Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre by Helen Nicholson

Author:Helen Nicholson [Nicholson, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, theater, Direction & Production, History & Criticism, General, Social Science
ISBN: 9781137242570
Google: Z-bnCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2015-10-01T00:03:31.408523+00:00

A Phenomenology of Community

Vered Amit offers a sceptical account of theoretical constructions of community, arguing that they have neglected to account for actual relationships of intimacy and social bonds. Although she suggests that in principle forms of identification are ‘quite portable’, a sense of belonging to communities beyond the immediate experiences of everyday living often only lasts for the duration of actual emotional or familial ties, and becomes watered down over time.34 Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of ‘being in the world’, I should like to extend Amit’s account of how social experiences can turn into personal intimacies and social networks and make a case for the significance of the body in feelings of community. This is intended, following Nancy, to move the discussion of community-building beyond the idea that communities are either imagined or constructed through ‘face-to-face’ interactions, as if the rest of the body were somehow invisible. As an illustration, my aim is to examine narratives of ageing in order to consider how the actual social experience of community involves what Merleau-Ponty described as ‘body-knowing’, an embodiment of personal and collective narratives.

What I am searching for here are ways of working in theatre which respect the relationship between the affective body and the various narratives of place and community through which identities are formed and reshaped. Places and experiences are not only inscribed on the body, but are integral to its material presence; our physicality and sense of being in the world are integral to the archaeology of identity, contributing to the ‘historical sedimentation’ of selfhood, to borrow Kate Soper’s memorable phrase.35 Elspeth Probyn sees the embodiment of locality as symptomatic of oppression:

In conceiving of the local as a nodal point, we can begin to deconstruct its movements and its meanings. Thus, in thinking how locale is inscribed on our bodies, in our homes, and on the streets, we can begin to loosen its ideological effects.36

Boal extends this perspective, describing how the body becomes ‘hardened by habit into a certain set of actions and reactions’.37 Linking memory, emotion and the body, Boal claims that the habitual repetition of movement is personally and politically limiting. In certain contexts this is, of course, painfully obvious. I vividly remember a Tamil primary school teacher in Sri Lanka showing me how his body had been irrevocably scarred by the beatings he had sustained at the hands of the ‘peacekeeping’ Indian army who had attacked him after a school football match. Boal’s use of dramatic strategies to deconstruct how experience has been etched on the body is explicitly political; his drama is about ‘de-mechanising, de-structuring, dismantling’ the effects of daily life.38 Boal’s objective, Philip Auslander explains, is to enable participants in the drama to liberate themselves from this physical oppression, but in the process he labours under the misapprehension that it is possible for the body to escape ‘ideological encoding’.39

Whilst Boal’s reading of the living body is an important reminder of how histories are carried physically, the idea that the body is marked by

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