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[00:10]
Angela Viora (2:25)
“Phenomenology of big hair caught up in the wind at night”
Al Evangelista (4:42)
“How to dance with Filipinx ancestors?”
Sonia York-Pryce (4:48)
“Sôma”
Claire Vionnet and André Dramé (5:39)
“Dereskina”
W. Donnie Scally (6:00)
“Reconfiguring sensory experience: The sounds of 100 rounds of karate shadowboxing”
Alen Agaronov (7:00)
“Meeting the definition of human subjects research: A case study”
[00:20]
Melbourne, October 2020.
Stage-4 lockdown.
Permission to go out for 1 hour within 5 km.
Curfew between 9pm–5am.
8–9pm: the city is deserted
fresh air hits my body
I still have a body
tactile
the wind reminds me to breathe
I am my nostrils, my throat and my lungs
there is a tactile life outside the online world
which I need to remember of
a body outside “my head” and my laptop
atmospheres temperatures sounds climatic agents
colours trees textures surfaces volumes
I AM ALIVE
SONO VIVA
I stand tall and still for more air
my hair moves, I am alive
I breathe deeply, I am alive
the wind blows on me
reappropriation
corporeality
my fleshy body
resists alienation
I am an alive
moving
touchable
vulnerable
smelly
pulsating
body
I BREATHE
© Angela Viora 2021
editing Sabrina Talarico
[02:50]
This video essay approaches three main questions: What non-linear ways of thinking about history can be embodied? How does historical documentation and analysis alongside a moving body offer multiple ways of knowing? How to dance with pamilya, Pilipina/o/x, and Pilipina/o/x-American history? This unedited video was originally a rehearsal for
Step 1
play
Step 2
Step 3a
Humbly adapt Yen Le Espiritu’s
Step 3b
“[I]nvisible things are not necessarily not there. How do we write about absences? How do we compel others to look for the things that are seemingly not there? How do we imagine beyond the limits of what is already stated to be understandable?” (
Step 3c
[I]nvisible things are not necessarily not there. How do we [dance] about absences? How do we compel others to move for the things that are seemingly not there? How do we [choreograph] beyond the limits of what is already stated to be understandable? (
Step 4
Remind yourself that you were introduced to Espiritu’s work by Julian Saporiti, the person singing the song you are currently dancing to.
“‘
Step 5
After reaching for ancestors, strength, care, hope, and many unnameable things, bring all of that in towards you.
“But the Philippines and its diaspora can never forget the legacy of U.S. imperialism, as its effects on the Philippines’s territory, laws, economy, citizenry, and diaspora are still unfolding […]” (
Last Step
Remind yourself there are multiple ways to dance with your Filipinx ancestors. See Ani Gavino, Jay Carlon, Lucy San Mae Pablo Burns, J. Lorenzo Perillo, and Martin Manalansan.
Espiritu, Yen Le. (
Habito, Cielito F. (
Kosnik, Abigail D. (
Keywords: Filipinx, Filipina, Filipino, Filipinx/a/o-American, diaspora, queer, dance, queer dance, auto-ethnography, Philippines, Anti-colonialism
The author declares that he has no competing interests.
a video essay by Al Evangelista
[Lyrics to “Gimme Chills”:]
Give me rhyme for no reason
Give me the world for a start
Give me all the treason you might carry in your heart
Give me life fantastic
Get me over the hill
Until the day I go, gimme chills
Gimme seas of blue waves
Tangled round my hands
Give me sand and soft shoes
Evenings with the band
Sing me songs so classic, like cherry cola thrills
Lips on glass not plastic
I know you will
Give me trial without jury
Give me Imelda Marcos’ shoes
Give me another century to make it up to you
Hear of the Sangley rebellion?
Twenty thousand killed
16 and 03, gimme chills
Give me Dewey in Manila
Give me the Pearl of the Orient
Give me the USS Olympia, nine ships heaven sent
Skype me Christmas eve from Doha
Toast me New Year’s from Crown Hill
And if we never get back home, gimme chills
Give me Lopez de Legazpi
From Jalisco to Cebu
Make me your religion
I’ll watch over you
Dream of Spanish autumns
From New Granada to old Castile
Over all them miles, gimme chills
Give me rhyme for no reason
Give me your balikbayan box,
Give me coca-cola, Chuck Taylors, and an Apple watch
Give me your Asian manhood
Give me Duterte’s sober will
Black flags in Marawi, gimme chills
[07:36]
sôma
Archive footage produced in 2017 as
Experimental research to film
Myself
Unaided.
