Issue #2 - Bouzioti - A Glance at Forms of Recorporealisation...

A Glance at Forms of Recorporealisation in Remotely Directed Medea Inside (2021)

Denny Bouzioti

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Abstract

Medea Inside (2021) is an awarded home-filmed lockdown performance directed exclusively remotely with limited means. The film forms the final piece of the practice-based doctoral research Embodying Greek Tragedy: Phenomenological Explorations of the Suffering Body in Theory and Practice (2022), which investigates the embodiment of suffering in performer training and theatre directing. The research is concerned with contemporary non-logocentric adaptations of Greek Tragedy and employs the Merleau-Pontian (1945) phenomenology to examine the lived experience of psychosomatic imprisonment. The article discusses recorporealisation as a concept that appears in the creative process in two forms. The first one is that of the traumatic reconstitution, which occurs through transcendental dance and self-expansion. The second is defined by Rosenberg (2012) as filmic recorporealisation and is generated at the post-production stage, where fragmentary pieces of otherness recreate the performing body.

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Article

Medea Inside (2021) is an awarded home-filmed lockdown performance directed exclusively remotely with limited means. The dance film forms the final piece of the practice-based doctoral research Embodying Greek Tragedy: Phenomenological Explorations of the Suffering Body in Theory and Practice (2022), which investigates the embodiment of suffering in performer training and theatre directing.[1] The research is concerned with contemporary non-logocentric adaptations of Greek Tragedy and employs the Merleau-Pontian (1945) phenomenology to examine the lived experience of psychosomatic imprisonment. Influenced by Husserl’s theory, Merleau-Ponty treats the body as the zero point (nullpunkt) of all perceptual experiences that are perpetually present in the ultimate here and now. In this regard, Medea Inside explores occurring psychosomatic manifestations of imprisonment and isolation as lived and performed by the ensemble (i.e. the research participants) in domestic and virtual settings.

​The article discusses recorporealisation as a concept that appears in the creative process in two forms. The first one is that of the traumatic reconstitution, which occurs through transcendental dance and self-expansion. The second, which is defined by Rosenberg (2012) as filmic recorporealisation, is generated at the post-production stage, where fragmentary pieces of otherness recreate the performing body.​

Medea’s tragedy refers to her husband’s adultery and her extravagant decision to commit infanticide. The act has received various interpretations that span from punitive motives to an underlying mental condition. From a phenomenological perspective though, I argue that we can view infanticide as a self-transcendent act, where the children represent the mother’s psychophysical extension, hence their termination suggests the maternal body’s self-destruction.[2]

Aesthetically, Medea Inside re-imagines the Euripidean tragedy in minimal domestic settings using theatrical symbolism. The film brings together multiple artistic mediums into an esoteric rendering of Medea’s emotional journey during the decay of her marriage. Distinctive performative narratives, postmodern textures[3], and original music predominantly inspired by the human body serve a non-logocentric exploration of suffering and vulnerability. The film challenges those traditional portrayals of Medea, which were predominantly determined by stereotypical projections as constructed by the male gaze.[4] In these directions, which were prominent until the late 90s, Medea is the synonym for feminine madness and appears as an untamed beast, a witch or a cruel ungrateful mother seeking vengeance.[5] The production examines the concept of imprisonment as experienced by the world and the ensemble. Moreover, it draws on the increase in domestic violence against women during the extended lockdowns.[6]

In theatre, most of Medea’s interpretations remain on the verbal re-enactment of her trauma, neglecting the corporeal perception of the trauma per se. In other words, we encounter Medea verbally addressing her trauma but never revealing its psychosomatic impact. The medium of dance, on the contrary, enables this traumatic experience to surface and heal through body memory and transcendent movement. Here, the notion of transcendence associates the phenomenological epoché with the body’s outward movement from its zero point. In this respect, transcendence is justified by the fact that dance movement involves self-expansive sensorimotor activity, which reinforces our psychophysical connection with the world (being-in-the-world). Dance offers the opportunity to re-enact traumas -that is, to bring them back to our here and now through our bodies as in Medea’s re-embodiment of Jason’s abusive gestures (full film: 08.30 and 15.20). Dance, therefore, is the medium to embody and recorporealise the traumatised subjectivity. Given the effects of psychophysical imprisonment during the lockdowns, the re-embodiment of trauma in Medea Inside enabled a process of self-healing for the performers as both enactors of their characters’ traumas and living bodies of a traumatising reality (i.e., the lockdown).​

