Citing musicality: Performance knowledge in the Gardzienice archive

This article draws on previously published multimedia documents to explore the notion of musicality in the work of Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices. In addition to offering a close analysis of several documented moments – including performances, work demonstrations, expeditions and gatherings – it tests the ability of multimedia documentation to capture performance knowledge, arguing that the work of Gardzienice is a paradigmatic example of ‘practice as research’. Taking the archive as a crucial dimension of the dissemination of knowledge, the article uses multimedia citation to examine the specific contributions of Gardzienice in the context of musicality as a relation between the theatrical and the musical. The article demonstrates that the stability of the archive allows for a detailed explication of performance knowledge in a way that is not possible from live performance alone

Massimiliano Balduzzi: Research in Physical Training for Performers

This essay begins the process of contextualizing and analyzing Massimiliano Balduzzi’s solo physical training practice by introducing six newly created video documents. It locates Balduzzi’s work in a wider historical and artistic context – touching upon the work of Konstantin Stanislavski, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba, as well as acrobatics, martial arts, and Balinese dance – while arguing that the documented physical training constitutes an original research contribution to the field of embodied technique. The essay has three main purposes: First, to give verbal articulation to some important aspects of Balduzzi’s practice, as he begins to teach more widely in New York City and beyond. Second, to test and develop a theoretical framework that conceives of embodied technique as a field of knowledge in which rigorously framed research can and does give rise to new knowledge in the form of new technique. Third, to explore the epistemological status of multimedia documentation through a focused case study. Each of these goals has the potential to expand and clarify current discussions of actor and performer training, movement analysis and documentation, and practice-as-research

Colors like Knives: Embodied Research and Phenomenotechnique in *Rite of the Butcher*

This essay extends the epistemology of practice put forward in *What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research* (Routledge 2015) through a detailed application of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s social and historical epistemology to a 2011 solo performance by the author at Movement Research in New York City. Whereas *What a Body Can Do* surveys a range of historical and contemporary practices, this article attempts for the first time to enact a close technical and epistemic reading of the author’s own embodied research. Eleven minutes of practice are analyzed in what the author, following Rheinberger, calls the phenomenotechnical mode. The article works to distinguish this mode of analysis from more prevalent approaches such as those associated with phenomenology, semiotics, and cognitive studies. In addition to suggesting how a rigorous phenomenotechnical analysis might be applied to one’s own embodied practice, the article offers insight into a specific line of embodied inquiry in post-Grotowskian song-action, with supporting photo and video documentation

The Video Way of Thinking

This article rethinks the concepts of zoê and bios proposed by Giorgio Agamben in relation to the history of technology. It argues that the relationship between embodiment and the audiovisual is only beginning to be understood alongside the recent and increasing omnipresence of digital audiovisual recording technologies in everyday life. Just as writing completely changed human society’s understanding of speech, the development of audiovisual media over the past century has profoundly affected and perhaps even founded our contemporary understanding of embodiment and embodied knowledge. Questions of performance documentation that have circulated in performance studies barely scratch the surface of what amounts to a new way of understanding life, embodiment, and knowledge, which I here begin to call the ‘video way of thinking’

What do we document? Dense video and the epistemology of practice.

Much recent thinking about performance documentation has coalesced around an apparent opposition between the relative stability of the document and the ontological ephemerality of the live event. Indeed, if we begin from the problem of translating a singular and ephemeral event into a stable document, then failure is guaranteed from the start. Understood as an inherently transient moment, performance “cannot be saved, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (Phelan 1993: 146). But the problem of documentation is illusory insofar as the performing arts have no special claim to ephemerality. As I have argued elsewhere, it is not performance but life in general — the world, the real, being itself — that escapes documentary capture (Spatz 2015a: 234). In fact, the questions faced by a documentarian are not entirely different to those faced by a director or choreographer who works through the craft of composition to condense various embodied and dramaturgical materials into a repeatable performance score. Nor do the spectators who attend such a performance necessarily have better or more direct access to the underlying processes that gave rise to it than do those who encounter the work through written or recorded documents. Understood in this way, documentation poses not the insoluble problem of grasping the ungraspable but rather the concrete challenge of isolating and articulating those aspects of a practice that can be shared and transmitted through the available tools. As the tools change, the potential for sharing and transmission also change

Singing Research: Judaica 1 at the British Library

This article analyses a performance of Judaica 1 at The British Library in London, part of an ongoing research project to investigate the embodied technique of contemporary (Jewish) identity using a ‘laboratory’ methodology of post-Grotowskian songaction. Through a close analysis of this event, the article seeks to articulate some of the main concepts and questions that underpin the Judaica Project, such as the relevance of social epistemology to fields of embodied knowledge; the ethics and politics of embodied research in culturally defined areas of technique; and the relationship between referential meaning and non-lexical vocal form. Although the Judaica Project focuses specifically on Jewish songs, the proposed synthesis of scholarly epistemology and contemporary performance could have relevance for other projects in which embodied performance materials function both as markers of identity and as unfolding epistemic objects

Choreography as Research: Iteration, Object, Context

There is great interest these days in applying scientific research methods to dance and other embodied practices (for example, see Schmalzl and Kerr 2016). That is hardly surprising, given how important the discoveries of technological science are to the world we live in. In this essay, I explore a different pathway. How does science work? Through what processes do the sciences generate new knowledge? Arguably, if we want to understand how science works, scientists are not the people to ask. Scientists can tell us how molecules and particles and chemicals work, but who can tell us how scientists work? I have argued (Spatz 2015) that social analyses of science — the field of social epistemology — have as much to offer our understanding of embodied practice as science does. When technoscience looks at embodied practices like dance, it follows its usual approach of reduction and division: It sees bodies and body parts, heart rates and brainwave patterns, muscles and tendons, statistics and other quantitative measures. This is very different from what social epistemology sees when it looks at embodied practice. Social epistemology (Schatzki et al. 2001) studies how practice is structured by knowledge. When it looks at dances and dancers, it sees styles and schools, practices and techniques, social processes of transmission and innovation, invented traditions and traditions of invention. Above all, social epistemology sees dances and dancers as epistemic, as knowable but never fully known, constantly unfolding. Rather than trying to pin down a dance, social epistemology treats it as a field of knowledge that increases rather than decreases in complexity the more we study it. A social epistemology of dance would examine the objects that interest dancers rather than those that interest scientists. It would do so in a way that brings a particular kind of rigor to those objects, accounting for both their corporeality — what social epistemology calls realism — and their social construction. In this chapter, I begin to develop such an account

Embodiment as First Affordance: Tinkering, Tuning, Tracking

In a diverse range of recent research activities, I have worked to develop productive distinctions between embodied knowledge, embodied practice, embodied technique, and embodied research; but I have settled for a brief gloss of the crucial descriptor ‘embodied’ (Spatz 2015, 11– 14).1 In this essay I offer a critical and philosophical approach to embodiment, explaining why we continue to need this concept and what I believe it can still do for us