disrupted embodiments (meant for posting, midsummer 2011!)

I haven’t posted for a while because I have been busy preparing for my upgrade to PhD in which I was successful, so all the hard work paid off in that respect.

I have written a first chapter in which I have been investigating aspects of embodiments of memory in the research pedagogy of Goat Island Performance Group.

I begin the second section of this Chapter with a quote from Kafka which Goat Island utilise in their reflections on the process of making the show entitled When will the September Roses Bloom? Last Night was only a Comedy:

I can swim like the others, only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. (Kafka qtd. in Goat Island, Missing Scenes)

This section looks at disrupted embodiments in the work of Goat Island and how a number of strategies of disruption are utilised in their devising and teaching. These disruptions are applied to the habits of memory, of bodily movement or everyday action, both of which engage embodiment in the mode of performance. The creative and re-creative imagination, which is the ability to ‘radically design’ and ‘leap across meanings’ becomes activated by these disruptions, in a process which is reflexive and embodied.  This can also be seen as embodied learning, where the re-creative imagination enables new assemblages of performance material, and where there is an imitation and disruption of the source of these new assemblages and becomings. Furthermore the ‘source’ may, in

fact, always be the body, where memory, movement and thought reside, the body that haunts space (according to Merlaeu Ponty), an ‘unfixed, shifting mass of movement, speed and flows …’