Performer Training Reconfigured

Post-psychophysical Perspectives for the Twenty-first Century

Frank Camilleri

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350060197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Interprétation et audition

Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately 'doing' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing. Frank Camilleri puts forward the 'post-psychophysical' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The 'post-psychophysical' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured – including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition – this volume provides readers with an enticing array of critical approaches to training and creative processes.

1

Towards Post-Psychophysical Perspectives

Psychophysicality, in discourse if not in practice, is an important battle that has been won. The concepts of ‘psychophysicality’ and ‘bodymind’ now occupy the same space that the unconscious, the sign system, and social class structure enjoy in other spheres of human knowledge: we no longer need to justify their discursive existence.

(CAMILLERI 2013D: 30)¹

In a twenty-first century when technology increasingly detects ambient conditions and takes action on our behalf, questions regarding human perception and agency come to the fore. This has various implications for aesthetic performance practices, especially those founded on or linked with the physical presence of human actors.² Aspects usually associated with the ‘human’ – such as awareness, intention, and imagination – are affected by the ubiquity of technology, be it installed in the environment, carried around or worn, or even ingested or implanted in our bodies. In view of such evolving scenarios, the status and processes of the ‘human’ in aesthetic performance are reconsidered in this book in the light of a critical posthumanism that embraces a situated or ‘embedded embodiment, in which the human body is located in an environment that consists of plants, animals and machines […] where human complexity, with all its internal organization and operations, is a consequence of its openness to the environment’ (Nayar 2014: 9, emphasis in the original). To this end, I argue for post-psychophysical perspectives that acknowledge current and potential implications of the technological embeddedness of twenty-first-century performer processes, the nature of which is set to intensify during the century.

Psychophysical capacity as described by Phillip Zarrilli (2009: 21) marks an integration of outer/physical and inner/psychic action in which body–mind dualism is overcome (84). In acting this takes the form of impulses which initiate actions that in turn constitute a performance score (2009: 19).³ The re-evaluation and conceptual broadening that I am proposing by the term ‘post-psychophysical’ marks not only the fusion of outer/physical and inner/psychic action, but also the dynamic and necessarily integrated embeddedness in the surrounding context and environment. In other words, and from a posthumanist perspective, I am extending psychophysicality to include the world’s materiality as an integral and crucial aspect of the human performer.

Such an extended ‘inner/outer/context’ fusion marks an embedded embodiment that actively intervenes on the nature of what has been previously designated exclusively as the inner and outer dimensions of human agency and action. This intervention occurs by means of integrated extensions (such as prosthetics, implants, and other forms of surgery) or ingested incorporations (e.g. chemicals, radiation, pollution, air, food, and drink), but also by means of agential networks that are inter-species (e.g. animals) and inter-organism (e.g. plants), as well as – more contentiously from a humanist psychophysical perspective – a huge range of material elements, components, or objects, i.e. ‘external extensions’, primarily technology that includes not only the machinic and the digital but also everyday items such as clothes and spectacles.

The source of the problematic here is, initially and on the surface, epistemological, i.e. what do we understand by inner and outer? What constitutes something as part of us, and therefore us? Answering this question, in turn, makes it a phenomenological issue in underlining the experiencing (act) and experience (affect) of the world around. However, at the core, and echoing Karen Barad’s performative posthuman reassessment of Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics (2007: 24), the problem is ontological: what is the constitutional distinction (if any) between inner and outer? Are spectacles any less part of me than contact lenses, and are both any less part of me compared to laser eye treatment? These options are essentially three different methods, which, in resulting in different narratives, highlight distinct epistemologies. However, all three are fundamentally technologies (produced from the existing materiality of the world) and all have a comparable phenomenological effect, i.e. a remedially optimized eyesight.

If an intensified enmeshment of the technologized human may not yet be overwhelmingly ubiquitous in practice (depends on how one looks at it), it will be increasingly the case in the foreseeable future. Accordingly, an updated discursive framework – one that is broader and more inclusive – to psychophysicality is needed. Such a framework is required not so much to ‘account’ for something that is currently still emergent but, more crucially, to develop a discussion that is inclusive of the twenty-first-century’s posthuman condition. The alternative is to adhere to a vision and to conceptual frameworks that essentially hail a (singular) construct of the human, i.e. one possible and basically static version of the human to the detriment of a wide array of complex and hybrid (post)humanities that have always existed and which are set to proliferate, diversify, and complexify even further with the intensification of the technology–human coexistence. A coexistence, therefore, that is increasingly and more explicitly an intra-existence that reciprocally shapes all parties concerned.

Rebecca Loukes offers some initial reflections on whether the bodymind of performers can be ‘extended’ by means of objects and technologies (2013: 241–4), thus acknowledging the need for psychophysical discursivity to reassess outlooks developed in the twentieth century. In line with the current book’s objective to offer an updated twenty-first-century reconfiguration of performer training, Chapters 2 and 6 discuss the issue of ‘bodymind extension’ in more detail. The post-psychophysical project envisaged here spreads even further with the sociomaterial deliberations of Chapters 3 and 4, and with the perspectives from affect theory in Chapter 5.

