Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008
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Nair, Sreenath. Restoration of Breath: Consciousness and Performance. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007. 198pp. Part of Consciousness, Literature and the Arts series.
Reviewed by
University of East Anglia
This book engages with a number of intriguing challenges, which include bringing together material from eastern and western philosophy, traditional Indian aesthetic theory and contemporary performance practice. It negotiates the different assumptions and different discourses which characterize these fields with considerable aplomb. Nair makes good use of his own local knowledge, his specific linguistic ability and his experience of performance training and methodology both in India and the UK. The research addresses some material until now almost entirely unknown or unavailable, interrogates practices which are in danger of being lost, and checks both against the available evidence and against theoretical work past and present from across the world. In so doing it manages to develop a plausible interpretation of some functions of breath in performance, both for performers and for receivers, in terms of traditional Indian aesthetics and in the light of modern thinking about performance, reception, repetition and consciousness. The book negotiates both the obscure and the complex, places the very ancient against the very contemporary, bends together several subtle and difficult forms of metaphysical thought and reads them intelligently in the light of consciousness studies. In short, it delivers an original and significant argument which exemplifies good intercultural performance scholarship – it makes important links and parallels but respects the source culture – and produces potentially important conclusions which could lead to further interesting theoretical and practical work.
The book has four chapters:
Location of breath (performativity, theatricality, breath, time, being): how do theatricality and performativity offer a context for investigating links between body, breath and meaning?
‘In Search of Breath’ (how history, tradition have positioned breath, e.g. in Aristotle, Taoism, Sanskrit and other Indian critical writing).
Training, Performance – Eastern and Western.
Consciousness (models, time, breath, restoration).
Chapter 1 examines models of theatricality and performativity (Greek, Sanskrit and recent western) and concludes that in all cases ‘meaning is related to...bodies and objects in time’, as a conjunction of physical presence and subjective reflection. Thus performativity is understood as ‘an interactive process between presence and perception [which] constitutes the basic configuration of consciousness and meaning’ (18/19).
These are important dimensions in order to position performance as a key factor in understanding. Pace D.E.R. George, who could have been very helpful here, performance operates a special kind of knowing; Nair cites Fischer-Lichte’s dictum that it is a situation in which signs are used as signs of signs. If, like me, your head starts to go round too fast at this sort of thing, it is nonetheless useful to hold on to the fact that the repeated or restored element of performance signals that something is being consciously presented as meaningful. Whether you are talking about theatricality and performativity as marking something as different from the quotidian (mimesis, making other), or signalling it as a moment of production in time (lila, unmaking and remaking meaning, instigating kinds of reception), you need to interrogate the processes which generate this. Nair aims to investigate breath, which underlies all activity, in terms of both philosophical understandings and practical modes which impact upon the production and reception of meaning in theatre.
He also identifies consciousness as a phenomenological relationship which is characterized by different modalities and qualities; there is also a kind of consciousness which seems to operate ‘outside’, as ‘witness’ to any phenomenological situation. The key issue here is whether this is always linked to a cessation of normal breathing, and whether it initiates a generative but ‘neutral’ condition in which the ability to inhabit different modes is heightened.
In the main, the problem with this which emerges more clearly in Chapter 2 is twofold: i) there are lots of references to breath in philosophical tradition and even in the context of performance, but very little direct evidence from the sources Nair is drawing on of links between specific breathing practices and particular performance modes; ii) such references as there are seem frequently to be highly metaphorical, bound up with interpretive or esoteric systems, or difficult to interpret in terms of everyday physiology.
This becomes quite frustrating in that so many systems are cited but the evidence of clear practice seems very difficult to track down. The suggestion about the conjunction of Nada (seminal sound) and bindu (generative point) looks promising but he says it is ‘not found in practice’ (77); Yoga describes various modes of breathing as part of the ‘8 limbs’ and posits influences on the chakras through the use of mantras or pranayama, but Nair says he can’t identify how mantras actually affect chakras, ‘though they always do’. Nair considers Siva Svarodaya Sastra (a postulated ancient source) at some length; he includes some quite fascinating if bizarre instructions about which nostril ought to lead breathing when and during which kinds of activity; the claim that three different channels of breath can affect subtle meridians called Nadis which ‘influence the entire body chemistry’ (89) is impressive; but Nair has to qualify this by recognizing that it needs to be checked against contemporary medical systems, since there seems to be no more evidence that these channels exist than there is for the famous meridians of Chinese acupuncture.
