A documentation of Alice Connolly's collaborative practice with Kayleigh Giles in their new contemporary performance project - exploring the inner and outer layers of the abject female body.
Kayleigh and I have begun this project with a mutual curiosity in the relationship between the outer and inner layers of, in and around the human body. With Kayleigh predominantly focusing on the body and myself predominantly focusing on suppressed/hidden thought - we intend to explore the human body as a vessel which contains, as well as leaks, abject thought and aspects of self.
I will use this blog to document our explorative and investigative devising process through our self-coined methodology of 'extensions' and 'unravels'. An extension involves the creation of a performative response to a question, asked by one of us to the other person. An unravel involves the creation of a performative response to a curiosity, sparked by an occurrence or discovery from the previous workshop. Kayleigh and I will bring an extension and unravel to each workshop, as the stimuli for our exploration and investigation that day.
The final layer of our piece will take place inside the box and represents the third and deepest layer of skin – the Hypodermis. In Dr David Menton’s article, ‘Skin: Our Living Armour’, he tells us that the Hypodermis is the layer of skin which heals wounds: “it is here that hair grows and the sweat glands produce their sweat. When we lose skin in a deep abrasion, the surviving sweat ducts and hair follicles serve as a source of new skin”. However, even when our wounds have healed, scars often remain visible on the surface of our skin, as well as imbedded within our memories. These workings of the Hypodermis are allegorically reminiscent of Dr David Eagleman’s theory, in his book Livewired. As noted in my previous blog post, Eagleman explains that life experiences determine who a person is, just as much as DNA does. Just as some wounds mark us and stay with us – some life experiences mark us and stay with us. Mine and Kayleigh’s intention for the Hypodermis layer is to present this theory through this metaphorical connection
As well as exploring the analogy of wounds staying with us on the inside, Kayleigh and I also intend to explore the analogy of life experiences staying with us on the outside – scarring our skin. If, as Eagleman states, life experiences make us the people we are, this must mean that the remnants of these experiences leak from our body barriers when someone from the outside sees who we are. However, through mine and Kayleigh’s previous research (documented in previous blog posts), we acknowledge that the process of revealing the entirety of one’s innerself to another is a process too abject to fully complete. Kayleigh and I aim to maintain this portrayal of abjection in the Hypodermis layer of our piece through exposing and playing with the toothpaste and partially-eaten apples (which haven’t quite reached their cores) from our previous audience members’ journeys. Therefore, because we can never fully reach and perceive the core of a person, we only ever see fragments of their true selves leaking from their bodies. In other words, we only see the scars; rarely the full stories.
In order to present this perspective, we intend to project the video (attached to this blog) in our Hypodermis box, when our audience members enter. This video is an amalgamation of all the performative ‘self-dissections’ Kayleigh and I undertook during our initial research and devising process, using our self-coined methodology of ‘extensions’ and ‘unravels’. Just as our audience members will have leaked aspects of their inner cores in the Dermis layer, Kayleigh and I will now leak parts of our inner cores in the Hypodermis layer. Through mine and Kayleigh’s use of layering and volume, our audience member’s attentions will be drawn to specific words from different texts when watching the video. As a result, our audience members will hear incorrect, amalgamated sentences, as their ears pick up different words from different spoken word pieces at once. This will illustrate how fragmented leakages of self can engender misinterpretations of people’s true inner selves.
As well as depicting Kayleigh and myself as vessels which leak fragmented evidence of life experiences, we also intend to present our audience members themselves in this way. At the final connection point in the Dermis layer, Kayleigh and I will invite our audience members to place words that have ‘penetrated and stayed stuck under their surface’ into our mouths. We will then ask our audience members if they give their permission for their words to be seen. If they do give their permission, their words will be pinned and displayed onto the flesh-like backdrop at the back of the Hypodermis box. If an audience member does not give their permission, the piece of paper with their words on will still be pinned to the back-drop but it will be pinned back to front. This will ensure that their word is unseen, but the exposure of the paper itself will still expose the evidence that words have ‘penetrated their barrier’ and ‘scared their surface’.
The liminality between the outside body and inside body, which Kayleigh and I explore in the Dermis layer of our piece, reminded me of Dr Bessel Van der Kolk’s theory in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. In his chapter, ‘Losing Your Body, Losing Yourself’Van der Kolk explores the liminality between the brain and skin. He explains that the prefrontal cortex receives messages from our physical sensations which tell us how we feel. However, it is common within people who experience trauma to lose this connection because they no longer trust how their physical sensations make them feel. This causes sensory insensibility – where you can no longer feel your skin being touched if you cannot see your skin being touched. Van der Kolk refers to this experience as “losing your body”.
