The exquisite corporealities of Leibniz : performance as embodied practice of thought and documentary praxis

• Main Author: Spackman, Helen
• Published: London Metropolitan University 2013
• Subjects: 709.040755
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.591068

This document offers a theorized contextualization and analysis of the performance research I (Helen Spackman) have undertaken with and through LEIBNIZ, the fluid Live Art collective that I co-founded with Ernst Fischer in 2005. Extending Ernst's and my long-standing engagement with issues of alterity, 'home' and 'belonging', our more widely collaborative activities as LEIBNIZ have developed to specifically address the polemics of grafting personal with communal and political identities and the often problematic relation of such, both to civil and human rights and the wider ecologies of which we are each formed! forming a part. Our particular research interests reside in the ways in which the embodied and transient acts of performance and the im-material traces it generates and/or leaves behind might together serve as an accessible and vibrant means of exploring and articulating marginalized life experiences, concerns and aspirations. While issues concerning the documentation of performance as an inherently ephemeral art form have recently preoccupied critical debate within the intertwined fields of contemporary Live Art and Performance Studies to which our creative and critical practice as LEIBNIZ belongs, this dissertation examines the ways in which performance can itself serve as a vibrant and accessible means of both recording and generating experience with reference to the four LEIBNIZ projects (namely: The Book of Dust, The Ship of Fools, The Book of Blood: Human Writes and Ghost Letters) presented as case studies in this submission of PhD by prior output.