This essay explores the question of how to make from the ambiguities that constitute the body. It begins from the idea that our experience and understanding of our own bodies fundamentally shape how we perceive the world, and consequently how we act and create.
Motivated by a frustration with the strict conditioning of the [disciplined body], the text searches for cracks, openings, and moments of slippage within these rigid structures. In doing so, it pulls all sorts of cards, plays tricks, and draws from everything it can get a hold of, grasping onto words from Foucault to the complaints of a speaking kangaroo. Through these encounters with different [conceptual bodies], the body will soon reveal itself not as a fixed or coherent entity, but as inconstant, affective, and always in the making.
In its second part, the essay turns to artistic practices, particularly dance and choreography, to ask what it means to make from these bodily ambiguities. The distorted gestures and out-of-joint positions of Butoh dance and Meg Stuart's "Disfigure Study" serve as key references. Rather than treating contradiction and ambiguity as instabilities to overcome, these practices point to the necessity of locating these sites of contradiction and ambiguity, not as instabilities to avoid, these practices point to them as sites where potential is already active.
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