“The feminist critic Lucy R. Lippard argued persuasively in 1980 that feminist art was ‘neither a style nor a movement, ‘ but instead a ‘value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.’………..What was revolutionary in feminist art, Lippard explained, was not its forms but its content. Feminist artists’ insistence on prioritizing experience and meaning over form and style was itself a challenge to the modernist valorization of ‘progress’ and style development: ‘in endlessly different ways,’ wrote Lippard, ‘the best women artists have resisted the treadmill to progress by simply disregarding a history that was not theirs.’”.

The Power of Feminist Art, Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard.

MANIFESTO

Susan Banyas says (embodiment, or) putting a story on its feet helps aid the imagination.

Spiritual Autobiography

•  is a process by which ………………
•  is a methodology of …………………
•  is a ritual for ………………………
•  is a sacred realm to …………………
•  is a communal and private encounter with the divine

Embodiment is

•  experiencing it
•  owning it
•  mystical

EMBODIED SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A New Definition for Performance Art

Leah Solo Taylor

Purpose

LOOK AT ARTIST AS  Spiritual STORYTELLER IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Intent

I will be developing a full two hour piece for theater which I will record on high quality video to show at arts and community centers, college campuses and finally to develop for Broadway. It will be called Goddess Vestiges. (Working title).

Goals

I hope to teach this Artistic way of researching the goddess, images, archetypes and lifestyles.

Goddess Vestiges-The Stories-Life’s Narratives

Goddess Vestiges teaches about life cycles.
It is a performance piece based on life cycles and passages. The structure will be the following:

1. Naming Birthrite/Woman as Child
2. Menstruation/Womanhood
3. Marriage/Woman with Other
4. Birthing/Woman as Mother

It is young woman’s attempt to trace her larger origins back beyond her family, her tribe, back to a time of women knowing and honoring women. Women were on the planet as vessels of information from female earth goddesses. They contained inner knowing through the kinesthetic methodology of being a container. Body knowledge lives within them.

“The body is our home. When we move and when we come to rest in our bodies, we can naturally begin to integrate what we see, feel, think and sense into a whole. The whole is the poetic image. The language of the heart…We can choose many ways to dance in our changes and our imagination is liberated through the dance”. Soul Stories Workshop Brochures, Susan Banyas.

The piece will look at individual life stories or autobiography as embodied spiritual autobiography. A new genre of telling stories through music, dance and song. Artists make meaning out of life, of their own lives. Any individual can take on this task without necessarily being an artist.

Anna Halprin’s dictum in life was that art is life and life is art. There is no separation in our need to make meaning, make up stories, live art stories of our own.

“We are eternal creations in that moment, creating stories, drawings, treehouses and plays for the sheer joy of creating”. Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, Page 233.

As adults we need to make meaning from this creating.

“Virginia Woolf referred to the ‘Semi-transparent envelope surrounding reality,’ the ‘fragile skin’ which encases what might go on in our minds in the flicker of a moment, the journey of a day, the lifetime of an hour. As artists have moved away from the linear perspective in painting and the linear plot structure advocated by Aristotle in literature and theatre, readers and audiences have been invited to ‘step outside’ their normal reality”. The Knowing Body, Steinman, P. 121

I am creating life stories through embodied investigations. I am journeying from female passages of birth, menstruation, marriage, giving birth, menopause. Five cycles in life, the loose structure.

“After we have located our physical voices, felt them issue forth from the breath with which we warm our bellies, what kinds of stories are we going to tell? We have found the sources in our nerves, muscles and joints. A wide range of kinds and sizes of stories are being explored by experimental performers today. The range goes from creating myths to family portraits”. The Knowing Body, Steinman, P. 113

 

METHODOLOGY

Methodology will include embodiment workout sessions and daily improvisations as well as readings from literature of performance art studies. Methodology encompasses sacred psychology, Jungian myth and folktales. Dance, drawings, dreams, quotes, questions and dialogues. (Jean Houston P. 19)

Conferences attended and planned on being attended

American Association of Religion

National Women’s Conference

Art and Educators Conference

Guest artist residencies

(Currently being planned)

Documentation accompanying Dissertation

•  Video-The Empress of Imperial Travel, A College Education for Wandering Scholars
•  Audio CD-Compilation of stories: Jewish Wedding, College, Birthrite as name, Crocodile Tears (non-narrative)
•  Still Photos

BIBLIOGRAPY AND RESOURCES

Literature is well based on this subject. A tentative bibliography for performance art, writers, psychologists, anthropologists.

Books

Cameron, Julia,  The Right to Write,  1999

Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary D. Power of Feminist Art , New York, Abrams, 1994

Steinman, Louise, The Knowing Body, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1986

Lippard, Lucy, The Pink Glass Swan, Norton, New York, 1995

Schechner, Richard, Performance Art,

Roth, Moyra, Performance Art of the 70’s

Orenstein, Gloria Feman and Diamond, Irene, Reweaving the World, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1947

Iris magazine, The body politic

Todays voices and visions of women Artists

The Vagina Monologues

cunt

Writers

Walter Benjamin, Essay of the Storyteller

Victor Turner

Richard Schechner

Mentors

Anna Halprin

Susan Banyas

Solo Women Performance Artists

Anna Halprin, 1960’s

Yvonne Rainer, 1960’s

Meredith Monk, 1970’s

Bitch-Femme-Performance Artist at Northridge, 1980’s

Denise Uehara/Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles, 1990’s

Nancy Agabian/Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles, 1990’s

Blown Sideways Through Life-Sam French, Publisher,1990’s

Anna Devere Smith, 1990’s

Eve Ensler, 1990’s

Sandra Tsing Loh

Workshops Taken in NYC, SF, LA

Natalie Goldberg

Ping Chong

Meridith Monk

Steve Chlorofine

Bonnie Brandbridge Cohen

Emily Conrad D’aud

Akila Nalo Oliver