This post is part of my MA in Performance Practices at ArtEz, University of the Arts, in the Netherlands. Thanks for your interest.
Multiplicity: embodied learning and resistance
In this glossary entry, I am approaching multiplicity not as an abstract theoretical concept but in relation to lived embodied realities emerging through my performance art practice. Multiplicity is at the centre of my work; it is a process of becoming-with multiple others through specific practices that challenge fixed norms. I am an older feminist artist whose performance practice initially developed as a resistance to gender normativity and now encompasses a broader view of neoliberal demands on identity.
The practice focuses on sustained work with four alter-egos – Doris, Donnah, Tatyana and the Little One. I do this with the aim of creating what I call more “we” – relationality and community - and less “I” – individuality. This urgency is driven by neo-liberal forces that demand what philosopher Byung Chul Han describes as an achievement society, populated by self-optimising individualised subjects (Han 2015, 35) and what T.J. Bacon – artist philosopher - considers a “contemporary crisis of identity fixation, where individuals are increasingly pressured to maintain consistent marketable selves across a range of contexts and platforms,” (Bacon 2024, 78) .
I define multiplicity as an inherently embodied capacity to inhabit alter-egos without needing the resolution of a unified identity. I see my alter-egos as multiple self-states with distinct cognition, behaviour and affect. This draws on psychologist and psychotherapist Phillip Bromberg’s argument that the healthy self is not a singular cohesive entity, and that the capacity of different self-states to recognise each other is vital to psychological health (Bromberg 1996, 14). I argue that while multiplicity offers potential for challenging neoliberal identity demands and gender norms, reflection on its limitations is vital. This is a live and unfinished enquiry, with multiplicity emerging at various levels in my practice, through concepts, methods, and aesthetic choices. My investigation explores some theoretical foundations of multiplicity, how multiplicity appears in my embodied practice and the challenges it poses, as well as weaving in reflections on how multiplicity functions as resistance. I conclude by sharing thoughts on where I position my practice strategically and some possible pedagogical contributions.
Within Western philosophy, theories of multiplicity systematically unsettle traditions that treat the self as singular and the mind and body as separate. Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential work, Will to Power (1901) , argued that individuals are made up of a multitude of drives, or many wills to power, striving to express themselves and suggested that: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general” (Nietzsche 1968, 490).
Henri Bergson, first in Time and Free Will (1889) and later in Creative Evolution (1907), distinguishes between quantitative multiplicity (discrete, countable elements) and qualitative multiplicity (heterogeneous states that interpenetrate and cannot be simply counted). He describes the self as composed of several conscious states organised into a whole that permeate one another and gradually become richer, an account that links multiplicity directly to lived consciousness, emotion, and temporal experience (Lawlor, Leonard and Valentine Moulard-Leonard 2025). These theories helpfully ground my thinking and align with how multiplicities feel from the inside in my practice. Each time I (or other artists) inhabit my alter-egos, they accumulate, containing traces of previous experiences, physical and emotional.
For Michel Foucault, “[m]ultiplicity can be understood as a web of relations between elements,” - where elements refer to the various forces, practices, events and positions that compose any given situation - “it signifies the undoing of the identity of a human subject” (Lawlor and Nale 2014, 59). Resistance manifests in his multiplicity as counter-conducts - alternative practices of self-conduct and social relations that can produce heterotopic spaces. These heterotopias (actual sites like cemeteries or theatres) become spaces of freedom where dominant norms, temporalities and identities are unsettled, demonstrating that identity need not conform to singular, coherent patterns (Lawlor and Nale 2014, 106) .The creation and adoption of such spaces is a feature of my practice for all of the alter-egos. For example in a recent performance entitled “small entinglements,” (Bodies in Dissent module at Home of Performance Practices) the space created with my alter-ego, the Little One, provided the freedom to be an older body in the imagined body of a child in a specially designed tinfoil room. This could be read as a heterotopic space, a freeing environment for engagement and development with an audience. Likewise alter-ego Tatyana, who claims performative territory in a local park, makes a space where multiple times, bodies and norms co-exist - as can be seen in the film Full,full, half half (Reeves 2021).
