Paper short abstract:

Building on ethnographic fieldwork with a performance art group, I analyze the performer’s aim to engage with the past in a sensuous manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal relational embodiment which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual body proper.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proceeds from ethnographic fieldwork with the Chicago-based performance art group Every house has a door. I analyze the performer's aim to engage with the past in a sensuous manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal relational embodiment, which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual body proper.

Every house's arts practice can be understood as what Marilyn Strathern has termed dividual being: bodies comprise a field of relations, a plane on which that which we might perceive as single skin-bounded individuals are complexly interwoven (Strathern 2009). Drawing on my fieldwork with the performance artists, I argue that Every house's members are continuously enmeshed in meaningful relations to each other, thus producing common experiences and worlds (Haugeland 1982). Understanding these relations as a practice, Every house enable a contingent performance space which, as the director Lin Hixson frames it, is made up of "connective tissue" (Hixson 2013). Hence, relational embodied inquiry and the production of collective affective worlds question a phenomenological account of an experiencing self that is bound to an individualized "experience-collecting […] body proper" (Farquhar/Lock 2007). In order to grasp the quality of the performer's relational embodiment and the affective forces it generates, neither a purely phenomenological perspective nor a structuralist perspective suffices on its own. In this light, I hope to show how a less oppositional treatment of the respective positions might be more appropriate. I conclude with an outlook on the normative consequences of understanding being in performance as fundamentally relational.