Writing with practice: Body Weather performance training becomes a medium of artistic research

Abstract

This article discusses an artistic research project that investigates the impact of Body Weather performance training on the perceptual process and modes of knowing of the performer. It revisits an early stage of my doctoral research, in which my main concern was to develop an embodied approach to the articulation of the knowledge created by the training practice. It begins with a brief introduction of the Body Weather training programme and the practice that is the focus of my investigation: the Manipulations. Drawing on the concept of bodily knowledge, it indicates the difficulty in providing a linguistic articulation of the tacit knowledge that is embodied in artistic practice. The article discusses how I address this issue by developing a ‘research score’ and creating a ‘Glossary’, and how these two are combined in order to think through the Manipulations. It provides a close reading of the process of alteration that is enabled by the Manipulations and a thick description of the research score, arguing that the latter allows for an equal relationship between practice and writing. It concludes by sharing observations regarding the expansion of training practice into a medium of research and the potential of my approach to research into training to become a mode of training research.

Keywords:

• Body Weather
• artistic research
• bodily knowledge
• embodied reflection

Notes

¹ Notable exceptions are the unpublished PhD thesis by Snow (2002), as well as, more recently, articles by Taylor (2010) and Fuller (2014) in this journal, as well as by Marler (2015).

² See Pakes (2003, 2004) for a detailed analysis of the issue in the context of dance-based practice-as-research in the UK, as well as Borgdorff (2012) and Nelson (2013) for transdisciplinary perspectives on the subject.

³ On the issue of expanding artistic practice into artistic research see for example Borgdorff (2012), Kirkkopelto (2015), and Nelson (2013).

⁴ See Hug (2016) for a video recording of Manipulations number One and Two.

⁵ An exploration of ‘affect’ in relation to ‘touch’ in the practice of the Manipulations is beyond the scope of this paper.

⁶ I will elaborate below in more detail on the process of alteration.

⁷ I have regularly practised the Manipulations since 2002 and began to work with a less elaborate solo version already during my final project for the Master of Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam 2008/2009.

⁸ See above for an explanation of the part of Body Weather training called ‘M/B’.

⁹ I further developed my conceptual reflection on the Manipulations and on the research score in the process of preparing for numerous research presentations at conferences and university seminars, when facilitating workshops and practice sessions, and by practising the research score.

¹⁰ It is impossible, of course, to attain a state of ‘zero’ muscular tension. The point is to work towards the impossibility of ‘zero’ as a means to observe what happens along the way.

¹¹ On the notion of the ‘meshwork’ see Francisco J. Varela (1991) and Tim Ingold (2011).

¹² A definition of my notion of ‘thinking’ would contribute to a clarification of the complexity of ‘reflection’, but I cannot elaborate on this subject here.

¹³ I used to instantly make written notes of thoughts, the Scribblings (see above). More recently, I worked with audio recording. To my surprise, the recording of my voice uttering thoughts interfered much less with the process of observation than I had assumed.