Abstract
Inside/Insight Me was initially presented as a ten-minute performative provocation in response to Anna Furse's production Glass Body: reflecting on becoming transparent at the conference Birth: The Cultural Politics of Reproduction, Lancaster University, March 2007. The work aimed to creatively critique Glass Body and Furse's theatre workshop The flesh is no longer the deepest thing – writing the body from cellular to cyborg, by viscerally and visually highlighting what I perceived as lacking in the production: deliberate, intentionally unruly, fractious women's bodies in performance.
As with every written paper that emerges from practice, Inside/Insight Me has inevitably changed in the course of, to paraphrase Geraldine Harris, translating it from one set of codes into another (1999: 4). Thus, in order to echo the performative aspect of the initial provocation – and here provocation has to be understood simply as an act to incite critical thought – this paper aims to re-create a fruitful interplay between my artistic and my scholarly voice, both of which are intrinsically linked in all my work as performance practitioner, academic and pedagogue. Starting with a brief introduction of Furse's artistic work, I present Inside/Insight Me as a dialogue between Glass Body and my performative responses to it.
Anna Furse
Anna Furse is an award-winning writer, and director of over fifty productions spanning from dance and theatre, which have toured and been produced internationally in Europe, Asia and the USA. Her Artistic Directorships include the pioneering visual physical theatre company Bloodgroup in the 1980s and the new writing company Paines Plough in the 1990s and she is a founder member of Chisenhale Dance Space. (Furse, 2006a)
Most of Furse's performance work has so far been concerned with notions of ‘writing the body’, particularly ‘themes and issues pertaining to the woman's body (e.g. hysteria, eating disorders, infertility and prostitution)’ (Furse, 2008). For the last ten years, Furse's artistic and academic research has focused on reproduction and especially the stigma of non-reproductive bodies, their representation in medical science and their absence in artistic work. Triggered by her own experience of sub-fertility and consequent IVF treatment, Furse produced ‘a triptych of very different projects on (non-) reproduction and correlative issues since 2000’ (Furse, 2006b: 159). In 2003 she established the production company Athletes of the Heart with which she devised, among other work, Yerma's Eggs (2003) and Glass Body: reflecting on becoming transparent (2006), which premiered as a twenty-minute performance installation at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. These two productions engage with the visualisation of women's (non)reproductive bodies and in particular, the representation of their usually invisible insides. The work reflects Furse's fascination with ever increasing possibilities of imaging technologies which can picture that which lies beneath the skin and flesh.
Furse held a three-day workshop as part of the research project Women's Writing for Performance. On the final day of the workshop, I produced a short solo piece entitled ‘Inside Me’. I understand this work as an act of revolt/resistance that deliberately ‘messed’ with my own somatic borders in order to emphasise these as absent within Furse's representations of women's unruly, fractious bodies. A revised version of this piece became the performative provocation Inside/Insight Me that I will explore here.
Inside/Insight Me – an intertextual dialogue
Material:
a black cardigan with images of my ovaries and womb, blown up to A4size, sewn onto the front, back and arms
a blender
a carton of tomato juice
a petrie dish with pen, paper and cut raw liver in it
a glass
five OHP transparency sheets
seven to nine rice paper sheets
It all started with
inside me
(Slip into cardigan back to front; ask a member of the audience to button me up.)
In the middle of an otherwise open space between staircases and lifts, I find a small enclosed room, reminiscent of an oversized incubator. The space is supposed to host a maximum of twenty audience members at a time – though that number seems optimistic. On entering it, I am confronted with the traditional divide between audience and performance space. I take my position on the audience's side. In front of me are two large touch-screens on either side of a hospital bed. Both are echoed with projection screens at the backdrop wall. A woman in a white nightdress lies on the hospital bed. She holds a bowl in her hands, resting upon her stomach. Slowly she raises one of her hands filled with a white, sand-like substance – I assume it is salt. She lets it rinse through her fingers back into the bowl. She continues this movement a few times. On the projection screens I see images of water, birds, and, later on, an embryo and the fertilisation of an egg. The sound is pleasing to the ear, making me feel relaxed and comfortable. I sit down on the floor and let the imagery, sound, voice-over and dance-like movements of the performer ‘wash’ over me. Everything seems in perfect harmony with each other. The colours are intriguing and pleasing to the eye. The movements are elegant, deliberate, precise. The voice-over is soft and soothing. The sound effects are enhancing an already pleasing and comforting atmosphere. I remember images of children in the playground on the projection screen. The camera focuses on a girl's red shoes. I then see similar objects in the same colour laid out on the bed in front of me. Red woollen tights, a red cardigan or coat and a pair of red shoes. They are all the size of a baby or a toddler. I also remember the performer pulling a pearl necklace out of her mouth very slowly, pearl by pearl. She sometimes disappears into the dark shadows between the projection screens, while at other times she places her body in a position so that it becomes the screen. I remember the performer making a triangular shape with her hands just below her belly button, on her abdomen. There are questions from the voice-over: ‘If I asked you would you let me look inside you? Are you in your body? Where is your heart? Your lungs?’ I remember text fragments, such as: ‘medical heaven’, ‘magnificent wonder’, ‘miracles of life’, ‘pure and true deepest insides’, ‘I can see the future and she is marvellous’. During the twenty-minute performance I hold a petrie dish with a little piece of paper and an even tinier pencil in it in my hand. I know, I am supposed to write something onto it after the performance, give some kind of feedback. I also know that I might be expected to get up after the performer has left the space. Expected to engage with the touch-screen. I do not get up, but I watch. The touch-screens reveal a drawing of a yet unsexed body. At the left-hand side near the bottom of the screen are the various sexual organs. I can place these playfully anywhere in the frame of the body. Anna Furse remains in her seat, watching those that have engaged with the touch-screens. Now this I find interesting and slightly unsettling. I have to rush off to catch my train back to Lancaster. What stays with me from this performance installation is a feeling of relaxation, the image of a beautiful body in a space of beautiful images with a soothing voice-over and relaxing soundtrack, and a distinct feeling of lack. (Put text, on rice papers, into blender; pour tomato juice over it.)
The autobiographically charged production Glass Body: reflecting on becoming transparent delivers a range of images that engage with technologically mediated and enhanced visualisation of a body's insides, mainly a woman's body's insides. Indeed, in the production there is a constant shift between images of outsides (macrocosms of sociality and nature) and images of insides (microcosms of corporealities), engaging me in a journey from one to the other. Yet, while it might ‘explore some of the emotional impact of seeing inside your reproductive body in some detail throughout pregnancy’ for the artists involved, it fails to do so for me (Cinti and Furse, 2006: 13). One of my main criticisms lies within Furse's assuming generalisation of women's experiences, desires and perceptions both within the performance as well as its reception – most notably in her use of terms like ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘us’, ‘our’ – and consequent lack of attention to social, cultural, psychic and economic specificities.
This leads, in my opinion, to a lack of ambiguity and critique of, what Furse elsewhere describes as, a ‘traumatic’ period of ‘highly invasive treatment’ in ‘a high-tech male dominated medical environment’ in the performance (Furse, 2003: 1–2). Glass Body presents me with an IVF success story. The imagery – often juxtaposed in a way where, for example, the microcosm of an egg is echoed in the macrocosm of a flock of birds – is placed alongside a text, which seems reminiscent of a process of sanctification and/or glorification of the body's ‘divine architecture’, arguably, subscribing to a tendency toward a renewed bond between religion, medical science and art – at least with regard to generative aspects of women's bodies (Kemp and Wallace, 2000: 11).
Where is Anna Furse's critical voice? Has she underestimated the ease with which I look at images that represent the microscopic insides of bodies and perceive these images not necessarily as mediated, fragmented representations, but rather as ‘realities’? How can she take that position of authority? Telling me where to look? What to look at? Telling me what I will see? Making the decision on what I will not see? Where are the ‘failures’? Where are the voices of those that were not ‘blessed’ with Furse's success story of IVF? Where are the images and voices of those who are excluded from the possibilities of IVF in the first place? (Put questions in blender; pour tomato juice.)
