Faceless Body in Performance is a practice-led research project in live and digital
performance. There are two series of solo performances, Breath of Air and Black Glove,
which explore choreographic procedures that can direct the audience towards
ambiguous plays of relation within the embodied, sensory encounter of the
performance. The focus is on decentring the modalities of visibility, invisibility,
aurality, stillness, and motion, with the aim of exposing intermodal relationships
across the senses and genders.
The project is located in a post-phenomenological paradigm where the body,
environment, and technology are regarded as a field of mutually dependent relations.
Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological exploration of amplification technology and
notion of an auditory turn, provide a framework for viewing the solo performances as
indeterminate plays of relation across the senses and technology. Jacques Derrida’s
strategies of deconstruction and notion of undecidability, provide a lens for viewing
each of the solo performances as an open-ended process that is irreducible to a final
meaning. The project argues that there is a range of choreographic procedures, which
can expose performance as an embodied, relational process that resists stabilisation
into a single modality or meaning.
