Reflection on the responsibility of putting bodies on stage

In 2022 I was invited to present Can we feel touch when we’re made of light at Flipchart #2, an event series hosted at the iii workspace and whose goal is to create a platform for young artists to showcase their work and engage in a setting where they can discuss and receive feedback. The theme of this edition was “Resonating Bodies”.⁸⁵ I performed there with Kristia and Róis and after the performance, the three of us were very happy with the result. A week after the performance I was confronted by an email that stated that some of the people in the audience had found my piece problematic. Some of the elements pointed out were the dubious amounts of nudity of both performers and how I somehow engaged with a “male gaze” by being on the side of the stage, standing up, and making arm movements that resembled puppeteering. It is important to note that the performers were wearing sports bras and sports shorts and that these movements were made because I was using Myo sensors to generate sound, which detect muscle tension and arm movement.

I was initially flabbergasted by such a strong reaction from the audience and couldn’t understand why it had occurred since it goes against every fibre of my being. In a fit of rage, I started blaming the audience itself. In my mind, they just didn’t know who I was, or what I stand for and weren’t able to see beyond the exposed skin or didn’t read the translation of the text Sabina had written. In normal circumstances, this translation is projected but that wasn’t possible at the concert due to technical issues. At the same time, I also felt disgusted at myself and felt like I had lost all credibility. In a moment I dubbed “boys tears” I even kept asking myself if I couldn’t work with women performers anymore. This is of course a ridiculous thought. After a couple of weeks, I was able to think more rationally about the situation. As a Queer person, I am very aware of the weight the choice of bodies has on stage, but as a person passing as male I can still be a part of the machine that perpetuates “male gaze”. The fact that they don’t know who I am or what I stand for,

Background

In the school year of 2020/2021, I participated in the project Soundscape, whose goal was to create an opportunity for students of the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art to collaborate. The project was headed by Brecht Hoffmann, Yannis Kyriakides, and well-known Dutch designer Gert Dumbar, the person behind the design of the NS (Nederlandse Spoorwegen/Dutch Railways) logo, which has been in use since 1968.⁸⁰ The premise of Soundscape was (and is) for the participants to create a wearable instrument with which they could perform on stage. I came into the project in the year after having created Twitch_Plays_Max which created a sort of cognitive dissonance within myself: I wanted to focus my creative output on reflections on digital media and how we are embodied in them but signed up for a project which would make me more aware of my own physical body, even if augmented by a wearable instrument.

The image of two bodies on a stage that had cables coming out of them came to me in a dream - literally. I was watching them from above as they were interacting with one another at a short distance, but without touching. By extending their hands and moving them in a “scanning” motion an interaction would happen, and small waves of energy would emanate from one body to another. At some point, I start floating higher and realise that the cables coming out of their bodies were part of a larger network of wires which spanned kilometres. At the end of the wires more bodies could be found interacting, still at a distance. When I woke up, the dream felt like a McLuhan-esque prophecy, until I realised that I had fallen asleep on my couch and the auto-play function of Youtube had brought me to videos about how the internet is actually fibre-optic cables under the ocean.⁸¹ This wouldn’t be the only time that the algorithmic “choose your adventure” function of Youtube inspired me! Though saddened by the realisation that my dream was a mere visualisation of the video by my half-asleep brain, it became an inspiration for the piece Can we feel touch when we’re made of light (2021, rev. 2022) for two performers and live electronics. In line with the Post-digital and Post-internet paradigm, this work touched upon ideas of touch, physicality and embodiment through the extensive network that is the World Wide Web and the Internet and how they mold our social experiences.⁸² Digital translation of the human body is also a central theme. The program notes of the piece encapsulate these ideas:

“The camera picks up our face, the computer turns it into bytes, then they become light on a fibre-optic cable. This cable reaches somewhere, light turns to bytes and bytes become a face on a computer screen. What happens to our physical bodies in this trip at the speed of light?