Further to the traumatic reconstitution that the ensemble and I noticed during the creative process, another form of recorporealisation emerged. I will draw on the theories of Rosenberg (2012) and Brannigan (2011) to explain this argument. Rosenberg suggests that screendance ‘recorporealizes [sic] the bodies it represents and also rematerializes [sic] those bodies as a hybrid that is both corporeal and mediated.’[8] A contingent interpretation is that as a dance audience situated in a theatre auditorium, our visual perception of the performing bodies is determined by their movement within a given spatiotemporal (and sensory) continuum. In contrast, as a film audience, we might perceive objects as a whole even when our screen displays fragmentary body parts from different subjects or diverse angles of the same body. According to Rosenberg, it is the medium of film that has the capacity to perceptually reconstruct one body as a whole and that justifies the term ‘filmic recorporealisation’.[9] Screendance prompts the spectator to reconstruct and re-articulate the body as a ‘totality’.[10] Totality, in this context, refers to the spatiotemporal continuum implied in a comparison between the theatrical event as a synergy of multiple elements in here and now and the experience of wholeness deriving from the film despite its fragmentary nature.

From a film-maker’s perspective, we acknowledge the role of the camera as a recording medium and creative implementation in the stage of post-production. In theatre, it is more likely to use a camera as a documenting device for archival purposes or improvement, but in filmmaking, choreography recordings serve and project conceptual and aesthetic perspectives that are much different from the continuity that characterises a live performance and real-time movement. In post-production, we reconstruct the body within its symbolic representation. From its articulation being subject to a choreographic idea and its documentation by an anchored artificial eye to its archival and assemblage, the body encounters and embraces consecutive transformative reconfigurations before its final exposure for aesthetic consumption. In addition, the methods of montage and fragmentation that include ‘repetition, duplication and slowing down are used to intensify the continuity of the performance itself’.[11] To this effect, the film is interested in extracting the experience of the suffering body within its lived spatiotemporal continuum rather than focusing on an accurate display of time.

For Brannigan, dance film forms an aesthetic and technological continuity among screen media where framing, filming, and editing typify the choreographic process.[12] Disruption, fragmentation, and non-linearity are also aesthetic choices of postmodern art. Still, it is possible to employ them ‘for a reorganization [sic] of time and space in mediated representations of choreographic ideas’.[13] Hence, in Medea Inside, I assemble pieces together reorganising and reconfiguring spatiotemporal parameters while seeking emotional and kinetic continuity through corporeity and movement. That is evident in the scene where the lower bodies of the Chorus are entangled with images of Medea’s hands that violently press her abdomen (full film: 16.32-17.55). The scene shows how the personal becomes political while growing into a universal phenomenon of coercive tolerance and suppressed fear. In other words, the Chorus reflects multiple versions of Medea making a statement for the wider sociopolitical implications of oppression and violence against women. In that sense, Medea Inside’s fragmented bodies are thereby deconstructed, processed, and mediated in post-production to be given a new form and symbolic dimension on screen.

Full Feature Film

link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neilrGXindo&feature=youtu.be

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​Short version (25 mins) - link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sowKIess7U​

Endnotes

[1] The research was supported by the University Research Scholarship (2017-2021) at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. It has been awarded by academic and international cultural organisations, while a copy of the film is stored in APGRD, University of Oxford.

[2] Dionysia Bouzioti, Embodying Greek Tragedy: Phenomenological Explorations of the Suffering Body in Theory and Practice (University of Leeds: WREO, 2021), pp. 110-111 https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/31665/

[3] I use the expression ‘postmodern texture’ to characterise the diversity in aesthetic forms that co-exist in the film, as well as the broader context of the work and its composition alongside the methodological and ontological rationale.

[4] Amjad Al Shalan, ‘Euripides’ Medea and the Male Gaze of Antiquity’, International Journal of Literature and Arts, 11.1 (2023), pp. 26-33. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20231101.15

[5] Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 258

[6] Jinan Usta, Hana Murr, and Rana El-Jarrah, ‘COVID-19 Lockdown and the Increased Violence Against Women: Understanding Domestic Violence During a Pandemic’, Violence and Gender, 8.3 (2021), pp. 133-139. https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2020.0069

[7] M12 is an indicator for research participant anonymisation

[8] Douglas Rosenberg, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 57

[9] Ibid.

[10] Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance. Theater, Dance and Film (Michigan: The University of Michigan, 2003), p. 8

[11] Rosenberg, p. 26

[12] Harmony Bench, ‘Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image by Douglas Rosenberg and The Moving Image by Erin Brannigan’, Dance Research Journal, 45.2 (2013), pp. 132-138 (133-136)

[13] Rosenberg, p. 551