#intimateperformance

UNRAVEL 

Kayleigh and I decided that we should unravel my response to Kayleigh’s question, ‘Where does your body belong?’. Within this response I created a paper representation of Kayleigh’s body and instructed her to write on her ‘body’ what she thinks people see when they look at her. Inadvertently, Kayleigh chiefly wrote down the aspects of her body which she does not want other people to see, such as her ‘spots’. I found it interesting to note that few of the characteristics on Kayleigh’s list actually aligned with what I see when I look at Kayleigh. Rather than writing a list of what Kayleigh thinks people see when they look at her body, Kayleigh had written a list of what she hopes people don’t see when they look at her body.

To unravel this discovery, we decided that I should also create a list of features which I hope people don’t see when they look at my body. We also decided that Kayleigh should re-write her list and we instructed ourselves to try to be as deep and honest as possible… (although the length of time that was taken for us to create these lists was evidence of our difficulty in conforming to this instruction). We then took it in turns to read the other person’s list to them, so that would could record and observe our subtle physical reactions when someone else does see the parts of us that we don’t want them to see.

When watching these recordings back, we noticed a nervous habit which was frequently carried out by both of us – sucking in our bottom lips. As noted in my preceding blog, during Kayleigh’s previous unravel, we discovered that the mouth is the most abject place of leakage on the human face. However, rather than presenting a seepage, this action of sucking in our bottom lips conveys our mouths attempting to absorb – to suck our exteriors into our interiors – into the place where we can hide the ‘unsightly’ aspects of ourselves.

EXTENSION / UNRAVEL 

MY QUESTION TO KAYLEIGH: IS YOUR BODY INSINCERE? IF SO, WHAT LIES DOES IT TELL?

In exploring this question, Kayleigh also unravelled my use of a mobile phone screen, which displayed images of facial features and were placed over my own face to create a distorted face illusion. In the first section of her response, Kayleigh places her phone with an image of a smile in front of her mouth. This visual representation of a distorted face is mirrored in Kayleigh’s spoken words: “The best makeup a woman can wear is her smile . . . If I don’t smile you will get a glimpse of what is on the inside”. Effectively, Kayleigh answers my question by letting it be known that her mouth is the part of her body which is insincere – lying through its smile.

It is the second section of Kayleigh’s response, though, which really evokes my interest. In this section, Kayleigh masquerades her own eyes with her phone screen displaying an image of someone else’s eyes. During this section, her live spoken words inform us that, opposingly to her mouth, her eyes are the part of her body which display truth: “My eyes . . . lie, they do not. Look into my eyes and you will see that my smile is simply a notion of deception”. However, by presenting someone else’s eyes as her own, Kayleigh simultaneously contradicts her claim that her eyes are sincere. Whilst Kayleigh is able to manipulate her mouth with a smile to conceal the truth, she cannot do this with her eyes – she must conceal them completely.

EXTENSION 

KAYLEIGH’S QUESTION TO ME: WHERE DOES YOUR BODY BELONG?

I decided to explore this question in the format of a one-to-one performance. In a previous discussion with Kayleigh, we decided that our final piece needed to be presented as either a one-to-one or intimate (i.e. one-to-few / two-to-two) performance, in order for every audience member to benefit from the work. We felt that a performance which consisted of a large audience would result in a representation of a collated or generalised human body. With our initial, broad intention for this project being to create an opportunity for our audience to explore the outer and inner layers of their individual bodies, we very much want to avoid the outcome of representing a generalised human body. Every body and identity is intricately and personally unique – we want to ensure that this recognition is placed at the forefront of our work through the format of one-to-one or intimate performance. …

MY QUESTION TO KAYLEIGH: WHAT IS UNDERNEATH YOUR SKIN?

Kayleigh responded with the following spoken word piece:  “My skin. The barrier between what you can see and what you can’t see. You can see the spots and scars, the freckles that cover my face and arms, the veins that tease you with a glimpse of what is on the other side. You can’t see, the blood that flows through the entirety of my body, my lungs expanding on every inhale. You can’t see the eyes that have penetrated the barrier, the words that have seeped through and stayed stuck under the surface for years. You see the end result. Not the before, not the process during. But the after.”

An aspect of Kayleigh’s response which I particularly find thought-provoking, is her metamorphosis between the imagery of her body storing physical interior anatomy with the imagery of her body storing life experiences. Just as a witness of Kayleigh’s body would not wish to comprehend the “blood”, “lungs” and “veins” within, Kayleigh recognises that a witness would likewise not wish to comprehend her stored experiences (“words” and “eyes”) within. Therefore, just as the leaking of Kayleigh’s inner anatomy would be abject, as would the leaking of her stored experiences.

In Rina Arya’s book, ‘Abjection and Representation’, she describes the effect of disgust, a leaking body has on a public eye: “Social conventions dictate that we are generally privy only tothe external and outer bodies of other people in our dealings with them. This ‘public’ aspect of the body . . . concerns what is on the outside, while what lies inside the envelope of skin is veiled from the public gaze. In fact, it is not wide of the mark to say that we are encouraged to think of body-image as consisting of only the external. When we do conceive of the body in terms of inner and outer, the insides of the body are not meant to be shared with others. The distrust of the body we harbour also applies to rituals of care; we mop up after our leaky insides but prefer not to dwell on them.” (Arya, 2014: 86)

EXTENSION

KAYLEIGH’S QUESTION TO ME: WHERE DO YOUR SECRETS LIE? 

The aspect of this question which particularly evoked my interest was Kayleigh’s use of the double meaning, “lie”. Was I to answer the question of where my secrets are located or rather, where my secrets are insincere? Whilst exploring my greater interest in the latter interpretation, I consequently answered the former. My answer to both these questions is, social media – being the location of my otherwise untold/unseen life events and simultaneously being my tool for concealing and twisting the truth of these events. Social media is where my secrets lie and lie.

Kayleigh and I have begun this project with a mutual curiosity in the relationship between the outer and inner layers of, in and around the human body. With Kayleigh predominantly focusing on the body and myself predominantly focusing on suppressed/hidden thought - we intend to explore the human body as a vessel which contains, as well as leaks, abject thought and aspects of self.