Abstracts

Steps, stages, space and song: Observations on performance architecture in the long thirteenth century

The following observations draw upon a recent essay, ‘Sing Here: The Physical Traces of Sacred Song’, in Julian Luxford (ed.), The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages, Harlaxton Medieval Studies (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2021 forthcoming). The full version of the chapter considers three related aspects of late-medieval sacred song: (1) large-format books; (2) performative chants and their spatial contexts; (3) physical furnishings, specifically lecterns. The redaction given here focuses upon the second of these, particularly the nature and purpose of the quire step, or gradus chori, with reference primarily to two great Marian cathedrals of the thirteenth century. Salisbury provided the liturgical blueprint for lowland England: the Use of Sarum was codified in the twelfth century. The ceremonial customs of Lincoln Cathedral were enshrined in its Consuetudines of 1258x79. In both cases, the physical fabric is interdependent with the institution’s ceremonial customs.

Reading: Daniel Trocme-Latter, 'Liturgical re-enactments and the Reformation', Early Music, 45 (2018), 665-72.

Approaching aural embodiment and awareness

Ouzounian (2006) has already discussed aural embodiment and ‘situated sonic practices’ under the prism of sound, space and time, revealing their complex, but dynamic variables, while Droumeva and Andrisani (2011) have set the basis for an auditory experience, as seen through the specificities of a listening culture. Following their ‘experientially-oriented ethnography of embodied aurality’, this presentation aims to briefly trace some aspects of aural embodiment, which can be reflected through particular practices, cultural conceptions and human experiences. Informed by Don Ihde’s auditory phenomenology (1976) and Murray Shafer’s ‘soundwalking’ (Westerkamp, 1974), it also helps the reader understand music’s semiotic dimensions, where performativity and auditory participation help the process of heritage production. Closely linked to a cultural soundscape within which a bespoken identity is shaped, memories, thoughts and beliefs share a vital role in musical intrinsic meanings, as evidenced in tangible resources, verbal, non-verbal and proprioceptive features. Enhancing these approaches with Taylor’s ‘creative orchestra’ (Lock, 2018), aural embodiment seems to have the potential to lead to a small, but collective musical civilization with traceable social, ethnic and topographic attributes, where individual and group sounds are transformed into wider sonic and/or aural narratives. However, before bringing this discussion to an end, it’s also worth touching the sense of silence, which entails a series of quiet musical events that incorporate a rather different procedure of aural awareness, often associated with philosophical, theological and meta-musical ideas (Lynch, 2018; Scherzinger, 2015 and Wolf, 2016).

Key readings

Ouzounian, Gascia (2006), Embodied sound: Aural architectures and the body. New York and London: Routledge.

Kuutma, Kristin and Kästik, Helen (2014), ‘Creativity and “Right Singing”: Aural experience and embodiment of heritage’, Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 277-310.

Droumeva, Milena and Andrisani, Vincent (2011), ‘Toward a cultural phenomenology of mediated aural practices’, Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture, 1(1), Retrieved from: http://www.interferencejournal.org/toward-a-cultural-phenomenology-of-mediated-aural-practices/ [Accessed on 01 April 2020).

Embodying Security: Choreopolicing and Choreopolitics at the US-Mexico Border

From the USA to Israel, India to Hungary, nation states have embarked upon an unprecedented trend toward national securitisation through new border security projects. Re/securing international border spaces has been a response to the apparent threats posed by cross-border movement and the lingering fears of insecurity brought about by ‘terror’ attacks. In this paper, I examine embodied mobilities, politics and policing at the border. More specifically, I enlist the language of choreography ­– understood as “the arrangement or manipulation of actions leading up to an event”– to forward an embodied theorisation of governance and securitisation of bodies at the border. I bring together Foucault’s seminal writings on biopolitics with dance theorist Andrea Lepecki’s account of choreopolicing in order to advance the aesthetic, affective and performative regimes of the border. I am interested in how bordering techniques and technologies shape pathways and determine modes of circulation within border landscapes, with the effect of de-mobilising political action. The second half of the paper is concerned with asking how we might respond. Here, I introduce Cuban choreographer Reniel Basil’s Fragmentos, a contemporary ballet about everyday border crossings and control at the El Paso-Juárez check-point. I work with Lepecki’s notion of choreopolitics to call for the political possibilities of dance choreography, not least through embodied and affective insights into how to move politically. Where choreopolitics is understood as the reinvention of bodies, affects, and senses, dance choreography is well placed to activate, experiment with, seek out, and invent with a movement whose only sense is the experimental exercise of freedom; that is to say, enacting a politics of movement.

