What is the body?

A body of knowledge, spreads itself, open and regenerative, desiring. What is the Body? My body, this collective body, this body of text. This body of water. Cleansing itself, regenerating, dying and birthing itself anew with every movement, every thought and skin shed, every in and out breath, every revolution gone, party celebrated, war ended, every intimacy or trauma experienced. It is my home in this life, this ocean of possibilities – this transformative vessel through unknown trajectories. There are so many stories still to tell, to unveil and to discover.

I recently had an experience of this body, all knowledges together as a soup, my soup. The intelligence of this precarious beloved home cut open with doctors and nurses holding my hand, the touch of comfort counteracting the trauma of a blade. There at once, the body's intelligence. Knowing how to bleed, how to receive, how to remove illness, how to heal, how to love. The body knowing how to believe in its own capacity for change, for social-political transformation. It's protest, it's polemic.

It's need.

Defined by its variations, skin colour, genitalia, dis/ability etc it is culturally prescribed specific physical freedoms and socio-political limitations, hegemonically. Still. Born of possibilities. Due to socio-cultural conditions it adopts specific behaviours and customs to which it prescribes or rebels, contesting the subjugations of its cultural categorisations.

The body is the ultimate paradox, a bondage transgressed, simple and yet extremely complex, requiring the longest length of study in order to understand its workings, limited by it's materiality and yet defined by this precise sense of infinite possibility for change of political perspective and understanding through it.

In all senses.

I am asked. To present myself. In so many ways. I am present. There I am on a stage, on a table, a platform, a diving board, presenting the possibilities of my female agency from which to spring. The spring is a fountain of infinity. The body becomes a passage even in death, filled with so many possibilities. For resistance, for surrender. For choice. This body, my body, this collective body, this body of text, this body of water, can keep politically evolving, this fountain of knowledge.

Text written for Houston exhibition Public communication: Performing knowledge of the Body in January 2015, curated by Joe Joe Orangias.
http://splx.org/public-communication-performing-knowledge-of-the-body/

Theatre of Ocean

Stories of performance between Us

This manuscript, titled Theatre of Ocean, is 100,000 words and was edited by Lauren Oyler in Berlin. 

Theatre of Ocean: Stories of performance between Us - says ‘There is nothing wrong with I. The I sometimes speaks of “we” better.’ (Chapter 11, “A Letter to Grandma”)

The work is a non-conventional narrative; a cross-cultural, feminist artist memoir best framed within the literary traditions of post-modern writing, autobiography, contemporary arts and feminism, spanning across 3 cultures including New Zealand. 

Theatre of Ocean is a memoir of a performance artist moving backwards and forwards in space and time; it is a series of stories of art and experience that interweave performance, love, art, culture, and gender politics. Framed as an autobiography, it plays on the idea of genre just as the artist's live work does by incorporating aspects of narrative, poetry, film, music, activism, travel writing, New Age ideology, academia, and performance within a metaphorical dance between cultures and art forms that is both speculative and political, wide-reaching and deeply personal. An established performance artist, dancer, choreographer, video artist, and burgeoning writer from New Zealand, Alexa Wilson guides the reader through fragmented musings that traverse the spaces between cultures, borders, art forms, lovers, identities, and times to explore a spiritual anarchism, offering reflections that stretch beyond the confines of institutions and conventional narrative.

The writing in Theatre of Ocean ranges from hyper-emotional prose-poem to academic feminist critique to humour piece. Written largely in Berlin, the book expresses a feminism through a theatre of words; the ephemeral medium of performance is articulated across cultures and times during the peak of a consumer age. Juxtaposing real stories with art works performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for great change in the fabric of our world, in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand. Theatre of Ocean uses its central metaphor to connect everyone and everything through a relentless ocean of performances within frameworks of experience, often violent, offering the reader opportunities for engagement. Ultimately, it is the opposite of an autobiography about an individual – it is stories of performance between an individual and her audience as well as those in her world, an autobiography about the collective forces that both affect and are affected by an individual, and what an individual can do to transform these forces.

Published in Contemporary Almanac with Toxic White Elephant Shock, NYC 2014

http://contemporaryperformance.com/2014/02/19/feature-contemporary-performance-almanac-2013-launches/