Ankita Patro (Collaborators: Julia Lee, Benjamin Belai, Thuy-An Tran)

Grace of the Cyborg

            Grace is the “quality of producing favorable impressions, attractiveness, or charm” Oxford-English Dictionary. In this project, we explored what it takes to achieve this quality through the humanoid arts of dance, music, and speech. I choreographed and performed Bharathanatyam, a classical Indian dance style, to Beethoven’s “Appassionata 3^rd Movement,” which Thuy-An played on the piano. Benjamin then wrote an introductory speech explaining the combination of South Indian dance and western music, and Julia filmed the entire process, from the presentation rehearsals to the performance in front of our dorm mates. After we staged the final piece in Burbank, we asked the audience to comment upon the relative gracefulness of the live performance versus the videos of rehearsals. We provided the audience members with our definition of grace and asked for the reasons behind their choice.    

            Fifteen out of seventeen said the live performance is more graceful. Their varied reasons included the apparent passion shown through the dancer’s smile and expressive eyes, the pianist’s musical dynamics, and the speaker’s voice fluctuations and gesticulation. Furthermore, several in this group stated that the physical performance in the final product was more refined in both movement and costume. Conversely, the two individuals who found the rehearsal to produce impressions more conducive to grace believed the costume’s gaudiness impeded the techniques presented during the live performance.   

            To analyze the results of the experiment on grace, we used La Mettrie’s Machine Man, Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theater,” and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” First, La Mettrie argues, “We take everything- gestures, accents, etc. - from those we live with” (9). From speech inflections to body movements, every human aspect results from external stimulus, or man’s environment. Accordingly, man’s surroundings affect even his grace by “programming” him to behave in a certain manner that is identified as attractive. Kleist thus claims the marionette attains grace because “it is incapable of affectation” (413). However, I extend the scope of the charming marionette system to include the puppeteer. Without the human, the puppet is not graceful, as it is just a block of wood. Consequently, the affectation of the manipulator in combining acquired knowledge with the puppet’s spontaneous expression creates an attractive system. Finally, Haraway asserts, “We’re all…hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (150). Haraway further declares that, “Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs,” for without script, man has no means of preserving and communicating his ideas. Therefore, humans are cyborgs with the two distinct parts of machine, or technology, such as writing, that forms their existence’s foundation, and organism.

                 Applying these texts to the experiment’s results illustrates that in order to achieve grace, man naturally merges technical knowledge with spontaneous emotion. This combination of programmed and instinctual expression defines his existence as a cyborg. During the rehearsals, artists focus on form in attempting to perfect a graceful technique. In contrast, the live performance combines the rehearsed technicality with impulsive expressions, which result from the performers’ need to connect with the audience, one of the external environments La Mettrie implies. Costumes supplement the grace in spontaneous actions because they move attractively independent of the performers’ control. Some observers believe the live performance harbors a loss of technical grace, possibly due to the affectation that Kleist articulates. Nevertheless, the consensus lies in the live performance achieving a higher state of charm due to the grace in expression outweighing the loss of grace in technique. Ultimately, humans can only attain grace as cyborgs because without a “machine” or “organism” input, they lack the key components, e.g. language, basic dance steps, or musical notes, that, when combined with the spontaneous, internal elements of expression and emotion, lead to graceful outcomes.

Final Project Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXTRhRQ0tGk