Walking Encounters

Walking as a creative practice is not new and comes with a long tradition of playful experiments. Theoretical and methodological treatments of walking have been informing performative explorations of space as means to create new embodied ways of knowing: this has been particularly evident in ethnographic disciplines (e.g. anthropology, sociology and human geography) as well as artistic practices. As Pink, Hubbard, O’Neil and Radley argue, “walking with other or asking others to represent their own experiences through walking offers an inspiring route to understanding”.[1] The political dimension of walking is evident in discussions regarding issues of gender, mobility and age privileges; it touches upon issues of ethnicity and addresses various types of boundaries. There is a multiplicity that characterises the walking practice, that makes it clear that there is more to walking than just walking.

Since 2014, I have been exploring ‘walking with’ as a practice and mode of enquiry towards environments of openness in performative explorations of space. I explore ‘walking with’ as a site of intimacy, a practice that aims to build relations rather than escape them, to understand space through experiences and also challenge disciplinary boundaries. I have been exploring ‘walking with’ as a performative and participatory practice which is attentive to physicality, encounters, sites and contexts. A practice that raises issues of accountability and suggests new ways of structuring and narrating the research event. The convivial nature of walking has been explored and embraced by women walking artists and researchers. It is in their work that we see them navigating explorations through spheres of relationships, active listening, and actions that claim space. These key aspects that have been informing my work, and I have been approaching ‘with’ as a mode rather than a fixed condition, a practice that involves openness that aims to tease out forms of interaction with the other, our inner and outer world, as well as with the environments we inhabit.

EAS project starts its exploratory journey with an online ice-breaking event. In the spirit of these first encounters and first exchanges that may open new paths of collaborations, I suggest bringing the walking encounter at the heart of an online workshop! The walking encounter will be approached as a site of enquiry to map out questions of embodied awareness while revisiting walking experiences from the past year as well as a playful experiment to create dialogues between the participants.

Suggested readings

Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. "Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility." Contemporary Theatre Review 22, no. 2 (2012): 224-36.

Myers, Misha. Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement." Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 13, no. 2 (2008): 171-80

[1] Sarah Pink, Phil Hubbard, Maggie O'Neill, and Alan Radley, "Walking across Disciplines: From Ethnography to Arts Practice," Visual Studies 25, no. 1 (2010): 3.

Representing objectified spaces using Regular Polyhedra. Images, models, holograms

This study focuses on spatial awareness and physical consciousness of complex geometries by using images, 3d-printed models and Holograms to explore the qualities of forms generated from Regular Polyhedra.
Discovering different ways in which complex geometries can be produced through an operative design approach,  various elements are shaped using topological and standard modelling operations.            

In particular, the investigation is divided into two phases. A visual ensemble of ninety rendered objects is generated in the first one, applying different geometric transformations to each of the six regular polyhedra.   

In the second phase, a group of three operations is applied sequentially to each Solid to produce a set of five sculptural objects to be printed in Polyamide (SLS) and subsequently recorded in Colour Holographic Panchromatic plates, translating physical objects into images that have depth, parallax and can be viewed from different angles.       

The proposed approach aims to combine technical possibilities, operative working knowledge, and awareness of spaces, bringing a different perspective to the study of design and architectural forms and providing a guide for reading and understanding works and space that already exist. 

During the event, a real-time holographic recording will occur to reveal how space-time is imbued in our physical geometries and how this process can produce new possibilities of exploring relationships between objects and their surroundings.   

