True Love Waits

Sunday 19 February, 2012 at 12:27pm · Filed under True Love Waits

On the 4th March 2012, I’ll be creating a project titled ‘True Love Waits’ with participants at, and as part of, Tempting Failure – a new live art platform curated by artist, Thomas John Bacon.

This platform, originally to be staged in Bristol, became the victim of censorship – see recent article below:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11978/

True Love Waits

I wanted to go back to some of the earlier work I engaged in as part of my research, but to also find a way of bringing in other people as collaborators; to make something together. My ‘play’ work is intuitive, responsive and improvisational, but it is also drawn from the practices and training that dwell within my muscles, joints and bones, what Erica Stanton describes as a movement heritage or somatic experience (2011). This project is driven by a desire to know something about other people’s somatic experience, through the agency of a non-verbal encounter – actions, behaviours and feelings.

I became fascinated by Luce Irigaray’s conception of philosophy as a wisdom of love, rather than a love of wisdom. Asserting that the nature of knowledge, reality and existence – those topics of philosophical enquiry – are better explored as dynamics of love.

Plato’s ‘Symposium’ and in particular the theories of Diotima, which are conveyed in the story through Socrates as an intermediary, became important to my rationale and understanding of the development of ‘True Love Waits’. Diotima’s theory of love and wisdom develops from her argument that ‘all human beings are pregnant in body and mind’ (1999: 43). Diotima asserts that procreation, more commonly associated with child birth as a result of love between two people, also refers to the way in which wisdom is produced – a giving birth through the mind (and indeed the body). Love therefore, is involved in both operations; wisdom is produced through partnership and love.

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