Gesture Geste

Dance studies
Gretchen Schiller, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France

Geo-gestures

I am a Canadian choreographer and academic at the University of Grenoble Alps. My upbringing as well as my professional career in the arts and academia have been shaped by journeys across geographic and linguistic contexts since the day I was born.

Ariel Osterweis uses the term geo-choreographies (with hyphen) to describe Faustin Linyekula’s choreography across public spaces and landscapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Carolina Caycedo describes her works as geochoreographies (without hyphen) to highlight the political, social and environmental projects in Brasil and along the Magdalena river in southern Colombia. I use geo-gestures (with a hyphen) to talk about the public’s bodily agency, as both carrier and creator of platial movements in contemporary performance here, there and everywhere.

As an artist-researcher the underpinning dialogical duet of place and body have underpinned my choreographic practice and thinking since the 1990s with works such as Face à Face (1994), Shifting Ground (1999), Trajets (2000-2007), Falling into place (2014) and the book Choreographic Dwellings coedited with Sarah Rubridge in 2014.  Choreography, Allegra Fuller Snyder told me does not always take place on a stage, and when it walks onto or falls off of platial and performance territories it invites dance to consider gesture through the lenses of place, site and our planetary condition.

Since 2018 the Performance lab at UGA has witnessed a diversity of workshops and projects which highlight the public’s role in performance works where the ordinary (daily habits), extraordinary (trained dancers) and infraordinary (difficult to perceive) gestures intertwine. Here we are witnessing how the public, bodies of different ages, places, heritages and imaginaries, are invited to contribute to the fabric of specific artworks or dance events. Within these contexts the public’s body is not seated or silent, but asked to participant with its own agency, its own performativity, a host of its own nomadic condition. Collectively these projects challenge the choreographic canon of movement vocabulary invention, compositional creativity and are game changers in terms of our understanding of the multisituatedness of the public’s bodily agency.

The term geo-gestures help us pay attention to the ways in which the public’s gestures locate and dislocate themselves through platial bodily rest and unrest in both contemporary performance and the performance of contemporary life. The tectonic shifts of the daily life body and the trained dance body are sharing roles and questions of their socialness, functionality, expressivity, transformativity and survival. Whose body are we really speaking of here? With geo, we can draw on the spatiotemporal conditions often neglected in dance studies such as geological time frames. Geological time, is indeed a much slower evolutionary process than mortal time, yet gestures, connected to bones, like rocks, are metamorphic and sedimentary. The geo in geogestures links the earth scientists’ spatiotemporal scalarities of place with our kinaesthetically-wired sensorial bodies on the move.

Cite this item: Gretchen Schiller, “Gesture”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177833

Language studies
Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GIPSA-lab, 38000 Grenoble, France

As a physician and phonetician working in the vocal sciences, vocology in particular, I am interested in the vocal gesture which is, at once, the body’s sound expression and a vehicle of thought. In order to produce a vocal sound, we must blindly coordinate a number of gestures: respiratory gestures that will allow the breath to come and go in a controlled fashion; phonatory gestures, an invisible ballet from within the larynx to the source of the sound; articulatory gestures that will shape the vocal sound as a potter molds a vase – with precision and dexterity. Every gesture has its importance, its sonorous impact, its place in the complexity and the richness of human vocal expression. These invisible gestures are accompanied by an ensemble of visible gestures, like the movement of the lips, the jaw, the eyes. The head’s movements, the arms, the hands, and postural movements, like weighing scales.

The particularity of the vocal gesture is that it is not visible, but clearly audible. In fact, its control is based on how its product is received by its listener, and on the proprioceptive sensations that accompany this act of listening. Besides, it is not the gesture itself that produces the sound, but rather its interaction with the air being exhaled and its acoustic environment. The gesture is thus the finished product of a balance between breath, moving structures, and sound. This equilibrium can be disrupted at any moment, whether by an ill-suited gesture, by a mood, by an emotion that insinuates itself into the gesture.

How do we grasp the totality of gestures that constitute the vocal gesture, without disturbing the speaker or singer? Experimental phonetics have aroused interest in the development of a whole set of tools for measuring the breath, phonation, articulation, and nasal or oral airflows. For example, we can successfully measure the contact between the vocal folds within the larynx with a non-invasive technique called electroglottography. This measure of resistance to the passage of a current between two electrodes attached to the person’s neck at the level of their Adam’s apple is directly related to the area of glottic contact: the current will struggle to pass through when the two folds are spread apart, while it will pass more easily when the folds are in contact. Another example is the technique of electromagnetic articulography in which small coils are attached to specific flesh tips, allowing to capture their movements in space. As such, we are able to observe the movements of the tongue and lips with great temporal precision during articulatory speech gestures.

More from the author:

Claire Gillie-Guilbert, “‘Et la voix s’est faite chair…’. Naissance, essence, sens du geste vocal”, Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, 14, 2001, pp.3-38 [online] : https://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/71 (03/10/21)

Cite this item: Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, “Gesture”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177833