ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with meetings in the flesh: bodies as sites of the intercultural encounter. We begin our investigations with cultural taxonomies, move into hybrid worlds, and finally trace the pathways of nomads. There are three bodies that weave through this text – the subjective body of the performer, the artificial performing body, and the body of the audience. We do not intend to re-visit the plethora of recent writings on the body, but the basic premise underlying our approach falls within Rosi Braidotti’s definition of the new form of ‘corporeal materialism’:
the body is seen as the inter-face, a threshold, a field of intersection of material and symbolic forces; it is a surface where multiple codes of power and knowledge are inscribed; it is a construction that transforms and capitalises on energies of a heterogeneous and discontinuous nature. The body is not an essence and therefore not an anatomical destiny: it is one’s primary location in the world, one’s primary situation in reality.