As a starting point for one of mine and Kayleigh’s workshops, I created a spoken word piece, exploring this theory. We decided that this spoken word piece should be performed while we test and attempt to strengthen the connection between our audience members’ skin and cores. In order to achieve this, our audience members should not be able to see their skin being touched. We therefore built a hole in the wall between our ‘Dermis’ and ‘Hypodermis’ spaces, for our audience members to place their arms through, effectively being out of their own eye sights. Either Kayleigh or myself, on the other side of the wall, would then create sensations on our audience members’ arms for them to attempt to feel. If it were not for the spoken word piece making our audience members aware of someone touching their arms, as Van der Kolk explains in his book, our audience members may experience sensory instability if they have experienced trauma. However, if an audience member does experience sensory instability, whilst being told that they are experiencing physical sensations, the audience member may feel fictional sensations based on their past experiences. As neuroscientist, David Eagleman explains in his book, Livewired, “The flexibility of the brain allows the events in your life to stitch themselves directly into the neural fabric”. Therefore, what our audience members feel touch their arms, on the other side of the wall will be, as Eagleman terms it, “experience-dependent” – different and personal to each audience member. Rather than feeling the objects that touch our audience members’ skin, our audience members will feel their past experiences. Furthermore, because, as Eagleman tells us, our life experiences are just as much who we are as our DNA, our audience members will also feel who are they are.
. . .
As well as presenting the spoken word piece, the attached video also demonstrates how Kayleigh and I intend to present the piece, along with the other dialogue in the Dermis layer. As shown in my previous blog posts, Kayleigh and I have experimented with placing phone screens, playing videos of mouths, over our live faces to create distortion. This is how we intend to present the dialogue in the Dermis layer of our piece. Initially, Kayleigh and I experimented with performing the dialogue through audio on headsets. However, when putting this into practice, we felt that this created an unwanted disconnection between the performer inside the box (in the Hypodermis), the guide outside the box (in the Dermis) and the audience member. With it being our intention to portray the liminality between inner and outer, Kayleigh and I felt that we needed adapt the way we present this dialogue, in order to strengthen the connection between the performer inside the box with the performer outside the box. This therefore determined mine and Kayleigh’s decision to metamorphose our faces together through our phone screens. Moreover, this visualises our intended presentation of the abject body – leaking fragments of self through the barriers, whilst keeping other aspects of self, sucked in – hidden away.
Following on from the Epidermis, the second layer of our piece will be named after the second layer of skin – the Dermis. This section will take place in a corridor, around a boxed off area which holds the final layer of our piece – the Hypodermis. This staging design is reminiscent of dance practitioner, Kerryn Wise and performance artist, Tina Carter’s piece, ‘Awakenings’, which also takes place between the boundaries of inside and outside a box.
In biologist, Dr David Menton’s article for Answers in Genesis, ‘Skin: Our Living Armour’, he describes the Dermis as “our body armour” which is made up of “fibres [that] are woven together like fabric”. This description of the Dermis as “woven” made me think of the thread that Kayleigh and I use to lead our audience through the performance space – this thread could be adapted to visually resemble the Dermis’ woven appearance. Imagining this thread woven together makes me think of the small holes that will be present between the weft threads and the warp threads. In spite of the Dermis’ function to, as Menton puts it, “shield” the inside body from the outside world, these small holes leave room for parts of the outside world to seep through. It is this imagery of seepage between inner and outer which resulted in Kayleigh and myself being inspired by Wise and Carter’s portrayal of slippage between inside and outside in ‘Awakenings’. Kayleigh and I believe that who a person is on the inside is shaped and defined by the life experiences that they absorb. This belief derives from the research of neuroscientist, David Eagleman, who in his book, ‘Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain’, states that “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it”. Therefore, we intend to use Wise and Carter’s liminal staging techniques, as well as allegorical spoken words about the Dermis to depict this belief. The following words will be spoken aloud as our audience members enter the Dermis layer of our piece:
We’re in the Dermis now. The second layer of your skin. The place that lets you feel, or not feel. We’re crossing the barrier between out and in. Here, your collagen fibres are woven together to form a shield – stopping the terrors from the outside coming in. However, no matter how tightly we weave our fighting fibres together, between our bravery and our courage we still all have little holes. We can’t always stop the cutting words and the sharp glances from penetrating and seeping through.
There is a moment in ‘Awakenings’ where one performer is stood on the outside of the box but her feet are exposed to the audience who are inside the box. This liminality between outside and inside influenced the way Kayleigh and I portray the allegorical function of the Dermis and Hypodermis in this section. In the wall between our piece’s Dermis and Hypodermis, we built a flap for our audience members to push open and reveal either mine or Kayleigh’s mouth. As it is the Hypodermis’ function to heal the wounds that have been created by the outside world penetrating through the Dermis – our audience members will be invited to write down a ‘cutting’ word or phrase that is personal to them and place it into mine or Kayleigh’s mouth. This encounter will engender a Temporary Autonomous Zone which, in a previous blog post, I expressed our intention to create. Rather than power being given to either the performer or the audience member, power will be placed within the encounter itself. This is because the abject nature of this encounter combined with audience member’s agency, provokes uncertainty for both parties. Every audience member will feel a different level of discomfort with this activity and will therefore experience their ‘cutting’ in a way which is personal to them. The video attached to this post features an early version of this moment in our piece.
QUESTION FOR BOTH OF US:
HOW SHOULD WE STRUCTURE OUR PIECE?
Throughout the spoken word pieces that Kayleigh and I have generated, we have frequently returned to the allegorical imagery of looking through the skin, peeling back the layers of self and seeing a person on the inside. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, we have decided to portray this imagery as abject, in order to depict that choosing to look at the emotional and experiential interior self can be as equally difficult as choosing to look at physical interior matter. Therefore, in order to present the process of looking within as abject, Kayleigh and I have decided that our piece should illustrate a journey through the literal layers of the skin. We intend to do this by structuring our piece into three sections, each titled with the name of each layer of the skin – the Epidermis, the Dermis and the Hypodermis.
Being the outer layer of the skin, the audience will firstly arrive in the Epidermis. The Epidermis is the first line of defence against the outside world and is made up of cells which repeatedly die and replenish. As Dr Adone Baroni describes in his article for Clinics in Dermatology, ‘Structure and Function of the Epidermis Related to Barrier Properties’, the Epidermis is “continually self-renewing”. This definition of the Epidermis is reminiscent of N.H. Azrin and R.G. Nunn’s description of nervous habit’s, on page 619 of their article, ‘Habit-reversal: A method of eliminating nervous habits and tics’. They describe nervous habits as “instinctual impulses” to events on the outside world “which are continually escaping”. This description of nervous habits as the initial regenerating defence mechanism against the outside world therefore aligns with the function of the Epidermis. As well as nervous habits, this Epidermis’ ephemerality also reminds me of the transience of appearance. Moreover, just as the Epidermis is the first, outer layer of our skin, appearance is the first, outer layer of self. These similarities therefore influenced mine and Kayleigh’s decision to bring our research and performance material surrounding nervous habits and appearance into the Epidermis section of our piece. We have thus edited our previous writing into the following spoken word piece to create a poetic and allegorical alignment with the function of the Epidermis:
This is the Epidermis. Your Epidermis. The outside layer of your skin. The preliminary barrier between what I can and what I can’t see. I can see this outer layer of your skin. I can see your transient appearance. I can see the spots and bruises that fade and replenish along with ephemeral cells that make up this layer of your skin. I can also see the veins that tease me with a glimpse of what is on the inside. I can’t see the blood that flows through the entirety of your body. I can’t see your lungs expanding on every inhale. I can’t see the eyes that have penetrated the barrier or the words that have seeped through and stayed stuck under the surface for years. Oh, what was that? (Say whatever nervous habit they’ve been making, e.g. biting nails or playing with hair.) Is that your nervous habit? We have them too. (Suck in bottom lip and look to the screen.) Like our Epidermis, that’s our first line of defence from the outside world. Neither you or the outside world even realise it’s there. But I can see it. And now you see it. You have to see it if you want to move through it… follow me.
In order to implement our material on nervous habits effectively, Kayleigh and I have also decided to make the Epidermis section a waiting area for our audience members – a place of anticipation. While our audience members wait to be met by a performer, we intend to display the following video which presents mine and Kayleigh’s mouths, carrying-out our shared nervous habit – sucking in our bottom lips. As explained in previous blog posts, through our research, Kayleigh and I believe the mouth to be the most abject point of the human body. We therefore felt that the nervous habit displayed in this section should derive from the mouth. Also in this video, we have incorporated millisecond long clips of footage from our devising process, interwoven between the footage of our silent, nervous mouths. We have chosen to do this, to provide a teasing ‘taster’ of what is to come – to portray a leakage from the performance container, before our mouths leak from the body container within the performance itself.
