R a c h e l M a y e r i
Primate Cinema: How to Act like an Animal
Primate Cinema:
How to Act like An Animal
Sign up for a free workshop at Interspecies at A Foundation
London on 3 October 2009
Single Channel Splitscreen, Mini-DV, 6 minutes, 2008
How to Act like an Animal
Superhuman strength, superhuman smell, hunting, nesting,
snacking all day, not having to clean up after yourself, swinging through
the air on branches, being grabby, not having to form sentences, screeching,
barking, hooting, whimpering, shit-flinging,
public nudity, sex, grooming, being groomed, wrestling, eating with
your hands, eating without hands, biting others, suckling.
Acting like an animal seems like a lot of fun. But
we know from nature documentaries that it is rough out there (it's
a jungle). There are other animals who want to kill us. There's no
guarantee of finding enough food in a day. There are struggles for
power within our own family. There's no semblance of a justice
system or shelter from the cold or heat. No one will have a barbeque,
because animals are notoriously bad planners nor can they grill.
Why learn how to act like an animal when we clearly
already are animals, trying every day just to get by and get along with
each other? Many of us seem to act like animals all the time and can
be unpleasant company. What, in fact, does this workshop entail?
In May 2008, a number of people in the Los
Angeles area of California, not far from Hollywood, participated in a
three week workshop which took place in an art gallery called TELIC
Arts Exchange. They signed up through The
Public School, an extra-institutional learning forum, run by TELIC,
which enables people to post classes they want to teach or attend. How
to Act like an Animal was in the good company of other
proposed classes like Taxonomies
& Classification and Bad
Acting as a Cradle for Self-Actualization.
The class description ran: This performative workshop explores primate
communication and social organization and leads to a videotaped nature
documentary, part of the Primate Cinema series.
Participants will watch video clips of animal behavior in the wild and
in cinema, learn about primatology, and engage in physical theater techniques
and improvisation.
I organized and led the workshop with Deborah Forster, who
is a cognitive scientist who has worked with primates at the San Diego
Zoo and has studied wild baboons in Kenya, and Alyssa Ravenwood, a physical
theater director and mask maker. Participants included an engineer, a
playwright and zoo volunteer, a full time stage actor, and others with
an interest in performance and animals
Contorting our bodies to move like quadrapeds, we tried and failed to live in a different type of anatomy. Attempting to communicate without words, we saw instant commonalities with other primates in what we express with our bodies and eyes. Theater exercises, like play behavior in other primates, seems the perfect context for learning about social life. As the behaviorist Marc Bekoff notes, play is the forum in which all sorts of animals learn their roles, and are forgiven for their transgressions.
We had a lot of interesting discussions about other primates' societies, how much we could actually know - scientifically or intuitively - about what it means to be a baboon, a chimpanzee, or a bonobo. We learned about how primatologists both strategically distance themselves from the animals they observe, and at the same time, how primatologists have come back around to empathy as a means of understanding animals' motivations and interior worlds. We wondered how primatologists' techniques for objectively observing other primates would work on ourselves.
We looked at how movies
have biased primatologists and ordinary human beings
alike. World War II influences film noir influences primate science:
and we have the urban jungle. We looked at the primatologist-primate
connection as a loop, reinscribing human nature. This week (Kiss
Me Deadly) human nature is cast as patriarchal and aggressive, peopled
by femmes fatales and sociopaths; next week (March of the Penguins)
we are noble, altruistic, and moral. Ultimately, we came back around
to viewing human society as only one of a myriad of primate social
systems that evolved out of the particularities of African ecosystems
a million years ago, and we found that profoundly strange.