Pat toh

How can the lived body be experienced beyond representation? Movements in theatre or dance are often representational whilst I work from the paradigm of performance as live events that challenge traditional dramatic conventions. My artistic practice experiments with extreme physical states and its affects to look at the lived body as a performative event. I approach the raw physical processes of breath, muscularity and movement as critical-kinetic potential to disrupt and destabilise normative attitudes towards the figure on stage, to emancipate the figure from constrains of cultural representation to produce alteric modes of being (alterity). 

Drawing from the body as a resource and a site for experimentation, I re-evaluate my combat sports training to process contemporary questions on femininity as I survey myself against circumscribed codes and structures in the fight ring. Through the production and performance of a fighting fit figure, I work from muscle as material and investigate how the body as processes of power is malleable to personal desires, transgressing logic centricity of gendered constructs. I engage with fitness regimes as politicized acts of empowerment and subversion of traditional gendered norms, looking to the current wave of women’s athleticism as a quest by women for equality, control of their own bodies and self-definition.

The Map is a manifestation of the body as kinetic phenomenon where the figure transcends its semiotic functions. This project challenges rigid order of power by confronting the Vitruvian Man, the canon of proportion for the ideal human figure, problematizing against dominant power systems as fundamentally white and male. It critics how when one type of body is a role model, all other types of bodies in its domination are undermined and confined to a single unified culture and historicist process. This work proposes a mobilization of flesh to decentralise power.