How Material inspired Deviation of Concept

By Zara

Working on the original music and it’s concept, we began drawing from our depictions of the ‘primal’ and incorporating corresponding themes and imagery into the music and dance work. The project began to change direction when we realised that our depictions of ‘primal’ or what was ‘natural’ were by large part informed by our opinions rather than any formal understanding. Our learning of how to define ‘primal’ and ‘natural’ characteristics differed between us, but our definitions were respectively singular. Upon further thought we became more aware of the extent to which these depictions were subjective, realising it could even be argued that the diversity and plasticity of characteristics are definitive as ‘natural’, and that this protects species in the wild [1] [2].

We no longer wanted to create work that was inspired by humans masking their ‘primitive’ emotions ‘behind an ambiguous and clinical veil’, since upon deeper examination, we could not objectively state or agree on what the ‘primitive’ was, which made this notion somewhat less communicable and relevant to us. In response, we wanted to interrogate another matter that had become apparent when reviewing our initial research and corresponding discussions. We wanted to interrogate why we had both intuitively seen our own subjective concepts of the primitive as somewhat more pure, valid or important than anything that wasn’t primal whilst developing our work; regardless of how many characteristics we identified as primal or how different or contradictory our definitions were, we intuitively discussed and spoke of our own concepts as how humans are ‘supposed to be’ or how we ‘should be’, without critically being able to explain why.

I perceived sex binaries as unnatural, because I was considering how human bodies that did not fit into these binaries had been underacknowledged and partially hidden due to recent Western culture and practices [3] and I had experienced media, marketing and cultural behaviour that pressurised me to exaggerate physical characteristics identified as female. I was also considering regularly seen characteristics of species in the wild, including protandry, protogyny and bidirectional sex changers. I therefore felt that my movement I was researching should not reflect sex or gender binaries if I were to embody the ‘natural’. Saphira on the other hand believed sex binaries were natural and viewed this system of labelling as a stable fundamental, upon which gender (which they viewed as unnatural) could therefore be constructed.

Or, for example, I saw women’s autonomy and empowerment as natural, due to how I identified women’s oppression with economics, media and disparities in labour and education. At the time, Sapphira saw this as unnatural because from Sapphira’s learning and experiences, they thought most about how the oppression of women has been reduced significantly by conscious intervention and political action, rather than letting society behave passively. 

We are not scientists, and we were not going to try to be scientists. What we wanted to respond to was the fact that neither of us felt capable of pointing to anything that verified what we chose to associate most with a notion… and yet both of us had a very different blend of concepts and images associated with this notion of what’s natural. A notion which we had been treating as if everyone understood and visualised it in the same way.

I felt as though identifying something as unnatural invalidated it and meant that it was being identified as less important or valuable, yet our differing perspectives attested how fluid the concept of ‘unnatural’ could be, and therefore how unreasonable it seemed to universally identify the ‘unnatural’ as less valuable simply due to such a label.

Through the practice of creating artistic material together, we were able to comprehensively and intuitively project our concepts of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘natural’ that we had developed, and upon doing so we were able to identify the ways in which our definitions differed, and thus realise how they were coloured and transformed by our opinions. In response to this, we redirected the work so that we were using congruous inspiration that was more considerately informed and inspired by what we had discovered about ourselves during the research. We both agreed on and shared the experience of pressures to fulfil modern ideas of what ‘natural’ is, regardless of actually carrying through with becoming this.

In summary, developing the original, longer music and dance performance was productively unproductive. The original concept and artistic research surrounding it allowed us to understand our response to the stimulus more deeply and create more informed work from this. The knowledge we extracted from this material informed congruous decisions later in the creation process.

 
[1] Convention on Biodiversity. (May, 2021). Genetic Diversity: The Hidden Secret of Life. Retrieved from https://www.cbd.int/article/genetic-diversity-the-hidden-secret-of-life

[2] Lynch, A. (April, 2016) What is Genetic Diversity and Why is it Important? USGS. Retrieved from: https://www.usgs.gov/center-news/why-genetic-diversity-important

[3] Costello, C.G. (2019). Beyond Binary Sex and Gender Ideology. In Boreo, N. & K, Mason. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment. Oxford University Press,
198–220. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.14