Freya Olafson’s Avatar
By Kendra Ballingall
A figure emerges from behind a white screen, enters the stage. She sits at her laptop, adjusts her webcam, hides apologetically behind greasy hair. Multiplies infinitely on screen and invites the audience to “view photos of Freya.” Channels pre-recorded voices, contorts her age. Disembodies her gender. Reincarnates YouTube videos of others, populates them, live on stage. Strips. Paints her body away with Chroma key blue. Returns to the floor and puts her best face forward. Generates himself, so grateful for her subscribers’ attention.
Avatar performs an intermedia study of ontology, incorporating conventions of dance, performance, video, and the Web. The hunched body of the vlogger and the gyrating, swooning online pornographic body become the body of the dancer in an annihilation and affirmation of the body that may be most familiar to performance art (let us leave dance school ignorantly aside). The discourse of the avatar somehow contains these simultaneous drives to erase and expose, deny and assert the body; in Hindu texts, online gaming, Internet forums, or social software, we may find that it is indeed this ambivalence toward the body that makes becoming possible.
There is precedence for such ambivalence within dance: as the Classical emaciates the singular body – reducing to it to line to draw the corps, the Modern resuscitates it – returning its volume and weight. A rejection of metaphysics, the modern revitalizing gesture relies on the same concept of the subject that allowed Camus to write that to create is to live twice. Articulated through an automatism of the body, the Expressionism of Modern dance takes the form of a Humanist becoming, an ontology that remains confident in the self.
The Internet’s recent avatar shares such an emancipatory promise to the self: claiming to be user-generated, dynamic and accessible, the Internet is a technological dream not yet rhetorically repressed beside 20th-century Western materialism. We still have faith in the indistinction between author and user; as artists, gamers, vloggers or Facebook friends, we somehow believe in ourselves as the authors of our own (corporate) genealogies. “Everyone can watch videos on YouTube”; “YouTube is empowering [people] to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.”1
Do such avant-garde and technological utopianisms program our freedom, or do they discipline the subject, making it “more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely”?2 (Is the dancer, artist, programmer or user subjugated or empowered?)
Conventional and institutionalized, dance may be the optimal art of the human, a policy of coercions that acts upon the docile body. And is the Internet such an amenable medium, a form malleable to our desires, or are we newly governed by its conventions, too? To reply, it is tempting to finally take refuge in “interdisciplinarity,” to collage together a place between disciplines where we can put our hybrid identities. Avatar presents a different ontology that threatens the status of the identified individual, performing a profanation of the body toward a redistribution of the concept of the self: the dancer steps down, the artist temporarily disappears, the user generates herself as someone different, and the body ceases to be the essential, sacred site of the self, becoming an interface among interfaces. This is intermedia as a practice rather than a place, as a potentially empowering method with which to confront technologies of the self.
*****
Avatar was performed October 15 - 17, 2009 at the Rachel Browne Theatre, Winnipeg.
This text initiates a dialogue on ontology and the status of the human between Freya Olafson and the Winnipeg Free Museum.
1 http://www.youtube.com/t/about
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House, 1975, p.
138.