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Look Right Through: intention and accident in performer/audience training

This article was the first attempt to begin to explicitly foreground the place of bodies within our conjoined research / practice. Growing out of a gradual shift towards the training principle that might have value in a conceptual performance art practice (which begun with our contribution to the Choreodrome Lecture Series at The Place, August 2009), this article considers the interplay between bodies – the bodies of performers and the bodies of their audiences. Drawing upon the authors’ training in acupuncture and Ashtanga yoga, the article explores the role that the physical understanding of a performance action might have upon engaging with work. Using the fiction of the ‘ur-body’, an original (and impossible) physicality from which questions about training in relation to the role of witness might be developed, this article asks an attendant question about the intersubjective terrain that lies between bodies. It was this construct of the ‘ur-body’ that allowed us to move towards a consideration of those shared moments of discovery that have been housed in different physical sites throughout our collaborative practice. Further, the article was an attempt to address how those ‘accidental’ trainings might have likewise impacted upon our understanding of the trainings undertaken by audiences. By questioning an embodied receiving and reading of the work of body-based performance artists, the article is intended as a space to open up a conversation about the role training might play for an audience.