International Federation for Theatre Research Conference
Organiser: Universidade de São Paulo
Embodied Research Working Group
Tittle: Developing Structures and articulating the reflexive investigation of the embodied memory and the contemporary body.
Abstract
In my investigation of the embodied memory, I acknowledge that embodied memory is fluid, flexible, has a variety of styles and influences, fluctuates within the body and has multiplicities of existence. My process of inquiry and experimentation of the embodied memory is shaped by the layers of cross-cultural considerations and concerns because of the complexities of structures of the subjectivity of cultural memory and history in the contemporary embodiment of my practice as meaning-making shifts and shapes across time and space.
Using the ideological frameworks or vein of Kalaripayyatu (an ancient South Indian martial arts) as a preparatory tool for rehearsals, the intuitive processes that exist in the rehearsal space and somatic practices of my current practice, I enter into the studio-space. Centring my body/mind so that I am able to move in sync with the breath. I develop a way of accessing how this can trigger a response that raises questions of embodied memory. This triggers emphasises the creation of physical actions that streams from the responses and create this natural impulse to act – which is describe here as physical actions. These physical actions are the creative processes – a discovery of an embedded memory of physical actions that can be stringed together to create a physical score. The use of the term ‘physical score’ should not be confused with the Grotowskian use of ‘physical score’, as these scores are the embodied cultural memory and are used as original personal narratives
In the space, I asked these questions:
How do we harness these triggers and evoke a flow of consciousness/memory that can articulate through the body?
What are the sources of origins and essence that is triggered?
Can the body articulate a new possibility, a re-writing of history and the contemporary?
Conveners:
Elizabeth de Roza and Dr Ben Spatz (University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom)