Abstract
This practice-based research project sets out to adapt the literary concept of heteronym from Fernando Pessoa’s fictional writing to performance practice to create three different fictional characters that reformulate the body. Being a Body and Becoming Somebody comprises fictional characters that combine the literary concept of the heteronym, performance practice, and the methodology of fictioning. Each fictional character gives rise to new subjectivities that re-engage with the original promise of the body – that of connecting between the self and the Other. It is an attempt to not only imagine reality using fictioning but also to express and produce new subjectivities in reality through the performance practice of fictioning.This practice-based research project sets out to adapt the literary concept of heteronym from Fernando Pessoa’s fictional writing to performance practice to create three different fictional characters that reformulate the body. Being a Body and Becoming Somebody comprises fictional characters that combine the literary concept of the heteronym, performance practice, and the methodology of fictioning. Each fictional character gives rise to new subjectivities that re-engage with the original promise of the body – that of connecting between the self and the Other. It is an attempt to not only imagine reality using fictioning but also to express and produce new subjectivities in reality through the performance practice of fictioning.
It aims to address the following research questions: What does it mean to use the body as an archive and an experimental testing ground for the multitude of different perspectives and fictional narratives? How does the process of becoming and fictioning affect and challenge the construction of my own identity as an artist?
In addition to having Pessoa as my creative companion, I will also refer to Gilles Deleuze in search of a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ to complement the fleeting creation of multiple selves as they develop through performance. Finally, reflecting on the inescapability of being a body, I consider Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Rosi Bradotti’s ‘schizo-analysis’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and ‘difference machine’ (Braidotti, 2011), to instrumentalise the three fictional characters in the iterative and diffractive practice of fictioning.
Combining performance with reflective thinking, with an eye towards artistic creation, this project offers a hybrid practice-based enquiry into a performance-situated ontology that collapses the imaginative reality and possible futures and frames the contemporary notions of performativity, subjectivity and the role of the artist.
| Date of Award | May 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Paul Sermon (Supervisor) & Duncan Bullen (Supervisor) |