BODY PAINTING: SCENOGRAPHIC BODIES

Abstract

This essay was presented at PQ talks – Expanding Scenography Panel during the 14^th Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space – PQ2019. It addresses body painting as an artistic language capable of producing urban interference in which bodies can be camouflaged either merging with the environment in which they are, or standing out in the urban environment, yielding extra-everyday effects in purely performative actions. We therefore have the articulation of an expression plane and a content plane, materialized in body paintings on historically located subjects in a specific space and time frame, thus composing, according to Patrice Pavis (1999, p. 232), a "moving scenery”, capable of being a "totalizing aesthetic element of the staging". Body painting is endowed with a visual expression plane in which colors, shapes, topology and matter merge in the body support so as to create codes socially interpretable by habit, or produce unexpected senses. There is a correspondence between contents that fluctuate in relation to the expression plane, producing senses that range from the usual to the surprising. As a "moving scenery", the body under the painting can be drawn back or visible, deformed or inverted, in a space and time operated in the dimension of the discursive act, that is, here and now. Thus, painted statements can define the body as a counterpoint and / or a reiteration of its relation to the city (Space / here). The optical sensation or illusion of an absent body in body paintings frees that body from social senses culturally rooted under the skin, leaving it free to provoke new senses and create other spaces.

Keywords

Body painting. Expanding Scenography. Prague Quadrennial 2019.