The performance body

                                            

A woman drapes her skin across a chair in the bedroom she shares with her husband and slips out the window to enjoy the night.Night after night she leaves their bed.She is always careful to return before her husband wakes.She slips back into her skin and then back into their bed.But one night her husband wakes and sees her skin across the chair.He is distraught.He seeks the advice of "an old woman in the village".She tells him to take some salt and rub the inside of the empty skin with it .A few nights later ,the woman leaves again and the husband applies the salt to her skin.When she returns to her skin it will not yield: "Skin,skin,ya na know me?" she screams.

An west Indian folk tale

Caught between her body and  her spirit,her insides keep her out.The husband who believes he has the right to the entrances and exits of her body,can coat the inside of her skin with salt but he cannot keep her home.His failure to hold her in their bed prompts him to make her skin unable to house her spirit.Both exiled,her question hangs in the air: "Skin,skin ya na know me?".The woman's voice cannot reanimate her skin.And she remains lost to her own body because of his desire to mark it as his.(Phelan:1993:10)


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                TEXT*FEMALE*BODY



"To understand that the dancer is not a woman dancing, for the juxtaposed causes that she is not a woman ,but a metaphor summarizing one of  the elementary aspects of our form,sword,cup,flower.etc.,and that she does not dance,suggesting,by the prodigy of shortcuts and energies,with a corporeal writing that would necessitate paragraphs of prose in dialogue as as well as description to express, in editing: poem disengaged from all writing apparatus."

  Stephan Mallarmé on Loie Fuller

from ''Crayonné au theatre"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIrnFrDXjlk

     

 

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 MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Presence.
Being Present,over long stretches of time,
Until presence rises and falls,from
Material to Immaterial,from
Form to formless,from
Instrumental to mental,from
Time to timeless.


From Nightsea Crossing,                                                                                                                                                                       
1981-86
Marina Abramovic, Ulay



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"In our relation work, we cause a third existence
that carries vital energy.This third energy conjured by us is  does not  depend on us not any longer but has its own quality,which we call "That self".Three as a number means nothing else
than that self."

                Marina Abramovic

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tz-K4EC8hw

                                                                                                                                                              

"Rest energy",1980

from the series "Thatself"