Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies

Anne Harris, Stacy Holman Jones, Anne Harris, Stacy Holman Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000262452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods.

The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics.

This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

PART I

Affective movements

1

AFFECTIVE LEANINGS IN PERFORMANCE

Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris

Introduction: leaning in

Most performers know all too well the experience of standing backstage waiting to go on, and feeling the cold, clammy, where-can-I-run escape fantasy of ‘I can’t do this, get me out of here’. The flashing certainty that I might need to use the toilet, that my breath will come too short and shallow to project any words much less emotions, or the certainty that no one who may be in the audience out there will connect with what I have to offer. That physical contraction of knowing that the harder I fight against the nerves, the more insistent they become; what is sometimes called ‘stage fright’, when described in the language of emotions. But this apprehension, like all affective experience, is grounded in the body. In his ‘Confessions of an Apprehensive Performer’, Ron Pelias (1997) writes of his body:

First, it had the shakes—the hands fluttering, the kneeing knocking, the voice quivering. How can my body act without my intent? …Then, it was the pounding—the heart racing rhythm to the rapid speech and the breath disappearing in mid-phrase. Now, it goes deaf; it goes blind. (p. 32).

In proximity to an ‘audience’, these embodied experiences can be shared by those of us willing to ‘lean in’ to the precarity and thrill of performance. Leaning in to fear, to improvisation, to the pulsing preacceleration¹ (Manning, 2009, p. 13) of the body doing its thing in relation to other bodies. Binaries fall away: no longer are ‘they’ out there while ‘I’ am inside the blinding light, no longer are they are relaxed while I am tense, no longer are they watching my internal struggle from the outside. What we think of ‘as performance’ is the field of experience and affect passing between and among us, together. The distance between bodies, smells, temperatures, words, movements of the performance, is coloured and set in motion in space. Space, that defining and core component of performance, can be measured in distance, but also in the changing affect between bodies-in-performance: forces vibrating, emerging ‘from surfaces, recombining with lines, folding, bridging, knotting’ (Manning, 2009, p. 13). Performance is a coming together that celebrates the ability of bodies to move and be moved through practice and in proximity (Harris & Holman Jones 2018). When we lean on one another, as Manning might put it, performance is an affective negotiation of bodies worlding.

Pelias stays with us, using the apprehensive and pulse-racing experience of performance to consider how ‘bodies place themselves in relationship to other bodies’ (2016, p. 9). He writes, ‘When bodies tilt toward each other, they may begin to move in the same rhythm, with the same pulse. They may sense themselves in an empathic encounter, each understanding and feeling with the other’ (2016, p. 9). Through the practice of attunement—the embodied work of tuning in to one another through the occasion of performance—‘presence turns space into place’ and ‘calls for a negotiation of bodies’ (2016, pp. 44, 9). We wonder about the non-binary possibilities of leaning in rather than staying or going, about how bodies are both soothed and stressed by leanings and leanings-in. How might a leaning be/come both an event and also an affective inclination, a moment of connection in which bodies come into contact?

To consider performance as affective inclination is to call attention to performance’s relational force, and to look to affect studies and posthumanism for a language of inclination-as-relation. For example, Rosi Braidotti (2019) asks us to reconsider notions of ‘a’ subject in/of performance as ‘an autonomous capacity’ defined not by ‘rationality, nor our cerebral faculties alone, but rather by the autonomy of affect as a virtual force that gets actualized through relational bonds’ (p. 38). Braidotti also urges a decoupling of affect from

individualized emotions, as meaningful expression of psychological states and lived experiences. Affect needs to be de-psychologized, and to be de-linked from individualism in order to match the complexity of our human and non-human relational universe. This relational process supports a thick and dynamic web of interconnections by removing the obstacles of individualism.

(Braidotti, 2019, p. 38)

Similarly, Manning’s writing on movement, in its changing force and direction and becoming elastic in relation to an other body, whether linked by touch or at a distance, turns our attention to performance as ‘relational shape-shifting’ (Manning, 2009, p. 13). Approaching performance as inclination allows us to consider performance as a more-than-human set of relations and the value of performance to creating sustainable ecologies.

If performance is a form of sociality in which ‘some performing bodies appear to be saturated with the terror of precarious life’ (Diamond et al., 2017, p. 2), affective leanings in performance are a ready lens through which the effects of sexism and misogyny, human exceptionalism, and cultures of terror can be not only seen, but felt and understood in both empathic and embodied ways (Harris & Holman Jones, 2019a, 2019b). In this chapter, we ask how, taken together, performance and affect studies gives posthuman ethics breath and flesh by expanding understandings of matter, discourse and enactment as they move in relational embodiment.² This chapter also seeks to extend affect scholarship and its ability to reconceptualise the political promise of the collective and spatial relations through the lens of performance.