In this performance two people are eager to engage with each other through a network. To talk with each other, to interact with each other, to feel the softness and warmth of their skin when giving a hug. They are eager to witness each other in a very real way, even though they are separated by a barrier.

Is this enough though? Will we ever be able to build a replacement for real human contact which pleases our needs to socialise and witness other people in the realest way possible? Can beams of matter-less light accurately translate our very matter-full bodies?”

This piece was made possible with the help and patience of my dear friends and stunning performers Kristia Michael and Róis Ní Chonghaile and with the always inspiring written words of Sabina Mérida Entrocassi. Due to the Corona Pandemic, the work wasn’t performed live until 2022, since no live concerts were allowed. The final result of the project was a video recorded at the auditorium of the Royal Academy of Art, which was presented at the Online Spring Festival 2021. This piece was later presented at iii (instrument inventors initiative) with Kristia and Róis as performers and also performed 9 times during the Delft Fringe Festival with mimers Emiel Janssen and Julius Schraven.⁸³

The setup

In this piece, two performers (originally Kristia and Róis) are separated by a semi-transparent curtain. The curtain is hanging from the ceiling and the performers have multiple contact microphones (piezo elements I built) attached to their bodies. Each of the performers stands on one side of the curtain and has a small portable speaker which they will use throughout the performance to generate feedback sounds. Two independent feedback lines are created by routing the microphone output of Performer 1 to Performer 2’s speaker and the microphone output of Performer 2 to Performer 1’s speaker. Each contact microphone has a different equalisation to excite different sets of frequencies. Later, when performing this piece at iii on the occasion of Flipchart #2, I decided to add more contact microphones to the curtain itself. This brought the total number of contact mics to 16. 

An electronics performer/improviser is also playing along with the performers on stage, but is not themself on stage. Their role is to accompany the performers by creating a soundscape of freely chosen electronic sounds, as long as they consist of mostly stable drones and soft glitchy sounds. When I first video-recorded this piece for the Online Spring Festival, my setup consisted of a No-Input Mixer, an old radio and vinyl player (a Silvano which my dad has owned since the 80s), synthesised drones, and a granulator, both built in Max/MSP. In later iterations, my setup was reduced to a No-Input Mixer and synthesised drones.

firstly a reason to shift blame, is also key. To me, this also reveals a mistrust that certain people might have when artists passing as male program bodies passing as female on stage. Perhaps they have seen many instances of the blatant objectification of female bodies on a stage. How could I then show that there was consent and that nudity was discussed before performing the piece? What elements amplified this “male gaze” outlook on the work? How could I have been more clear on its themes?

From my perspective, the following aspects of the performance evening contributed to this reaction. First, there were no program notes for the piece. My program notes are extremely informative on the topics discussed and the fact that I didn’t push to have them available deprived the audience of context. Second, the lack of projection of the text created a language barrier. Unless you spoke Catalan, it was inaccessible. Indeed, I had the translation as a scannable QR code and announced that it was available but that leaves room for the audience to choose not to read it. Understanding the text is essential and I should’ve found a way to have it present. Third, in the performance itself, I was easily perceived as a controlling figure. The elements that I think contributed to this were the cables that came from the performers’ bodies to my big towering setup of electronic equipment, the fact that I’m standing up and facing the performers, and that using movement-detecting sensors makes it seem like I’m manipulating their bodies from afar. Fourth, the physical touch that the performers were engaging in at the climax of the piece was too active and could easily be mislabeled as sexual, thus amplifying the view that I, as the creator and a performer, was objectifying the female body.

