| Play, Mis-appropriation, Risk, Freeing, Liberation |
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Play sets the foundation for fruitful relationships between design and performance. When two people, especially if they come from different disciplines, play together in an exploratory way, something new may be created. Thus, play is a cooperative activity in which both parties take the shared risk of exploration (see Huizinga 1980, Turner 1982, Swanwick 1982). Swanwick coined the term imaginative play used in the creative learning process that allows creative exploration without the urge to produce an outcome. (Swanwick 1982) Similarly, Caillois observed that play is always related to joy, never obligatory and not targeted at an outcome. (cf. Callois in: Shepherd & Wallis 2004: 21) In this regard, play is a freeing activity, the freeing element of which is improvisation, spontaneity and trying out something new according to Gary Izzo (1997). Thus, rules interiorized by society can be overcome and the way to creative thinking is freed.
In Homo Ludens (1949, engl. Translation 1980), Huizinga attributes the following characteristics to play: First of all he stresses the non-seriousness of playful activity; it takes place away from usual every-day duties, somehow it can even be regarded as an interlude in real life on a voluntary basis. Play is often allocated a particular space in social life such as a football pitch, a chess board or a theatre stage where the tension by playful activity is turned into a captivating experience fuelled by enthusiasm. Gary Izzo (1997) uses the Greek term temenos to denominate the play area and the space for play respectively. As games as a part of play have rules the players have to adhere to in order to preserve the ‘seclusion’ of play, Huizinga states that play creates order: “Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” (Huizinga 1980: 10)
Closely linked to the exploratory aspect of play is the notion of Mis-appropriation. Mis-appropriation in the framework of the design-performance relationship involves the non-regular use of equipment (performance technology). By means of this innovative mis-appropriation, play opens up doors to new and more creative ways of interacting with objects and the wider environment.
Victor Turner’s concept of the liminal incorporates the notion of mis-appropriation. He refers to Arnold van Gennep who in his 1908 “Rites de Passages” differentiates three phases of the rite of passage: separation, transition and incorporation. The transitional phase is important as it marks the threshold (Latin: limen) between the old and new state of mind and social order of the individual who, at this stage, is marked by his/her old and new identity and finds him/herself in an ambiguous state. This ambiguous state of seclusion fosters the concentration of one’s creative energies and playful activities: the “’ludic’ invention.” (Turner 1982: 32) In liminal initiation rituals determined by one set of rules the breaking of a different set of rules is considered obligatory as opposed to liminoid activities that are characterised by personal choice. (Turner 1982: 43) The division of work and play in industrialist and post-industrialist societies has led to the loss of common liminal rituals and myths and favoured liminoid leisure genres which are subject to individual choice and are not traditionally inherited from one generation to another. Leisure means freedom from work and freedom to play and time to release creative energies. (Turner 1982: 36-37)
To summarise, Huizinga gives this concise definition of play: “… play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’.” (1980: 28) Play is an important way of exploring the design-performance relationship as play and creativity often initiate the design process. Playful activity allows to move freely within a limited space increasing awareness of the body and its movement possibilities.
REFERENCES:
Huizinga, J. (1980) Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Izzo, G. (1997) The Art of Play. The New Genre of Interactive Theatre, Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Shepherd, S. & Wallis, M. (2004). Theatre, Drama, Performance, London: Routledge.
Swanwick, K. (1982) Discovering Music: Developing the Music Curriculum in Secondary Schools, London: Batsford.
Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: SAJ Publications.
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| Space, Spatiality, Embodiment, Phenomenology |
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Space is conceived as a medium of expression and understanding in performance. The complementary partnership of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’; ‘inner space’ and ‘external space’ seems particularly important in linking design and performance theory. Henri Lefebvre differentiates between perceived (individually experienced and explored space indicating the actual location), conceived (as by planners and cartographers) and lived space. (Lefebvre 1991) The concept of lived space as denoting imaginative space is crucial for the interaction of design and performance as creativity is embodied and adopted in imagination and the imaginative space. Space, which consists of human interaction with the designed world, can be conceived as an imaginative arena where we define and are in turn defined by our relation to the other objects in the world:
"Objects touch one another, feel, smell and hear one another. Then they contemplate one another with eye and gaze. One truly gets the impression that every spatial plane constitutes a mirror and produces a mirage effect; that within each body the rest of the world is reflected, and referred back to, in an ever-renewed to-and-fro or reciprocal reflection, an interplay of shifting colours, lights and forms."
(Lefebvre 1991: 183)
Gaston Bachelard, too, calls for a lived experience of spaces (Bachelard 1994) in stressing the augmenting effect imaginative lived spaces have on real spaces.
The dialectics of interior experience and exterior reality constitute the essence of phenomenological thought. Mark Fortier, for instance, puts his emphasis as follows: “Phenomenology’s primary concern is with the engagement in lived experience between the individual consciousness and the real which manifests itself … as sensory and mental phenomena…” (Fortier 1997: 29) Maurice Merleau-Ponty accentuates the importance of experiencing the world via numerous senses, above all the body: “…our fundamental cognition of the world is not purely ‘mental’, a wholly intellectual operation- it is rather a function of all our sensory, motor, and affective capacities operating as a unified field. This involves a primordial awareness of our body’s positioning and its unity- an awareness which articulates the world into an intelligible schema” (in Crowther 1993: 103). Deleuze equally supports the idea of the body as our main perceptive organ (Deleuze 1993:95). Phenomenology, then, examines how we perceive the world and how we apprehend space through our senses and especially through the body. Phenomenology puts the individual experience of the world over the objective and scientifically proven explanation of the world (cf. Garner 1994: 2). Thus, the individual finds to itself through its embodiment in space, is present in itself in “transcendental ideality” as Garner refers to Edmund Husserl (Garner 1994: 23). When in this state of transcendental ideality the individual has access to their innermost creative energies. Bernard Tschumi’s questions “Are objective social space and subjective inner space then inextricably bound together? Is space thus one of the structures which expresses our ‘being’ in the world?”, (Tschumi 1990: 34) can be answered positively for our aim of facilitating knowledge transfer between design and performance.
Several techniques can help to experience, understand and design space. Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi claims that the medium of spatiality, whilst qualitatively different from other mediums of expression, such as language, nonetheless acts to contain and project meaning (Puglisi 1999:80). Projections in space as carried out by KMA Ltd, Dr Sita Popat and Scott Palmer from PCI give a new frame to spatiality and facilitate and enlighten processes of embodiment. As the body is always spatially productive, embodiment describes being in space. The embodiment workshop of the Performance Robotics Research Group with a dancer and a robot exemplified the knowledge transfer that can be created through embodied understanding.
Please visit the Projects section of this website for more information on these projects.
REFERENCES
Bachelard, G. (1994) translated by Maria Jolas, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press.
Crowther, P. (1993) Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, Oxford: Clarendon.
Deleuze, G. (1993) translated by Tom Conley, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fortier, M. (1997) Theory/ Theatre. An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge.
Garner, S. B. (1994) Bodied Spaces. Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell.
Puglisi, L.P. (1999) Hyper Architecture. Spaces in the Electronic Age, Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser.
Tschumi, B. (1990) Questions of Space. Lectures on Architecture, London: Architectural Association.
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| Translation, Communication, Projection |
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Basic to the work of the Cluster is the translation of performance knowledge into terms understandable to people working in design and vice versa. This knowledge exchange, situated at the heart of the creative design process was coined translation/communication.
The rubric of translation/communication also addresses the role of performance in improving access for publics and other client constituencies to creative design processes, their being enfolded into the design process as a whole. The process of translation can be regarded as a development determined by the transition from the general to the special (Deleuze 1993: 10) which is easy to apprehend when regarding the design process and the gradual shaping of a concrete outcome of this process.
One of the several models and figures relating to translation/communication is Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘objectile’. Deleuze distinguishes between object as event and the objectile as occupying an in-between state in the dissolved nothingness of space and time. The performance of embodied knowledge informs this liminality. It is important to note that an object becomes an objectile by means of an event. The object-become-objectile is described as follows: “The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold - in other words, to a relation of form-matter – but to a temporary modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form” (Deleuze 1993: 19)
Information and communication theory differentiates between signal and noise. Here, noise figures as interference or excess, stuff that occupies the channel of communication but is not signal. It blurs the transmission of the intended content of a message. But this ‘by-product’ of a communications process can itself be recognised as something meaningful, sometimes displacing the originally intended message. “But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchannelling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.” (Attali1985: 33) Attali draws from performance in describing the creative design process of musical composition as “an exchange between bodies - through work, not through objects. … to exchange the noises of bodies, to hear the noises of others in exchange for one’s own, to create, in common, the code within which communication will take place.” (1985: 143) Composition as music as noise creates a relationship between bodies through a bridge of communication. Equally, thinking through the frame of signal/noise helps illuminate the culturally-specific nature of designed objects.
Puglisi’s notion of ‘projection’ figures in this context, as design content is translated from one system of notation, representation or embodiment to another. The following of Puglisi’s concepts of projection seem to be most suitable for our purposes: projection as transference as used in psychoanalysis, projection in art as the basis of representation and projection as reflection and mirroring as used in philosophy (Puglisi 1999: 30). According to Deleuze, the world becomes present through projection. The soul is projected into and onto the body as the world is projected to an individual’s receptive organ via something he calls “vibrations contracted by the body” (Deleuze 1993: 97).
The lens of performativity can help in understanding both the nature of specific projections and the re-articulation of the design content.
Puglisi describes the object-concept-image triad as part of his concept of projection. The object we see is translated into a concept that is represented in the image that is painted by the artist and that conveys and projects a meaning. This process of projection is carried out by translations. Translation always denotes interchange and communication between different realities. (Puglisi 1999: 40)
More broadly metaphorical is consideration of erstwhile dominant design processes in linguistic terms, as being fashioned on the syntactic norm, subject-verb-object, where the successive terms are occupied by substrate or design problem, design process, and design outcome. According to Deleuze, Leibniz’ includes the predicate in the subject which for our interest in performance-informed design describes the interdependency and interrelationship of the design process and the design problem.
REFERENCES
Attali, J. (1985) Noise. The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1993) translated by Tom Conley, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Puglisi, L.P. (1999) Hyper Architecture. Spaces in the Electronic Age, Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser.
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The Emergent Objects Design and Performance Research Cluster brings together researchers and practitioners from robotics, performance, new media, digital arts and urban
regeneration to investigate the role that performance knowledge could play in relation to understanding design, the practice of designing and its outcomes.
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