QUESTION FOR BOTH OF US:
HOW ARE WE GOING TO STITCH THE MATERIAL WE HAVE GENERATED TOGETHER?
Through our methodology of unravels and extensions, Kayleigh and I have journeyed through our layers of self – from our skin through to our cores. We feel therefore that through our piece, our audience members should also journey through their layers of self through a process of extending and unravelling.
Thinking about how this process might be visualised, makes me think of the installations of multi-disciplinary artist, Chiharu Shiota, who uses thread in her work because “like a mirror of [her] feelings... Yarn has tension like a human relationship” (Ocula Magazine, 2016). In her biography for Ocula Magazine, it states that “Shiota confronts her own experiences by cultivating special spaces with a physical and emotional passage in mind”. I feel that it would be interesting for our audience members to unravel thread physically whilst simultaneously conducting an emotional unravelling. Shiota also states that she uses red string because in Japanese, Chinese and Korean cultures, it represents “the movement of blood through our veins or the 'fated path'”. This coalition between physical internal matter and external experience aligns with mine and Kayleigh’s intended abject representation of the self as a metamorphosis between inner and outer. Shiota presents this metamorphosis by attaching the string (i.e. “our [internal] veins”) to external objects which memorialise experience: “From a collection of mismatched shoes to suitcases, dresses, keys, pages from a book, bed frames and doors, the materials she introduces have lived elsewhere but are summoned as an artery for a personal and collective psychological experience”. The way Shiota uses the nouns “artery” and “veins” to describe the path we take to discover true self reminds me of mine Kayleigh’s spoken word piece, ‘The Hidden Tease’. Within this piece, Kayleigh describes veins as the part of our exterior selves which “tease us with a glimpse of what is on the inside”. I therefore feel that our audience should physically unravel blue thread as a visual metaphor for our teasing veins.
While Shiota attaches her thread to autobiographical items as a means of stitching her inner self to her outer self which absorbs life experiences – our thread could be attached to experiences and tasks for our audience to encounter, in order for them to discover and reveal the life experiences that have been ‘stitched’ to their inner selves. Shiota also states: “I think art is primarily about the eye. It is important to see art, and then have feelings, and then see meaning. Not come up with the meaning first”. In light of this, I feel that Kayleigh and I should create performative encounters for our audience to witness and experience before they are given questions to answer about themselves. Drawing back on my previous research on extracting pure subconscious thought, psychologist Robert Waggoner states: “because we assume we create the dream, we never bother to ask the dream itself. To get beyond ourselves, we have to stop focusing on our doings and manipulations and allow the unconscious an opportunity to respond” (Waggoner, 2008: 54). Therefore, in recognition of this and in alignment with Shiota’s statement, it is important that we do not allow our audience the chance to construct fictional feelings – we must provide imagery and experiences which enable our audience to naturally and authentically generate feelings.
Whilst watching Kayleigh brush her teeth during her unravel piece, ‘What do you desire?’, I was reminded of Traci Kelly’s one-to-one performance, ‘The Mirror Pool’. During this piece, Kelly squirts wine from her mouth into her participant’s mouth and vice versa. To use Kelly’s words during her Bunker Talk for Manchester School of Art, she creates “a slippery place that takes place at the boundaries of skin”. It is this description which, for me, is reminiscent of the act of teeth-brushing – both, taking place at the “boundaries of skin” and being “slippery”. Whilst Kelly’s performative act and teeth-brushing are both literally slippery, in terms of their incorporation of fluid substances – Kelly’s performative act is also slippery in terms of her evasive, elusive and unpredictable encounter with her participant. Kelly transforms the typically solo activity of wine-drinking into a duo activity. After watching Kayleigh’s piece, we talked about the nature of teeth-brushing, being a private, solo act. Moreover, we revealed to each other that we both experience embarrassment if our teeth-brushing is witnessed because of our shared struggle to keep the toothpaste contained inside our mouths. This imagery of trying to keep toothpaste contained inside our mouths allegorically visualises peoples’ attempt to keep certain words inside their mouths. In her Bunker Talk, Kelly also said that ‘The Mirror Pool’ “undermines the orality of the mouth in relation to its cultural adherence to language by reattaching it to more primal muscular functions such as spurt, sucking and blowing”. Therefore, Kayleigh and I also decided to undermine the orality of the mouth by transforming the act of teeth-brushing into a one-to-one performative act – Kayleigh watched me brush my teeth and vice-versa. If a person can become comfortable with witnessing (as well as performing) a physically abject leakage, then maybe we can begin to normalise verbally abject leakages as well.