I must confess though the sadness I felt with how people decided to voice (or not voice…) their concerns. Instead of coming to me after the show to discuss their views and what made them feel unsettled, they kept it to themselves, only to be revealed later through email. What could have been an opportunity for personal (and artistic) growth

Symbolic elements, text, and form description

The main visual and sound symbolic elements of this piece are the curtain, the contact mics, and the feedback. This last element was something present since the inception of the piece. To me, it became a symbol of distanced connection: it doesn’t need a physical point of contact to happen and it always needs at least two agents to emerge. When the gain and volume is carefully set, the feedback is only activated when the two agents approach each other, creating an almost mystical and “immaterial” exchange of energy.⁸⁴ I find this analogous to how we engage with online communication: somehow we are able to witness and emotionally connect with each other, but always from a distance. The curtain aims to represent both the layers of translation spoken about in the program notes of the piece and the computer screen as an element that divides us. The fact that it is semi-transparent alludes to the thought that when two people are engaging in, for example, a Zoom call, their bodies are connected but represented with digital binary data. Therefore, it becomes a matter of debate if the image on the screen is an actual representation of their physical selves. To me, the other person’s physicality becomes blurry in such a context, and so does the “realness” of our interactions. The computer is paradoxically a gateway and a barrier. Finally, the contact mics are meant to illustrate the way we have extended our bodies and emotions to the digital realm. In a sense, they are meant to represent alternative ways of imagining our human existence expanded by technology. Each contact mic is put on a specific place of the body: the stomach, representing our organic body with which we are forced to live; the throat, representing our need for communication and kinship building; the heart, stereotypically representing emotion; the head, representing our personhood.

For this piece, I once again worked with Sabina Mérida Entrocassi. One night, while explaining to her the conceptual idea behind the work, she became so excited and inspired that I proposed to her to write a text to be used as a leading narrative element. I asked her to write it in Catalan since it’s one of her native languages and she enjoys writing in it. In the text, Sabina reflects on the fact that the Internet is actually “a bunch of cables deep in the ocean” and what that entails when our “corporeality fades” into light and goes at its speed.

The work itself has a simple arch form and each section relates to the parts of the text written by Sabina. The performers begin outside of the stage, slowly walk in and start approaching the curtain. When near the curtain, they pick up the speaker and start interacting with it by introducing feedback (called “scanning”) and lightly touching the curtain, which due to the contact microphones is hyper-amplified. After some build-up time, their hands slowly go through the curtain by using medium-sized cuts, a kind of “breaking the barriers of the internet” attitude. The performers then start “scanning” each other’s bodies and slowly approach each other. At the apex of the piece, they fully embrace one another with a simple hug. With this, they acknowledge each other’s corporeality and identity, even if separated by an element that blurs their “physical realness”. After the hug, they separate and walk backwards.

became a source of anxiety and pain. Perhaps, this is a symptom of a larger problem within the artistic world: the big divide between artist and audience. I don’t think I can fix these issues myself, so instead, I need to take preventive measures and turn an emotionally debilitating situation into “good damage”.⁸⁶ With the lessons I took from the situation, I tried to revamp the piece when it was selected to perform at the Delft Fringe Festival. With the help of the amazing mimers Julius and Emiel, we were able to refine what it meant to “give a hug” and took out the sexual energy that could easily transpire. We spoke a lot about the intention in the movements. Why should they feel compelled to touch the curtain? Why should they pick up the speaker? Why should they be tempted to touch one another? We spoke about where I should be on stage. Initially, I thought of myself as a “master of ceremonies” in the piece but that took away attention from its true focus: the digitally mediated distanced-connection of the two performers. Before each performance, I would thank the audience for being there and read the program notes out loud since they were not available in print. I also took a beamer to project the text on the walls of the 4 different places I was performing in during the festival.

To conclude this long but necessary reflection, I’m still a young artist that is finding their place in the bigger context of the art world and is still working on finding respectful ways of dealing with sensitive - but important - topics like embodiment, representation and identity. I cannot say that I’m thankful for the situation, and I know what I’m critical about in terms of how it was handled, but I can only wish that others learn from my mistakes and become more aware that a body on stage is not just a body on stage. It carries history, culture and identity. And certain bodies bring historical issues of repression, erasure and objectification. To ignore these facts is to try to live in a fictitious societal tabula rasa. All bodies are political and so, all art is political too.