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Session 11	Receptions
Kristine Diekman and Karen Schaffman	United & Severed: Collaborative Research and Cognitive Authority
	United & Severed is a media installation based on the corporeal experiences of three women living with traumatic injuries. Using video, audio, dance, sculpture and narrative, the artists create a multi-layered sensorial environment to convey the perceptions of people living in extraordinary circumstances as they traverse a challenging world. The work embraces feminist values, such as collectivity, collaboration, and subjectivity, as central to the process of research and art-making. To translate kinesthetic and sensorial experience, the artists created a space for the participants to share their physical realities, stories and creative actions in their own voices and actions. By creating an immersive environment, the artists mobilize audio and visual images to forward an intersubjective understanding of perception and kinesthetic awareness. This paper will investigate these strategies of art-making and ways that work enables empathetic responses.
Vivia Kieswetter	Looking at Her Power: the Gaze as Transformative Force in Christian Liturgical Dance.
	Although much attention has been given to the “male gaze”, in this investigation, the focus is pulled away from this definition of gaze as purely voyeuristic. Instead, this work seeks to direct attention primarily to the gaze of the performer, thereby constituting an investigation of not only the audience-focused gaze but also the “female gaze”. Utilizing a case study in a Presbyterian congregation, the research uses fieldwork, historical research into the theology of the body, and a survey of dance manuals to explore the role of the female body in Christian worship. The gaze of the performer is explored as a source of her power; her gaze communicates her intent, it solidifies her role, and establishes her boundaries and her audience, allowing her to re-insert the body into the Christian sacred tradition.
Dr Vesna Milanovic	Feminist gaze and subjectivity in performance technology
	The paper explores the space wherein issues of feminist subjectivity, French feminist critical theory, psychoanalysis and performance overlap in the study of the domain of the ‘female gaze’. In this arena, I have worked both as a scholar and as a performance practitioner, using multimedia tools and creating new ones to help me to tell the stories of women living through these political and global changes, in multiple languages and through multiple communication and media formats. Being involved in creation and than using the same interactive system for my own performance and writing the ideas for my study as a whole, I have attempted to give multiple voices to these important issues. This paper discusses the theoretical, technological and personal processes in which I engaged as a performance-technology researcher, in what led to creation of the PORT (Performance Online in Real Time) technology toolkit. The paper explains the process of creating a digital performance work and the theoretical framing through feminist thoughts. Cixous’ theories embedded in écriture féminine and a sort of visuality of ‘writing the body’ and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach enabled me to establish a model for performing and spectating position, which allows the visibility of the female subject and revealing the female gaze in the global society.
	Kristine Diekman is a renowned video artist who has received numerous grants and fellowships. Committed to making socially integrated work while exploring issues on a personal level, Kristine’s work addresses institutionalization, language, sanity, somatic experience, and feminist identity through documentary, narrative, and poetic strategies. She is Professor of Video at California State University, San Marcos, where she developed the Community Video Project and serves on the Board of Directors of Media Arts Center, San Diego.
	Karen Schaffman is a choreographer, writer, collaborator, and life-long dancer. Her work is concerned with sensation, perception, memory, and the politics of transgression. She earned her Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside with her research in contact improvisation, performance, and identity. Here writing appears in Taken by Surprise: An Improvisation Reader (Wesleyan) and Contact Quarterly. She is Associate Professor at California State University, San Marcos, and travels internationally as a teacher and performer.
	Vivia Kieswetter is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at York University in Toronto Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and a Master of Music from The University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her research deals with the body as instrument in both vocal and dance performance in the Christian church, and how performance is transformed into worship in this context.
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