About the Project
H.I.I.T. (High-Intensity Identity Training): Strategies of Self-Awareness in a World Fit for Consumption is an autoethnographical artistic research project, which draws the attention to the human body and the ramifications of its inextricable connection to identity within Western contemporary society. More specifically, investigating this matter from the lens of consumer culture imagery and the fitness industry, the body is constantly used for reasons of branding and marketing and has become a consumer item, a means of constructing an identity which complies to the social and cultural needs of the time.
My personal urgency to delve deep into this matter resonates with the impact that I believe this commodification of identity has to the acknowledgment of the latter as ungraspable and fluid, rather than fixed and predetermined. The more the fit body is perceived as a signifier of good life, success and happiness, the more human subjectivity is reduced to a singular rather than multifarious potentialities of expression. With H.I.I.T., I suggest that, in order to escape stereotypical preconceptions, the possibility of multiple selves inhabiting one body should be acknowledged and established. In addition, I assert that this self-awareness of being ‘more than one’ is equally fundamental in the probable occurrence of unpredictable events in the course of life. To my understanding, when facing a calamity or trauma, being under a state of shock, when we experience a moment of tension between contrasting realities, where a need to find new identities, new shapes to embody the current state of precariousness is generated. H.I.I.T. is a project which encompasses a thesis, a solo dance performance and drawing as documentation. By using myself as a study case, I intend to invent ways to comment on today’s society of consumption and invite the viewer to critically lean on to the social norms without being trapped in them.
Performer and creator: Penelope Morout
Duration: 30’
Music: Christos Parapagidis
Supervisor: Dr. João da Silva
Dramaturg: Dr. Konstantina Georgelou
Specialist Counsellor: Silas Neumann
Photography+video: Dora Dimitriou
From Theory to Artistic Practice
An artistic and physical investigation of subverting the established preconceptions placed on the body by the social construct and of reclaiming the agency of our body, our identity, while sharing a common space.
A need to reconfigure the way of living – not only surviving –, a need to redefine who I am, what choices I make and for what reason, to acknowledge my potentialities, my strengths as well as my limitations, and claim back agency of my body, my existence in time and space. An artwork which started from the 'I', but aspires to reach and connect to the 'We'.
A thesis - an artistically academic essay.
A solo performance - a composition of the body, the sound, the video projection on stage
A documentation - a creative process, an exploration of various mediums, the story from the beginning until the end
This project started as a thought in May 2018. It evolved in an artistic proposal for the master's programme I hope to complete in July 2020 (https://www.artez.nl/en/course/theatre-practices).
It initially took the form of an artistic installation about storytelling, in order to expose the ways it can affect our perception, as well as to generate the potentiality of re-inventing and re-writing all kinds of stories.
It became a need, an obsession which opened my own 'Pandora's box'.
It transformed into a solo piece, a mixed-media physical performance.
It reshaped me.
Some mediums were there from the beginning, such as writing in various forms, crafting, comic-drawing, filming and video-projecting. Others were added later in the process, but became indispensable. The body, the sound score, the light, the space.
I always found inspiration in cinema, from the way movies where initially made by snapshots to the storyboard, the close-ups, the creation of a whole world. I would always recur to my studies in architecture, my books on painting and sculpture in order to shape my imagination into images.
H.I.I.T. is a performance, a thesis, a documentation. The thread that connects all the mediums is the storyboard, the script. The script on one character, who assumes all the roles - the person, the artist, the academic, the society.
During this creative process, I could hear many voices. All the time. To find a peace of mind and peace of heart, I had to find ways to extract them and bring them into the world. Multiple voices - multiple mediums.
This is H.I.I.T.