In her Bunker Talk, Kelly also talks about the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” that she creates within ‘The Mirror Pool’. Kelly describes this term, derived from the theory of anarchist writer, Hakim Bey, as “a socio-political space that undermines formal structures of control . . . They take advantage of the cracks in formal procedures and they open up a new terrain that operates on the borderline of established grounds . . . So, the empowerment is not taking place where I’m located or where the participant is located – it’s on this borderline space between both of us where the power of the encounter takes place and emerges”. She says that “in this space between bodies, biological assigned sex or sexual orientation dissolve. And, when I say dissolve, it does not mean that these categories are not relevant to different subjects - it’s more that they become a different solution with the possibility of different applications. So, ‘The Mirror Pool’ is very much about contested borders where skin meets with mucous membrane and, in this respect, proposes a different materiality”. As it is mine and Kayleigh’s intention to create a space where societal labels and identities dissolve and the true core of self is revealed, Kayleigh and I discussed how we could use the performative act of teeth-brushing to also generate a Temporary Autonomous Zone. We decided that our audience member should be presented with the option of brushing our teeth, rather than watching us brush our own teeth. Therefore, rather than either the performer or the participant being in control of the orientation of the event – the power is placed within the encounter itself. The participant does not unwillingly witness abject leakage from the performer’s mouth. Instead, the participant consents to a co-production of the leakage and as a result, an acceptance of this leakage is generated.
During a previous workshop, Kayleigh and I discussed female desire and how that could be perceived as abject. Kayleigh decided to unravel this discussion through a video piece. Within this piece, Kayleigh attempts to tell her viewer what she desires. However, Kayleigh never finishes her sentences – instead, she pulls out words (written on small pieces paper) from her mouth. These words, such as “choke” and “tease”, tell the viewer what Kayleigh’s spoken words fail to express – they tell the viewer what she desires. The way in which Kayleigh extracts the saliva-covered words from her mouth effectively presents her words as abject – the reason why Kayleigh cannot finish her sentences.
The abject nature of female desire is also explored throughout the work of video and performance artist, Louise Orwin. In her essay, ‘On Identity: Survivor vs Victim’, which explores the making process of her show ‘Oh Yes Oh No’, Orwin references one of her interviewees saying: “people don’t want to hear you’ve been raped and still enjoy sex. They want to keep you in a box”. The analogy of a being kept in a box makes me think of Kayleigh’s mouth, in her video piece, as a box – feeling that she needs to keep the truth locked inside. However, in this video, Kayleigh does unlock her box – she does extract the contents within her mouth. Through the exposure of Kayleigh’s internal fluids mixing with her words, Kayleigh presents the visceral feelings of disgust that are engendered within her beholders when her box is opened. Orwin, on the other hand, presents what happens within herself when her box remains unopened – a loss of identity. When talking about her desires, in ‘Oh Yes Oh No’, Orwin either speaks through a microphone which distorts her voice or she speaks with the stage lights turned off so that her audience cannot see the body from which the abject words are leaking from.
Within Kayleigh’s piece, she also displays imagery of brushing her teeth – the viewer sees her metamorphosed tooth paste and saliva leak from her mouth. I find this metamorphosis of internal and previously external matter very interesting. It is the metamorphosis of external experience and internal desire which Orwin conveys females feeling made unable to express. To reiterate Orwin’s interviewee: “people don’t want to hear you’ve been raped and still enjoy sex”. If identity is the result of the relationship between the internal self and external, absorbed experience – then a reveal of a female’s full identity is unwelcome; abject. I also find it interested that brushing teeth is an act we conduct on our own – an act we generally don’t let anyone else see. We try to keep the toothpaste bottled up inside our mouths, just as women try to keep their desires bottled up inside their mouths.
Trigger warning: references to cutting and bleeding
EXTENSION
KAYLEIGH’S QUESTION TO ME:
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING A FEMALE BODY AND BEING A FEMALE BODY?
I probably interpreted this question slightly differently to how it was intended... rather than exploring myself both having and being a female body, I considered the difference between being a female body myself and someone else having (i.e. holding or beholding) my female body.
My performative answer to this question was inspired by the theory within the article by Kathy Smith, 'Abject Bodies Beckett, Orlan, Stelarc and the politics of contemporary performance', where the quote which inspired Kayleigh's question came from: "[Stelarc] observes a distinction between ‘having a body’ and ‘being a body’".
