Yo-Yo – What is the Body?
Descriptions
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Yo-Yo
A field of blues and magentas with a moving red silhouette, kneeling and arching over becoming more and more fragmented, disjointed, fuzzy, the sounds of popping and crackling bones and joints fill the air. The body slowly moves from a crouch to half-standing, bending at the hips, the back flat, arms stretching forward onto the ground, feeling the stretch in the back. As the body continues to disintegrate in form, the body begins to look less human, more creature-like. The sounds of stretching bones and muscles continue to intensify as the body transfers weight forward onto the hands, shifting, bending the knees, crouching back down into an amorphous haze. The sounds retreat, and the body haze fades from red to white, the strain passes. The background fades to black, the glowing haze sits back onto the legs, arms bent, rotating, the spine shifting in circles, gently, methodically, slowly re-materializing into human body form, though the form continues to be nebulous, shifting in undulating waves. Slowly the body shifts forward, kneeling again, setting one hand on the ground, and bringing one hand extending out in front. The hand moves up, extending upwards, then moves back down towards the heart space then down to the earth. And repeats, up and down, sky to heart to earth, moving closer and closer to the sky each time. Soon the other hand steadying the body follows suit, moving forward, up to the sky as if in prayer or in offering. A wavy blue orb materializes behind the white silhouette, then an ocean of glittering light, the music of bones and joints resembling melodic tones. The body kneels, bringing the arms to its sides, then forward, leading with the spine, up over the head, then back down to the sides in a slow, controlled, sacred motion.
some thoughts on the way the body is a body in Yo-yo’s piece: Body as cells, atoms. Ghost-like. Liquid. A reverse silhouette. A shadow, signaling presence. Sounds: jagged, scraping, crackling, popping. Not a shadow, but matter itself. The sound a body makes? Contradictions. Electronic imagery, referring to a real presence. There, not there.
Yo-Yo,
I like knowing that the sounds I’m hearing are the sounds of a body, abstracted and amplified in ways to make them unfamiliar. They are sounds that a dancer in particular would attend to: “Is that a sound I need to worry about?” It has been my observation that people who are not dancers don’t listen to their bodies in the same way. From your description, I get the idea of a kind of narrative arc of rising then falling motion–reaching up, reaching down, extending and receding.
In this moment, I find myself asking not so much what is the body but how is the body present. And if I could answer that question, I think I would know what the body might be. The digitization of your body enables a series of questions for me around form–how much do we need the familiarity of fleshly form to understand our bodies and if not what do we learn or gain from the digitization of the form. What things become clearer in the abstraction and conceptualization of the form that were not present when looking at a more mirrored sort of representation of the flesh? At the same time, perhaps as you intended, I am acutely aware of the physical presence of the body in its defamiliarized musicalized sounds. In the contrast between digital and physical presences, I find myself searching for the physical and being reassured by it sounds as well as urgently desiring its visual form. I find myself questioning what I know about the borderlines between digital and natural, particularly when the recognizable background of water appears. I find myself questioning what I know of my own physicality as I attempt to try out the forms in my own body. I bring to my interpretation my familiarity with Sunny Taylor’s work both her book and her series of self portraits as animals of various kinds. The most recent, I think, being a kind of underwater being said I really cannot name. The failure of language to realize names for the forms and movement intrigues me.
This dance is an interesting conversation with the question of what the edges of a body might be. The metaphors for skin often draw from the vocabulary of containers and contained, which this dance challenges with the graphics that represent a porous border between body and environment. Another important conversation in disability theory about the borders of bodies involves the dominant concept of embodiment Alice D-r-e-g-e-r calls “singleton” embodiment that is contrasted with the rare, unusual embodiment of conjoinment. Although this dance represents a singleton body in its expected configuration, the undulating and shifting borders suggest the instability of what is often imagined as the singleton normate body.
You’ve captured the sounds of your joints in a way that seems really organic. It had me wondering if there would be a process for capturing or even manufacturing body sounds that are more subtle–how could we begin to externalize the internal?
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