This solo work was designed as an
investigation
To highlight
CORPOREAL DIFFERENCE
using my body as object
and ageing as the subject
The camera lens tried to focus
on my form.
This shifting focus,
provided a metaphor
for the lack of status
that ageing
brings
of visibility/invisibility
within society
and the field of dance.
(
“can I have become
a different being
while I still remain myself?”
(
Framing the ageing body.
How is the older female body viewed?
Can boundaries be widened or removed altogether
within classical ballet and contemporary dance to
give a place and value to the older dancer?
“Almost no-one questions how old
people feel only seeing younger
people on stage. What would happen
if we altered that perspective?”
(
“There is a lack of older dancers – we
don’t see older dancers”
Hege Haargenrud (
“What is seen
and
what is thought.
What is thought
and
what is seen.”
(
“The ageing body challenges
The system
Of dance and the
Politics
Of
Aesthetics
In
dance.”
(
It is writing from the void,
and it amounts to a
writing from our own
bodies,
from the moment to
moment of our own
existence.
(
embodiment
There are uncertain expectations of
what we imagine when watching an
older dancer because it is not
common; culturally we veer away from
decline. By being aged, in this case
over 40, they are different, a
(
is it appropriate?
is it inappropriate?
“My body is my dwelling place.
I move within a context.
My movement expresses the
place I am in, and it is
through the body that
I turn it into
experience.”
(
“The dance body is the
emotional body.
The physical body,
the instrument
through which
it is expressed.”
(
must I have a
dance-by-date?
My aim is to change perceptions
by bringing
a new understanding described
by Gullette for “age-on-the-body.”
To draw attention to the
discrimination
that dancers suffer and to enlighten
others unaware
of the impact of ageism in the
dance world.
(
I AM
MARKED
BY CORPOREAL DIFFERENCE
CREDITS
Filmed and performed by Sonia York-Pryce
Music composed by Ölafur Arnalds and reproduced with his kind permission.
Loftið Verður Skyndilega Kalt (The Air Suddenly Goes Cold).
Written and performed by Ólafur Arnalds
Published by Kobalt Music Publishing
Courtesy Of Erased Tapes Records
Filmed on location at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, Scotland. UK. (2017)
REFERENCES
Gullette, Margaret M. “Acting Age on Stage: Age Appropriate Casting, the Default Body and Valuing a Property of Having an Age.”
Morris, Gay. “Bourdieu, the Body, and Graham’s Post War Dance.”
York-Pryce, Sonia. “A body of work.”
[12:30]
A dance production between Claire Vionnet, anthropologist & dancer from Bern and André Dramé, former dancer of Cie Jant-Bi in Dakar
The piece was created in 2020 during partial lockdowns in Switzerland, becoming a journey into the unfamiliar and the unknown of creation
The two dancers met during Claire’s investigation into the question of intimacy in Contemporary Dance
Fieldwork was interrupted by Covid-19
and found another actualization through this collaboration
Dereskina is an attempt to create a harmonious gesture between here and there
between the close and the far
How to avoid epistemic violence of otherness’ representation?
In the research-creation, we explore our respective conceptions of movement, body and performance
through investigating the question of appropriation of gestures
We mixed Sabar – André’s Senegalese tradition –
with Djembe and Contemporary Dance
Dereskina is an invented term composed of “der”
(skin in wolof) and skin
We felt that dancing the gesture of otherness
allows us to enter under the skin
Copying another’s gesture transformed our anchoring, as well
as body axis and posture
By doing this, we experienced another sense of moving
and another way of being in the world
How to perform African dances beyond exotic representation?
Can bodies work through their blackness/whiteness?
What are the colonial residues still present in encounters between the North and the South?
Co-creation offers the possibility to enter in another
gestural, emotional and artistic language
It’s more than the mimesis of a gestural shape
By co-creating, we invented together the sense of movement –
sensorial and semantic
We produced together the meaning of our dance
Moving, breathing and sweating together
created an intimate bodily experience
The appropriation of another’s body language invites us to
feel beyond the skin
to feel with and through the other
Harmony finally came out of friction
besides misunderstanding and opposite opinion
about contemporary dance, dramaturgy and performance
The bigger confrontation was the written facing oral mode of
communication
Since André doesn’t share the written culture, academic
writing is de facto exclusive
making symmetrical collaboration an ideal to be achieved
How can ethnographic accounts also address our counterparts?
We constantly had to learn to inhabit the world from another
posture, changing our expectations
This only became possible through long conversations
and attempt to understand the other from their “skin”
perspective
beyond racial discrimination
Dance is an intercultural laboratory generating intimacy
but also resistance and confrontation
Dereskina was an attempt of harmonious gesture based on
difference
going beyond the asymmetrical relationship between a
scientific subject and an artistic object
bypassing the reductionist exhibition of blackness in a
traditional past
Most important was to show the contemporaneity of ‘African
dance’ as a practice in ongoing transformation
and to claim for the symmetry between western and
non-western cultural practices
André settled in 2016 in Switzerland after ten years
intensive training and touring
Over the years, he improved his anthropologist’s gaze on
western behaviors and attitudes
we always laughed as he was ironically playing out Swiss
modes of communication
Claire also had to learn Swiss culture,
but as a child
When her family moved back to Switzerland after an early
childhood in Cameroon
Recording: Alain Vuilleumier
Music :
TMPLT – Tho Ara Square
Gidge – Fauna Pt II
Djembe
[18:15]
Abstract
Training, competition, and performance in martial arts provide a stage where practitioners’ minds and bodies are continually revised, laying bare the techniques, processes, negotiations, and experiences involved in making and remaking the fighter’s self. Through years of training and competition in Enshin Karate, a bareknuckle, knockdown-rules karate style, the author’s body—including muscle, bone, skin, coordination, and perception—has changed to fit the art and the sport. Sensory shifts are among the most striking of these changes. In the most chaotic and high-pressure moments of training and competition, an experienced fighter may seem to feel sound or hear pain, shifting distracting, demoralizing, or damaging sensory phenomena to another mode better equipped to maintain performance in the moment. Sound has come to take on an important haptic and anesthetic role in the author’s martial arts practice.
This article shares video taken of the final two of 100 shadowboxing rounds completed in a single session and discusses how this video relates to the author’s direct sensory experience. Years of hard training and high-pressure competition can alter even the perceptive schema and sensory hierarchies that otherwise appear fundamental to our experience, and this video article represents an early step in the exploration of the limits of that directed self-modification. The author describes how, over the course of 100 rounds, sound begins to dominate his sensory experience. This article also demonstrates the potential for sound to cut across forms and media of memory, anchoring and uniting seemingly disjunct representations into an intelligible, if still contradictory, whole. The cultivated reconfiguration of the senses through experience with sites of extreme sensation has profound implications for the understanding of sound’s role in embodiment, complicating and potentially extending everyday understandings of the body’s limits and the limits of self-modification. Analysis of the disjunctures and connections between organically housed personal memory, associated with direct sensory experience, and digitally housed media representing the same phenomenon illuminates the role of particular phenomena—in this case sound—that may otherwise be understood as secondary to the visual in connecting these seemingly divergent mnemonics.
Keywords: Sound, Materialism, Sensory Reconfiguration, Martial Arts, Combat Sports
This video article is a contribution to an ongoing, multi-work individual and collaboration investigation of sound as a material technology of embodiment in combat sports, currently being conducted by the author and James Raymond Ace (UCLA). While the author bears full responsibility for the ideas presented, the article should be understood in the context of this ongoing conversation and in the broader context of materialist investigation of embodiment and the senses.
Introduction
In the fall of 2019, I began training for a 100-round fight, a harsh test of endurance and spirit in knockdown-rules karate styles. In this challenge, a single fighter completes 100 full-contact rounds with minimal rest, each against a fresh opponent. The length and specific rules vary. I am using two-minute rounds, with ten-second breaks between each. The video in this article displays the final two rounds of my first attempt at 100 rounds of shadowboxing. Encouraged by this exploratory foray, as of this article’s publication, I continue to train toward my eventual goal of 100-round fight. During the COVID-19 pandemic, my training has been exclusively solo, and I expect my way of sensing the world will shift further, particularly as a reintroduce hard contact in my training. Training and competition has already altered my body, including my senses. Sound in particular now serves situationally important haptic and anesthetic functions. Through a shifting of my perceptive framework to privilege the aural, I can maintain presence and appropriate tactical movement even in moments of profound physical disorientation. In competitions and training, my attention to sound regulates my breathing and defers the pain of exhaustion and repeated impact.
