Absence/Presence in Embodied Narratives With and Through Things

• In Event: Dance, Body, and Presences

Abstract

The power that objects bring to the world is clearly undermined by most. We continue to operate on the stigmas that objects are an excessive apparatus to our daily-ness and, therefore, secondary in our meaning making processes.
I am interested in the tension/relationship between the temporality of sensorial experience and the permanence of objects. One will often become the provocation for the other and this absence/presence in embodied narratives, has become the core of my work.
Improvisational characters are a critical part of my research. One of the characters, in a floor length overcoat and old felt hat, carrying a battered leather suitcase, will reveal an object at some point in the embodied performative narrative. This object, a piece of tissue paper, an onion, a handkerchief, is brimming with infused meaning beyond the everydayness of its use. “To create such an object is to de-create the external images that normally identify it, re-shaping the plasma of their qualities into a hybrid structure” (Harman, 2005, p. 109). Emblematic of the core of the performed poetic narrative, they also provoke those who witness and this co mingling of memory and perception constitutes a critical participatory element of my research. This collective meaning-making event, often cultivates a powerful ecosystem steeped in listening and empathy. Traditional protocols of audience/spectator with insular, private perceptions gets tipped on its head and instead a community is quietly constructed.
This becomes an activated space where memory meets presence and ignites a profound reflectivity. It is this space where habituated thought patterns are suspended and the unexpected may surface. Appelbaum (1995) describes this event as “an unexpected collision [which] compels the attention to awareness” (p. 81). He explains this further, “The stop neutralizes a tendency of percipient energy to animate intellectual categories through which events are viewed. Assumptions about a world external to the perceiver are neutralized” (p. 80). This neutralization is the opening through which new information can enter—the possibility of discovery is created. This is what I call fracturing the signifier understanding that whatever meaning has been historically and habitually grafted to the object gets blown apart within a moment.
Sensorial provocations are intrinsically linked to this state of collective discovery. We often dwell in the senses to re-awaken our memories in fact the senses become windows, gateways, and doors to the world of discovery. Objects not only provoke but also anchor us in these seemingly transient and ephemeral experiences.
Arendt (1958) writes with this flow of relationality, there is a sense of permanence brought by the objects that both separate and gather; they are an anchoring; they are the reference points of that which outlasts us—and thereby become that which identifies shared meaning and understandings.
Harman asserts that there is an endless depth in the life of objects and urges us to unleash “the music in the heart of things” (Harman, 2005, p. 110). Through my performative provocations I strive to foster the music of collective storying towards cultivating empowered communities.

Author

• Kathryn Ann Ricketts, University of Regina