Instrumental perceptions

The discussion needs to start not ‘at’ but before the beginning. This is an important and strategic move to highlight continuity rather than rupture because, despite the innovation of the existing and emergent technology around us, this is not something without precedence. The perspectives offered by technoscience studies provide valuable insights in this regard. Technoscience, often considered an offshoot of science and technology studies, examines how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these, in turn, affect society, politics, and culture (Nayar 2014: 20–5). Therefore, if we adopt a technoscientific outlook and consider electricity as technology, with its attendant and correlated technologies of, say, lighting, heating, and cooling systems, then the direct and pervasive impact on the environment as well as the human capacity to sense it and live with it becomes immediately evident.

Other similar albeit humbler examples include the already mentioned case of spectacles or contact lenses, which enable some humans to see/perceive/feel through technological mediation. Even the clothes we wear can be considered as technology that affect the way we sense and, consequently, make sense of the world.⁴ For instance, see Mike Michael’s discussion on velcro in clothing as technology:

Velcro evokes the enormous multiplicity of ways in which technoscience mediates our everyday life [… It also] illustrates that technoscientific artefacts should not be uncritically regarded as ‘singularities’ – stand-alone unitary entities: rather, they are tied into, and function in relation to, complexes of technologies, knowledges and cultures – [i.e. as] ‘sociotechnical assemblages.’ (2006: 5)

In this conception, therefore, technology ranges from the digital and machinic to the tools and implements we use in everyday life, all part of the assemblages of human activity. For a simple example from theatre, objects and props such as training mats or sticks are technology, which determine and condition our perception of the world (Loukes 2013: 243–4). The same case can be made for architecture, ranging from design to materials used and features installed (e.g. soundproofing). Consider, for instance, the impact of design on embodiment, which once again suggests human–non-human assemblages:

the role of technology design in facilitating the kinds of extreme mediation […] can lead to subjectivities and embodiments that are neither fully human nor fully mechanical in a world where technology has begun to render the human-object dichotomy obsolete. (Weiss, Popen, and Reid 2014: xvi)

For an example from theatre, see Katie Mitchell’s multi-media productions like Waves (2006) and The Forbidden Zone (2014), which technologize human embodiment by blurring the boundaries between life and memories in the live and projected action that is evoked through the integrated design of material and digital scenography. The same argument applies to musical instruments. As the word instrument itself reveals, musical implements like a flute, a guitar, or a piano are always already technology, however primitive or sophisticated they may be.⁵ The use of musical instruments mediates our perception of the world, not only for the musicians themselves but also for other practitioners relating to the music (e.g. dancers to a pianist playing during a class) and for spectators during a performance.

The example of musical instruments calls up a number of issues that are relevant to the impact of technology on human perception, action, and agency. If musical instruments are a technology that is somehow – to coin a phrase – ‘psychophysically legitimate’ (i.e. they facilitate bodymind integration through assimilated sensory mediation), is the use of electronic instruments and digital sound systems any less so in not being supposedly ‘organic’, i.e. in not being made of natural materials like wood or animal parts? Consider the BioMuse performance of Atau Tanaka, where the artist’s body is transformed into an acoustic instrument through biosensors that capture gestural input and intention (Tanaka 2012: 160–3). This is an extreme but concrete manifestation of potential techno-psychophysical integration, which is, moreover, shared with others because the audience hears what the performer hears and feels during (not after) his performance. Is it ‘legitimate’ to accomplish psychophysicality through the inanimate medium of digital technology? From a posthuman and new materialist perspective, the matter/substance of so-called ‘life-less’ materials (like plastic and metal) has agential force (Barad 2007) and vitality (Bennett 2010). This force or vitality may be different from that of organic materials but it is, nonetheless, active.⁶ In the grand scheme of things painted by quantum physics, we are all connected in being-of-this-world, regardless of organic status:

Niels Bohr [who] won the Nobel Prize for his quantum model of the atom […] rejects the atomistic metaphysics that takes ‘things’ as ontologically basic entities. For Bohr, things do not have inherently determinate boundaries or properties, and words do not have inherently determinate meanings. Bohr also calls into question the related Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, and knower and known. (Barad 2007: 138)

The problematic implications of ‘psychophysical legitimacy’ will be taken up at a later stage. The point here is to stress the continuity of technology’s impact on the lived human experience. ‘Technology’ is not only the smart phone we carry in our pockets but also the pockets themselves. Both smart phone and pockets are part of the assemblages we call ‘the world’, and both are at once extensions and parts of what constitutes and means ‘us’. For Barad, the distinction between materials is only one that is enacted according to the instrument/apparatus engaged, whether it is technology, discourse, or material practice:

the apparatus enacts an agential cut – a resolution of the ontological indeterminacy – within the phenomenon, and agential separability […] provides the condition for the possibility of objectivity […] If the apparatus is changed, there is a corresponding change in the agential cut and therefore in the delineation of object from agencies of observation and the causal structure […] enacted by the cut. Different agential cuts produce different phenomena. (Barad 2007: 175, emphasis in the original)

A different instrument, therefore, results in a different ‘cut’ or ‘take’: the same note can be played on different instruments, rendering that ‘sameness’ distinctly multiple. Likewise with discourse. Post-psychophysical perspectives extend and reconfigure the remit of the ‘cut’ currently provided by psychophysical accounts – they do so through a focus on the materiality of the environment that situates activities like training.