Foucault's ideas about multiplicity as relational networks and heterotopic spaces of resistance directly influenced philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who took these concepts further and developed the theory of assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari radically reconceptualised identity and being, defining multiplicities as "the relationship of the elements that make up reality," (Przedpełski 2022, 75). For Deleuze and Guattari, identity is a process that emerges through multiple forces and relations, with reality consisting of continuous becomings rather than static beings. There is no fixed self being represented only on-going processes of becoming-different (Przedpełski 2022, 78). My alter-egos work sits well with their ideas of multiplicity as assemblages of elements - assemblages being “the provisional, dynamic organisations through which multiplicities produce effects and experiences - including those of subjectivity or identity” (Thornton, 2018).
I have previously argued that these assemblages, in my case of props, spaces, time and embodied techniques, help to co-constitute my alter-egos (Bodies in Dissent module, Home of Performance Practices.) Each alter-ego is enacted through specific embodied practices for example, movement qualities, vocal expressions and bodily postures. These are not static traits, but techniques of embodiment that co-produce the alter-egos' identities in performance. Similarly all the alter-egos have objects that are active components, they shape affect, movement, narrative possibilities, and how they relate with audiences and each other.
While these more general theories of multiplicity form helpful anchors for my thinking, when considering my definition of multiplicity and my urgency more specifically, I recognise they are contested. I am choosing here to consider Alain Badiou and Byung Chul Han as their critiques force me to critically reflect on how I position my practice in relation to multiplicity, particularly asking why I do what I do and does it contribute in the ways I hope? Badiou argues that neoliberalism promotes a model of the individual as a self-interested, optimizing subject, trained into behaviours aligned with capitalist market logic. He provides a critique to Deleuze and Guattari, suggesting that their multiplicities are ineffective in resisting neoliberal individualism.
This is due to the emphasis on process over decision which prevents the kind of committed action Badiou sees as essential for revolutionary change (Badiou et al. 2006, 64). Multiplicities ultimately lack the capacity for genuine political transformation because they refuse the "cut" of a decision that enables revolutionary action (Badiou et al 2006, 76 ). Badiou calls for decisive interventions and political change, including specific, committed acts that create clear breaks with existing conditions. These are acts that demand sustained organization rather than “fluid becoming” (Vartabedian 2015, 73). This fluid becoming is how I describe all my alter-egos evolving, but it is particularly evident with Doris.* She is in the process of becoming a cosmic being, she is interested in quantum physics, uses storytelling as a dramaturgical operation and engages with the public.
A relevant performance would be her durational performance as part of the Cosmic Titans Exhibition, Lakeside Gallery, UK. (Reeves, 2025). Doris* resists human, earthbound body limitations through embodied transcendence, she challenges individualistic assumptions by reaching toward more-than-human possibilities and resists practical identity in favour of speculative becoming. While strong on resistance, I suspect there might never be a decisive “cut” with Doris* and she shows no interest in political transformation. Badiou’s criticisms help me to reflect on both the functions the alter-egos play and the types of transformation I am looking to make; they serve as a caution not to make any grand claims for the practice in this regard.
Moving on to Han’s criticisms of multiplicity per se, he argues that society has witnessed the erasure of the other, not physical disappearance but genuine alterity – meaning a difference that it cannot be assimilated or fully understood within existing normative frameworks (Han 2015, 29). Genuine alterity entails friction and resistance, forcing the self to encounter what it cannot fully grasp or control. Han argues that multiplicities may contribute to this erasure by replacing otherness and proliferating commodifiable sameness. His suggestion that multiplicity theory’s political potential may be largely neutralised by neoliberal capture has implications for both the way I practice and the contribution my practice might make. The stakes feel high, as Han argues that multiplicities might become another form of personal development, serving the achievement society by providing the illusion of resistance whilst maintaining competitive individualism (Han 2015, 67) – the opposite of what I hope to achieve. Han asserts that what is needed is a sustained engagement with the other.
I feel safe arguing that there was sustained engagement when developing my alter-egos with each of them emerging over the course of a year, but this is more of a challenge now my practice is expanding. Another practical implication for my practice from these criticisms is to keep an awareness of this genuine alterity in mind, to notice it and value it whenever it emerges. Through my learning from practice, performances, and theoretical engagement, combined with this nuanced recognition of a broader societal urgency, I am now focusing on the relational aspects of the alter-egos. Rather than individual identity exploration, I am investigating how they might develop together, creating free spaces for their collaborative emergence. This evolution toward relationality potentially guards against Han's criticism by moving beyond individualised identity multiplication toward collective investigation.
I now draw into this review multiplicity theories from Judith Butler and T.J. Bacon whose theories address multiplicity from the perspectives of gender performativity and lived phenomenological experience. These are theories that raise more of a productive tension, provoking useful questions about how this multiplicity is possible phenomenologically, and methodologically. Although I began developing my alter-ego practice primarily working with theoretical notions of gender performativity and now work with broader notions of resisting neo-liberal identity demands, Judith Butler’s seminal ideas on performativity and gender construction, remain important to me. Butler suggests that by embodying multiple, potentially contradictory identity positions, multiplicity practice and specifically subversive repetition with sufficient variation, might reveal the artificial nature of all identity categories while maintaining enough connection to existing frameworks to remain intelligible (Butler 2009, 81).
Their concept of the "subversive power of unrecognizable, multiple, or contradictory selves that resist easy categorization" aligns with the aims of my practice (Coles 2007, 67). However in reality I have found that negotiating the dynamic of sufficient variation and intelligibility is tricky. I call my alter-ego Donnah my twin sister who was not born, her spirit is now called into being as a raging teenager. She investigates how gender performance might recover silenced possibilities while generating new forms of embodied speech (including lots of swearing, grunting and hybrid poetry forms) this resists easy categorization and is often not intelligible. Butler’s work, which sees subversion operating within rather than outside existing power structures, has also challenged me to think about the connections between resistance and subversion. I see my practice as subverting gender norms, creating instability and opening new possibilities – moves that might be part of a strategy of resistance against neoliberalism but are not transformational in themselves.
Coming from performance art, T.J. Bacon’s arguments draw heavily on phenomenology, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of embodied perception. Bacon emphasizes the self as an “irreducible embodied experience,” directly felt and lived. She states that “Multiplicity doesn’t negate selfhood. Instead, it reveals that selfhood has always been multiple. The irreducible experience is of SELF/s (plural), not SELF (singular)” (Bacon 2024, 29). This notion of multiplicity as the actual phenomenological truth of embodied experience, not a theoretical construct imposed on unified selfhood, felt like an important base for my practice. However it made me reflect on another of Judith Butler’s foundational ideas (explored in Bodies In Performance Module – Home of Performance Practices) that the self does not exist prior to performance; "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." (Butler 2006, 140). If Butler is correct, how can Bacon and I - as in my definition of multiplicity - claim direct phenomenological access to self/s? Following this question through, I understand Bacon (in-line with Merleau-Ponty and Bergson) to be asking what do self/s feel like from the inside? While Butler is investigating how the experience of the self/s is constructed (and how it came to feel natural?)
As I see it, my alter-egos did not exist before I performed them into being through repeated performances, but once emerged, they become an irreducible embodied experience that I can access phenomenologically. T.J. Bacon also offers embodied research methods that help provide evidence for the reality of multiple selves, which I am incorporating into my research. She uses these methods to study what she calls “internal communities” (Bacon 2024, 34). These communities consist of distinct selves that relate to each other, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively. Bacon suggests that this model challenges common binary oppositions such as authentic/inauthentic, real/performed, or unified/fragmented selves (Bacon 2024, 35). I am currently exploring these tensions by bringing my four alter-egos together in live, relational experiments and performances that test how these binaries hold or dissolve.
To do this, I am adapting two existing methods - transmissible personas and experimental improvisational scores – and bringing them into a new context. Performance artist Philippine Hoegen describes transmissible personas as “characters or alter-egos designed to be shared and embodied by multiple performers, allowing the persona to be passed on, adapted, and reinterpreted in different bodies while maintaining distinguishing elements or features” (Hoegen 2020, 11). I am currently working with three artists to inhabit my alter-egos in different combinations using improvisational scores. I made this choice to work with other artists’ bodies inhabiting the alter-egos, because of its contribution to my urgency for more “we” and less “I.”
