ON HAUTLICHKEIT
International conference "Choreographic Strategies – New Perspectives, University of Lodz, 28 Sept 2016, pp. 103- 111 Artistic Praxis;
breathing as a sign of Epidermality
Esthir Lemi, Elena Vosnaki
ABSTRACT
The art of breathing connects us with the artefact in question, exchanging information between the inner and outer world with no glamorisation, since humanness forms part of it. Therefore the syntax of things re-arranges itself in free association with memory, in silent mode, working on the first impression triggered, thus shaping our experience. As we comprehend the world through all our senses in collaboration in order to interact, memory plays a significant role in expressing and communicating what lies in-between; The body remembers things that we can barely explain, on a kinaesthetic level and on the level of communication and expression as well. The term Hautlichkeit in this sense could suggest the significant meaning of creating a new vocabulary that we may use in embodied performance connecting choreography, haptics and transdisciplinary art, as sweat and human touch is still necessary there, when in all other art forms sweat and touch seems to be an in-context subject and not the natural tool within which we achieve communication.
keywords: Humaneness, Epidermality, Embodied Performance
Introduction
In order to explain the significance of the juxtaposition of old-fashioned virtues as compelling for the new genres of art, this paper focuses on the "superficial" that art must take into consideration in any aesthetic analysis, since art is based on praxis where reasoning follows experience. Therefore, even if dance is the art of gravity and balance, kinaesthesia collaborates with all senses and therefore the focus is on the tactile and the sense of smell; in other words, on how both stimulate memory and communication. Nietzsche created a definition that may describe this tactile stimuli, and remains unexplained in his Aphorism Nr. 157; the word is Hautlichkeit, translated in English as epidermality. Although Nietzsche was not fond of the superficial in life, at the same time he uses skin —a complicated sensitive organ that connects the inner world (our bodies and its function) with the outside— for this new definition that opens a new subject in our society and arts (Nietzsche 1882).
All those who dwell in the depths find their happiness in being like flying fish for once and playing on the uppermost crests of the waves. What they value most in things is that they have a surface, their “epidermality" - sit venia verbo (Nietzsche 1882)
Connecting this idea with the recent scientific discovery that there are one trillion stimuli which human can detect by smell (Bushdid et al. 2014), a new palette has been created for artists in order for them to connect and research all arts together, leaving aside the visual as main focus for a while; a new balance exercise for the senses per-se. If we assume that the uppermost crests of the waves is what we research in haptic interaction, a need of choreographic knowledge could now be suggested in order to research the possibilities in communication that this new connectivity brings.
Sweat as the smell of reward
This paper suggests a choreographic practice based on epidermality, which in this case means the interaction between audience and dancers through the sense of touch. In this society the balance between erotic and robotic may be signified by sweat. Hence contemporary society tends to create odourless artificial environments and massive education considers the odourless as “civilised”. Choreography seems to be an interesting area where we could add scents and manifest changes in temper (anxiety, satisfaction, etc). This could educate a more intelligent audience in understanding social situations by using body language and the sense of smell. One the one hand we discover constantly new fascinating information on how our brain and senses function (Lang 2000, Yeshurun and Sobel 2010). On the other hand, there is a strong assumption that we are losing the ability to distinguish between artificial and natural which can lead us to a non-ability for humaneness (Lemi 2016) Epidermality as a fact of research in dance may signify the aspect of training the ability to distinguish changes in our body that may lead to a more empathetic communication, as art follows research results in how brain functions and the way we comprehend the world. K. Ashenburg (2008, p.297) concludes as follows in her book “The Dirt on Clean” while she presents a history on this subject:
The future of cleanliness is a mystery, dependent as it always is on resources as well as mentality. Nothing, for example, would change our bathing habits more quickly and thoroughly than a serious water shortage. One thing is certain. A century from now, people will look back in amusement if not amazement at what passed for normal cleanliness at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Ashenburg 2009, p.248).
Art may affect the more subtle communication between artists and viewers/ audience. Apparently there is no word that signifies the sense of smell for participants in artistic acts. Is it any wonder, then, that smell is cut off from the sensory stimuli that surround us during verbal and conscious communication?
