Collective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Change

“Collective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Change” argues for a novel approach to performance for social change that focuses on the sensory and somatic dimensions of collectivity as the basis for countering the atomizing politics of neoliberalism. It proposes a critical somatics approach to the deconstruction and reconfiguration of participants’ embodied subjectivities, emphasizing the cultivation of conditions that facilitate experiences of collective embodiment and affective interdependence. Whether in the kinesthetic awareness of bodies dancing together, the situational or proprioceptive awareness of a collective engaged in creative disruption, or the physical contact of activists’ clasped arms forming a human chain in protest, these conditions require multisensory engagement, improvisational coordination, and shared feeling. Based on ethnographic accounts of the phenomenological experience of collective embodiment, I argue that such experiences enact—rather than merely argue for—forms of collectivity through their operation on the level of the body. This approach to performance for social change builds on the experience of practitioners and artist-activists in an effort to preserve the core contributions of existing techniques while seeking avenues to overcome their susceptibility to the influence of increasingly ubiquitous neoliberal frameworks. Opening with a consideration of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as a touchstone example, I argue that the technique’s cognitive approach to social change and its emphasis on discursive techniques contribute to the manner in which it individualizes responsibility for combating systemic oppression. Turning to Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter’s InterPlay as an example of an affective approach to performance for social change, I critique its practitioners’ culture of individualism, but identify the critical potential of its recognition of collective embodiment. Extending this analysis to protest and direct action, I explore the existential prefiguration of communities of care and the cultivation of communal feeling, an affective and collective form of embodied cognition. After offering a series of activities designed to create the conditions for experiences of collective embodiment and develop the affective bonds of communal feeling, I close with a consideration of the broader implications of positioning speculative theory at the forefront of movements’ political practice.Doctor of Philosoph

THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form “InterPlay” utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes “social change.” I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that—even in these endeavors—they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain