Partake in the elusive touch of "shared body" Nov 9

It's almost the moment I've been waiting for...since the Spring...the premiere of my new collaboration with Madeleine Bailey, shared body at the Chicago Cultural Center from 6-9 PM, Monday Nov. 9. The whole experience of making this piece has felt like the closure of a long cycle, and I wonder if Julie Laffin and Clover Morrell knew on some intuitive level that they would catalyze such a thing when they brought me into Site Unseen.

Of course, graduate school has started up again so I've been subsumed by rhetoric (chewing on it) and this complex circumnavigation of H1N1 that seems to be hitting students as bad as the resurgence of combat boots (those aren't gonna help you fight the virus). So, I've been trying to inhabit and shape the piece as intimately as possible given these challenges.

It is hard to land when you have so many voices destabilizing your logic, your way of locating yourself, problematizing your practice while showing you how everything you are doing is always already historically situated, as if the work was there waiting for you to enter it vs. being your own maker. This is why I came here! But standing under the dome of Preston Bradley Hall, trying to envision a performance based on physical vulnerability and limitation, I've had to step out of this art cocoon (or vice) and tackle some very personal issues, which while they might motivate my work and live within my aesthetic have rarely ever existed at the forefront of it.

I did a lot of crying in the corners of Preston Bradley, laid down on the floor, thought about all the hands that went into making my body possible again, and how it is that suddenly I've been given this space to perform these possibilities. So much of my adult life I've had to re-think my autonomy as a woman and artist based on the need for care from doctors, therapists, healers, family, friends, lovers, etc.

Shifts, gaps, failures and transformations within or from these relationships have forced me to ask myself what it means to have a body, and whether my focus on the body as subject, as art, as performer, as site is all there is or needs to be.

Maybe recovering in the context of a New York modern dance world was a continuation of the manipulation of my body that I experienced as a patient, i.e. this is how you lift your arm right, this is how to maximize efficiency, etc. whereas if I had recovered in another place I would have had a completely different perception of body and meaning. Watching dance as a body that aspired to be a possible body, I was the uber active witness, somatically filtering the vocabulary and information offered by these performing bodies to navigate the new terrain of bone and metal and the complexity of a reprogramming nervous system. So, I stand under that dome with tourists walking around me and inconspicuously begin to move - it makes me laugh a little because I realize I'm enacting that awareness of vulnerability that I feel as a person with a disability that is not visible to others.

The feeling of being in public knowing I look like a person there, but meanwhile carrying this wound, complexity, tenderness that disrupts that continuity of persona and the ease of appearance/ placement/ presence/ control. I felt like I needed to keep that cloaked, invisible and only show the surface parts that I knew could perform. Relying on my body is precarious whether in every day life or in performing, and taking it to extremes has been way of asking it to prove that it still means, as in that there is a life for a disabled body beyond being a patient, beyond being an object of examination, correction, study.

Madeleine questioned me about this a lot, sending me e-mails about my blog and the sense of isolation in the language, in my aspirations to communicate with the audience and my feelings of failure, and we started on a dialogue about restriction and limitation that has formed the foundation of our collaboration. Her delicate yet incisive observations led her to create objects that externalize this truncated or metonymic relationship of my body to the world. She has carved out a space for me to move and has allowed an emptiness to live in the installation that allows the isolation to be the spectacle/ spectacular presence. Adam Rose, Georgia Wall and I move in and among her sculptures and my bed as our own objects and worlds, sometimes colliding, acknowledging, but never knowing. The space is our home while being completely alien, just as the bed proposes the possibility of rest whether or not it actually enables rest, just as the sculptures imply an intimacy that can be felt but never seen.

(photo taken by John Sisson. Adam Rose, Marissa Perel, Georgia Wall
activating sculptures by Madeleine Bailey)

Site/ Non-site

It has been a lively Summer for the body of Marissa Perel.

In June, I took a road trip with composer, Chris Peck to visit many a Brooklyn ex-pat scattered about the country. Swamps, fireflies, Four Roses Bourbon and an epic stop at the Black Mountain College Museum were all part of the prelude to a residency at Earthdance in Plainfield, MA for the SEEDS (Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science) Festival curated by Margit Galanter, Olive Bierenga and Melinda Buckwalter.

A synchronicity was in the air as an artistic awakening and spiritual awakening occurred for me simultaneously throughout the month. One important part of the residency was getting in touch with the Contact Improvisation community again and reconnecting with that kind of somatic experimentation. I had a profound visit with Daria Fain, choreographer and Qi Gong instructor where one of the many things discussed was the body's inner-wisdom of trauma and the pull of the body toward an understanding of it whether or not our conscious mind is aware of what is happening.



A visit to Tsegyalgar, the first Dzogchen community in North America, brought me to the feet of practitioners of Vajra dancing. The dance takes place on a large mandala and the goal of it is Rigpa, "instant presence." I was moved to tears by witnessing the dancers turn and twist as they let their bodies fall into the form. If it's possible, I believe that as my body was opening up to the universe in my own process, I could feel their bodies opening up to the universe through Vajra.

Another remarkable presence in the residency was Camille Renarhd whose text about the body and translation in my panel, "Performing Needs" articulated the complexity of body language, or the dichotomy between the body and its own language vs. the language we assign to the body. Assisting her with translating parts of the text from French to English was a ritual in of itself that entailed turning over dry leaves, arranging birch, and observing the delicate and cunning suction of mosquitoes on our arms and legs. Stay tuned for that in a coming post.

SEEDS culminated in a jam night and a day and evening of performance. I have to admit that after being away from Contact Improvisation for a few years, I was unsure about how to approach the jam. My own inner-sensibilities competed with my desire to belong, meaning that on one hand I did not feel ready for that kind of trust and intimacy of bodily contact but on the other I just wanted to run up and embrace someone. Eugene Williams approached the floor in his wheelchair and I was immediately inspired. What started as a mysterious brushing against fingers and heads became a fluid and luxurious spiral of arms and torsos and as we danced and rested in turns.

As it turns out, Eugene became quadriplegic after a wrestling accident in high school and is now about to undergo cancer treatments. He also knows my professor at the Art Institute, Roberto Sifuentes, as he took workshops with him and Guillermo Gomez Pena. As he described the performances he made, they sounded pretty bold and hilarious.

I talked with him about the commissioned project I am working on for Site Unseen at the Chicago Cultural Center that is themed "disabling conditions." One suggested title for my project was "What the fuck's the matter with you?" which is his response to people constantly asking him what happened to him, how he got fucked up. It was from a story about a female quadriplegic friend who worked in the television industry who would reply to people with this question when they were shocked to find out that she was wheelchair-bound. Though I am engaging a different approach to the theme, I did appreciate Eugene's spark and confrontational approach to the issue. But I observed that that was his unique strength, the same thing that would motivate him to get to a contact jam as the sole quadriplegic in the room without fear.

I have to laugh again when I think about the way he proposed that title...

The following day, Chris and I set to create an environment for what was about to be a ceremony for us to become brother and sister. To make a long story short, we are both only children, yet deeply connected in a way we can't understand and can't seem to live down either. After our road-trip and time spent together in tents and beds around the country, we realized that if we became siblings, we would always have one another to see each other through the hard times as well as the good. We wouldn't have to feel the dread of isolation, loneliness or sole responsibility. We created a mythic birth that has something to do with John Cage, Gertrude Stein and Thich Nhat Hanh being birthing us from three umbilical cords, but anyway...

...I excavated an old Airstream and made an installation that told the story and we performed the rites of the ceremony just outside...

...This was the test as we wrapped up the residency and headed to New Hampshire as newly bonded brother and sister. Mostly everything was the same with the exception that we were less afraid to argue and our empathy deepened. We went to the mountain where I had my accident. Someone who happened to be there that night met me and described details I could not recall, and then he escorted us to the actual site.

I found a rut between a tree and rock and felt that it was possible that I had been struck there
and flown from that spot onto the trail.

Chris and I sang a version of "In the Pines" that we re-worked, and then I laid down on the trail.

I felt myself disbursing into the atmosphere, into the ground, becoming part of the surrounding landscape and it felt like home. Here was where I died. Here is where I was reborn. For a moment I couldn't distinguish myself from the place, and it felt as though the universe was inhabiting the wounded sites of my body.

I've been reading a Phaidon book on Conceptual Art, and in it Tony Godfrey described Robert Smithson's work as a play between the site and the non-site, "...the site being the 'real' place, the non-site being the representation of it. A non-site could, for example, be a pile of rocks relocated in the gallery space. But the site was always, he was aware, in a process of change and entropy."

Something about this struck me -made me think about how we approach spaces. If I had not been crushed on that trail, how would I have approached that site? And because I have, it functions within a cathexis where I might never be able to see it only as land. The way that now I might never be able to see my body as just a body. It is a gateway to another world. This problematizes the site/ non-site duality.

If we are unable to locate ourselves, whether through memory or sensation, are we existing in a site or non-site?

If a body cannot re-member itself does that make it a non-site?

Is the gallery in the above quote considered a non-site because we are assuming it has no memory or relationship to the natural world and does not experience change?

What happens to identity during the process of entropy?

What happens when memory is lost at the same speed that change occurs?

These are the questions I ask myself in bed, touching my scar. I know there is a world enclosed in that scar, and it might not even be aware that it is part of a larger body, that it carries a body even.

This is part of the shifting contextual web for sharedbody, the project at the Cultural Center on which I'm collaborating with Madeleine Bailey.

Madeleine: what is this architecture that is your body? how does it inform me as a more or less, passive or involved being that is outside of you?

monster cipher

It's June and I am gearing up to go to Earthdance in MA for the SEEDS Festival.

I've started a couple different blog posts since the April post, but I erase them deciding
to write later...

It's later now and I am still not sure what to say.

Desire.

Roland Barthes, blah blah.

Desire is shattering my pelvis.

I am looking for a language for my pain. I am looking for a way
to communicate my pain out of love.

I am working on a way to transform the pain, which feels like a
problem of language. The way for transformation to begin is
by giving language to that which is hidden - to that which
resides within the flesh without a name.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just happens. Language comes later.

Or the language already exists - if the body is its own text -
then perhaps the scars are names. When a lover touches your
body, maybe s/he is naming it. Is that name for your lover or for you?

Perhaps it's Frankenstein. Communicating your pain is like bringing out your Frankenstein, mis-matched, swollen, uncontrollable, an anomaly inside of this "you" person you are working so hard to build, become, maintain. The desperate part with a mouth full of clumsy language.

"I want"

"I need"

"I am"

Where's the moment of distanced irony?

ah, there.

o.k.

A mouthful of desire-mud. The child Frankenstein sleeps
and screams in turns.

"Conquered by ...love...I burst all bonds"*

How many months can go by until I feel able to pick this thread up again? I'm in art school and in that sense I am on a different time that is not so much marked by the calendar. Going between a small cement corner called a studio and a larger cement room painted black called a "rehearsal space," I have been gnawing on the corporeal, the hyper-real - spending TIME.

Since Freedom of Information, I can't seem to get away from the walls. Most of my time choreographing is actually rubbing up against walls and hitting them. My flesh can't seem to get enough of this kind of caress and impact. I get on the floor and feel it with my ass, arms, the back of head until I flip over, etc. This has been an ongoing activity since January. So has the desire to push my body in other ways beside movement. This desire has caused a lot of fear and confusion on behalf of fellow artists, teachers and audience members, however the inspiration comes from contemporary performance art idols such as Marina Abramovic and Gina Pane - but more immediately, Andre Stitt.

3 years ago, visual artist and musician Fritz Welch co-curated a show at the Drawing Center called "Acute Zonal Occult Outer" in which Stitt performed for the duration of the 8 hours the gallery was open. (It's funny I'm deciding to talk about this right before Welch and Stitt's collaborative performance/accumulation, "SHIFTwork" at Roger Smith Lab Gallery is about to close.) I went there to get a glimpse of his "akshun," but ended up staying for at least 4 hours. Stitt himself exudes a raw intention that makes it hard not to be drawn to him, but makes it hard to look at him too. You don't know if he's performing or raising the dead - and you realize he doesn't need you as an audience member but as a believer or something close to one who is willing to believe right there.

What struck me was a moment after intense aggression toward himself and the walls and floor of the gallery (ah - that seems to be a thread) where he sits down on a chair, puts a big black flag across his lap and cuts "LOVE" into his left arm. Then he puts a black burlap sack on his head and sits there while the blood trickles for a while. My feeling in that moment was of a profound disbursal of whatever emotion or energy he had been conjuring with his aggression. I felt like having been there for hours made complete sense - his presence and willingness to open himself in that way connected me to him in a way that I have not been able to stop thinking about for 3 years.

At the time I had been working with urine and pig's blood in my own work, a departure from the dancing and musical improvisation that made up the majority of my world. I felt that there was a dichotomy between the type of risk taking I read about in books on performance art and the times when Marina Abramovic would grace NY with her presence, and the type of performance work the majority of my peers valued - not to say that it wasn't risk taking at times - but in this sense it was mostly kept to sexuality and representation.

It was 2006, still 2 wars, terror, etc. etc. that I have talked about on the Freedom of Information blog and in this one too. You know. So, to see Stitt bleeding there - it hit a nerve. It sparked a flame for me about testing my own limits as a person not as a performer per se - but to really think of my own skin and how I feel about its boundaries.

Which brings me back to this wall choreography and endurance - that I have not been able to shake something since dancing for 24 hours, and I'm in grad school, learning, learning, learning, how to be critical, how to be seen, how to talk, and meanwhile entering a breaking point with what I have known as "the body of marissa perel." All of these entries about chronic pain, empathy, anger, art are not serving my body now.

If I am inscribing my wounds into this blogosphere, I want to communicate that they are opening up to something right now that is not about recovery but still about healing. It's not about the quotidian reality of a body in pain, but more of an interrogation of pain and its usefulness. Would I have had the same reaction if Stitt just said "LOVE"? I have a feeling the answer is no. If I didn't have to dig deep to keep dancing at 5:00 PM to make it to midnight, would I have ever been able to guess that the pain would become a motivating factor in my perseverance as opposed to a limitation? Definitely not.

This sends me into confusion in a social way - like I still am "disabled" - I can't lift certain things, I can't move certain ways, right now I have bursitis again in the joint with the metal (which leads me to believe it has to do with seasonal transition) and can't sit without getting stuck. But I'm not disabled - and when I am moving I am still aware of that gift and that it could leave me one day.

I am also confused about my desire to try cutting myself in my performance work now. It's not scary or necessarily profound, but it is intimate. It's something that is normatively called masochistic, but this I find entirely strange. Masochism is rooted in punishment, but I don't believe my desire originates there. It originates from the opposite maybe - the flesh is miraculous, wounds heal. But how does this speak to my own deeper wounds? I haven't figured that out yet.

Lack of fear of a superficial pain is too much of an easy answer, though I don't discount it.

I have performed this piece "black seeds" a couple times, once at BARN in NY and another at Elastic Arts in Chicago, and it feels like the whole environment becomes a working experiment with my own hybridity as a dancer and performance artist, disabled body and hyper-sexualized body, believer and non-believer. Cutting has taken place as well as planned and unplanned audience participation that conjures something I can't define. This usually makes the audience uncomfortable in a way they want more of or really, really don't.

I'm splitting the membrane of my skin, but that's only the beginning of the splitting. My vulnerability splits the membrane of the performance, and that creates a bigger kind of bleeding than just the kind my body is doing. I want to experience a palpable permeability even if it hurts me emotionally. Is that sacrifice taken out of its symbolic value? I go somewhere - and the audience goes there too, or observes my travels, or neither (because they have to close their eyes, or because they are angry). And I am wondering if it is o.k. to try, even if I fail - to go somewhere I haven't gone before in front of people.

At dinner with a couple of friends a month ago we got into a conversation about crying on the El. Both of them have done this many times and complained and laughed about people coming up to them and either trying to help them or comfort them or reprimanding them for their behavior. This is related to my question. This thing is happening that you can't control - you're shattered and you can't hide it. What does that do to the people around you? Does it make you more or less of a spectacle than the person, by contrast, who seems very together and offers you a tissue or tells you to shut up? Something is being felt and known between you whether or not it's acknowledged and that thing is ugly or banal or tender or all of these.

For me, the audience is like these fellow passengers...in their own worlds and unpredictably attentive, desiring, and I can either match that and fulfill it or I fall short, I can't read them, and I can't give them what they want (which is deeper and more superficial than I can evaluate without knowing them as people). I run, I get up, I run I get up, I hit the walls, I bleed, I sing out of my own need, desire, effort, and willingness. It's not so much about what it means as what it does. The body, its wound, or the personality that animates them. I'm not saying this as a conclusion, but as a way to talk about use.

* This is taken from a translation of Vergil's Aeneid that I found in my aunt's papers after she passed away.

twist & breakage

The reason why I did not post last week was due to something simple: it was too fucking cold in Chicago. What is it like to walk through below zero temperatures with metal in your body? An analogy: how does your laptop feel after walking a few blocks in such a temperature? It's freezing, right? Now imagine one of your joints feeling like that.