Enabling technology

Broadly considered from a technoscientific angle, then, technology is – and has always been – imbricated with what constitutes the human, including in training and performance. And if this view of technology reflects human agency and intention (i.e. it serves to facilitate human activity), technology is fundamentally enabling rather than obstructive of human existence. There is a complex argument to be made, which I can only sketch here. Even so-called destructive technology (like bombs, to take an extreme example) may be viewed as ‘enabling’ to its users in fulfilling its function or intended use. In such cases, it is not the technology per se that is destructive. In fact, anything, including one’s own body, can be used as a projectile for harmful purposes. It is not even a question of the user’s intention because without the means to execute it, intention remains at the level of fantasy. What is at stake, rather, is the question to ask. To distinguish between technology that is either enabling or disabling is an epistemological exercise that already contains its own answer. Barad’s agential realism is aimed precisely at resisting such binary-based enquiries that predetermine yes-or-no answers (Barad 2003: 819–20). The alternative, which is harder to accomplish because it is counter-intuitive in the dualism-saturated culture of the West, is to develop frameworks and conceptualizations from positions of more distributed agency across human and non-human entities. Bruno Latour’s term for such entities is ‘actants’: ‘A semiotic actor, or actant, is an entity that plays a role in a narrative […] human and non-human actants are constantly related and folded’ (Block and Jensen 2011: 48). Latour and the role of actants in his actor-network theory are discussed in Chapter 3. The point to bear in mind here is that, from a technoscientific perspective, technology is enabling in being such an actant.

Just as the ‘same’ note can be played on various instruments, resulting in different experiences, the question concerning the enabling or otherwise status of technology resonates with issues of physical and mental ability/disability, which in turn sheds light on matters of psychophysical proficiency/deficiency. Barad’s reading of so-called ‘disability’ is illuminating when she argues that:

‘able-bodiedness’ is not a natural state of being but a specific form of embodiment that is co-constituted through the boundary-making practices that distinguish ‘able-bodied’ from ‘disabled.’ […] [T]he very nature of being able-bodied is to live with/in and as part of the phenomena that includes the [agential] cut […] [I]n an important sense, then, being able-bodied means being in a prosthetic relationship with the ‘disabled.’ (Barad 2007: 158, emphasis added)

In other words, ableism is enabled because the world is organized in a specific manner and not in others. ‘Abled’ individuals can be ‘disabled’ in a world that is organized differently to suit other purposes. A similar argument can be applied to the role that technology plays in human activity (including as it impinges on aesthetic performance), as well as to the psychophysical status of performer processes – it depends on the outlook employed to measure it. Accordingly, post-psychophysical perspectives promote a critical awareness of psychophysicality as a specific agential cut that gives rise to specific forms of embodiment and not to others.

Though not much has been published on the subject of (dis)ability in performer training, a recent article in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training by Daron Oram (2018) addresses the ‘dysconscious discrimination’ of psychophysical actor training when it comes to dyslexic and dyspraxic individuals in institutional school settings.⁷ Oram found that the ‘open-ended’ and experiential approach of this kind of training, which is rarely demonstrated and explained ‘to stop students mechanically mimicking or end-gaining’ (2018: 63), resulted in an observable pattern of problems for dyslexia and dyspraxia students. These include confusion ‘when several alternative explanations were given’, when ‘the work used [specific] imagery that changed rapidly’, and during ‘physical orientation changes e.g. from floor to standing’ (2018: 59). Part of the problem lies in the fact that laboratory-style vocal and movement approaches like those of Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Lecoq, Feldenkrais, and Kristin Linklater ‘were never designed to sit within a contemporary higher education structure’ (2018: 64). The agential cut of these individual-based ‘no-one-right-way’ approaches tend to wreak havoc with such students who are then assessed on ‘d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• 1. Towards Post-Psychophysical Perspectives
• 2. Experiencing Bodyworld: Postphenomenological Perspectives
• 3. Of Materiality and Dynamic Hybrids: Sociomaterial Perspectives
• 4. Unfolding Materialities of Practice: Methodological Perspectives
• 5. Incorporeal Materiality: Perspectives of Affect
• 6. Tuning to the Post-Psychophysical Dance: Perspectives from Situated Cognition
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint