The elective Expanded Acting has opened up ways for me to look at performance making as not contained only to professional performers or human beings but as one that goes beyond human to human relation (performer to spectator). It has given me insights into different strategies that can be applied to navigate through the world of performance that can consist of non-actors, non-humans and objects. The strategy that is the most relevant and of great interest for me is the staging of the real, in particular, staging organic and inorganic objects. This strategy looks into how organic or inorganic objects are made present by dislocating them from the real, to stage them in a performance setting. The staging is not for representational or mimetic purposes but to form an environment that stages the concreteness of the materials present. The strategy offered a space to look into the power of objects (non-humans) as performers through the absence of human performers. The concept of absenting the human performer in performance was explored during the module through group work and through engaging with theoretical text and artistic works. The observations, experience and knowledge has helped me widen the horizon of my research and practice that explores the agency, co-presence and intra-action between objects and I. In this reflection, I hope to elucidate the ways in which this strategy has widened my research and opened up a new performance approach to further my investigation into intra-action between objects and humans.

 

My current research and artistic practice has been centred on my relation with objects and the ways in which the object and I affect one another and co-constitute a reality in a performance setting. The main theoretical and practical spine of my research and practice has been supported by the Baradian concept of intra-action. According to American theorist Karen Barad, intra-action—as opposed to inter-action—is when two or more entities are in relation with one another, not as separate independent entities but as ‘entangled entities’. These entangled entities create phenomena and co-constitute a reality. Agency emerges from the entangled nature of the relation and not as an inherent attribute that the two entities impose on one another. But the view of objects has been largely anthropocentric and dominated by an understanding of agency that is solely from a human perspective. Thus, my interests lie in discovering or making apparent the agency and co-presence of objects and how they are active participants in the relationship with me in performance settings, as opposed to objects serving only as props in a performance. Through this intra-action, new ways of becoming are constituted. This elective elaborates the move towards looking at performance beyond humans and has brought attention to agency, presence of objects and intra-action and has played an important role in understanding performances that explore the non-human or object. Post humanist philosophies of agential realism by Karen Barad and Actor-Network Theory by French philosopher Bruno Latour have played a significant role in locating the trajectory of contemporary performance towards the more than human. And has particularly helped me situate my work and stretch its boundaries especially through discourses on how their theories can be applied in performances with objects and without human performers.

 

So far, my research and practice has been limited to objects and their intra-action with me. My physical presence in the performance has been one of the two core elements in order to investigate and experience intra-action in durational and non-participatory performance settings. Through this module, I have been encouraged to look at absenting the human performer from performances. In this context, I began to think about how I can still explore intra-action and objects as agents and co-present. As a result, I was led to the potential of a second approach to my practice and research. The approach I speculate is the staging of the real in a one-on-one performance setting where I, the artist/human, is absent and the spectator is encouraged to intra-act with the object. Through my absence, the object becomes the prime—in Latour’s terms—an actor or actant. Latour’s book Reassembling the Social (2005), introduces the concept of Actor-Network Theory or ANT which helps me understand how this approach may support my research into the agency of objects. According to him, the social and material realm are heterogeneous assemblages that act with one another in a network—as opposed to dichotomies—that last temporarily, and this collective constitutes of matter and the social, participating in the assemblage as active agents that do something. I relate this to my practice by seeing the performance setting as an ephemeral assemblage of material (objects) and social (human) through intra-action, where the object and I are acting or ‘doing’ and thus affect each other by making a difference on one another’s form, colour, shape and give rise to mental , emotional and physical affects. According to Latour, “anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor—or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant” (Latour, 2005, 71). With the presence of my physicality as the human performer, there may be a tendency for the agency of the human actor to be more visible than the agency of the object because of the anthropocentric understanding of action or agency as “intentional” or “meaningful”. This limits the perception of agency and makes it difficult to see the action and agency of objects.

