Context

Several decades of critical theory and artistic practice have underscored the essential role of the body and embodiment in constructing identities, cultures, and worlds. Indeed, as recent works on theatre and dance dramaturgy have shown, investigations of performance technique and aesthetics are always also explorations of culture and identity (see Kondo 2018, Profeta 2015). As a result, it now seems plausible to ask: How might one design a full-time, academic laboratory that would take embodied knowledge and the performance of identity as its explicit content?

The Judaica project set out to answer this question through a new audiovisual embodied research method with the capacity to structure and document sustained, experimental, embodied practice. In our case, the foundation of this practice was songs, which we approached as nodes of practice linking technique, identity, and place, and as irreducible to written scores. The project’s idea of “songwork” refers to “what songs can do”: the possibilities they open, the connections they reveal, and their complex entanglement “with the non-songish things around them” (Tomlinson 2007: 51). Songwork incorporates countless elements, including rhythm, melody, genre, language, narrative, vocal quality, social function, cultural status, authorship, and personal association. Any given embodied performance of a song activates connections across history, memory, artistry, and scholarship, while at the same time being an open-ended, emergent, and never entirely predictable event.

Approaching songwork this way gives new meaning to the video materials generated by the Judaica project’s laboratory sessions. Instead of being documents of a performance, or even of a process, these videos are the products of a genuinely experimental method that is not governed by any final authorial power and which never arrives to any final closure regarding the “aboutness” of a given moment of practice. Taking inspiration from social theories of knowledge production in the sciences (see Schatzki et al. 2001), we approach this video material as more or less raw data, which must then be analyzed—first by ourselves as practitioner-researchers—through a process of video editing. The edited video essays produced by the project are therefore both interventions into contemporary theories of embodiment, identity, and performance, and proposals for a new form of audiovisual thought.

Methodology

Prior to the lab period, Spatz selected eighteen albums from the Smithsonian Folkways record label archive, which served as an ethnomusicological starting point for the research. All of these albums are labeled “Judaica” in the Folkways catalogue, but their content is highly diverse in terms of geographical location, language, genre, time period, social function, and other variables. Likewise, the three individuals who came together in Huddersfield, northern England, to begin the lab work in May 2017 embodied diverse nationalities (United States, Poland, and Turkey) and culturally religious backgrounds (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

To structure our daily practice, Spatz devised a method to formalize a set of roles and relationships that almost universally structure performing arts practice, but which are rarely made explicit or used as configurable research tools. These are: the relation of a performer or practitioner to embodied material (in our case, songs), the relation of two or more practitioners within a space of practice, the primary external or “directorial” relation, and finally the videographic relation, which is not usually considered part of performance practice. Two specific innovations of the Judaica lab are worth noting: first, these roles and relations were not assigned permanently to individuals, but continually circulated in response to our ongoing discussions about the research process; and second, the videographic relation was present from the first day of lab work and was primarily filled by the three of us (rather than an external videographer). These small but significant changes to conventional performance practice worked to continually shift and overturn power dynamics and to activate a new kind of experimentality in the lab, where no single individual was in control of what happened, how it was audiovisually traced, or what it could be said to mean.

In this way, we took turns sharing three key roles: practitioner, director, and videographer. Soon, we introduced more complexity: multiple practitioners; practitioners also directing; directors also operating the camera; invited guests joining us in specified roles; and ultimately the lab itself traveling to other locations while retaining its internal structure. Every lab session that included the videographer role generated new experimental video data.

Songwork Catalogue

Our first published output, the Songwork Catalogue, is a webpage containing 308 short video clips selected from more than 500 hours of video created during the Judaica project lab. The selections range from our earliest work, with just the three of us working in two studio spaces, to the final phase of the lab, during which we traveled to practice and perform at more than twenty different sites in the United States, United Kingdom, and Poland, including universities, theatre venues, and synagogues both active and ruined. (Selections from the first day’s sessions, described above, can be found at the beginning of the Songwork Catalogue.)

Our approach to video in the Songwork Catalogue differs in form and intention from both performance documentation (see Reason 2006) and documentary filmmaking. This difference is marked especially by the fact that all of the titles in the Songwork Catalogue were chosen after the lab session that generated the video material, rather than before. In comparison to Garry Cook’s short documentary above, which is about the Judaica project as a whole, the video selections in the Songwork Catalogue are about the diversity of topics invoked by their myriad titles. These include, for example: rhythm, character, storytelling, impulse, affect, gesture, pedagogy, tuning, musicality, textuality, deconstruction, play, presence, proximity, history, memory, race, place, training, coloniality, epistemology, ritual, somatics, and ecstasy.

The audiovisual traces in the Songwork Catalogue do not immediately provide clear definitions, categories, or conclusions. Instead, they may be understood as a new kind of data, full of content and meaning yet radically open-ended in significance. The process of selection and titling offers an initial entry point into the Judaica project’s research, which can be used and cited by teachers and researchers working with any of these topics or themes.

Two selections from the Songwork Catalogue, “threading impulses into the song” and “conflicting associations 2,” capture moments of personal and political urgency in which the practitioner-researcher responds with agency to the prompts of the director. To read accompanying textual commentaries, which shed light on the 'aboutness' of these moments from our three distinct but intersecting perspectives, follow the links to the Songwork Catalogue.

Beyond the Catalogue

While the Songwork Catalogue involved minimal video editing (just selection and titling), the Judaica project team has also developed an ongoing series of video essays, in which editing and textual montage further articulate the meaning of the underlying video data. Each video essay focuses on a theme or perspective that arose from the process and is developed by a lead editor, with varying degrees of input from the rest of the team. In addition to juxtaposing video material from the same or different lab sessions, some video essays use voiceover or onscreen titles to bring in textual content. This text might attempt to explain what is happening in the video, or on the other hand it might add further complexity by layering poetic annotations or scholarly citations onto the video.

As of October 2020, two edited video works have been published in peer-reviewed online journals, with several more in development [1]. We are excited to offer the Judaica project’s video archive, Songwork Catalogue, and edited videographic outputs as a model for the kind of data and publications that can be generated by an audiovisually-based embodied research laboratory. Going forward, we hope that they will serve as reference points and digital resources for interdisciplinary thought, discussion, communication, and research design across a range of fields and topics.

Footnotes

[1] For a range of approaches to videographic scholarship, see the Journal of Embodied Research, edited by Spatz, and the film studies journal [in]Transition.

Bibliography

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• Ang, Gey Pin, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ditte Berkeley, Daniel Alexander Jones, M. Lamar, Samita Sinha, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Ben Spatz. 2019. “What Is a Song?” Performance Research 24 (1): 20–93. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1601945
  
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