Something happens to me from enduring this weather. The strain and difficulty wears on a sense of safety and stability that causes deep strain lasting far after I have been able to get warm again. I've been attempting to examine this feeling, and it's reminding me of another residual feeling after performing Freedom of Information.

It's about reaching the breaking point but not being able to stop. Your body continues, but inside some part of you is deadening, twisting. I am going to give a lecture on Freedom of Information on Monday, and yet I am still working out this resistance, this twisting that happened to me around 9:00 PM that night.

I went to see Jenny Holzer's Protect, Protect here at the MCA. Viewing blown up documents and LED screens filled with testimony from the Guantanamo hearings, that 9:00 PM feeling arose sharply. Holzer's work provided a kind of mirror that reflected the relationship between my surviving body and descriptions of bodies that had been/ were being actively destroyed.

Even though I consented to the endurance test of Freedom of Information, I nonetheless intimately experienced a breakdown where everything was lost and I felt completely disoriented and broken.

Sensation, memory, and the somatic bond between them...

My breaking points (inside and outside) as a space for information to enter...

Xenia

I have been deliberating about how to approach this weekly post. I have had a discussion of the host and guest relationship in mind, but here I am attempting to talk about "other" in a newly defined way.

Xenia is the my best introduction to this discussion.

The Greek term is conceptual, naming a relationship between host and guest that is ritualized whereby the guest makes her needs known to the host, and the host honors those needs by providing for them. The experience of hospitality is ranked/ lauded based on how well this is executed.

There was always the possibility of a divine presence appearing as a guest to test the hosts to see if they were worthy of encountering the divine. We can find traces of this in religion now, in Catholicism where incorporation of the host is part of a divine ceremony. Derrida discusses xenia in On Hospitality, stretching the concept further to dissect issues of place, territory, control.

If I address my hardware through xenia, I acknowledge its presence as the guest for which I must provide as host. In an optimistic sense, the better I provide for the guest, the more I am able to receive from it by way of positive results.

This gets sticky for a couple reasons.

One is that the guest is an "it," metal which lacks a consciousness of its own (though lately I have been questioning that). Another is the ambiguity of "results," if I don't take care of my guest, I can't move, or move without pain. Does this mean the gift is walking in of itself? I'm thinking about a little bit more here, like a power given to me by this machinery that is equitable to revelation of Zeus at the dinner table.

When Derrida talks about the relationship between host and guest, he describes an implicit tension in this relationship partially driven by control. For the host to be able to be hospitable, she must have control over her domain, and over the guest as a result. The necessitates the guest remaining in the subject-position as the other. If that changes from duress, a situation of abuse of the host, of the guest never leaving, or of the host preventing the guest from leaving, the reality of hospitality has changed into something else.

Applying this theory to my body reveals the complexity of my own subjectivity. How do I know when the hardware stops being a guest? If this occurs when it demands more of me than I can provide, it has seemingly never quite been a guest, then. I can control it, as in dancing for 24 hours, however it will control me equally as retribution for the performance of this task.

What happens when the other is incorporated into the self, changing that self into something unrecognizable to her? I, as your host, take you into me, and you as my _____ (guest/ other/...) transform me. This is often understood as the position of the cyborg, however I am interested in another term.

Receptivity & Participation

As a response to Claudia La Rocco's article in the New York Times: Across the Country, Dancing in Solidarity for 24 hours (Dec. 30th 2008) where I was featured as a surviving body, I have decided to devote this space to the discussion of my body, its history and related bodies and histories. As La Rocco described, in 2001 I shattered many of the bones on the right side of body while careening through the snow on an inner tube. As a result, my right hip and arm have been reconstructed with titanium plates, rods, screws and wires.

As a poet, I have traveled through the world of pain and loss in recovery with language. My desire for more/ new/ better language caused me to turn to music, dance, sculpture - forms that are propelled by kinesthetic awareness and comprehension. While living in New York amidst choreographers, I became informed about movement techniques, and danced and choreographed as well. I also developed a course of study in performance/ body/ live art, which has led to my current position as a graduate student in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Body Blog is the channel from my physical body to this network that is also a body. It is my way of seeking to integrate the personal into the artistic and theoretical, thereby stretching the membrane of the self, the blog into something more - a way of opening my body yours.

In reading this blog, you are participating in my recovery and my work as an artist. I will be posting entries that pertain to these manifold interests: recovery, theory, body art, movement, language and architecture.

I will be discussing endurance, survival, sacrifice, failure, disintegration and entropy....