ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of the ‘bodymind’ or embodied consciousness in two non-verbal performances: Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words I and ota Shogo’s The Water Station. Act Without Words I was one of Beckett’s very early plays, written in French in 1956 with music by John Beckett. Both in life and on stage, the life-world the bodymind inhabits is not static; rather, it is dynamic and constantly changing according to each immediate environment(s) we inhabit and engage and to which we respond. Each action or response in a score optimally arises ex corpore, simultaneously coming ‘out of the body’ and exposing the bodymind in “such a way that the body could come out of itself”. The embodied synthesis of second-order bodymind awareness is accomplished “not through an intellectual act” but because together the bodymind in all its parts could be said to “perform a single gesture’”.
