THE PROJECT

I became interested in this topic while studying abroad in Nantes, France, a city which was France's largest slave port during the 18th century. My program offered a history course called France and the Atlantic World in which we explored le commerce triangulaire or the Atlantic Slave Trade. In French it's called le commerce triangulaire because of the triangle created between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean and/or North America depending on the century. Upon my return to Grinnell, I enrolled in a French literature course entitled Francophone Caribbean World in which we analyzed literature written by Haitian, Guadeloupian, and Martiniquais authors. In another seminar taken the same semester, Anthropology of Disaster, I analyzed Le Monde, a French newspaper, to determine France's level of accountability in the role that the colonization of Haiti (Saint-Domingue) played in creating the high-level of vulnerability that the country exists in in the present day (See "pages" on the right hand side for a copy of the paper).

All my encounters put together led me to want to make something in response to what had happened and its continued effects on today's world. I discovered a love of dance when I came to college and wanted to use performance as a way to react to the subject and share the knowledge I had learned with a larger audience.

As an anthropologist, however; I am very apprehensive about inserting myself where I don't belong. It should be noted that I am not French nor Haitian nor Guadeloupian nor Martiniquais nor African. A key inquiry of this choreographic exploration is how to talk about a subject or a history that is not your own. I do not want to speak for a group of people, acceptance or judgment is not my place. But I do think that subjects such as these need to be brought to light because they continue to affect the world today and I believe knowledge and understanding are the only way to move forward. It's a fine line that I'm trying to find. I haven't found the answer yet and maybe I never will but I'll fill you in on the progress through this blog!

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified by Josette Féral and Terese Lyons

To be perfectly honest this article didn't demystify anything for me. It was one of those articles where you can read the same sentence five times and still not be able to explain what exactly it was saying. Never good for the academic ego, but good for the dendrites.

Anyway, here were a few quotes that stuck with me:

"Performance does not aim at a meaning, but rather makes meaning insofar as it works right in those extremely blurred junctures out of which the subject eventually emerges. And performance conscripts this subject both as a constituted subject and as a social subject in order to dislocate and demystify it. (173)
"A problem identical to one presented by the theatre of non-representation: how can we talk about the subject without betraying it? How can we explain it? From descriptions of stagings taking place elsewhere or existing no longer, to the fragmentary, critical discourse of scholars, the theatrical experience is bound always to escape any attempt to give accurate account of it. Faced with this problem, which is fundamental to all spectacles, performance has given itself its own memory." (175)
"Performance can therefore be seen as a machine working with serial signifiers: pieces of bodies...as well as pieces of meaning, representation, and libidinal flows, bits of objects joined together in multipolar concatenations*...And all of this is without narrativity" (178/179). 

* Concatenations: a series of interconnected things or events. 
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