Performed Ethnography and Communication

Improvisation and Embodied Experience

D Soyini Madison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317656197
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Communication Studies

Performed Ethnography and Communication explores the relationships between these three key terms, addressing the impact of ethnography and communication on the cutting edge of performance studies. Ranging from digital performance, improvisation and the body, to fieldwork and staged collaboration, this volume is divided into two main sections:

• "Embodied technique and practice," which addresses improvisation, devised theatre-making, and body work to consider what makes bodies move, sound, behave, mean, or appear differently, and the effects of these differences on performance;
• "Oral history and personal narrative performance," which is concerned with the ways personal stories and histories might be transformed into public events, looking at questions of perspective, ownership, and reception.

Including specific historical and theoretical case studies, exercises and activities, and practical applications for improvisation, ethnography, and devised and digital performance, Performed Ethnography and Communication represents an invaluable resource for today's student of performance studies, communication studies or cultural studies.

Part I

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Embodied technique and practice

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Chapter 1

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Embodied technique and practice

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The tendency in practice theory is to characterize a practice like swimming or cooking as an “amalgam of elements,” as “complexes” or “bundles” of meanings, competences, and material objects … In contrast, I propose to do away with “practice-as-entity”—a phrase with no comprehensible meaning since it is neither abstract nor specific—and recognize instead that concrete moments of practice are structured by knowledge in the form of technique. The immediately allows us to distinguish between a given practice of swimming, bounded in time and space, and the technique of swimming which is not merely a repeated pattern or set of rules but an area of practical and technical knowledge. Conceiving of the relationship between technique and practice in this way solves several problems in practice theory. It also opens the door to an epistemological understanding of practice that can inform our thinking about power, agency, society, and material reality.

(Spatz 2015: 40–44)

Beyond biology and sociality, what makes some bodies move, look, sound, behave, or mean something different from other bodies or, more importantly, the same as other bodies? Why should it matter that race, gender, sex, class, sexuality, and geography variously influence what our bodies do from the smallest unconscious gesture to the largest spectacular event? And how does all this body talk specifically and profoundly affect the very foundation of those everyday improvisational moments of our lives as well as those intensely crafted collaborations of staged performances? These questions invoke an important insight offered in the resonating question, most recently illuminated in the work of Ben Spatz: “What can a body do?” Those things our bodies can do, that is, walking, talking, eating, swimming, reading, dancing, telling jokes, making love, playing the piano, public protest, family dinners, brain surgery, meditation, acting, building rockets, sweeping the floor, Yoga, praying, and so on, and the way we do all these things—including how we learn to do them through repetition and inheritance as well as social and environmental relations—are all doable through trans-historical techniques that ultimately give form, content, and context to examples of specific practice (Hamera 2007; Jones 2015; Martin 1998; Mauss 1973, 2006; Spatz 2015). What our bodies can do, through the infinite manifestations of practice that are constituted by unwavering technique, is made possible through the “transmission of embodied knowledge” (Hamera 2007; Martin 1998; Spatz 2015). It is the passing on and circulation of embodied knowledge that produce the techniques that lead to the practices inherent in the ordinary and extraordinary realities of life.

This section is organized in two parts. The first part begins with brief working definitions of technique and practice followed by three vignettes to serve as examples of how technique and practice are manifest in social life. The second part is a discussion of how conceptualizations of technique and practice affect performance and communication.

Technique

In practical terms, technique provides social bedrock for imagining new ways of being together and being oneself (13) … In his moving essay “Worn Worlds: Clothing and Mourning,” Peter Stallybrass reflects on wearing the jacket of his late collaborator Allon White. “Bodies come and go,” he observes. “The clothes that receive those bodies survive” (Stallybrass 1999: 29). So, it is with technique, which likewise survives the bodies which enact it, even if the enactments themselves are always and inevitably disappearing. Sometimes technique is an unwanted and burdensome legacy to be resisted; at others, it is a generative inheritance.

(Hamera 2007: 8)

Technique is material. It is a doing. It is embodied knowledge. It is transmitted and it is always already relational. Technique is not possible without others. Technique is more than representation, signification, and symbol because it encompasses a corporeal effort (conscious or unconscious) of things repeatedly learned and done over time and space. As bodies negotiate, circulate, and interact with other bodies they simultaneously learn what Kenneth Burke calls “equipment for living” in the form of transmitted techniques that are then reproduced and recirculated. Because technique is learned and layered by histories and inheritances, if we turn to the embodiments of the oppressed and marginalized, we move beyond discourses of disempowerment and enter the epistemological depth of subaltern knowledge. There is a “common curriculum” across social lives that sustain and (re)produce themselves (Spatz 2015). Spatz provides a “working definition” of technique:

Here, I have traced a selective genealogy that conceives of technique as vital, dynamic, and complex. In this conception, technique is a kind of knowledge (Aristotle) that moves across time and space (Mauss) in ways deeply influenced but not entirely determined by social power relations (Foucault). It structures every aspect of human embodiment and works by indirect as well as direct means (Crossley). Furthermore, embodied technique of all kinds, from the mundane to the highly specialized, interacts in and through specific bodies and moments of practice (Martin).

(Spatz 2015: 38)

Embodied techniques exceed the narrow notion of being a mindless procedure, automated action, or skilled method. Judith Hamera describes technique as “relational infrastructure” as it “offers templates for sociality” (2007: 19). Hamera goes on to explain, “Technique translates individual bodies into a common ‘mother tongue’ to be shared and redeployed by its participants: a discursive matrix, a vocabulary and a grammar, to hold sociality together across difference and perpetuate it over time.” She further adds, “At its most basic level, technique births new templates for sociality by rendering bodies readable, and by organizing the relationships in which these can occur” (19). The conceptualization of technique as “relational infrastructure” and as “transmitted knowledge” is particularly useful as we explore the intersections of performance, ethnography, and communication (Hamera 2007).

Practice

If we look at chunks of human life bounded in time and space, we are looking at practices. If we look instead at the transmissible knowledge that links such chunks together across time and space, we are looking at technique (45) … Practice is never reducible to technique. As the image of fractally branching pathways suggests, technique is only ever a network of filaments that gives structure to practice. There is no such thing as a pure enactment of technique. Therefore, practice is always larger (as a sum of all its filaments and pathways) than the techniques that give it form … All the countless layers of sedimented technique that structure an in instance of practice nevertheless fail to determine it. Every chunk of practice exceeds the technique that structures it.

(Spatz 2015: 57)

Practice is a unique moment of action structured by knowledge in the forms of technique. The distinctions between technique and practice are illustrated here in a jump rope game. The jump rope game of double Dutch is centuries old and spans the world. It requires two long ropes turning rhythmically in opposite directions where one or more players jump simultaneously in the center of the two ropes while the rope-turners keep the rope moving, sometimes at higher and higher speeds. Knowing how to turn two ropes in opposite, synchronized, speed and directions while counting, keeping score, and chanting a double Dutch tune to beats and steps of the jumpers is a learned technique.¹ How to jump and turn is not unique to one moment in time; there are world-wide d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: performance and what it does to ethnography
• Part I: Embodied technique and practice
• Part 2: Oral history and personal narrative performance
• Epilogue: the intermix of performance, ethnography, and communication
• Appendix: illustration of creativity and the brain
• Bibliography
• Index