5 BODY AND EMBODIMENT

Amanda Card

Bodies are research tools. They can be put to work in concert with other sources to explore the past. Bodies are also archives. They are of the world, (re)created within the same contexts as the objects they use, the places they inhabit, and the times in which they live.

Available technologies often represent the past in drawings, writing, paintings, photography, sculptures, and film by recording the activities of living bodies. Dead bodies can also give up the secrets of the past when archaeologists, historians, and physical anthropologists learn about the health and habits of humans through the examination of exhumed remains. Contemporary bodies can also help reveal history by doing things that have been done before. Reenactors use their bodies in this way. They perform the past by relating their bodies to past activities and engaging with material culture—buildings, weapons, furniture, clothing, books on etiquette, recipes, descriptions of practices, and lists of purchases. They also recreate these objects for research through performance. In these situations, contemporary bodies stand in for formerly living bodies, asking questions of the past from the vantage point of the present. But no body, whether past or present, is a tabula rasa; all bodies are made in cultures. This affects what can be known about the past through the contemporary embodiment of historical practices.

The normative practices of any body are developed within a particular place and time. The body's shape and actions are transfigured by what a culture considers to be natural, proper, and authentic in the world. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have it: we inhabit the world and the world inhabits us. This he calls habitus: “history turned into nature” (1977, p. 78). From this perspective, society dictates what it is possible to be and do.

What can be done is contingent on the status and distinction given to familial relations, gender, age, body type, and sexual orientation (among other things), and these contingencies affect a life, its living, and its reenacting. The value, censure, or ignorance of certain attitudes and attributes are dictated by social, cultural, and economic circumstances, but the way of doing things becomes naturalized within any given circumstance through repetition. Through the accumulation of tastes, expectations, and understandings of the world, bodies are made and dispositions are embodied. Ways of being create, restrict, and enable how the world is knowable. Bodies are accumulations of what the world is, is thought to be, or ought to be, and they are also the very means through which one can have a world at all (Bourdieu, 1997; Dreyfus, 1996). To claim this is to accept the ontological and epistemological acuities of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and those philosophers who use his ideas. For these thinkers, speech, gesture, action, thought, and subjectivity are embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 2002;Young, 1990; Noe, 2004; Noland, 2009; Spatz, 2015; Smith, 2017; Cheng, 2018).

As the aforementioned scholars insist, environments are structured around a set of embodied assumptions. Table-construction, the presence or absence of chairs, and even the designs of toilets, are all predicated on presumptions of what a body is or what it can or should be able to do. A lack of ramps where there are stairs presumes two-legged enablement, whereas ramps into buildings and curb cuts on sidewalks promote the presence of the differently abled in a city. For visual artist and disability activist Sunaura Taylor (Taylor and Butler, 2009), this means that city life is lived differently for all abilities. Access promotes presence and, as Taylor sees it, presence promotes access.

To take another example, film theorist Vivian Sobchack lost one of her legs to an above-the- knee amputation after a cancer diagnosis.

Sobchack can get about very well on her remaining leg or by using a prosthetic limb or crutches. Her skill with crutches may belie the assumptions of the able-bodied, for whom crutches appear cumbersome, but for Sobchack: “If one learns how to use crutches properly they are extraordinarily liberating” (2005, p. 59).

Taylor and Sobchack remind us that humans are skillful copers. They adapt commonalities and differences in body structure to the world as they find it by acquiring skill within a culture or society (Dreyfus, 1996). No matter their abilities, humans learn to deal with the world through engagement, improvisation, and repetition. People adjust and remake what they are given—their body/brain architecture—as they engage with the world. The word embodiment represents how values, dispositions, and preferences from the world (re)make the body through practice and performance.

The problem that presents itself when attempting to embody the past arises because one's habitus is particular to a time, place, and social system. This means that embodying past practices will only ever be partial, but performances that fail to replicate the actions and activities of the past in the present are often the most informative (Johnson, 2014). To do the past is to come arm to sleeve and leg to skirt with embodied difference, i.e., to feel the distance between one's own body and the material objects of the past. Wearing Regency dress, performance theorist and historian Katherine Maree Johnson found the “restrictive clasp of the corset and the encompassing length of the gown heightened my awareness of the garments I wore, and the way I moved” (2015, p. 200). They impressed on her “the way clothing shapes not only the physical appearance of our bodies, but also the ways in which we can/not move” (ibid.). In stumbling over her hem, or sitting uncomfortably in her corset, Johnson added a dimension to her research through experience. It is often in the gap between ways of being and doing—where embodied presumptions of comfort, access, propriety, and practicality produce the shock of the old—that embodied research is most instructive within historical research.

