The Space Between: Performance, the Body and Scholarship
The thesis is concerned with the interrelationships between the body, making sense of experience through performance, and the conceptual and scholarly understanding that people construct around experience. The lens through which these interrelationships are explored is phenomenology, both in terms of phenomenological theory per se and, more specifically, with theories related to performance and pedagogical process. The research question explores the relationship between the body, space/place and digital media through four cycles of participatory action research in which practice and theory are interrelated. The experience of (the body) in space and place is captured and re-created with digital media in the live performance space drawing attention to spatial and temporal anomalies that both de-stabilise and re-affirm what is it to be ‘now’ and ‘here.’ Ideas shift from the determined to the disintegrated, and the body moves between a critical engagement with experience and a pre-reflective and heightened consciousness of ‘being’ in performance – as maker, performer and viewer, and as learner, teacher and researcher. Answers to questions are replaced by gaps and spaces between – in which the known, the not known, and the imagined unfold and become exposed. Experiments shift from the body immersed in and subsumed by technology to the body, live (not mediatised) in performance, and again to the live as mediatised, exposing the phenomena that we encounter. Performance emerges as the body touched, sensed and multi-faceted in an in-between space of inter-relationships, inter-subjectivities and inter-medialities. The body is both fullness and void, coexistent and isolated – in suspense as it hovers and ‘is’ of all worlds. Investigations are devised and delivered, with students as co-researchers, through a teaching and learning model that guides and exposes, disrupts and transforms – creating a pedagogy of instability and discovery in order to reveal new and innovative performance.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations