Shoreline - A Liminal Space

“There are no bounds to the depth or to the expansion of any art which, like dancing is the expression of life’s urge. We must never shut it within the bounds of a stagnant ideal, nor define it as either Indian or oriental or occidental, for such finality only robs it of life’s privilege which is freedom.”

- Rabindranath Tagore, 1937

As part of a practice-led research enquiry, I explored the shifting boundaries of my movement in relationship with spectators, through a succession of participatory performances. Using the analogy of a wave, the work had similar ups and downs, negotiations and unpredictability in terms of how the spectators may engage, as is with the sea, its liminal shoreline and the world beyond.

The performance was designed for the audience to be in a circle with me and embody the shore. But then do they still only remain the ‘audience’ if they are a part of the performance, in fact, its central theme? How would such a setup shift the audience’s positionality from being ‘viewers’ to ‘participants’ (Bishop, 2012, p. 2)? To explore this possibility of collaboration, I added elements in the choreography to let my body come in contact with them. It included movements such as reaching out to them to be pulled to the shore, finding space next to them and moving through the spaces between their bodies. Furthermore, the chorus of the chosen Hindi song- Kinaare (Queen, 2013) which means shore, featured a line in its chorus- ‘khud hi to hain hum...kinare’ meaning we ourselves are in fact the shore.

PROJECTS

This performance was designed to study the audiences 'agency' and possibly transform them from being ‘passive’ viewers to ‘active’ participants. But they never broke the chalk boundary. Ranciere (2018) cautions against the understanding of participatory relations through binary lenses of viewing/knowing, performer/spectator, active/passive, having an inherent gap between the said entities and positionalities, symbolised through inequality of intelligence. He challenged this divide between those who know and those who need to be taught. He claimed that Both the artist and spectator are operating contextually, with no one’s interpretation being superior and there being no accessible universal interpretation that the audience has to ‘learn’ from the artist.

In the discussion after the performance 'ended', following were some of the comments and questions raised:

"Why did you make us sit in a circle? Why did you draw the boundary? Was it just to make us watch the performance from a certain angle?"
"I was really concerned when you asked us to sit on the floor. I thought you might make us do something."
"I thought you were an island who is looking for company. But towards the end you become aware of the nature of being an island is to be alone."
"You were really enjoying yourself towards the end and I almost wanted to join you. But I didn’t because nobody else seemed to be getting up and I just wasn’t sure if that would be okay."

The use of chalk, which I initially thought was an innocent material demanded a re-examination of its role in the performance. Since 'it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories' (Haraway, 2016 p.12), chalk too has its narrative. Used as a primary instrument by teachers to write on boards, the material has a historically discursive property situated in the power dynamics of a classroom. A teacher uses chalk to write instructions, information and questions. Students are expected to follow those instructions and respond appropriately. Hence, it is possible that the chalk boundary could have played a didactic role in the artist distancing herself from the audience in that intimate setup, ironically discouraging participants from breaking the boundary. In Foucault’s terms, the inherent power embodied by the chalk was being channelled as a source of ensuring social discipline and conformity amongst the participants (1979). Consequently, several bodies started to curl up in response to the chalk line being drawn.

Moreover, the camera as an apparatus changed how the performance could be seen and interpreted, hence further diffracting the possibilities of participation to a broader field, one that is not even visible in an anthropocentric view (Barad, 2003). Therefore, a posthumanist lens provides a larger pedagogical framework to study these embodied, materially discursive practices of performance as research (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). Not restricted to a simplistic binary analysis of the notion of success and failure of the enquiry towards its objective, a posthumanist lens also challenges and pushes the boundaries in which it was initially defined, thus enabling the viewing of participation as being performed in between blurred boundaries.

Note- This enquiry is a work-in-progress and will be continually updated over successive performances.

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REFERENCES

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831

Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso.

Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press.

Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and punish. Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

Nail, T. (2018). Lucretius I : An Ontology of Motion. Edinburgh University Press.

Rancière, J., & Elliott, G. (2009). The emancipated spectator. Verso.

Tagore, R. (1937). Tagore's Tribute to Shankar. The American Dancer (B. K. Roy, Trans.). 13

Shoreline - A Liminal Space

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PROJECTS