In this article, Smith notes: “Orlan comments that as soon as we see the body opened up, our own body immediately identifies with it, and that ingrained in us is the idea that it must be a victim. She argues, however, that a body being opened up does not necessarily mean pain and that, “[i]n fact, it is really [her] audience who hurts when they watch [Orlan] and the images of [her] surgery on video” (Orlan 1998: 326).
I also found it interested within this article that Smith recognises that the sight of a body leaking with blood evokes an abject reaction within our own bodies, yet the sight of a body leaking tears does not. However, if we can numb the pain of bleeding with anaesthesia, then shouldn’t the pain of crying be a more potent pain? Perhaps, we feel a sense of relief when we witness someone cry because it is a confirmation that we are not suffering their pain alone.
In mine and Kayleigh’s previous unravel, we discovered that we both presented the same nervous habit – sucking in our bottom lips. I therefore became curious to discover more about nervous habits. In N.H. Azrin and R.G. Nunn’s article, ‘Habit-reversal: A method of eliminating nervous habits and tics’, they reveal that nervous habits persist because of “limited awareness” and “excessive practice”. Therefore, to attempt treatment for nervous habits, Azrin and Nunn acknowledge that you must make yourself aware of each instance of your nervous habit and practice movements which are the reverse of the habit’s action.
But, why would we want to treat nervous habits anyway? What is the harm in frequently repeating an action if it is small, subtle and does not affect your every-day life? It is because they show others the truth. As Azrin and Nunn reveal, “the present rational is that a nervous habit originally starts as a normal reaction. The reaction may be to an extreme event, such as a physical injury or physiological trauma . . . The behaviour becomes classified as a nervous habit when it persists after the original injury or trauma has passed and when it assumes an unusual form at an unusually high frequency.” Therefore, by repeating our nervous habits, we are effectively repeating and exposing our past traumas.
I therefore decided to experiment with Azrin and Nunn’s proposed treatment of performing the opposite action to the habit – pushing out my bottom lip. Within this unravel, I also returned to mine Kayleigh’s use of a phone screen as a mask. This is because, by performing a false, opposing action to cover-up my nervous habit, I am effectively masking and shielding others from witnessing my un-slightly thoughts and experiences. Therefore, just as my smile hides my truth to pacify my viewer, as does my attempt to treat my nervous habit. Again, my mouth becomes an abject point of leakage on my exterior body.
Kayleigh and I decided that we should unravel my response to Kayleigh’s question, ‘Where does your body belong?’. Within this response I created a paper representation of Kayleigh’s body and instructed her to write on her ‘body’ what she thinks people see when they look at her. Inadvertently, Kayleigh chiefly wrote down the aspects of her body which she does not want other people to see, such as her ‘spots’. I found it interesting to note that few of the characteristics on Kayleigh’s list actually aligned with what I see when I look at Kayleigh. Rather than writing a list of what Kayleigh thinks people see when they look at her body, Kayleigh had written a list of what she hopes people don’t see when they look at her body.
To unravel this discovery, we decided that I should also create a list of features which I hope people don’t see when they look at my body. We also decided that Kayleigh should re-write her list and we instructed ourselves to try to be as deep and honest as possible… (although the length of time that was taken for us to create these lists was evidence of our difficulty in conforming to this instruction). We then took it in turns to read the other person’s list to them, so that would could record and observe our subtle physical reactions when someone else does see the parts of us that we don’t want them to see.
When watching these recordings back, we noticed a nervous habit which was frequently carried out by both of us – sucking in our bottom lips. As noted in my preceding blog, during Kayleigh’s previous unravel, we discovered that the mouth is the most abject place of leakage on the human face. However, rather than presenting a seepage, this action of sucking in our bottom lips conveys our mouths attempting to absorb – to suck our exteriors into our interiors – into the place where we can hide the ‘unsightly’ aspects of ourselves.
We also both wrote down a description of who we think ‘we really are’ for the other person to read out loud, in order to compare our physical reactions and body language. Here are the recordings of mine and Kayleigh’s physical reactions to our lists and descriptions being read out loud…
MY QUESTION TO KAYLEIGH:
IS YOUR BODY INSINCERE? IF SO, WHAT LIES DOES IT TELL?
In exploring this question, Kayleigh also unravelled my use of a mobile phone screen, which displayed images of facial features and were placed over my own face to create a distorted face illusion. In the first section of her response, Kayleigh places her phone with an image of a smile in front of her mouth. This visual representation of a distorted face is mirrored in Kayleigh’s spoken words: “The best makeup a woman can wear is her smile . . . If I don’t smile you will get a glimpse of what is on the inside”. Effectively, Kayleigh answers my question by letting it be known that her mouth is the part of her body which is insincere – lying through its smile.
