A scholarly book tends to offer readers a reassuring sense of solidity. Bound between two covers, a succession of -chapters offers a “cut”—a train of thought or explanatory argument— through the author’s messy and entangled world. Yet while a book is just a nub jutting out from the writer’s extended relationships and practices, those rich life experiences tend to remain submerged—worthy of a mention in the acknowledgments, or an autobiographical digression at most. Ben Spatz’s extraordinary new book Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research offers a different approach, following the growth of its author’s thought out of an abundance of lifelong embodied research. Comprising seven sections or “thresholds”—“City,” “Song,” “Movement,” “Theater,” “Sex,” “Document,” and “Politics”—the book assembles a range of writings and documents from Spatz’s practice as an artist, researcher, human being, and teacher of performance. Each section contains an extended and well-crafted theoretical essay, preceded by an eclectic series of “fragments.” These fragments—sometimes highly personal, sometimes theoretical in the mode of “blue skies” speculative inquiry—include excerpts from published or unpublished journal entries, essays, and performance texts, drawn from the author’s early performance creations to more recent work. Blue Sky Body is bookended by an extended introductory essay, “Thresholds,” and an appendix containing interviews with theatre artist Iben Nagel Rasmussen and anthropologist Tim Ingold, as well as the full text of Spatz’s performance Rite of the Butcher. Formally daring, the book enacts what it calls upon researchers of performance to do: attend to the vast field of “embodied arts,” including healing, ritual, sexual, and daily bodily practices that subtend the more glamorous and eye-catching moments of public performance.

In its situated and multivalent structure, the book strives to undo the colonially inflected principles of distanced objectivity and critical spectatorship that, as Spatz argues, tend to separate researcher from subject, author from work, and performer from audience. This structure supports Blue Sky Body’s intellectual project, which is both epistemological and political: to understand the practices of “embodied arts” as meaningful research producing new knowledge, and to “decolonize embodiment” away from dominant frames of whiteness and toward ecologically and socially sustainable forms of collective flourishing. Spatz’s theoretical resources track a movement of thought, from Grotowskian physical performance research, to an immersion in science studies and theories of practice, to an increasing engagement with critical theories of gender, race, and decolonization. The book’s initial epistemological essay, “Thresholds,” demonstrates how a new opening in embodied knowledge (a threshold) can coalesce as repeatable and transmissible units of practice (or technique) and then become submerged as tacit knowledge that structures action (principles). Here, Spatz’s work on the concept of “technique” in their previous book, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015), is brought into contact with critical race theory to understand how whiteness can become a “principle” (or what Sara Ahmed calls an “orientation”) structuring individual actions and collective institutions. This analysis helps drive Spatz’s political argument, particularly in the book’s final essay “Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment,” which calls for the fusing of the “radical methods” of artistic and performance research with the critical work of decolonizing thought and practices, particularly for white scholars. Spatz observes that much “artistic research” (especially in Europe) is conducted without much critical reflexivity in matters of race, while a great deal of critically informed performance studies scholarship in North America remains caught in the distanced paradigm of the observer. Putting the more radical strands of embodied research and decolonial thought together, Spatz argues, could allow performance research to become “a home for transformative embodied praxis” (261).

Spatz’s focus on embodiment is what ties Blue Sky Body together, from a personal essay on embodying gender (“soft butch”) to a scholarly meditation on the potential of video to transmit embodied technique (“The Video Way of Thinking”). The book’s working concept of embodiment is often focused on the physical body, developing a concept of “embodiment as first affordance” that is rooted in the author’s long practice in physical theatre, movement, and martial arts. Yet Spatz also defines “embodied arts” more expansively as “concrete ways of grappling with, getting a grip upon, and coming to know the materiality of human embodiment through processes of direct and material negotiation” (248). This definition would open up spheres of material-bodily practice that Spatz does not discuss, such as puppetry or cooking, offering an invitation to other embodied researchers. The most radical suggestion of this book is its insistence on “embodied arts” as forms of experimental research that are valuable in their own right, rather than simply being of “instrumental value in the creation of artworks” (98). Indeed, Spatz argues that embodied research could (like the durational performance experiments of Tehching Hsieh) use art and performance as a “cover” for deeply experimental ways of being in the world. For myself, as a theatre artist and performer, this aspect of Spatz’s argument sometimes swings the pendulum too far. Its critique of the performer-spectator split tends to lump together the many rich practices of performing for audiences, which are not irredeemably colonial in origin or structure. Decolonizing the performer-audience relationship—freeing it from white Eurocentric forms of spectatorship—is surely necessary. But as numerous Indigenous and racialized theatre and performance artists continue to demonstrate, this decolonial aesthetic can be pursued without collapsing the distinction between performers and audiences entirely.

If Spatz’s claims occasionally overstep, this is one of the expansive pleasures of this book, which like other works on practice offers an invitation to the reader to experiment. Blue Sky Body is a vulnerable and provocative work that leads the reader across multiple thresholds into new fields of knowledge and action. We might not all be practicing the same thing, and certainly we practice for different reasons. But as Spatz generously reminds the reader, “You are not alone in the tunnels and shafts of practice” (146).