Home Body: Embodied Practice and Theorymaking from Being Present, Hosting, and Performing / Yuka Hayashi (2024)

I coin the term “home body” to inquire how I can inhabit my body as a home, which is a question I have embraced as an immigrant. Adopting a methodology of Practice as Research, this thesis shows how movement practices, writing practices, and theories weave together as an embodied way of knowing, which tips into embodied theorymaking of home body. Referring to the principle of Authentic Movement and somatic practitioners such as Janet Adler and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, I engage in my solo and one-to-one movement practices. The research develops a conceptual framework, which describes how the embodied experience of staying in the present emerges and accumulates between the internal and external world. With this framework and practices of moving and being moved, witnessing and being witnessed, I start to understand home body as the overlap of the experience of staying in the present, not knowing, and being a part of something larger. Encountering Complexity Theory and discussions about how the body inhabits a space by theorists such as Sara Ahmed, home body and its framework grow further to represent how the body exists in the complementary nature of the body and space. I start group sharings with multiple participants to investigate what container I need to coexist with the audience as a performer. It leads me to investigate the host-guest relationship as a model of a performer audience relationship, as the concept of home body takes me to reconsider performing as hosting. As I address the reversibility of the roles of host and guest, I encounter my desires and dilemmas emerging in a performative space. It leads me to deep reflection on what relationship I seek with the audience and what I want from performing.