Influencing, Power and Epilepsy
Rita is a conceptual choreographer working in dance and live art. She is also Artistic Director of Bradford-based Instant Dissidence.
Her current work includes a Digital Futures in Dance funded R&D project investigating choreography and smart phone technology, research into the crossovers between dancing and cooking and further research into the third of the period for the epilepsy trilogy, Involuntary Dances a commission for Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and presenting work at Springdance (Holland). Rita regularly writes for a variety of publications in the UK and abroad, gives talks about her work, and is Director at the Dissident Space in Bradford.
In 2011, Rita participated in Access All Areas - a two day public programme reflecting the ways in which the practices of artists who work with Live Art have engaged with, represented, and problematised issues of disability in innovative and radical ways.
Influencing and leadership
As part of my time at Sync Intensives, I have been doing a lot of thinking around the idea of leadership and the role of influencing as part of that: how do my actions influence people, and does that make me a leader? (Rita Marcalo)
The idea of ‘influencing’ sometimes appears as undesirable, linked to the ideas of manipulation, to ideas that if one influences others, one must surely be manipulating others; that one must be bringing others around to our mode of thinking.
Yet bringing others around to our mode of thinking is something that, as artists, we do all the time. Indeed, isn’t that the point?
As part of my time at Sync Intensives, I have been doing a lot of thinking around the idea of leadership and the role of influencing as part of that: how do my actions influence people, and does that make me a leader?
I have been particularly reflecting on this in relation to the work that I have been doing around my relationship to epilepsy, asking myself the question 'influencing and epilepsy: whose body is it?'
Involuntary Dances was the first in a trilogy of works looking at the relationship between epilepsy, notions of control and drug research.
Footage from Involuntary Dances integrates a second touring work entitled She’s Lost Control. A third and final work is currently in development.
All three works explore the idea of control of one’s body, and ask the question: whose body is it, this epileptic body?
Whereas in Involuntary Dances it is ‘my body’ (I present my convulsing body to the audience as a ‘dance’), in She’s Lost Control, I take the audience through the experience of having an epileptic seizure and therefore attempt to make the epileptic body the audience’s: ‘your body’. In the forthcoming epilepsy work, I am taking another step into this exploration and looking at ‘giving away’ my epileptic body; at it no longer belonging to me; at it becoming ‘everybody else’s body’.
Read an article by Jo Verrent about Rita in the Huffington Post
Power as dance
My interest in to whom this body belongs, stems out of a wider interest in power play which is not only evident in my epilepsy work, but permeates most of my art. In When Night Falls, for instance, I perform a one-on-one piece where I present the spectator with a naked version of me, and the possibility of an intimate moment. In the darkened room where this work takes place different people play the power I offer them in many different ways.
From feminist, to queer, to disability studies, power, or (re)claiming power, often appears as desirable: as something to strive for.
As a woman, a lesbian and a disabled person I am not so sure that is the point. I find it lacks motion. Indeed, I am more interested in dancing power that in taking it.
I am interested in exploring all its possibilities, in placing myself at different points in the continuum between taking it and giving it away. As an artist I am interested in setting up situations for myself (and my spectators) from within which we can undertake that dance.
Trying to influence
As part of the process of creating work about my particular kind of epilepsy I have been involved in a variety of discussions with producers, artists and scientists about the work.
One of the criticisms that have been aimed at me is that in wanting to creating a situation where I am ‘giving away’ the epileptic body to audiences, I am subscribing to a discourse that places disabled people at mercy of others (be it the carer, medical profession, disability charity, etc), and reinforcing the idea of a lack of agency.
Here is where, I suppose, the influencing comes in. Firstly, I don’t see the point in presenting a position on power and disability which is fixed; which, as I say above, lacks motion.
I am a performance artist and I am interested in opening up a space where something can happen. Indeed, the act of giving power away establishes a question: are you going to take it or not?
It immediately opens a space between me and the audience member from where we can begin our ‘dance.
Secondly, things (and power play amongst them) are hardly ever simple and straight forward, and I am interested in exploring the idea that power sometimes comes from giving away.
I am not sure
I am not sure I am a leader, there are so many people I follow. (Rita Marcalo)
I am not sure... ... of so many things.
I am not completely sure of the politics of what my work is saying: I need distance from it.
I am not sure who and in what ways I am influencing: can you tell me?
I am not even sure that I am influencing: who cares?
I am not sure I am a leader: there are so many people I follow.
I am sure, however, that at this point in time I am compelled to do this. It is part of a process of trying things out, and finding out how others respond to them and, in the process, finding out about myself, others, and how the world works.
So I will.
Rita Marcalo, February 2012
