By Jini ZlatniskiJini is a co-organizer of The Body Project and managing director of Storyhound Theatre. I’m not actually involved in The Body Project as an artist. When I showed up for the drawing of the Humors (Nov. 18th at The Greensboro Project Space), four tables were set up around the room, each containing a cabbage, a cucumber, a box of spaghetti, two onions and a lemon. Each table was also labeled with one of the humors. I had no idea WTF Gabrielle and Kate had cooked up for the evening. I raised an eyebrow and nodded politely. Even when it was explained to me, my skepticality only increased. I’m a little slow to get things sometimes, I admit it. So, after each of the participating artists drew their humor, they retired to the corresponding table. Feeling a bit lost and useless, I wandered to the table that only had two people at it, one of whom I knew. It was the black bile table. We all stood there staring at the vegetables. We rearranged them into the shape of a body. We were loathe to tear into any of them lest we make a mess. Then Gabby wandered over and asked us to deconstruct the body we made and talk about the temperament associated with black bile which is melancholy. We each picked up a vegetable and started to take it apart. Carefully. Orderly. Neatly. As I pulled the leaves from the head of cabbage, the melancholy hit me. Hard. Fast. When my son was born nine years ago, I wasn’t able to produce enough milk for him and we needed to supplement the breastmilk with formula to ensure he got enough to eat. After two weeks of tears and screams and feelings of inadequacy for being a horrible mother at not being able to produce enough food for my son, we switched to strictly formula. That’s where the cabbage comes in. Chilled cabbage leaves placed on the breasts help ease the pain and tenderness associated with breastfeeding. As I would no longer be feeding my son that way, for the first time since he was born, my breasts became engorged and I needed to help with the pain. So, out came the cabbage leaves. I used them until my milk dried up. It occurred to me that I hadn’t cooked with cabbage since then. I realized then that as I looked at the leaves, cabbage makes me sad. I had unconsciously associated the end of breastfeeding with a stupid vegetable. I started to rip it apart (carefully, of course, because I didn’t want to have to clean up too much later), and I began to realize it wasn’t my fault. And that felt good. By Gabrielle SinclairGabrielle is a co-organizer for The Body Project, and artistic director of Storyhound Theatre. Welcome to The Body Project! We are learning by doing. (Including with blog posts). A week ago today, The Body Project began. A three-month experiment bringing together upward of 40 local independent collaborators to investigate the human body through the four humors and their associated temperaments. Here's how this came about: My company, Storyhound Theatre, has engaged with learning as a lens for creation twice before, with our Uncommon Core reading series - first the Math Plays, then the Physics Plays - relationship-based theatre through the lens of math and science. Our next muse was human biology, with the Art Truck, UNCG's magnificent mobile art gallery. We were going to unmake it and remake the body. Easy. We might even solve it. Maybe everyone could draw a body part? Maybe we could literally build a body? It became clear, fast, that something felt inherently uneasy with our first instincts. Chunks of flesh and muscles and guts did not a body make! We needed to find a means of finding, manifesting a body in motion. A body moved. What makes us not merely piles of pieces? What is it that moves us to love, to hate, to sacrifice, to discover, to weep? What is that? Do you call it a soul? Then we remembered our Shakespeare. And the greatest characters of Western theatre - Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Falstaff, Viola among them - and their roots in their bodies, and the imaginative biological understanding of wellness, madness, sorrow, love. So last week, a gaggle of curious and brave Greensboro artists - visual, theatre, textual, musical, filmic, and movement - gathered at a hidden, unassuming place - The Greensboro Project Space - down a nearly invisible little lane alongside the Railyard in downtown. We ate yellow cake with flowers on it. We shook hands, wrote down our names, and wondered what was going on. We drew slips of paper with absurd, sticky sounding prompts - blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. We stood in a circle and tried to explain - “We’re building a body, together. This is where it will live. All of us will work independently. Your process is your own, and it’s a good one. Take your prompt - and go - get out of your comfort zone. In a little over three months, we’ll put on a show.” We were at the beginning - like a body gathered up in pieces. We did a silly yet poignant experiment sponsored by the produce section of Harris Teeter, to try and understand what these vital fluids are, and how their connected temperaments - sanguine, melancholy, choleric, and phlegmatic, might live in us and be manifest through our art. These "vital fluids," possibly originating in ancient Egypt, but most likely named by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, were the underlying basis of medicine for thousands of years. They are imaginative, and in many ways they make no sense. They were dismissed when modern medicine came along. And they are where we begin. Is it possible to build a community or creative doers, thinkers, makers, movers? A body of work. The body politic. Next door to us, in The Forge, students were learning to weld. In our room, for this short time, a question hung in the air - How do we forge a singular, living body from us? How do we create something - someone - whole? As Jess (of UNCG's Art Truck, and a grad student at UNCG) put it that night, "There's something powerful and freeing about inviting your demons to dinner." Each of these ancient images tap into something we often want to snuff out entirely, let alone find balance in. For the next three months, we're inviting our demons to dinner. What questions should we pose? And what will we do with the answers we receive? This online space is meant to serve as a remnant of this creative process - time stamps along the way. A safe space for collaborators working independently in this project to share and reflect on where they are at, what's on their minds, look for connections, put things in context. Check in. This online space is also an evolving, living document, where we hope to gather research that might be illuminating, inspiring, strange. History and stories. Revelations. Silliness. Tragedy. Stray thoughts. Questions we don't have the answers to and might one day. The image waiting for us at the end of this journey, in March, returning to where we began at the gallery down that little lane, is a body, filled up and alive and awake with fire, earth, water, air. With blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. In search of the whole, in search of harmony, we're giving the notes each their chance to sing. |
AuthorsThe Greensboro poets, theatre-makers, visual artists, composers, dancers, and filmmakers of The Body Project. Presented by Storyhound Theatre and the UNCG Art Truck. Archives
March 2018
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