Furse's directorial decisions on how to present bodies in performance (live and on screen) bear similarities to medical science's representation and control of women's bodies, limited either to their physically pleasing appearance and/or their reproductive system – both leading to fragmentations of women's bodies into sections that need (more or less) correction, in order to conform to their (unspoken) normalcy of valuable femininity. As commodity, women lose considerable status if not conforming to their implicitly assimilated market value of beauty and/or reproduction. Indeed, extending Julia Kristeva's theory on abjection here, medical science's control of women's bodies is not merely aiming to obliterate a psychic threat to the social order, but is furthermore intrinsically linked to the economics of that society.
Thus, for example, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie's performance in Glass Body reminded me of what Furse elsewhere portrays as ‘the unbearable silences in the waiting rooms, the agonised muteness of [her] fellow sufferers’ (Furse, 2003: 2). Clothed in a white nightdress, Rotie remains silent throughout the performance, while executing her tasks with somatic precision due to a visibly well-trained physique. Reading Glass Body in the light of Furse's description of Rotie, as ‘contemporary “praelector” (reader-demonstrator) of the kind used in 17th century Dutch anatomy lessons,’ the ‘lesson’ I attend is one of how to successfully amend a sub-fertile into a reproductive body (Furse, 2006a). With reference to Kristeva, it could be argued that the formerly religiously regulated sin from within (maternity) via marriage has developed into the medically regulated cells/DNA within via measurements of normality, or rather the necessity of normalisation. The successful modification of an otherwise unruly (valueless) body, once again allows for its positioning as reproducer, confirming its, and arguably all women's bodies’, market value as definable (marked and to be marketed) femininity. A woman that has failed to reproduce, whether out of ‘choice’ or not, is a social, cultural and economic threat.
Why does the performer, in her white nightdress, remain silent throughout the performance? How does she relate to the voice-over? What is the significance of the voice-over? Why remain the images I see – live and on screen – aesthetically intriguing, clean, engaging and beautiful? In the constant shift between images of the outside and images of the inside, where are the borders that lead from one to the other and back? Why are these thresholds absent both visually as well as literally? Where are the images of the fertilised eggs transferred back into the body? Why are there no images of birth? (Put questions in blender; pour tomato juice.)
I perceive the representational absence of the ‘gaudy bits’ of IVF, pregnancy and/or birth, as a refusal to engage with the ‘ugly’ aspects of women's insides, thereby denying deliberate acts of resistance. In Furse's Glass Body, a formerly unruly, fractious body has re-entered the realm of commodification, has been transformed into a reactionary abject body. There is no irregular, changing body that actively and visibly (r)ejects, vomits, expunges, protrudes, extends, secretes; no/body that draws attention to its borders. Indeed, the performance installation Glass Body remains within the framework of scientific art that keeps abjection and unruliness at bay by controlling its representation via renaming, recoding – mainly visually – women's bodies’ insides. Yet, these margins – skin and orifices – are arguably manifestations of a rupture between invisible insides and their mediated representations; a gap that holds the potential of disrupting an otherwise unchallenged system of knowledge.
Feminists who criticise technologies for effectively replacing the maternal body with a patriarchal apparatus must nevertheless contend with the enhanced autonomy that those technologies have provided for women. Feminists who embrace such technologies for the options they have produced nevertheless must come to terms with the uses to which those technologies can be put, ones that may well involve calculating the perfectibility of the human, sex selection, and racial selection (Butler, 2004: 11). (Put quote in blender; pour tomato juice. Mix papers with the tomato juice; pour substance into glass. Hold glass, while saying: ‘What I would have liked to give to Anna Furse as feedback is this’. Hand petrie dish containing paper, pen and cut pieces of raw liver to audience, while drinking/chewing some of the rice-paper-tomato-juice mix.)
Footnotes
Author Biography
Dr Kerstin Bueschges, Senior Lecturer in Drama & Performing Arts at Anglia Ruskin University, is an active practitioner, academic, and pedagogue with a research interest in representations of femininity and the affect of temporality on autobiographical materiality in live/performance art. She is founder member of Factory Floor, a new network of solo women performers and writers, a member of the international, interdisciplinary network MaMSIE, and co-organiser of the research unit Representation, Identity, Body (RIB) at Anglia Ruskin University.