This project is informed by existing work by scholars such as Paul Bowman (
How will I change by training for an undergoing the most punishing trial of my art? At the point of total exhaustion, where the boundaries of my own body no longer seem clear, what remains?
In these final rounds, sound alone holds my sensory world together, and its anesthetic functions seem to have reached their limit for me.
The sounds I make continue to suppress the nausea that came with exhaustion, but they no longer completely cover the feeling of my sore feet or the growing ache in my back.
I am incapable of lifting my limbs high enough or moving them fast enough to throw a punch or a kick with any speed or force without an accompanying vocalization.
Sound alone ties the images recorded in this video and my own sensory experience together. In the video, I watch a clearly dehydrated, exhausted, and dazed man with a face like mine attempt to throw punches and kicks as he shuffles in a slow circle.
My memory is of the dissolution of the body portrayed on the screen into a diffuse, vibrating field, only briefly collapsing into a denser form by strained vocalizations to execute one-to-two-second combinations.
Sound alone unites my memory and the image on the screen, just as sound alone held the entirety of my self together and propelled me through the final minutes of this exercise.
I began strong, pushing myself harder and faster than usual, spurred on by my excitement at coming close to an early, but major milestone in my training.
After around 30 rounds, I had to start making sounds to suppress nausea. I grunted, shouted, and growled along with my techniques to keep it manageable.
Around round 60, the dizziness and nausea subsided. I began feeling light and mobile again.
I started to feel a high frequency vibration along my entire posterior-chain, strongest closer to the ground.
I had experienced this in previous, shorter training sessions building up to this one.
My body vibrates, and if I stop moving for too long, it will feel like shaking from exhaustion, but as long as I use it, it feels more like energy building up and demanding release through movement and further exertion.
The vibration builds as a cumulative pressure that has to be vented.
Over time, the vibrating began to feel higher amplitude, but lower frequency. It eventually became uncomfortable, not painful, but with a similar level of discomfort to pain.
My lower back began to ache somewhere around round 70. By the upper 70s, the vibrating feeling no longer helped me move, it only provided greater discomfort.
Moving no longer made it completely subside and my limbs felt too heavy to throw them with the force, speed, or frequency that I previously had.
The pressure from the vibrating sensation began to build, no longer fully expressible at my maximum rate of exertion.
Around round 80, my mind began to retreat.
I began to lose awareness of my body, experiencing only the now aggressive feeling of oscillation in my posterior chain, the pain in my lower back, and the environmental sounds: traffic, crickets, birds, the occasional subway train, plane, or helicopter, motorized lawn equipment, and the periodic angry chattering of squirrels.
The mechanical sounds somehow seemed to merge with the uncomfortable vibrating sensation, temporarily amplifying it and drowning out all thought except a vague, unfocused anger at being subjected to such intrusions.
The sounds from organic things did not affect me adversely, but they did not lessen my pain, discomfort, and exhaustion, nor did they focus me or bring my mind back. I began to shout more frequently.
I began to make some sound continuously, breathing loudly and growling under my breath just to keep producing sound. As I entered the final ten rounds, I remember ceasing to exist locally except when producing a sound.
I dissipated into a diffuse vibration, with a core of hot pain that only gradually bled into its surrounding oscillating field, merging into the environmental sounds, with no distinct boundary.
When I made a sound, this sonic field collapsed and my sense of a local self reemerged. In these moments, I remained uncomfortable, in pain, vibrating, and tired, but became capable of moving, thinking, and acting according to my training.
Watching this video, I recognize the image in the video as me. I recognize that I did these things, but I have no memory of an experience corresponding to the visual aspect.
The point of commonality is the sound. I remember these sounds — both the ones I make and the ones from my environment — and their recorded depiction is close enough to provide an anchor.
The sound reconciles my experience as I remember it with the image of the denser parts of myself on the screen as I watch.
I recognize the memories in my own mind and the memory embedded in the video as equally true. I did these things, yet the video and the experience seem unrelated. They have only sound in common.
At the point where my body no longer has the resources for sustained intention, or even to properly execute techniques carved and beaten into my muscle, bone and brain through countless repetitions, only sound remains.
Competing Interest Statement:
The author declares that he has no competing interests.