 

 Latour offers two questions to help determine what makes something an agent, he quotes, “Does it make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this difference?” (Latour, 2005, 71). These questions help me establish the position of objects as actors in the intra-action that would take place in my one-on-one performance setting. The ‘trial’ would be the duration of the performance where the difference is detected not only in the change in the objects position and physicality but also the change in the participant’s mental, physical and emotional state that might take place. Through the intra-action that would comprise of my physical absence as a performer, the gaze and attention of the spectator is allowed to be completely consumed by the objects presence. The object will be made more visible by making its presence seen, felt and heard as opposed to retreating into the background due to its more silent presence compared to human presence. Thus, foregrounding my presence if I was present. Along with its presence, the difference it will make on other actors (participants) will be accounted for, through observing “what objects may be doing when they break other actors down” (Latour, 2005, 81), and thus trace the phenomenon of difference, affect and transformation. The foregrounding of the presence and agency of the object in my practice is important to me because it shows that the objects presence is not merely an action of a human. Quoting Latour, “artificial situations have to be devised to reveal their (objects) actions and performations” (Latour, 2005, 79). Thus, through performance a fictional space can be devised and the entanglement of the material and social can be brought to surface by making the object “talk” (Latour, 2005, 79)—so that the homogeneous notion of the ‘social’ is challenged and the heterogeneous ‘collective’ entanglement is made visible.

 

For me, the notions of ‘social’ and ‘network’ that Latour mentions resonates with the notion of representationalism and entanglement, respectively, in Baradian theory. She strongly challenges representationalism through her concept of agential realism. Through this theory she foregrounds the ontology of materials and urges us to think of agency in non-anthropocentric terms. In Posthumanist Performativity, Barad quotes,

“Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity […] Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. Agency cannot be designated as an attribute of “subjects” or “objects” (as they do not pre-exist as such). Agency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is “doing”/ “being” in its intra-activity (Barad, 2003, 826-827).

This reading led me to think that if agency is a “doing” and not “being” then agency is performative as it ‘does’ something and thus through an intra-active performance with objects their ‘doing’ is traced through their participation in the environment of the performance in the network between the objects and the spectator-participant and the affective changes that occur through their intra-action. Through using the strategy of staging the real where I bring inorganic or organic objects from reality into a performance context and allow the objects to take space as the primary performers by absenting the human performer I can experiment with the link between being and doing and thus transferring the notion of co-presence—that which has been considered to be between human performers and the spectator—as a phenomenon that occurs between objects and spectators-participants. This expands the network of the ‘social’ and ‘material’ or human and non-human through performance.

 

Staging the real through intra-action as an approach in my practice is not for the purpose of mimesis or representation. The link between social and material undergoes the brunt of representationalism, as the ‘social’ and ‘material’ are considered as dichotomies and hierarchies. The social or culture being favoured over material and thus considering language as that which represents the knowledge of the world. As human beings, language plays an important role in making sense or meaning of the world. Language creates a system of representation and due to this words and objects are made to be inseparable. Objects are put into the bracket of ‘representation’ because their ontology is not considered real. Through Barad’s performativity of matter and agential realism she investigates into the ontology and agency of matter to reverse the focus of culture and representation over matter. Through applying Baradian agential realism as an alternative to representationalism, intra-action in performance can act as a process of knowledge production. Through this alternative, as Barad would say, matter comes to matter by objects and their intra-action and network with spectator-participants offering ways of ‘knowing in being’ (Barad, 2003, 829) through the entangled agencies of objects and humans. The notion of knowing in being is offered by Barad’s concept of onto-epistem-ology, where knowing and being are not considered as separate, as knowing is derived by being in the world and not outside of it, thus knowing can be achieved in performance by being in network and intra-action with objects and not by considering the human separate from the material. Through linking the doing and being not only is agency and presence being accounted for but also new ways of perceiving and understanding the world are unearthed. Staging the real through intra-action allows for this unearthing through tracing and making visible the ontology of materials and the active role it plays in the ‘collective’—social and material.

