “entering the archive” in his multi-year project of reconstructing and performing Dore Hoyer’s dance cycle Affectos Humanos. See References.

3. I was inspired to tackle writing about my own memories of embodied change by Ann Cooper Albright’s (2011) article “Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology,” listed in the References.

4. Green (1999, 2002, 2013, xxxx) has written extensively about the Foucault’s concept of the docile body as it applies to methods of dance education. See References below for examples.

5. Japanese philosophers Nagatomo (1992) and Yasuo (1993) write about embodied states in which one is being moved by energy. See References for examples of their work.