Human skin, with its apocrine glands producing specific scents of humaneness, lies at the cusp between the inner world of biology (to which we are all more or less equal) and the outer world of environment (to which we are eternally liable, hence lacking control); therefore it acts as a medium of interaction and intra-communication between two planes of existence. The depths and the epidermis; literally. Ramachandran’s observation (2000) is a good example on how we can hardly tell if we tend to like something or not because the norms are stronger. In this effect most of people visiting a museum sweat from excitement when they see a portrait painted by Picasso, even if they reject it as ugly. Our intellect approves something by sweating, but our civilisation rejects or disapproves of such phenomena. Under this effect we may wish to fall asleep or select one image as beautiful, but we choose the opposite. A “good read” of the senses could lead to selections that take into consideration not only of our will but also of our needs. Dance education is a great re-calibration of such a significant tool to understand ourselves and others, and the best way to provide such a tool to society is to add epidermality as a parameter in choreographies that include interaction, as well as to create new terms defining movements and acts that stimulate smell and sweat, apart from using metaphors from the visual, musical, and poetic vocabulary (sharp, vivid, piercing etc). Therefore we don’t have a special vocabulary for smell; we borrow attributes from touch, hearing or vision to describe scents — for instance, the sharp smell of vinegar, a soft-scented powder or a perfume bright and shiny like a golden ray. The best path to connect all senses together and re-approach the artistic palette may be an archive of works in choreography that approach “epidermality” and propose new definitions.
Memory of fear: sweat as a sign of breakthrough
Human breath, with its complex mix of digested and metabolized by-products, together with human sweat excreted by the skin, communicate emotions and thoughts anchored in the purely chemical rather than the intellectual realm. This is why smell can act as the id to the Arts' super-Ego, so to speak; choreography employs the physical effort of sweating, oozing feeling out of the pores, communicating fear, anxiety, elated relief, paroxysmal joy, nostalgia and loss. In the progress of building characters in performances, a great tool is to start with the personas’ smell and then reveal and tailor all other parameters. This may be a contra- presentation to what the multi-media (based on screens) and the artificial had to suggest. Gradually it seems that bad smell signifies danger in theatres, as well as in everyday life: The loss of distinction between natural and artificial, where the artificial becomes the yardstick for the natural, leads us away from natural smells: A simple example of how smell is connected to the sense of taste is the flavour of lab-produced strawberry yogurt which seems more real to kids than that of the strawberry itself. Natural smells include the normal secretions of the human body, instead of which we smell the artificial scents that people add to their body (soap, deodorant, hair products, fabric softeners, perfumes, medication ointments, drugs that can be traced in the smell of sweat or urine, etc.). Hence we are moving away from the human aspect. If we could smell a robot, we could make it smell like a human thanks to the aforementioned artificial scents. We may say that this is a dehumanization of humans, as if they turn into robots; but we could work in choreography the opposite way and start a story telling from the surface of epidermality. E. Vosnaki (2015) suggests U. Eco’s term intertextuality as a link from “books speak of other books” to what rhizomatic connections scents trigger:
For all purposes we are not occupying ourselves with derivative and unimaginative fragrant projects which walk on well-trodden paths for the sake of marketability; but on deliberately referencing artworks which, like spirits hiding between well-bound leather covers, come out of their incarnation upon our opening the door and converse with gusto with one another.
Having on the one hand the “odourless” aesthetic mentioned above, we may go back to norms created by knowledge as Freud describes smell as the basest of all senses. Upright walking led to the loss of the habit of smelling one another’s genitalia, like dogs do, and vision gained the upper hand. The sense of smell has been cut off from the higher levels of the intellect. Dance, however, bridges the intellect with the memory of the body that is the basic instrument we use.
The viewers, the audience, the participants and the humanness
The first examples on new kind of choreographic strategy which may bridge the intellect with memory of the body via what we refer here as epidermality can be as close as possible to an amateur’s movement vocabulary. In this sense the choreography can follow the form of one on one: an amateur and a professional dancer. I am using as a case study the Sense-action performance “Sens-akcja” by Tomasz Ciesielski and Kuba Pały. Through a research in humaneness (Ciesielski, 2016) the team was able to evaluate scientific data parallel to the aesthetic. “Sens-akcja” choreography connects and investigates how smell and movement can interact.