Affective moves: touching feeling in performance terms

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) is foundational to our understanding of affect and/as performance. Her work demonstrates how transdisciplinary ‘making work’ can alter onto-epistemological formations of meaning, linking thinking-as-doing-theory with making-as-thinking work. For example, in her exploration of shame as affect, Sedgwick draws on the nine ‘categorical’ or independent affects in Sylvan Tompkins’s formulation, concluding the list of affects with:

Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance. I mean theatrical performance. Performance interlines shame as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though importantly it is those things. Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity.

(Sedgwick, 2003, p. 38)

Following Tompkins’s argument that ‘shame is the exemplary affect for theory’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 115) due to how it ‘floods’ our senses—pinking our cheeks and bowing our heads in the highly social dance of seeking and being denied recognition and affirmation—Sedgwick explores the conjoined and corporeal relationship of affect, individuality and sociality. She writes, ‘That’s the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality’ (p. 37). This double movement extends affects and their so-called opposites: ‘Without positive affect, there can be no shame … only something you thought might delight or satisfy can disgust’, in which ‘both these affects produce bodily knowledge’ (p. 116). Bodily knowledge is at the core of performance and, even now, informs the rituals of performance in the digital age. That is, digital cultures and practices have not removed the need for performance but rather show us new ways in which relationally affect is not only possible but essential. Using Sedgwick’s formulation of shame as an occasion for understanding the vibration between (self) absorption and theatricality, we consider how affects which might be experienced between performers and audiences help map the space between bodies, but also the limits of performance of the outside/inside as relational and embodied event.

Sedgwick pursues non-dualistic thought in her exploration of emotion through theories of affect in a project she terms touching feeling. Ann Cvetkovich (2012) pursues a similar non-binary mode of theorising in her ‘public feelings project’³ on depression. Cvetkovich notes the oft-cited separation between affect as a pre-personal/social force or intensity and emotion as a social understanding or categorisation of how affects assemble and move in/through relationality.⁴ This tradition follows the work of Gilles Deleuze and others’ critical efforts to expand the vocabulary we have for accounting for emotional and sensory experience embodiment, particularly in psychology and cultural studies. Such projects distinguish ‘between affect and emotion, where the former signals precognitive sensory experience and relations to surroundings, and the latter cultural constructs and conscious processes that emerge from them, such as anger, fear, or joy’ (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 4). Cvetkovich’s own work seeks to offer us a ‘generic’ term and site of inquiry⁵ that not only encompasses affect, emotions and feeling, but also

includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways (whether as distinct specific emotions or as a generic category often contrasted with reason)—but with a way recognition that this is like trying to talk about sex before sexuality.

(Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 4)

Like Sedgwick, Cvetkovich takes feeling as the central focus of her work, and explains that her affection for it comes from its ability to acknowledge ‘the somatic or sensory nature of feelings as experiences that aren’t just cognitive concepts or constructions’ (p. 4). She favours feeling ‘because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences’ (p. 4). Cvetkovich’s affect allows an integration of body and mind (as does much work in performance studies, including that of Dwight Conquergood, 2002 and José Esteban Muñoz, 2009). Both Sedgwick and Cvetkovich’s projects draw our attention as well as the inseparability and radical relationality of physical, emotional, psychological and experience.

In these considerations of affect, feeling is inextricably tied up with touching, for as Sedgwick notes, the sense of touch ‘makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 14). We would extend this to performance, in particular the ways performance demands that we lean on and toward one another, making nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of body and emotion, or of audience and performer. Take Sedgwick’s inspiration for writing Touching Feeling: photographer Leon A. Borensztein’s photographs of textile artist Judith Scott and her work. In Sedgwick’s description, Scott leans in and on her large, body-shaped sculptures constructed out of yarn, consumed a moment of ‘haptic absorption’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 23). The affect that saturates the touch inspired by leaning in/on becomes multiple and diffuse—a collection of feelings and relations caught up in a ‘transaction of texture’ (p. 22). And while the subject of the photo might be Scott’s relation ‘to her completed work’, the ‘intense presence’ of the photo also includes the viewer’s/audience relation to the many possible feelings embodied in an experience of that touching embrace (p. 22).

Similarly, Cvetkovich (2012) explo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Preface: Affective realness
• List of contributors
• Affective movements, methods and pedagogies: Introduction
• PART I: Affective movements
• PART II: Affective methods
• PART III: Affective pedagogies
• Index