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The ‘collective’ that comprises of the confluence of language (representation/social) and objects (material) played a key role in the group work that Korina, Lucia and I, conceived and presented during the module. The performance was a participatory performance with found objects (organic and inorganic) and personal objects. We placed these objects in space, some next to each other whereas some on their own. We demarcated the space with a rope. The audience was invited to engage with these objects and were guided by an audio score. The audio score was themed around a ritual of burial but was open to any kind of interpretation. The performance as a whole consisted of a score that: mentally prepared the audience before they could enter the space and which led them into and out of the space after the duration of the performance. Korina, Lucia and I were present only to facilitate this entry/exit score but during the performance, where the participants engaged with the objects, we chose to keep ourselves absent from the action. We wanted to explore the idea of how can we engage with found objects and create an environment. We wanted to adapt a score for the burial of the dead to objects. We discussed about how objects of the dead person plays an important part either in their burial or in the rituals of burial. In some cultures the objects of the person who has died are also considered dead because nobody should keep the objects that belonged to the person who died. This led us to exploring how a burial score designed for a human body, can be translated for objects. We considered the ‘body’ as the physical bodies of the objects. Every ritual requires people to conduct them. To activate the score, we decided that the work will be participatory in nature. In this context the participatory nature of the performance allowed for this ritual to take form through the active engagement of the participants. The open nature of interpretation allowed the participants to physically and mentally engage in whichever way seemed right to them, with no pre conceived notion of what is the correct mode of engagement or correct choice of action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personally this experiment-performance, gave me an opportunity to observe the intra-actions that occurred between the participants, the objects in space and language (audio score). In reflection, the objects placed in space exuded a certain kind of energy and presence that held its own place without the need for a human performer to physically activate its presence. The theme of death and the audio score of the burial had a strong sense of culture and language. It was interesting for me to see how the participants engaged with the social/cultural/linguistic input and the pure ontology of the objects (matter) in space. Each participant responded differently to the score and to the objects, some chose to sit in one place and only observe, some chose to engage with objects by creating relationships between objects by changing their proximity or position. It was also interesting for me to see the attention with which the objects were being handled, their ontologies were heightened through the careful engagement. I also noticed how language—that which usually dominates the material—did not have as much power over the objects because the score was intentionally made to be amorphous—through the overlapping of voices, through the choice of words that did not direct towards a particular action but was suggestive in nature. Thus, each object played or acted as an individual presence that was in a network and in intra-action with the participants. The object made a difference on the participants as much as the participants made a difference to the objects. Some participants chose to sleep by lying down on one of the objects, some were very active by creating actions with objects, some were sitting and observing, some were restless and trying to find what to do. And as for the objects, by the end of the performance, they were displaced from their original position and they were in relation with other objects. These observations helped me understand the ways in which representation and meaning can be blurred by combining matter and culture in this way. In its core, the group performance did not only facilitate in furthering my understanding of how intra-action between objects and humans can be explored without a human performer but also how matter and culture come into intra-action (in this case).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To conclude my reflections and assimilate them, I have learned that the absence of human performers resonates with my research and practice in two ways. Firstly, it replaces the passive role imposed on objects and brings them to light as active entities or non-human performers that are acting or doing something. Secondly, through this role change, it highlights the presence and agency that objects have. My research and practice does not isolate the human from the non-human, in fact it is interested in experiencing the relationality and intra-action that takes place between the body of a human (participant/spectator) and the object (non-human performer). But with the support of the theories of Barad and Latour and the experiential learning of the group work, I learn that performance with the absence of human performers adds a new layer to my research by considering how I may continue to explore intra-action, agency and co-presence through a participatory performance containing non-human entities, specifically, objects. In a performance of this nature, the central focus is attributed to the objects, and the absence of a human performer further elevates it. The nature of engagement of the participants with the objects reflect the intra-action that takes place between the participant and the object/non-human performer, revealing ways in which they affect one another and the agency that is operating within the process.