Anatomy Live the Production of This Book Was Made Possible by the Support of Het Oranjehotel and the Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (Nwo)
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Anatomy Live The production of this book was made possible by the support of Het Oranjehotel and the Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (nwo) Final editing: Fleur Bokhoven and Laura Karreman Cover: Sacha van den Haak and Floris Schrama Lay-out: V3-Services, Baarn ISBN 978 90 5356 516 2 NUR 670 © Maaike Bleeker / Amsterdam University Press, 2008 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre Edited by Maaike Bleeker Contents Acknowledgements 7 Prologue - Men with Glass Bodies 9 Francis Barker Introduction 11 Maaike Bleeker Performance Documentation 1 23 Holoman; Digital Cadaver (Mike Tyler) Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection 29 José van Dijck ‘Who Were You?’: The Visible and the Visceral 49 Ian Maxwell Performance Documentation 2 67 Excavations: Fresh but Rotten (Marijs Boulogne) The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Moxham 75 Karen Ingham ‘Be not faithless but believing’: Illusion and Doubt in the Anatomy Th eatre 93 Gianna Bouchard Performance Documentation 3 111 De Anatomische Les (Glen Tetley) Of Dissection and Technologies of Culture in Actor Training Programs – an Example from 1960s West Germany 113 Anja Klöck Ocular Anatomy, Chiasm, and Theatre Architecture as a Material Phenomenology in Early Modern Europe 129 Pannill Camp Performance Documentation 4 147 Camillo – Memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories – A Tear Donnor Session (Emil Hrvatin) Martin, Massumi, and The Matrix 151 Maaike Bleeker Performance Documentation 5 165 sensing presence no 1: performing a hyperlink system (Copraij, Jenniches, Kunzmann) ‘Where Are You Now?’: Locating the Body in Contemporary Performance 169 Susan Leigh Foster Performance Documentation 6 181 Under My Skin (Ivana Müller) Anatomies of Live Art 187 Sally Jane Norman Performance Documentation 7 205 Crash (Eric Joris/CREW) Restaging the Monstrous 211 Bojana Kunst Delirium of the Flesh: ‘All the Dead Voices’ in the Space of the Now 223 Michal Kobialka Performance Documentation 8 245 Körper (Sasha Waltz) Operating Theatres: Body-bits and a Post-apartheid Aesthetics 251 Rachel Fensham Index 263 Acknowledgements The beginning of my fascination with the anatomical theatre dates back almost ten years when I attended Mike Tyler ’s performance Holoman; Digital Cadaver and a lecture by José van Dijck . I am very happy that both are represented in this book. Four years later, the School for New Dance Development (SNDO, Amsterdam) invited me to teach a theory class about the body. This was the first time I used the title The Anatomical Theatre Revisited to frame my explora- tions into the relationship between the history of anatomy and current issues in theory, philosophy and the performing arts. I would like to thank the SNDO for giving me this opportunity, and my students for their challenging questions and remarks. In 2005, I continued this course at the University of Amsterdam as part of the MA program in Theatre Studies as well as in a PhD seminar. In 2006, they were followed by the international conference The Anatomical Theatre Revisited (www.anatomicaltheatrerevisited.com), a joint project by the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Waag Society, the School for New Dance Development, the MA program Dance Unlimited and Marijke Hoogenboom’s research group Art Practice and Development, the last three all part of the Amsterdam School of the Arts. This book is the outcome of that conference. It contains the plenary lectures presented at The Anatomical Theatre Revisited as well as a selection of the other papers, and one text (by Gianna Bouchard ) that was not presented at the conference but fortunately could be included in this volume. Added to this is a series of performance documentations informing the reader about perfor- mative explorations of the theatre of anatomy. The Anatomical Theatre Revisited conference and this book were supported by the Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (NWO). Both are part of my NWO-funded Ven i research project (provisionally) titled See Me, Feel Me, Think Me: The Body of Semiotics. José van Dijck ’s ‘Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection’ is part of her book The Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Washington, Wash- ington University Press, 2005) and is reprinted with kind permission of Wash- 8 ANATOMY LIVE ington University Press. I would also like to thank the University of Michigan Press for permission to reprint Francis Barker ’s ‘Men with Glass Bodies’ (from his The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995), Toer van Schayk for his permission to reproduce two of his drawings for René Vincent ’s book Klassieke Ballettechniek. De techniek en de terminologie van het akademische ballet (Zutphen, Uitgeverij De Walburg Pers, 1982), Vivienne van Leeuwen for granting us the right to include two of Ger van Leeuwen’s photographs, and all the other artists and photographers whose work features on the pages of this book. I would like to thank the editorial board of the Amsterdam University Press for their trust in this project and Jeroen Sondervan and Christine Waslander for all their help and support. Last but not least, I want to thank two people who have been indispensable to both the conference and this book: Fleur Bokhoven and Laura Karreman . Their double signature Fleur & Laura was the trademark of the conference. Their care and attention are behind every single word of this book. Without them I would never have been able to complete this manuscript in time, and it would definitely not have been such a pleasure. Therefore, I dedicate this book to them. Prologue Men with Glass Bodies Francis Barker Dr Nicolaes Tulp, surgeon and representative of the civil authority, anatomist and frequent office holder in the bourgeois government of Amsterdam. But also a general practitioner who, like Freud , left behind his casehistories, the Observationes, where the body is made text, and in which one of the patients is constrained to spend a winter in bed suffering from the insight that his bones were made of wax and would buckle if he stood up. The sick man was a painter to whom Tulp refers in a way that suggests it was Rembrandt, the most prolific producer of self-portraits ever, who was obsessed by the story of Samson and Delilah – that narrative of symbolic castration of treachery of women – and whose first important canvas depicted Tulp’s magisterial dis- section of the executed criminal Aris Kindt . At which event Descartes was probably present; anatomist himself, philosopher and legislator for modern subjectivity, who, mediating by the stove, considering strangely whether his body exists, uses the wax at hand to prove that corporeal objects have no con- sistency or essentiality but extension in space. And Caspar Barlaeus was almost certainly there at the dissection too, a leading intellectual and noted neurotic, who wrote poetry in praise of Tulp’s dissection of Kindt, and dared not sit down for fear that his buttocks, which were made of glass, would shatter. While in England, their brothers: Hamlet calling on his flesh to melt; Mar- vell , Member of Parliament, who let aggressivity write in his poem. And Mil- ton and Pepys: each committed in their different ways to inexorable textuality; riven by equivocal desire. A revolutionary poet and censor, who also wrote a Samson, and a secret diarist narrating himself and his world in private. Both eventually blind… But these are anecdotes and in some respects improbable, or at least not sus- ceptible of proof. Surely not worth serious historical attention. And yet is there not something at once risible and haunting about a poet of the bourgeois class who thought that his body was made of glass (for Descartes , of course, strictly a madness); or salutary in an image of the public dissection of a man who had 10 ANATOMY LIVE Rembrandt van Rijn, Th e Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. no respect for the law? Or revealing in men driven blind by writing? When we consider these conditions in the representatives of an historical order, is there not some reflection to be made on the rationality and freedom in the elabora- tion of which the period is said to have made important advances? Th en do these fragments not begin to fi gure the outline of an historical fable, even a structure: at the foundations of our own epoch a conjunction of themes and powers which is still ours to live, and, if enough time remains, undo, today? (From: Francis Barker , The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 103-104.) Introduction Maaike Bleeker In his classic 1947 ethnography of New Caledonia, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in a Melanesian World, Maurice Leenhardt reports on a conversation between himself and an elderly indigenous philosopher regarding the impact of Euro- pean civilization on the cosmocentric world of the Canaques. Leenhardt sug- gested that the Europeans had introduced the notion of ‘spirit’ to indigenous thought. His interlocutor did not agree and remarked that on the contrary, they have ‘always acted in accord with the spirit.’ What the Europeans brought to the Canaques was the notion of body (Csordas in Weiss & Haber , 1999, p. 143). Of course, the Canaques had already been bodies; they existed as bodily beings before and after their ‘discovery’ by Europeans. However, the character of this existence is what was altered by ‘discovery’, and it is that alteration that is at stake in the difference of opinion to which Leenhardt’s text testifies.