Marie-Eve Skelling Desmeules
Marie-Eve Skelling Desmeules
Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Bio: Dr. Marie-Eve Skelling Desmeules is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, where she studies circus training experiences at different professional circus schools. She is also a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa (since 2011) and a high school drama teacher. She recently received the Governor General’s gold medal for her PhD thesis focusing on an understanding of corporeal work in different voice, acting and movement classes in the training of professional actors.
Title: Studying Professional Training Experiences related to the “Fleshy Body” in a Circus Context
Abstract: This formal paper presentation describes research that seeks a better understanding of circus training experiences from the viewpoints of trainers and students. During the winter 2018 semester, I conducted a qualitative interpretative research at the Centre national des arts du cirque (CNAC, France) which comprised participant observation (75 hours), interviews (52) and focus groups (9). This research relies on Dewey’s concept of experience (1934/2005) and the concept of Multiple Bodies (Graver 1997, 2005; Hurley 2008, 2016) which refers to the Performer Body (physical skills and prodigality), Character Body (fictional identity) and Fleshy Body (self-identical corporeal identity). This paper presentation will focus primarily on how training experiences related to the Fleshy Body lead students to embody the singularity of their bodily presence.
During this presentation, I will first discuss the research context and methodology. I will then focus on the study of circus training experiences and present results obtained after this first data collecting semester. I will discuss training experience (mainly related to the Fleshy Body) from the viewpoints of trainers and students from different disciplines. Each body being unique, sensitive and authentic, the work related to the Fleshy Body differs from one person to another. Links, divergences and nuances between experiences can still be identified and contextualized to expand our understanding of this particular type of training.