Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Blow your mind! Shards hailing, on superfluous violence to stop surviving
Get PDFDavid Buckel set himself on fire to publicly stage the horrors of climate change, Delores “Lolita” Lebrón performed a sensational act in the US congress hall, hailing bullets while calling out: ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!When do we recognize violence as violence? When is the absence of a counter-attack a form of compliance? Do the desires of activists need an expression of violence to establish an ‘otherwise’ that’s carefully repressed? In “Blow your mind! Shards hailing, on superfluous violence to stop surviving” various instances of violence weave together, obscuring the difference between theatre, terrorism, assault and sensational act.The end of the world is a future for those who have been living like survivors. To explore the potential of violence as resistance, the author proposes to fight as an armless aimless army of vulnerables.‘Violence happens upon you. But that’s not really true for everyone. As a white cis-woman with passport privilege, I can say I’m interested in violence. Interested in, interested in. Violence doesn’t surround me. It may happen to me, but I would perceive it as an extraordinary event, a happening. I approach violence. I approach, I approach – there’s enough comfortable distance to repeat my sentence and imagine it echoing.’
Understanding Anti-performance: The performative division of experience and the standpoint of the non-performer
Get PDFPerformance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established institutions. The results of performance are never fully determined in advance; performances subject established images to reinterpretation; they take place before an audience that can criticize and intervene. But performative principles also play a role in maintaining established institutions and ways of being. Performance demands that participants take on roles and perform them more or less effectively. Performance also establishes a separation between the relatively active people who have the authority to perform publicly important roles and relatively passive audiences who observe those institutionalized performances. In this paper I argue for a balanced view of the subversive potential of performance, taking seriously the tradition of anti-theatricality, in order to determine the role of performance both in undermining and in upholding established institutions, and I call attention to the potentially subversive (but often contradictory) role of what I call anti-performance, the attempt (which is just as contradictory as performance itself) to move beyond the performativity that is imposed by established institutions, in order to achieve new forms of being that are experienced not only as “played” but as “real.
A ‘What If’ Exercise: On the institution of the art school
Get PDFWe are increasingly experiencing an antagonistic polarization within the art schools. This seems to reflect the contemporary socio-political atmosphere, ruled by inequalities and injustices, fuelled by a narrative of scarcity and competition and by a very broadly spread mistrust, when not aggression, towards the very idea of the institution. As a matter of fact, schools are one of the few institutions in the theatre field providing a space for such polarizing relationships: they provide a space for friction, for conflict even.This paper approaches the theatre school as an institution and a thinking entity, in the attempt to explore the forms of agonism that it makes possible, and how they can support positive forms of polarization. It assumes the perspective that “we are the institution” and, by acknowledging the agency that each of us has within artistic institutions, suggests some ways of thinking and practicing theatre school otherwise
On (In)security: A conversation on education and intergenerational dialogues
Get PDFThis paper presents a Q&A conversation held at the Performance Philosophy Biennial in Amsterdam, 2019. Three presentations responded to the conference call of ‘intervening in the habit of academia as a place for mature or adult voices,’ by exploring ways of making space for children’s voices. Connected by a focus on intergeneration dialogues, children’s disruption and the possibilities of empowerment, both within education and within familial structures, the three presentations opened a discussion about interpellation, sensitivity and (in)security. This paper presents this discussion in a reworked and extended format, offering insight into the presentations on the day, the subsequent conversation and the overarching questions that these dialogues provoke
The Physical Consequence to Knowing: A speculative report
Get PDFThis is my first attempt at approaching the notion of agency as a practice though the mode of dancing and writing; deconstructing and reconstructing what I know experientially and what I am trying to comprehend theoretically. I am looking for a way of releasing bodily capacities from the jurisdiction of the mind, whose cartesian definition I don\u27t attempt to deny, as most people I have the chance to work with and teach exhibit in one way or another proof of the fact they’ve embodied the concept. All the while, I am considering philosophical texts, anatomical texts, and (science) fiction; I am taking into account my bodily experience, I am dancing and I am writing, I am teaching, conversing, occasionally making progress, occasionally falling back to the embrace of old habits, making unnecessary assumptions, and failing. Repetition is a part of the study. Minimal difference is a part of the study. Changing perspective is a part of the study. My strategy includes not trying to fix but approach with care and attention every step I am taking; every achievement, every set-back; every question and every answer. I assume my learning curve to be cyclical, as I continue to practice in public, always vulnerable but eager to engage in an exchange
