Body knowledge/Body Prejudice- Cat 360

I found this chapter very comprehensive, but not overwhelming. The buildup to the author’s final point was interesting and opened my eyes to things I never would have considered, such as culture growth being the next step of evolution in humans. The idea of an extension was interesting because I have never thought in things (art) as being extensions of myself/human kind. It makes sense, and it very well might be a different way of saying that art is part of an artist, however I think it goes beyond that as well. I understood it as meaning that an extension can be an extension of the artist, but also an extension of what the artist portrayed. So an extension is really a fusion of abstractions of essences. I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me, or if that is wheat the author meant, but that is what I took from it.

I also found the author’s idea and definition of body prejudice very interesting because it was not what I had imagined it to be upon first reading the term. She defines it as a misunderstanding of movements and gestures. I originally thought it would mean the down play of the importance of body movement in general. That definition is included in her definition to some degree, however she says that body movements are taken for granted and are ‘tuned out,’ not suppressed/put down on purpose. After realizing what she meant, I thought of how gestures can be interpreted on stage. Of course this thought pattern led me back to the author’s statement about the Ladder of abstraction and the Merce Cunningham story about the different interpretations of the same piece of work. It would be really interesting to play with a gesture and extract as many different connotations as possible from and then abstract them. Joe Goode did a version of this with “29 Effeminate Gestures,” but it seemed that he was playing with one dimension to the gestures for a specific statement. I would love to play with it on my own.