IN A CLEARING: An Experiential Study on EcoPoetry and VocalAesthesis in Natural Environments

Abstract

This paper explores how my site-responsive and performance-based art practice embodies and re-inflects aspects of Hannah Arendt, Luce Irigaray and Adriana Cavarero’s philosophical writings. At a juncture between philosophy and art I discuss my working methodology and how this seeks to embody a form of practice-based ecological thinking.

The idea of a performative political arena is discussed in relation to Irigaray’s writings on air; she speaks of “the clearing” — “the place of entry into presence” (Irigaray, 1999, p.1). This clearing embodies “the condition of possibility, the resource, the groundless ground” (p. 5); here subjects flow into each other in non-appropriative relational interplay. Through discussion of my performance its song — an ambulatory reading of fragments of Irigaray's writing set in dialogue with danced movement - I elucidate orchestrations of body, text and architecture in relation to Irigaray’s clearing.

Cavarero’s writing on the uniqueness of each voice and her reference to Levinas’ distinction between “the saying” and “the said” is used to explore how the specificity of live performance — its ephemerality and situatedness — can bring to the fore and “recuperate ‘the very significance of signification”’ (Cavarero, 2005, p. 29); discussing this in relation to [these roarers]: a durational participatory performance made in collaboration with Bernice Donszelmann and Lucy Gunning on Whitstable beach, that drew together movement, the rhythm and fragility of speech with the rhythm and mutability of the coastal borderline.

I use Arendt’s concepts of natality and plurality to explore a politics of participatory space and collective embodiment. Arendt’s idea of “the gap between past and future” (Arendt, 2006, p. 12) is important here, as for her the present moment is a gap in which we can become “challengers” (p. 4) thinking and acting anew. My performance TO LIVE (currently in development) that enacts interplay between dancers, an oboist and gestures of protest is discussed in relation to this.