Charis

Charis Esther Taplin

Charis develops performance material from sensation rather than from an already determined dramaturgical proposition. Her Weekly Questions repeatedly return to the possibility that the body, an object or a changing sensory condition can organise the work before conscious interpretation decides what the work means. Marco Donnarumma's language of training and peripheral cognition is particularly important here: releasing a degree of rational bodily control becomes a way of allowing unfamiliar relations and compositional structures to appear.

This research also extends toward objects. Charis asks what changes when dramatic agency is attributed to an object rather than automatically to a human performer. Her engagement with Butoh reinforces a practice in which the subject does not always lead and matter does not always follow. The methodological gesture is therefore one of displacement: dramaturgy moves downward and outward from conceptual intention toward sensation, material relation and embodied response.

Charis is an important parallel to Clarisse's later development. Both become interested in the weakening of the sovereign performer who assigns meaning to passive matter. Clarisse, however, reaches this question through ritual, Beuys, Mendieta, ecology and her own material practices; Charis reaches it more immediately through sensory training and compositional experimentation. This parallel makes visible a significant evolution in Clarisse: material increasingly ceases to illustrate a philosophical proposition and begins to participate in producing the proposition itself.