Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre

271 Pages·2008·10.09 MB·English

by  Maaike Bleeker

Anatomy Live
The production of this book was made possible by the support of Het Oranjehotel and the
Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (nwo)
Final editing: Fleur Bokhoven and Laura Karreman
Cover: Sacha van den Haak and Floris Schrama
Lay-out: V3-Services, Baarn
ISBN 978 90 5356 516 2
NUR 670
© Maaike Bleeker / Amsterdam University Press, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without
the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Anatomy Live:
Performance and the
Operating Theatre
Edited by Maaike Bleeker

Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Prologue - Men with Glass Bodies 9
Francis Barker
Introduction 11
Maaike Bleeker
Performance Documentation 1 23
Holoman; Digital Cadaver (Mike Tyler)
Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection 29
José van Dijck
‘Who Were You?’: The Visible and the Visceral 49
Ian Maxwell
Performance Documentation 2 67
Excavations: Fresh but Rotten (Marijs Boulogne)
The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Moxham 75
Karen Ingham
‘Be not faithless but believing’: Illusion and Doubt in the Anatomy Th eatre 93
Gianna Bouchard
Performance Documentation 3 111
De Anatomische Les (Glen Tetley)
Of Dissection and Technologies of Culture in Actor Training Programs
– an Example from 1960s West Germany 113
Anja Klöck
Ocular Anatomy, Chiasm, and Theatre Architecture as a Material
Phenomenology in Early Modern Europe 129
Pannill Camp
Performance Documentation 4 147
Camillo – Memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories – A Tear
Donnor Session (Emil Hrvatin)
Martin, Massumi, and The Matrix 151
Maaike Bleeker
Performance Documentation 5 165
sensing presence no 1: performing a hyperlink system
(Copraij, Jenniches, Kunzmann)
‘Where Are You Now?’: Locating the Body in Contemporary Performance 169
Susan Leigh Foster
Performance Documentation 6 181
Under My Skin (Ivana Müller)
Anatomies of Live Art 187
Sally Jane Norman
Performance Documentation 7 205
Crash (Eric Joris/CREW)
Restaging the Monstrous 211
Bojana Kunst
Delirium of the Flesh: ‘All the Dead Voices’ in the Space of the Now 223
Michal Kobialka
Performance Documentation 8 245
Körper (Sasha Waltz)
Operating Theatres: Body-bits and a Post-apartheid Aesthetics 251
Rachel Fensham
Index 263
Acknowledgements
The beginning of my fascination with the anatomical theatre dates back almost
ten years when I attended Mike Tyler ’s performance Holoman; Digital Cadaver
and a lecture by José van Dijck. I am very happy that both are represented in
this book. Four years later, the School for New Dance Development (SNDO,
Amsterdam) invited me to teach a theory class about the body. This was the
first time I used the title The Anatomical Theatre Revisited to frame my explora-
tions into the relationship between the history of anatomy and current issues in
theory, philosophy and the performing arts. I would like to thank the SNDO for
giving me this opportunity, and my students for their challenging questions and
remarks. In 2005, I continued this course at the University of Amsterdam as part
of the MA program in Theatre Studies as well as in a PhD seminar. In 2006, they
were followed by the international conference The Anatomical Theatre Revisited
(www.anatomicaltheatrerevisited.com), a joint project by the Department of
Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for
Cultural Analysis, Waag Society, the School for New Dance Development, the
MA program Dance Unlimited and Marijke Hoogenboom’s research group Art
Practice and Development, the last three all part of the Amsterdam School of
the Arts. This book is the outcome of that conference. It contains the plenary
lectures presented at The Anatomical Theatre Revisited as well as a selection of
the other papers, and one text (by Gianna Bouchard ) that was not presented at
the conference but fortunately could be included in this volume. Added to this
is a series of performance documentations informing the reader about perfor-
mative explorations of the theatre of anatomy.
The Anatomical Theatre Revisited conference and this book were supported
by the Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (NWO). Both are part of
my NWO-funded Ven i research project (provisionally) titled See Me, Feel Me,
Think Me: The Body of Semiotics.
José van Dijck’ s ‘Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection’ is part of her book The
Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Washington, Wash-
ington University Press, 2005) and is reprinted with kind permission of Wash-
8 ANATOMY LIVE
ington University Press. I would also like to thank the University of Michigan
Press for permission to reprint Francis Barker ’s ‘Men with Glass Bodies’ (from
his The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, Ann Arbor, University of
Michigan Press, 1995), Toer van Schayk for his permission to reproduce two of
his drawings for René Vincent ’s book Klassieke Ballettechniek. De techniek en de
terminologie van het akademische ballet (Zutphen, Uitgeverij De Walburg Pers,
1982), Vivienne van Leeuwen for granting us the right to include two of Ger
van Leeuwen’s photographs, and all the other artists and photographers whose
work features on the pages of this book.
I would like to thank the editorial board of the Amsterdam University Press for
their trust in this project and Jeroen Sondervan and Christine Waslander for all
their help and support.
Last but not least, I want to thank two people who have been indispensable
to both the conference and this book: Fleur Bokhoven and Laura Karreman .
Their double signature Fleur & Laura was the trademark of the conference.
Their care and attention are behind every single word of this book. Without
them I would never have been able to complete this manuscript in time, and it
would definitely not have been such a pleasure. Therefore, I dedicate this book
to them.
Prologue
Men with Glass Bodies
Francis Barker
Dr Nicolaes Tulp, surgeon and representative of the civil authority, anatomist
and frequent office holder in the bourgeois government of Amsterdam. But
also a general practitioner who, like Freud , left behind his casehistories, the
Observationes, where the body is made text, and in which one of the patients
is constrained to spend a winter in bed suffering from the insight that his
bones were made of wax and would buckle if he stood up. The sick man was
a painter to whom Tulp refers in a way that suggests it was Rembrandt, the
most prolific producer of self-portraits ever, who was obsessed by the story
of Samson and Delilah – that narrative of symbolic castration of treachery of
women – and whose first important canvas depicted Tulp’s magisterial dis-
section of the executed criminal Aris Kindt. At which event Descartes was
probably present; anatomist himself, philosopher and legislator for modern
subjectivity, who, mediating by the stove, considering strangely whether his
body exists, uses the wax at hand to prove that corporeal objects have no con-
sistency or essentiality but extension in space. And Caspar Barlaeus was almost
certainly there at the dissection too, a leading intellectual and noted neurotic,
who wrote poetry in praise of Tulp’s dissection of Kindt, and dared not sit down
for fear that his buttocks, which were made of glass, would shatter.
While in England, their brothers: Hamlet calling on his flesh to melt; Mar-
vell , Member of Parliament, who let aggressivity write in his poem. And Mil-
ton and Pepys: each committed in their different ways to inexorable textuality;
riven by equivocal desire. A revolutionary poet and censor, who also wrote a
Samson, and a secret diarist narrating himself and his world in private. Both
eventually blind…
But these are anecdotes and in some respects improbable, or at least not sus-
ceptible of proof. Surely not worth serious historical attention. And yet is there
not something at once risible and haunting about a poet of the bourgeois class
who thought that his body was made of glass (for Descartes, of course, strictly
a madness); or salutary in an image of the public dissection of a man who had