For these transmissible personas I draw inspiration from Lynne Hershman Leeson's seminal Roberta Breitmore series (1973-1978) that pioneered the exploration of fractured identity and multiplicity (Williams, 2015). In this work, Hershman-Leeson created and extended multiplicities of a single persona by allowing multiple artists to embody and perform the same character. This series demonstrated her understanding of multiplicity as an inherently collective rather than individual phenomenon and provides a case study illustrating how personas can function as shared creative methodologies rather than fixed individual identities (Williams, 2015). Leeson gave exact instructions for artists to re-enact Roberta, this score, an artwork in itself, details what make up to apply how and where, and aspects of her costume and movement for example (Hershman-Leeson, 1975).
I am also aiming to resist single authorship but in contrast to Hershman-Leeson’s approach, my scores create the conditions for engaging with embodied multiplicities without pre-determining content or development. I build on artist Phillipine Hoegen’s analysis that, “the score serves as a strategy to tease out the multiplicity that hides beneath the surface of the self; to render this multiplicity at least partly sensible or tangible.” (Hoegen 2020, 9). As a result of the considerations in this essay, I have devised an improvised score for the group of alter-egos which invites reflection on the theme of resistances. There are scores that invite the alter-egos to communicate in their own ways in a specific context, others are based on artworks made by one alter-ego being passed to another without explanation (Doris*’s cosmic maps – large scale paintings 200cm x 150cm invited a performance by the little one inhabited by another artist,) and scores for embodied movement qualities expressed through poetry (for multiple Donnah’s.) I hope by continuing this approach to develop a methodology and tools that others might adapt and expand the exploration of multiplicity.
Conclusion
In this glossary entry, I have suggested that multiplicity is an inherently embodied capacity to inhabit distinct self-states without needing the resolution of a unified identity. Through connecting to theories of multiplicity that both support and helpfully challenge this thinking, I have considered how multiplicity, and some qualities of resistance, offer potential for challenging neoliberal identity demands and gender norms – and have included both examples from my practice. As a result of this inquiry I am now seeing this embodied multiplicity as a way to conceptualise my practice methodologically. This unresolved tension around resistance to individualized identity and gender performativity gains new complexity as others begin to embody my alter-egos — a move that I argue strengthens both resistance to individualized identity and collective negotiations of gender performativity. Initially, working with Doris*, Donnah, Tatyana and The Little One in my own body challenged the idea of a singular me / "Dawn", allowing me to subvert gender norms from the positionality of an older female performer. Inviting other artists to inhabit these alter‑egos extends this work in two directions.
Firstly, it further resists individualized authorship: for example, if multiple bodies can be Donnah, then 'Donnah' no longer belongs to me as an individual identity but functions as a shared methodological and aesthetic resource. This redistribution of the persona troubles neoliberal models of the artist as singular, ownable brand. Secondly, it complicates gender performativity: when differently gendered and aged bodies perform the same alter‑ego, the gendered and generational expectations attached to that persona are re‑negotiated each time. My alter‑egos become sites where gender norms are not only repeated with variation in my body but are collectively re‑worked across bodies. In this sense, transmissible personas link my resistance to individualized identity directly to an expanded, collaborative practice of gender performativity.
This move towards shared embodiment is also part of my attempt to guard against Han's worry that multiplicity becomes another form of individualized self‑optimisation; by shifting alter‑egos into a collective practice, I aim to keep multiplicity oriented toward 'we' rather than a proliferating, marketable 'I'. There are many productive tensions in my multiplicity focused practice, providing different lenses and textures with which to generate questions about how practices grounded in the body might contribute to broader social transformation – at the same time without overclaiming their political significance and with safeguards against neo-liberal capture. As a result of the considerations here, I might be positioning my practice as a hybrid approach, that: i) investigates how feminist material forces - temporality, space, objects – participate in embodied multiplicity ii) as a collective practice rather than an individualistic one, and iii) with a pedagogical aspect through transmissible embodied practice. Pedagogically, this approach offers transmissible tools for other artists and researchers.
My improvisational scores function like open-source methodologies—adaptable frameworks that others can apply to their own multiplicities while maintaining core principles of relational embodiment. By making alter-ego scores publicly available, I aim to create a shared resource for exploring internal communities and collective resistance, contributing embodied methods to performance studies. Future work will focus on developing these transmissible methodologies in ways that others can adapt - while maintaining attention to whatever specific cultural and material conditions are in the mix. I hope that the research experiments will provide embodied data and evidence to inform these questions and that my inquiry into multiplicity continues evolving, accumulating, and bringing richness to my practice.
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