Revisiting the Majaz. Reading the Embodied Multi-sensory Experience in the Threshold Space of Al-Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo

Mamluk Mosque Architecture in Cairo is considered a backdrop for various interchanges between the rituals, beliefs, and sensory spiritual experiences represented spatially and visually through various architectural devices. This initial research draft is concerned with the embodied multi‐sensory experience involved in the medieval Mamluk religious architecture, represented by the ‘Majaz’ of Al‐Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo. The ‘Majaz, Mejaz, or Magaz’ is an architectural device adapted in the Mamluk period in Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1516 to define the entry threshold between the outside and the inside of the mosque. The term can be translated as the offset, winding, or bent entrance. It refers to an indirect zigzag‐like passage, commonly used in Mamluk mosque architecture that connects the entrance hall (commonly a pointed recessed niche‐like, cave‐resembling portal) to the centre of gravity and events of the mosque. Aside from the utilitarian functions of the Majaz as often explained by historians, the Majaz combines different spatial and tectonic elements that upstage the function of the entrance hall from being a mere portal to become a transcendental device that creates a multisensory experience that amplifies an embodied understanding of the space. From the noisy street to silence, from light to darkness, and from heat to coolness, the Majaz was aimed to create a transcendental journey where the body accommodates physically to these changes and more importantly the soul to be able to attain a spiritual state of mind according to the Sufi belief. Setting this out, this initial research aspires to look into the Majaz of Al‐Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo and see how this architectural device allowed a wholistic embodied spatial experience that engages the body, mind and senses. Building upon the works of Ali Gabr and Doris Behrens‐Abouseif, the research aims to explore how the multisensory and bodily realisation as well as belief have merged in the Majaz, making it more than an architectural device but a microcosm of the whole mosque spatial and spiritual experience.

Suggested Reading

Behrens‐Abouseif, D. (2011). Craftsmen, upstarts and Sufis in the late Mamluk period. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 74(3), 375‐395. doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000796

Embodiment, meaning-making, and architectural heritage: Towards an interdisciplinary framework

This contribution presents our ongoing collaborative project aiming to develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how heritage architecture and places of memory are experienced and produced. With the point of departure in three aligned yet still detached research areas—affective and more-than-representational heritage studies [1–3]; the politics and agency of meaning-making [4–6]; and embodied cognition and the built environment [7–9]—our goal is to explore the dynamics of embodiment, affect, and socio-political factors in the making of architectural meaning and material culture and the role (or limitations) of architects/designers in this process.

Heritage architecture is investigated, in the context of this project, in a broad sense by taking an interdisciplinary approach to questions like meaning-making, place, memory, culture—and exploring how these are shaped at the intersection of spatial design (understood through affordances as designed possibilities for action and staging atmospheres), human embodiment (understood through body as a biological system, with embodied and affective experiences), and modes of cultural production (understood through socio-political factors, shared atmospheres, collective memory, temporality, political agency).

The first phase of the project we present here brings forward our insights into the concepts of affect, political agency, and affordances, as grounded in the three complementary research areas above, and in their explanatory value for unpacking the question of how meaning is experienced and produced in spaces of heritage. In particular, we highlight the open-endedness of the meaning-making process by virtue of embodied experiences and agency of the body, while simultaneously creating opportunity for designerly acts to increase our openness to different possibilities and to imagine new histories, new meanings—and possibly, new heritage.

The focus of my presentation will be on the concept, realities, experiences, images and constructions of home. My argument is that home can be defined in terms of three overlapping dimensions: time, place and relationships. In contexts where home spaces are either abandoned involuntarily (e.g. when people as refugees seek refuge away from their homes) or when their experience of being at home in their existing home spaces has been unexpectedly and radically transformed (e.g. during the pandemic) affected individuals experience a deep and fundamental sense of disorientation, which I characterise 'nostalgic disorientation, because of the strong nostalgic dimension in it. My presentation will also address practical ways of addressing the consequences of such forms of involuntary dislocation. 

The Splitting of Number 12: An exploration into disembodied experience within the domestic

Within this time of social disembodiment, the displacement of our corporeal and subsequent cerebral state ceaselessly challenges our methods and approaches to the everyday. Working from home is the new norm, and with this dramatic shift in circumstance, the traditional ways in which we perceive our domestic surroundings and our relationships with them should be challenged. Through utilising architectural model making, filmic studies and performance, we seek to ask questions of representing disembodiment from our current everyday lives.  

Part of a Stage 6 thesis postgraduate project, the presentation will use the Symposium as a testing ground for key ideas and arguments about the event and the spectacle and how their interrelation in virtual, remote, environment intensifies the role of human agency in processing embodied reality of the world. The presentation will touch upon themes of fore-ground and back-ground reality, aiming to claim for the distortion of psycho-somatic interactions between different people and between them and the “objects” that surround them in a screen-based landscape.  

Abstract