Synopsis
‘To Listen Out For’ proposes that, through an interruptive call that making can’t refuse, would-be performers are summoned to make towards Art’s Body and withdraw from representation. This discussion turns through some of the processes and terms through which makers position themselves in relation to this hazardous leap away from everyday life.
Withdrawal from the permeating modes (waves…) of representation entails an embodied turning back through and away from the everyday via the transforming flows (particularly breath/spiration as ‘inspiration’, blood, scenting) whose resources integrate and bear this process along.
Poiesis offers a range of writings (here drawn from Riding, Stevens, Auster) where the movement of ‘air’ and its specific relation to ‘source’/‘origin’ has been an explicit theme. These are considered alongside aspects of Irigaray’s reading of Heidegger in which she restores the mother’s gift of both nurture and air.
Lorca’s ‘Duende’ forefronts distinctive matters of embodiment’s inherency in poiesis as sourcing process.
Other writers sympathetic to embodiment’s unavoidability are drawn from in passing; these include Kristeva, Ehrenzweig, Olson, Bernhard, Tarkovsky, Blanchot, Josipovici, Howe, Zukovsky, Duncan, Gaddis, and Clement. All in different ways are concerned with the maker’s tumble into another region of becoming that is antithetical to the work-play demands of everyday life.
Sourcing, as performing’s key task that is not-work, turns into a conduct-unbecoming. It makes for the extreme point – the ‘most unlikely’ – suggested by Blanchot, where superabundance and lack are confounded.