Dance is bound with life and experience, hence focusing on the art of breathing and how this is connected with movement process and life. Therefore I aim to prove that epidermality in choreography/ art process shapes our experience and that choreography in this effect retains its core value in artistic depiction as it does in real life. Memories shared from amateurs here are extremely intertextual, the way we signified the term above. In a choreography where one of the participants possesses an old body full of traumas, bringing him/her back to a space to experience a pass de deux choreography with the eyes shut, includes darkness and moving in darkness as a bind of trust between the old amateur and the professional dancer. The topic is Holocaust Memories, and Laurence Langer can give us some hints on how memory is connected with the sense of smell quite differently than the examples mentioned above in this text. Here the sense of smell works in a more complicated way:
The human ritual of renewal meant relearning old habits from her “former” or pre-Auschwitz life: how to use a toothbrush, toilet paper, handkerchief, knife and fork, how to smile, first with the lips and eyes; how to recapture forgotten odours and tastes, like smell of rain. Implicit in the procedure of renewal, however, annealed to it with the epoxy of disruptive memory, is the “counter-time” of Auschwitz, where the rain stank of diarrhea and beat down on the camp, the victims, “the coot of the crematoriums and the odour of burning flesh.
The coordinations here, as well as the path taken and vocabulary of movement has same importance with the scents used in this project that are variable. The research started with the artificial scent of vanilla, but as this is an in progress project, improvisation and further research follows. Whatever scent may be used here is a transitive element of the choreography connected with fear and the sense of sweat by the amateur performer. Sense-action provides a chart of tools, aside from stimulating the senses, that they belong into interpreting epidermality. These tools serve in order to trigger memory and build trust between the audience and the dancers and the amateur and the professional dancer as well. The most significant aspect here is for the professional to empathise and respect the strength of staying alive of the old amateur, and their decision to inter-act on stage, as when in the grip of stage fright in front of the audience sharing an un-pleaseant memory. The writer W. Lawer (Lawer 2013, p. 91) demonstrates how sensitive people become in fear and anger when they get exposed to human odour, again in the same Holocaust scenery that is the subject of this particular choreography:
What Papa says is true; people with no moral inhibitions exude a strange odour. I can now pick out these people, and many of them really do smell like blood. Oh Mama, what an enormous slaughter-house the world is.
In this sense two different interactions through epidermality are created: the one is between the dancers (the amateur and the professional interaction) and the other one between the audience and the dancers. This leads to the basic question on how choreography could build such a connection, structuring an empathy aside from the music and the visual, as close as possible to humanness. The idea of creating special scents that trigger memories which may stimulate a vocabulary of movements may lead us to define parts of human communication that remain undefined. This fascinating area for a work in progress seems to be the link between art and everyday life. Choreographic strategies may include this significant parameter, since even in technology we experience in the past decade a “dirty hands” strategy; as J. Richards (Richards, 2008) points out, “digital technology has merely reinforced the importance of the human body and the physical in live performance.” The viewer cannot smell the dancer from the distance of their screen or the far aisles of the back seats in the packed theatre, they might smell instead the mingled humanness of their own reactions and their fellow viewers' reactions to the human load emptied on stage. Fellow dancers, whether they be professional or amateur, can smell (and touch) their colleagues and therefore decipher crucial components in their physical and emotional state which can then be better used in the artistic output of the choreographed performance. The performance becomes more empathetic and the recipient of the performance feels it more intensely as a result, compounding the intellectual reading of the performance with the olfactory reception of stimuli.
By focusing in the sense of breathing in and out in choreography as participants, we comprehend the rhythm that connects all bodies together in the synergy of participating in an artistic act. The physicality of the body in dance and the performing arts, via this heightened sense of sweat and breath involved, finally helps us disassociate from the sterilized environment of modern life where impolite smells are frowned upon as base, as per the Freudian view of civilization. Instead they bring us back to fauve and Fauvism viscerally and irrevocably, eschewing the contrived notions of sexuality as a choreographed and staged act, and investing every aspect of life into a seemingly longed-for primitivism. In order to touch the depths of the id, we come back to the uppermost crest of the waves and employ epidermality.
Conclusion
In this paper humanness is proposed to be one of the basic aspects in forming a choreographic strategy. This forms further questions, such as: how can we cultivate all senses together if we won't get involved with a process that connects us with the natural elements (and with our humaneness as well)? The history and future of dance can provide some hints in communication which are worth re-defining and using as a common vocabulary that we may exercise in the form of transdisciplinary entertainment and interaction, based on breathing-in and out and the sense of touch. In this way we may create new models of interaction that cultivate empathy based on dancer-amateur- physical communication as well as building a talented audience that uses breathing consciously, knowing that through being alive and breathing the space shared is constant and belongs to the act of seeing, hearing, moving and the pleasure in communicating and sharing memories.
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