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Monday 24 January 2011
 
Failure and Authenticity
by John-Paul Zaccarini

What does it mean to be authentic against the pressures of reality? What kind of negotiation do we have between an inner world that is ostensibly “ours” (eigenwelt) and an external world (gegenwelt) that seems foreign to our desire, towards which we must always be in a process of translation, making meanings and metaphors in order to participate.

Meaning-making in the world can often prevent us being authentic. Meaning-making can seem like a concession to the external world where we must present ourselves as legible and this only by some sort of translation.

I suggest that those moments in reality wherein we fail to make meaning, fail to tell a story, fail to produce a metaphor to carry our meaning over to the other, are moments when the real erupts, briefly, in the convulsion of an uncontrollable body, the self trying to manifest itself through a compulsive physical symptom.

To explore failure, we'll look at how the real of the body confronts and shames the social body, where the inexplicable and unsignifiable expulsions of this real body show how little we are in control of our meaning, our desire – or maybe to see how little our desire has to do with meaning.

Hysterical laughter (not funny), orgasm (more than pleasure), vomiting (not revulsion but explusion), sobbing (not sadness).... What is the difference? Not just one of intensity.

Roland Barthes knew the difference between pleasure and bliss. 


Pleasure we can all agree on, like a beauty that is measurable, that conforms with standards we all share that confirms that we live together in a world of meaning. Pleasure comforts us. 

Bliss however disrupts us, makes us singular again, because reason no longer binds us together in
the same reality, like the social forms of pleasure that we can participate in together. Bliss provides us with something similar to Kant's sublime; the momentary short circuit of meaning.

My orgasm and yours will never agree, because I forget momentarily who “I” am, this “I”, this metaphor or translation of myself; my stunt-double in reality who knows all the tricks.

We're going to start by leaving the stunt-double at the door, he/she is our worst enemy in the search for authenticity, because he/she tries too hard to succeed on behalf of the self.



Tuesday 25th January, Session 1


Tasks:
Create an impossible task. This may be for one or many people.
Create a situation in which you make “dance” more difficult for yourself.

Questions:
What do you have to exclude from your practice in order to qualify what you do as “dance”?
What does dance prevent you from expressing?
Where in dance have you felt inauthentic?

Reflections:
In searching for this non-narrative* form of expression, what sort of meaning can we ascribe to or convey with this pared down form of movement? This form of expression that leaves behind the social body and looks for the real body*. (We must remember here that we include the mind in the body.)
*Non-narrative = showing the reaction of the emotion, not the emotion itself. Narrative occurs when we say “I am sad as a consequence of …......”
*Real body = in all it's biological un-representability – vomit, shit, orgasms, itchiness (sorry ladies).
I'm using “meaning” here as a form of knowledge; that which can be both communicated and repeatable, like a scientific formula. But we're not doing science here, we're not trying to prove something, or indeed produce a formula that someone else could repeat. (I am reminded here of the sadistic choreographer who uses the dancer to prove his/her idea. I won't mention names.)

In looking for what is unrepeatable in oneself, what is singular one discovers who one is. This is very different to what one is which is the object of the scientific researcher – i.e. the search for what something is, how to quantify something and to provide a formula for its existence, an answer to the question “What is this?”.(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Adrienna Cavarrero, Relating Narratives)
This is where we come to process.
I am not a finished product, even now, sitting here writing I continue to develop, I am a process, a means. If I objectify myself into a what, (which is often necessary, think of yourself as your CV), I stop being a process and I become a product with an exchange value. In this way I forsake my un-repeatability and become exchangeable with something else; the logic of the commodity. A singularity is un-exchangeable. 
My point is that meaning is exchangeable, it has value, units of meaning can be given, bought, transferred but truth cannot be, it is necessarily singular. And here is where thoughts about authenticity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre) share the same territory as the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire (Freud, Lacan etc..) which is specific to each subject.
“What are we?” and “Who are we?” are two different questions and authenticity has to do with the latter.
This expression of the who that we attempt will continually shift, we'll never be able to pin its meaning down, because it is a process. In what ways is a process of dance a process of understanding this 'who' as opposed to the what.
We should be happy that answers don't come too quickly, and embrace the movement of questions generating yet more questions.
To end with something brief; as dancers we think with our bodies, so maybe Badiou is right when he says that dance is “an image of thought.” (Handbook of Inaesthetcis)