In looking at western understandings, Nair points out that Artaud and Irigary suggest a key role for breath from different perspectives and are – again from different angles - clearly interested in how consciousness may be shifted into other modes; but neither suggests a precise practice. In discussing recent investigations of consciousness employing some Indian models, what seems to be missing here is the suggestion that there are certain fundamental psychophysiological states or modalities which engender particular conditions of consciousness, and that, with reference to performance, the central condition is one in which creative activity and the ability to produce new combinations of meaning via both physical and verbal channels is particularly stimulated. It would have been helpful to examine whether some similar conditions explored by Barba, Schechner and Zarrilli, for instance, can be seen to arise from similar physical and mental parameters, and to trace how far these may be engendered by some of the kinds of training which are dealt with in Chapter 3.
Nair proposes in the closing section that a practice which he calls ‘restoration of breath’ fulfils many of the theoretical criteria drawn from the fairly wide range of sources he collates, and may usefully lead to ‘practice-based lab work’. However, although he provides some notations for breathing patterns using this method (189), he fails to explain what his symbols mean. Without explanation they are simply mystificatory; and there is no analysis about how each one might ‘alter’ consciousness. Do they produce modal or qualitative shifts? Are they similar to ‘rasa-emoting’? What is the ‘self’ that is experienced here?
This is a scholarly and impressive attempt to collate material from different directions, but it needs to make more explicit what the outcomes are which it seeks. In terms of performance and consciousness, we need a vocabulary which can tell us in a more down-to-earth way what kinds of ‘states’ or shifts of consciousness we are discussing. And this needs to be related to what actors and dancers and martial arts practitioners in a variety of disciplines actually do with their breath and how it affects the ways their bodies are related to space, to movement and energy and focus, and to each other and to the audience.
On the other hand, what is set out here is a particular stage in a very interesting development as argument. The book very thoroughly charts some of the most impressive propositions about breath and its relationship – as air, as a metaphysical source of being, and to some extent as the channeling or moulding of that air as it passes in and out of the body. Although it frequently has to stop short of actual exercises or precise equivalences of kinds of breathing to kinds of outcome, it nevertheless aims to identify understandings about why breath is important, and moves towards exploring ways of working with it. It explicitly states that the next stage is practical exploration through workshop; and it presents a particular model for such an exploration. The model makes sense because of the preparatory contexts which have been set up by the discussion of philosophical premises and some of the Indian – mainly Yogic – practice Nair addresses. He has identified a gap, and found a possible tool to fill it.
There is sometimes a tendency to summarise positions but not clearly state his own views, e.g. re. current views of consciousness (156). If no position is taken, why do we need to know about these? There are also a number of minor problems, which include some obscure phrasings and the fact that he hasn’t bothered to change ‘thesis’ to ‘book’; there are quite a lot of minor errors which have not been corrected. More substantially, much of the discussion of the historical material is detailed and complex – appropriate for a thesis, but it needs editing and summarizing here, in order to indicate what the key issues are. There are quite a lot of times when I – in spite of being relatively familiar with Indian thought and with some of the terminology – find it difficult to sort out just how much of the detail is really necessary and what it is telling me. I do think the book reads to quite an extent like a thesis, although useful additions have been made to the original. The tone, however, has not been modified, and I think we could do with some very clear and straightforward statements about why this investigation is important, and with some further editing of detail in order to refocus the argument and trim or develop accordingly.
The book displays some very good scholarship and builds some intriguing cross-cultural links. But it is for example much less specific about the nature of changes in consciousness than Margaret Coldiron’s work on Noh and Balinese forms (reviewed in CLA 7:2, August 2006); it also lacks any political positioning or evaluation of the cultural parameters. But it opens up some fascinating possibilities.