Interruption—Intervention: On the interval between literature and music in Jean Luc Nancy’s “Myth Interrupted”
Get PDFThis paper focuses on the role of mimesis and more specifically, the role of musical performance in creating communities by examining the oscillations between muthos and logos that inform contemporary thinking around community and institutions.The starting point is Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) intervention—or interruption— into the totalitarian or “immanentist” tendency of myth, a tendency that is especially at play in European modernity’s image of itself as a myth-less community as well as in contemporary or “(new) fascism” (Lawtoo 2019). For Nancy, the notion of myth must not be rejected but “interrupted,” so that “there is a voice of community articulated in the interruption, and even out of the interruption itself” (1991). What replaces myth in his account is “literature” a notion that arguably informs the contemporary movement of performance philosophy (Corby 2015). Why literature and not musical performance? In posing this question, this paper turns back to ancient Greek mousik? as a sonorous performance that interrupts the interruption, giving rise to the interval. Countering the myth of myth, I develop an account of mousik? that mobilizes rhythm, spacing, and iterability to suggest a notion of community that exchanges communion for performative communication, producing an intervened institution interrupted from within: an in— stitution
Performing with the Masquerade: Towards a Corporeal Reconstitution of Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Performances
Get PDFThis contribution aims for a “corporeal reconstitution” (Irigaray) of Sophie Taeuber’s (1889-1943) dance performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada in 1916/17. This means that the movements from the static images informing the history of Dada art need to be re-imagined. It implies a rendering perceptible of Taeuber’s trained dancer’s body, its particular movements, and the quality of these movements. Through testimonies of contemporaries, it becomes clear that Taeuber not only dances in a costume or behind a mask but with the mask, the costume and sound poems. The reconstitution of the moving body with the mask thus points at a foregrounding of the masquerade to which she is convicted as a woman. Her mimetic strategy (Irigaray) or playful repetition of the masquerade entails a “radically new mode of relating” (Obler 2009, 223) between human and non-human materiality. Taeuber is not only moving in between puppet and puppeteer, movement and stasis, abstraction and expressivity, performer and mask, presence and absence, but also in between feminine and masculine. The hybrid movements in her mimetic strategy disrupt the binary nature of the oppositional pairs. In dancing the perpetual movement in between dualities, through a patchwork of genres and materials (her drawings, embroideries and tapestries are also driven by kinetic forces), Taeuber not only playfully rebels against patriarchal discourse, but also against the dehumanizing effects of World War One violently raging through Europe.
Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time
Get PDFRay Brassier\u27s "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" (written for the 2013 collaboration with Basque noise artist Mattin at Glasgow\u27s Tramway) is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour.Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs.I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science.This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain.This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change
Resting with Pines in Nida – attempts at performing with plants
Get PDFIs it possible to respond to the challenge of a philosopher with artistic means, rather than on the one hand by attempting to philosophize, or on the other hand by resorting to illustration or application? Perhaps it is not. This text is nevertheless an attempt at responding to the challenge posed to artists by Michael Marder who, in volume 1 of this journal, challenged philosophers and artists ‘to include the spatiality, movement, and perspective of the vegetal in their work’ (Marder 2015, 192). The artistic research project ‘Performing with plants’ could be understood as a response to this challenge. In this text I will briefly outline the plan for the project, relate it to the current interest in plant thinking, plant theory and new materialist feminist theory and then focus on some works loosely related to the project, which seem to resonate with Marder’s challenge in some sense. The variations of Resting with Pines performed in September 2017 in Nida Art Colony on the Curonian spit in Lithuania will serve as attempts to include and even emulate the vegetal, and as an example of a characteristic common to many performance practices, namely the tendency to go on, to ‘keep growing’
Ta’wil: in Practices of Light
Get PDFThis research is situated within an Islamic philosophical paradigm, with a series of experiments in studio art practice. In my investigation of Mulla Sadr?’s theory of systematic intensification, I was led towards Ta’wil, a unique method of interpretation, that is primarily used for interpreting the verses of the Quran. I extract this traditional Quranic method of interpretation, Ta’wil and translate it into a visual and collective dialogue, for a practice-oriented research. Keeping in view the traditional association of the method of Ta’wil towards the Quran, I suggest there is evidence that Ta’wil is a method that can be practised outside the interpretation of the text. It is a unique method of interpretation that performs in both physical and metaphysical worlds. Ta’wil is both a noun, as an object or happening in the physical, and a process of carrying a perceptible image (for example text of the Quran) towards higher and deeper understandings. I start my writing with a brief overview of my research area, moving towards Ta’wil in creative art practice.