ABSTRACT
Chapter one seeks to establish the practical sense of embodiment in Live Art around a discussion of self and subjectivity. The phenomenological theory of embodiment tends to view the biological body as the being (rather than the vehicle of the mind or soul). Nor could the Body be taken as an exclusively physical thing; rather, it must be seen as the embodiment of mind or consciousness. A theory of embodiment is already a theory of body as ontological theorisation pertaining to the fundamental human condition of subjectivity and the world as milieu in which embodied subjectivity is posited. The enquiry into subjectivity leads to discussion of how the idea of the Body is utilised in contemporary performance. Yet the body as an idea conveys a certain degree of elusiveness, both in practice as a ‘naive essentialism’ and in post–structuralism as simply a linguistic abstraction. To clarify this problematic, I introduce Marcel’s two ways to interrogate the self, namely the first and second reflection. Such a dynamic then is explored with the example of Zhang Huan’s work, as well as Artaud and Grotowski’s theory. The phenomenological investigation of the singular embodiment to the world as reverberation, and its dialectical relationship between the sense of ‘unknown’ and ‘telos’ in performance is the conclusion.
