The Event of the Object

• In Event: Improvising interventions: Drawing, Dance, and Comics

Abstract

My research in literacy, embodiment, and cultural studies centres on a method I coin Embodied Poetic Narrative.  

I experiment with characters that span decades. These kinesthetic conduits present improvisational iterations through dance, theater, music and multimedia imagery telling stories ‘essentialized’ from shared and co-authored storying with small and large groups. I am probing notions of disenfranchisement and the rebuilding of personal and collective agency through performative storying by creating a porosity in narrative whereby audience can actively participate in their individualized and collective meaning making.

I am interested in the potency of objects becoming a source for character, environment, and plot development through improvisations and am fascinated by how conglomerates of objects grouped by a ‘stranger’ can create synergistic narratives that have potential to trigger both visceral and refined individual and collective responses of memory, value and meaning.

Objects are potent triggers for forgotten or hidden stories of our past and we seek comfort within the vulnerable moments of telling stories through our relationality. “Stories beget stories” (Norris, 2000), and by telling ours, we trigger other’s and so we set the dominoes clacking through the long circuitous patterns of reciprocal tenderness and interwoven meaning making.

Harman asserts, there is an endless depth in the life of objects such as candles and stars and urges us to unleash “the music in the heart of things” (2005, pg. 110) rather than beat them into a pulp of meaning. Harman (2005) further writes of the interiority of the object “relations unfold only on the inside of an object, since every medium is nothing less than such an inside”, if we consider the interiors of objects then we move beyond the form and into the ‘element’. Heidegger (1967) furthers this with the term ‘object proper’, suggesting that objects are not just empty forms of matter defining a distinction from the mass of other objects, nor do our neurological perceptions of this matter privilege us with the exclusive position of relationality but rather objects exist within a relationality of their own particular realm.

We privilege the world’s order through our perception
Our MO is through this deception
Deciding when a stone is ignored or held tenderly on our hands, our own precious folklore
On our knees, sealing the deal, a lifelong promise, a perpetually turning wheel
We check in and out of signifiers like a hotel
Order up our own significance like a side of fries
We are the syntax between material and space
We are the nexus of perception and thereby have complete control of the material world (as we know it)
We story the thing like a beast
We wrestle it to the ground until it holds a white flag up high shouting “you win”
When really it’s just a tie

I am particularly interested in how this work, coalesces with spontaneous visual design and how these creative forms ‘language’ each other creating a new lexicon of creative impulses and meaning making which can then be transferred to innovative educative practices.

Author

• Kathryn Ann Ricketts, University of Regina