It is the second section of Kayleigh’s response, though, which really evokes my interest. In this section, Kayleigh masquerades her own eyes with her phone screen displaying an image of someone else’s eyes. During this section, her live spoken words inform us that, opposingly to her mouth, her eyes are the part of her body which display truth: “My eyes . . . lie, they do not. Look into my eyes and you will see that my smile is simply a notion of deception”. However, by presenting someone else’s eyes as her own, Kayleigh simultaneously contradicts her claim that her eyes are sincere. Whilst Kayleigh is able to manipulate her mouth with a smile to conceal the truth, she cannot do this with her eyes – she must conceal them completely.
I find it interesting that when we (humans) see someone who appears upset, we tell them to smile. As Kathy Smith points out in her article, ‘Abject Bodies Beckett, Orlan, Stelarc and the Politics of Contemporary Performance’, we can bear to witness hurt in someone’s eyes – we can bear to see them leak tears, yet, we cannot bear to witness pain leaking from their mouth. The mouth is far more abject than the eyes. We ask the hurt subject to distort their true feelings for our benefit – to distort their mouth into a smile. Because, a mouth can give silent tears a voice. A mouth can say too much. When a mouth tells the truth, it can scream the truth – we cannot pretend to ignore it. Eyes, on the other hand, tell the truth silently. We can look away. We can ignore it.
KAYLEIGH’S QUESTION TO ME:
WHERE DOES YOUR BODY BELONG?
I decided to explore this question in the format of a one-to-one performance. In a previous discussion with Kayleigh, we decided that our final piece needed to be presented as either a one-to-one or intimate (i.e. one-to-few / two-to-two) performance, in order for every audience member to benefit from the work. We felt that a performance which consisted of a large audience would result in a representation of a collated or generalised human body. With our initial, broad intention for this project being to create an opportunity for our audience to explore the outer and inner layers of their individual bodies, we very much want to avoid the outcome of representing a generalised human body. Every body and identity is intricately and personally unique – we want to ensure that this recognition is placed at the forefront of our work through the format of one-to-one or intimate performance.
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In Kristevan theory, the corpse is the most abject expulsion because “It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border?” (Kristeva, 1982: 2). However, in Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s book, ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, he explains how trauma can cause sensory instability: “patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror”. (Kolk, 2015: 92). In this case, rather than being “the most abject expulsion”, expelling the self from the body becomes an anaesthesia to abject sensations. As mentioned in a previous post, for the next stage of this project, Kayleigh and I are to perform self ‘dissections’. I therefore created a paper representation of Kayleigh’s body, in order for Kayleigh to expel herself from her body and effectively be anesthetised during this ‘dissection’…
I wanted to unravel the subconscious thought which Kayleigh generated, during our playing workshop, by transforming it into a poem. I felt that the use of iambic pentameter and rhyming would create a flow which reflected Kayleigh’s imagery of blood flowing through veins. I then wanted to break this flow by removing the poetic iambic pentameter and returning to spoken word at the point of the sentence, “The flow is broken”. I felt that this would generate or intensify a sense of abjection – the viewer literally experiences the flow of the poem breaking as Kayleigh’s words describe a loss of blood flowing through the body. As a result, the felt experience and the described experience metamorphose. As Kathy Smith addresses in her article, ‘Abject Bodies Beckett, Orlan, Stelarc and the Politics of Contemporary Performance’, in alignment with Kristevan abjection theory: “[Blood should] be inside our bodies, contained by our skin; and once it crosses the threshold of our skin, it becomes an object of threat and of revulsion”. Therefore, if the viewer of this poem experiences the broken flow viscerally, through the loss of iambic pentameter, then the metamorphosed imagery of the loss of blood within the body should be felt within the viewer’s own body.
Here is a video of the poem spoken aloud, alongside imagery which I felt reflected and explored the lines, “the hidden tease” and “the outside engulfs me” …
After witnessing each other’s responses to our initial ‘extensions’, we ‘unravelled’ these responses through a workshop activity. I was interested in reconfiguring our words into sentences which reflected raw, subconscious thought, as opposed to constructed, filtered sentences.
In psychiatrist, Carl Jung’s book, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’, he states that “the unconscious is not just a mirror reflection, but an independent, productive activity” (Jung, 1993: 196) and is not “merely reactive to the conscious mind” (Jung, 1993: 196).
In psychologist, Robert Waggoner’s book, ‘Lucid Dreaming: A Gateway to the Inner Self’, he states that “because we assume we create the dream, we never bother to ask the dream itself. To get beyond ourselves, we have to stop focusing on our doings and manipulations and allow the unconscious an opportunity to respond” (Waggoner, 2008: 54).
Therefore, rather than writing initially straight from the conscious mind, Kayleigh and I wrote what we interpreted when watching ourselves playing with objects. We assigned the objects with different names/labels, such as calling a bottle of body spray “exhaustion” and an ornament “the night”. Because of this, when writing down what we saw the objects doing during our play, our writing became more allegorical than literal. Instead of seeing myself spraying body spray on an ornament, I saw “exhaustion” spraying “the night”.
Furthermore, the initial thought process whilst engaged in the play was focused on practicality and immediate thoughts about purpose. So, in the moment, we were less aware of emotions subconsciously affecting the play. Later, we allowed our conscious minds to interpret our subconscious thought whilst watching the recordings of ourselves playing from an objective viewpoint.
Just as Waggoner “asks his dreams” rather than “assuming he creates his dreams” – we asked our pre-existing thoughts rather than allowing ourselves to create new thoughts, i.e. what are we thinking rather than what do we think we are thinking.
When reading Kayleigh’s description of our playing, it was interesting to see her interpretation of a hair bobble (which she re-named “inside”) being placed around a bottle of body spray (which she re-named “hidden”). The sentence she had conjured was as follows: “The inside engulfs me, I am hidden. Hidden inside”. This sentence very much reflects our intentions for this project – to find what is hidden on the inside of our shells. Therefore, to see Kayleigh’s subconscious description of herself (“I”) being “engulf[ed]” was very exciting and instigates some ‘self-dissecting’ as the next stage of this project.
Here is the recording of mine and Kayleigh’s play, with the sentences of subconscious thought we both generated…
MY QUESTION TO KAYLEIGH:
WHAT IS UNDERNEATH YOUR SKIN?
Kayleigh responded with the following spoken word piece:
“My skin. The barrier between what you can see and what you can’t see. You can see the spots and scars, the freckles that cover my face and arms, the veins that tease you with a glimpse of what is on the other side. You can’t see, the blood that flows through the entirety of my body, my lungs expanding on every inhale. You can’t see the eyes that have penetrated the barrier, the words that have seeped through and stayed stuck under the surface for years. You see the end result. Not the before, not the process during. But the after.”
An aspect of Kayleigh’s response which I particularly find thought-provoking, is her metamorphosis between the imagery of her body storing physical interior anatomy with the imagery of her body storing life experiences. Just as a witness of Kayleigh’s body would not wish to comprehend the “blood”, “lungs” and “veins” within, Kayleigh recognises that a witness would likewise not wish to comprehend her stored experiences (“words” and “eyes”) within. Therefore, just as the leaking of Kayleigh’s inner anatomy would be abject, as would the leaking of her stored experiences.
In Rina Arya’s book, ‘Abjection and Representation’, she describes the effect of disgust, a leaking body has on a public eye:
“Social conventions dictate that we are generally privy only tothe external and outer bodies of other people in our dealings with them. This ‘public’ aspect of the body . . . concerns what is on the outside, while what lies inside the envelope of skin is veiled from the public gaze. In fact, it is not wide of the mark to say that we are encouraged to think of body-image as consisting of only the external. When we do conceive of the body in terms of inner and outer, the insides of the body are not meant to be shared with others. The distrust of the body we harbour also applies to rituals of care; we mop up after our leaky insides but prefer not to dwell on them.” (Arya, 2014: 86)
Whilst Arya refers here to the physical anatomy of the inside and outside body, her allegorical description of skin as an “envelope” alludes to messages written inside the body. Whilst, as humans in this society, we attempt to “mop up” the unsightly tears, mucous and blood which leak from our bodies, I also feel that we attempt to “mop up” the unsightly (or rather, socially unaccepted) messages which leak from our bodies.
KAYLEIGH’S QUESTION TO ME:
WHERE DO YOUR SECRETS LIE?
The aspect of this question which particularly evoked my interest was Kayleigh’s use of the double meaning, “lie”. Was I to answer the question of where my secrets are located or rather, where my secrets are insincere? Whilst exploring my greater interest in the latter interpretation, I consequently answered the former. My answer to both these questions is, social media – being the location of my otherwise untold/unseen life events and simultaneously being my tool for concealing and twisting the truth of these events. Social media is where my secrets lie and lie.
Here is my performative interpretation of this answer…