Being with others on a dance floor or on the battlefield, watching dancers or soldiers amass for a charge up a hill or down a hall, invigorates archived remains of the past. Embodied practices and an embodied engagement with objects help enliven the semiotics of the mise-en-scene: enhancing the what, where, and why, with how. But these are not histories per se, they are performances of histories. Bodies do not necessarily produce indubitable facts or evidence in the usual sense of the word. They can vitalize, enhance, confirm, and conflict with the facts from other archives and modes of research. The steel collar or the string of pearls under glass in a museum are given shape, structure, and substance when imagined around someone's neck—be it one's own or another's. Putting on these objects can reveal what others may have experienced of them in the past, in the tightening of the steel or the clink of the pearls. This may be a carni- valesque equivalence or even a disneyfication of facticity—there are no severed limbs and real blood on the reenactment battlefield (in live performance or on film) but there is still something unique in the relationship between contemporary bodies and historical objects or the embodi-

Amanda Card

ment of historical practices. Even as the dancers employed in the BBC documentary Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013) warmed themselves up in their usual way with footwork and stretches from a 21st-century classical/modern dance class, they found their fitness challenged as they produced cotillions (French social dances popular in 18th-century Europe) (Figure 5.1). The dancers were left sweaty and sore. They were surprised by the dances’ complexity, rigor, and vigor. They commented on the way the intricate patterns taxed their memory, and how the raised heels of the skipping steps strained their calf muscles. The realizations which became theirs through doing—not through merely watching others perform the dances or by looking at images and reading descriptions of the dances composed by others—provided each dancer with evidence of how different bodies were called on to perform in the Regency period (Figure 5.2).

As this suggests, approximating the experience of others has pedagogic utility not through its ventriloquizing success but often through surprise and failure.

But (re)enactor beware. The acquisition of skill may stymy the pedagogy of practice. One acquires the dexterity to perform actions over time—those cotillions will no longer surprise with their pace or cause sore muscles, the hem of a dress no longer trips its wearer, and the reenactor acquires the ability to breathe and sit simultaneously in a corset. When this happens, historically specific activities run the risk of becoming contemporary skills, embodied to the point of naturalization. These actions and activities may become incorporated into the world of the performer, the skillful execution blunting the oddities of historical corporealities, and the reenactor runs the risk of no longer being able to notice differences. Performances become a representation, an imitation, a simulacrum (Franko, 2017, pp. 10—14): skilled embodied action

Figure 5.1 Historical dance expert, Stuart Marsden (center back), rehearses with dancers and one of the program’s hosts, Alistair Sooke (center left), for the Regency ball in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013), a documentary produced by Optomen with the BBC. Source: Andrew Hayes- Watkins.

Figure 5.2 Performing a cotillion in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013). Source: Andrew Hayes- Watkins.

without authentic historical context. Therefore, learning a skill but never becoming entirely skilled has its advantages.

Our ways of doing—of walking, talking, eating, sleeping, marching, and dancing—are products of time and place. As Simone de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted work declares, “one is not born but becomes a woman” (1988 [1953], p. 295). If this is true, then engaging with the practices and objects that constructed, produced, and maintained what it meant to be a woman (or a man) can be revelatory of the embodied practices of another time and place.

To claim the body as archive and tool for research is to offer reenactment as a form of performance as research. Here performance is meant in its widest sense, anything on a continuum from framed actions with witnesses, to staged fictions with audiences (Lewis, 2014). Defining performance as research offers practice as a method of inquiry with performance as the evidence of that research (Nelson, 2013). This kind of enquiry favors ontology over epistemology, the “how” over the “that” (May, 2015). It does not claim bodies as infallible witnesses; performing bodies and their audiences are always situated. Bodies embody culture in time; performance (re)enacts time out of place.

5 BODY AND EMBODIMENT

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