References
_____. 2007. “Producing Pain: Techniques and Technologies in No-Holds-Barred Fighting.”
_____.
_____.
_____.
[24:20]
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Federal guidelines demand that research involving human beings, also known as Human Subjects Research, be reviewed by an ethics committee to ensure it upholds ethical standards. Guidelines broadly define research as any systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. The extent to which a single human subject can achieve generalizability thus determines whether such practices as self-experimentation qualify as Human Subjects Research, and hence, whether they demand ethics oversight. This study uses found footage of video projected over animate and inanimate objects to explore how this bureaucratic debate over generalizability, sample size, research and ethics is embodied by investigators performing self-experimentation. In the video, an investigator is seen struggling to dress their body double for a visual installation while standing in front of a video projector playing video diary entries on a loop. The light cast from the video projector imbues their bodies with life and casts shadows on a wall immediately behind them. Both bodies are further superimposed by text transcript from a phone conversation between the investigator and an IRB (Institutional Review Board) officer.
So… tell me about your project…
Well, I don’t really know how often IRB office deals with this type of research –
Well, give me some details about what it is you are planning and what the process would be.
Sure. Essentially, this will be a study of myself. I will be studying my experience over a period of time. It would involve no one else. Basically, I will be recording a video, like, every day, like a short one. Maybe a minute long? For like a year. I will also code the videos, or data – label them and move around and such – before publishing my findings in, like, a very reputable scientific journal… Um, yeah…
… Okay. So, the first thing that I’m thinking about this is that it probably is not going to meet the definition of Human Subjects Research. In which case you would not be required to submit to IRB. And the reason is – while it may be, um… a systematic investigation – it doesn’t seem like it reaches the threshold of contributing to generalizable knowledge. It’s really more of a case study sort of thing…
What if I want IRB, to lend legitimacy to the science? I can make the case study very systematic. Does that make sense?
…
Well, the IRB has to work with federal regulations, so it would still not fall under Human Subjects. I mean, we can say we reviewed it, and we can say it sort of meets basic ethical standards, but not much more than that. Finding the right journal for publishing is a better way to infer its legitimacy.
[27:22]
Hello! How’s it going?
Hello. Hello.
How are you doing?
Has anyone else been in here today, other than you guys?
Oh wow.
Yeah, I’m sure they’re coming.
What?
I’m sure they’re coming, right?
Yeah. In the afternoon.
…I don’t think so…
[More conversation in the background, inaudible]
…A space heater and a laptop…
… What is the generalizable knowledge to which you’re hoping to contribute? I don’t think it’s just your experience.
Even if I analyze it very systematically?
It seems like you need an N of – well, more than you.
Bigger N, as in, more participants?
Yes, rather than just yourself. Studying your experience – I’m not sure if that transfers to generalizable knowledge. It’s more of a case study, which can get published and I think case studies are important and can definitely contribute to… um… what…. people… know… Yeah.
Can you make an exception to the federal guidelines? Or, what can I do to make it qualify for Human Subject Research?
Ensure generalizability, or universality of a widely applicable knowledge. It must contribute to knowledge. Yes it needs to be systematic, but the sticking point here is the generalizable piece.
How can I make it more generalizable?
I’m just so used to people trying to sneak out of IRB, that – Look, you can submit to IRB but I suspect you will get a determination that is most in line with federal regulations. We have to apply them and that’s just how they define it – Non-Humans Subjects. It’s not at all a judgment on your project.
What if I signed my own consent form.
It wouldn’t make sense. That’s like a rubber stamp, like, “Sure, go ahead.” You have control over your own data. Autonomy is key, as in, “Are you doing this with your own free will?” Now, confidentiality is a risk, yes, but that’s if data breach the research context. Whereas you – you just risk disclosing your data within the context of your own, uh, life… And if you choose not to sign a consent form for your own study, then why do it in the first place?
What if, by the time I read the consent, I decide not to do it? Maybe it sounds like a good idea now, but when the time comes, I won’t want to do it anymore?
Ask yourself, “What universal question am I trying to answer?” With just you, it’s hard to say it’s generalizable and not just a case study. It would certainly be important knowledge to put out there, and publish, don’t get me wrong, but not in a generalizable context.
My suggestion is to have it determined as Not Human Subjects Research. Then, submit to a journal and when they say, “Where is the IRB approval?” you will say “It was reviewed by the IRB. Look, here is the determination.”
They get a determination from us. But they don’t necessarily care what the determination says as much as you have a determination at all. You know?