Profane on a Sacred Land: How can marginalized bodies devise themselves into existence within laboratory theatre practice?

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This practice research PhD will synthesize discourse from the influential French laboratory theatre practice of bouffon and live art drag performance to birth a new methodology for making radical performance, as a practice of freedom for marginalized bodies. Process-based and reflexive, laboratory theatre frequently explores performance's relationship with its sociopolitical context (Schino, 2009). Theoretically, bouffon has great potential to offer laboratory theatre what bell hooks described in Teaching to Transgress as a 'practice of freedom': embodied praxis that resists sociopolitical tyranny to actualize the marginalized self (1994). Outcasts of society that delight in profaning 'sacred' ideologies and authorities with diabolical humor, the bouffon was shaped by performer trainers, Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier, to 'believe in nothing and make fun of everything' (Lecoq, 1997: 124). With its boundary-pushing actions, bouffon aligns with hooks' depiction of alternative practices and knowledge thriving in marginal spaces (hooks, 1989). However, within its current practice within Lecoq-based pedagogies and by artists such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Poxy and Red Bastard, bouffon is primarily exercised by white able bodies, which, Spatz asserts, incarnate the categorization of coloniality (2019). Echoing Trinh T. Minh-ha's analysis of how bodies of color are fashioned as Othered profane subjects (1989), when creating a bouffon, performers are often trained to mimic monstrous, exaggerated physicalities that mock non-white physical characteristics and stereotypes. This PhD seeks to fulfil the practice of freedom offered by the theory of bouffon and to decolonize its practice, by drawing on the techniques utilized by live art practices that playfully and critically challenge representations of ethnicity, gender and nationality. Research questions include:1) How can women of color and / or exilic identities utilize bouffon's radical principles to enrich their practice?2) How can elements of bouffon be viewed in live art practices rooted in drag and postcolonial identities? 3) How can those live art works reveal new decolonial, inclusive possibilities in existing Lecoq-based bouffon practice?Primarily utilizing practice research methodology, supported by interviews and participant feedback, I will examine and compare practices of the French lineage of bouffon and a range of artists and makers, including Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joko Anwar and The Bitten Peach. Aided by a framework of germinal theories of intersectionality by hooks and Trinh, and an investigation into notions of the grotesue, I will synthesize exercises stemming from the bouffon and live art practices into original tools for performance makers from marginalized identities. This project aims to: critically re-envision the Eurocentric perspective of bouffon practices; create more inclusive laboratory theatre approaches; enhance the skills and practices of artists from marginalized identities.