Day Two: 27.1.11

Authenticity then...or “being oneself”...doesn't seem to be a simple thing; because what is the difference between authentic performance and a narcissistic, self-involved, wrapping in on oneself? What we commonly call “self-indulgence”, where the pleasure is all the performer's. It's no coincidence that sometimes when all participants of a workshop are required to work on their own, at the same time, so deeply immersed in themselves, the room looks a little like a sad cliché of a lunatic asylum; people shuffling, shaking, contorting themselves, banging their heads or rocking back and forth. It's merely the fact that a door is closed both to the outside world and to others in the space. This is a valid studio process, yet we know of performers who do the same thing in the public space and we fall asleep watching them, because they don't energise us, they drain us with their demands to be watched.

Authenticity is clearly then about a relation with the “other”.

So: keep the eyes open in improvisations, this is not a meditation class. Even if one thinks it aids concentration (in trying to think of oneself as water pressing against stone for example), we loose the humanity of the artist, which is his/her presence or being; being-with-others (Mitsein), being-in-the-world (Dasein), to use Heidegger's terminology.
To her with eyes shut; you are a body of water negotiating obstacles to your movement. However your obedient representation of the exercise close s down the possibilities of my imagination; you are only water finding the cracks in the stone to flow through. You tell me what to see. You show me a meaning.
To her with eyes open; you are not the particular difficulty of rock and water, you are everyone who has to deal with this difficulty or this imprisonment or this violation of rights or this hard journey to freedom. You ask me how I have been in that same situation. You present a question and give me the freedom to formulate my own answer.

This is one aspect of authenticity, the experience of freedom, too much choice, the question “What am I to do with the rules/situation given to me?” The student diligently obeys but in order to assist the flourishing of an artist one must encourage disobedience.

This is what we offer then to the spectator, this all-important other, without whom we may as well just be dancing in our bedrooms in front of the mirror like we did when we were children. Choice, freedom to experience something personal, the chance to be disobedient.

The “good enough” choreographer cherishes disobedience because his/her mission is a) a devotion and active adaptation to the dancer's needs, b) to create an environment that “contains” the dancer's traumas, fears and bliss in such a way that they can safely explore them, c) to encourage the dancer to express and develop their authenticity/ identity. (Winnicot) Otherwise we are the sadist law, the (often) paternal authority that disavows dialogue, interpretation i.e. “Don't interpret my law, the meaning I force upon you, just obey it, just believe it, because I say so!” The relation between choreographer and dancer will be the relation between dancer and spectator.

We can choose what relation that will be. “Who” we are, “who” we present onstage (not represent) is a question concerning that relation.


About John-Paul Zaccarini
John-Paul Zaccarini is an internationally renown interdisciplinary performer, dancer, choreographer, and Circus artist. He trained in dance and theatre at the Guildford School of Performing Arts and subsequently with Peta Lily, Phillipe Gaulier, David Glass, Lindsay Kemp and Andrew Dawson. He studied circus skills at The Circus Space, London. He performed as a soloist with the Adam Darius Company and worked as movement director for plays appearing at The Kings Head and BAC. John-Paul founded the company Angels of Disorder in 1992 to produce political, passionate performance polemic. John-Paul directs for The Gandini Juggling Project, an interdisciplianry dance and circus company and was a member of DV8 Physical Theatre for the award winning Enter Achilles and The Happiest Day of My Life. He curated and arranged multi-media club events, art shows and had fiction published. In circus, he worked with Circus Mamaloucus, Acid Cirque, Archaos, Cirkus Cirkor, Dramatern in Stockholm, Momentary Fusion, Heir of Insanity, No Ordinary Angels, The Dome Show and choreographed aerial dance for The Royal Variety Show, The Nobel Prize Ceremonies and Hermes fashion house. He was nominated for a Circus Fellowship from the Foundation of The Arts and for the Best Actor Award by The Stage for his performance in Throat.


Links

http://www.companyfz.com/john.html


Resources


J.-P. Zaccarini, Circoanalysis, manuscript, 2010 (read here)


Interview with John-Paul Zaccarini


Video of recent Beside Myself