Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Choreographies of Dissent and the Politics of Public Space in State-of-Emergency Turkey
Get PDFThis article investigates a recent period in which dissenting activism has been shifted in Istanbul under the state of emergency (2016-2018). Based on an ethnography conducted with activists in feminist and LGBTQI+ demonstrations, anti-emergency decree vigils, and the Presidential Referendum protests, the study discusses how activists resist and undermine mobilization of violence through using the hegemonic tools of repression tactically, and choreographically. By employing Hannah Arendt’s concepts of “politics” and “isolation,” I examine that state agencies like the police forcefully disperse protesters and display authority, oppression, and occupation of public spaces by constantly creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. In opposition, dissenters practice and rehearse dispersal as a resilient choreography to once again relate each other against the forces of isolation. I suggest the term “tactics of dispersal” to define and analyze how activists depart from the central assembly of the social movement to create smaller, mobile, and ephemeral assemblies. In the city-scale, by scattering themselves in the city of Istanbul and mobilizing peripheries of the urban space, dissenters re-choreograph and subvert a thanatopolitical strategy of dispersal in favor of pluralism under political hardship. In the bodily-scale, activists claim the public sphere through the transience of folk dance. Whenever protesters depart from folk dance collectives to create new ones, they perpetually re-configure the area and initiate novel actions contingent upon their temporal and positional assessments during the dance. Such tactical applications of dispersal characterized by the smaller scale and transitory gatherings with ever-changing combinations of bodies at the peripheral space of urban activism manifest its great potential for collective agency and plural politics.
Break Up Variations: An Annotated Score
Get PDFBreak Up Variations is an annotated score by means of which we consider the document as a break-up from — and with — the thinking of performance. We explore the formal categories of page-based and stage-based scores and documentations of performance, asserting the simultaneity of the document and its performance in their mutual departures, theorising the break-up as a form of relation, not as its absence. As a committee of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners, we consider annotation in terms of affective and theoretical responses to each other’s subject positions.Break Up Variations relates to the problems particular to working in groups: the challenges of collaboration, the disagreements and community-led conflict resolutions, the difficulties with acting professionally, and the desires to keep working together, despite it all. We ask the following questions of each other and ourselves: What are the strategies that art, science, politics and theory might offer each other for navigating — possibly circumventing — the demise of relationships? If the working relationship breaks down, could the end of the group be considered a constitutive aspect of that group? We consider these questions to be about institutions as much as they are about interdependence on personal and planetary scales. Riffing on ideas about romantic break-ups, political dissolutions and ecological collapse, Break Up Variations considers the possibility that an end to a dream of symbiotic life is exactly what makes that dream possible and important
Hopeful Acts in Troubled Times: Thinking as interruption and the poetics of nonconforming criticism
Get PDFIn his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.)
Failing to Think: The Promise of Performance Philosophy
Get PDFPerformance Philosophy, at its most hopefully imagined, seems to promise to succeed where other philosophical discourses and performative practises have come up short—perhaps even failed. That is to say, far from simply announcing a relatively modest interdisciplinary venture between philosophy and performance, Performance Philosophy seems invested with a radical potential that would, if realised, reveal a paradigm of creation and/or interpretation that is quite new and distinct. Its achievements, if successful, would be beyond the compass of performance and philosophy conceived independently of each other. Even the term itself, ‘Performance Philosophy’, conveys a certain paratactical momentum that seems directed towards a profound artistic, intellectual, and disciplinary miscegenation where neither performance nor philosophy would remain separate and intact and neither would be subordinated to or conditioned by the unchanged disciplinary genealogy and underpinnings of the other. Though exciting in prospect, this is far from unproblematic. Is performance, as an act of deliberate creative expression, not to some degree pulling in the opposite direction to truth-revealing, knowledge-bearing philosophy? Or does Performance Philosophy relate only to more elastic understandings and redefinitions of philosophy? More specifically, this article asks what ‘thinking’ ‘itself’ might be in the context of Performance Philosophy and what sort of ‘knowledge’ it might give rise to. It will be argued that against the usual measures of epistemological success Performance Philosophy must be judged to fail. However it will then explores whether, in a move reminiscent of the aesthetics of failure of early German Romanticism, it is precisely failure that seems to hold the promise of opening up new epistemological ground.
Climate Change and the Inescapable Present
Get PDFThe crisis of climate change is a difficult phenomenon to conceptualize, particularly in light of how we experience time and how our consciousness works. It is an event that spans tense in ways that are difficult to pinpoint, and it provides no past precedent to shape our future anticipations. Furthermore, climate change encounters us at a moment when time also feels compressed. This paper explores climate change and its relationship to time by assessing how theatre, with its own phenomenologically unique qualities of time and experience, has portrayed these tensions. Utilizing phenomenological theories of time from Husserl and Heidegger, and drawing on philosophical and cultural theories of presentism, this paper examines how these ideas manifest in two climate change plays: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne’s Greenland (2011) and Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion (2012). In conclusion, it is argued that theatre’s own conventions of time and space allows an inescapable present to exist, in which audiences are given a phenomenological experience of climate change that is otherwise unparalleled
Love in the Time of Crisis: Examining the Subject of Love in the Southbank\u27s Festival of Love (2016)
Get PDFThis article is an interrogation of love, as it is understood, conceptualised, and practiced in the social sphere, focussing specifically on the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love (London, UK, 2016). By drawing on Christian Lotz’s social material critique of love (2015), and Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality (2009) I argue that the Festival of Love, whilst asserting love as celebratory and aspirational, does in fact demonstrate the governmentalised love of modern liberal governance.Following this I engage with Gillian Rose’s discussion of love in periods of social crisis (1992) in order to articulate what might be understood as the ambitions of governmentalised love, and, moreover, what is at stake in this politically. In doing so I draw out the dangers of love as a concept and practice of modern governance, so as to stress the importance of thinking love differently, as an ethico-political practice
Krisis as the Scene of Non-Decisional Judgement: A Performance Fiction for the Generic Human
Get PDFFrançois Laruelle’s non-standard aesthetics proposes a framework for ‘conjugating’ philosophy with the arts to articulate new models of thought (2012a). This posture of thinking is posed as a defence of man against the presuppositions that ground philosophy, which conceptually overdetermine the human and condemn thought to a perpetual state of crisis (Gracieuse et al. 2012). Laruelle’s epistemological approach holds a certain potential for the field of performance philosophy because it brings performance together with philosophy in a non-hierarchical arrangement that combines their respective means, producing an ‘art of thought’ (Laruelle 2012a, 5). This article examines the effects of bringing performance into thought in this manner, by putting Laruelle’s pragmatics into practice. It enacts a non-standard re-description of two sets of theoretical materials: one ‘philosophical’, the other from ‘performance theory’. The first, a deconstruction of the performativity of human rights declarations (Hamacher 2006), resonates with Laruelle’s concerns about the conceptual overdetermination of the human; however, it appeals to the Platonic scene of krisis as an alternative paradigm for presenting the human—which remains an event with a crisis-structure. The second, an aesthetic theory of performance conceived as a liminal event (Fischer-Lichte 2008), has a similar structure. By articulating these materials together, I will show how terms can be extracted from performance theory and used as a means to radicalise the scene of krisis, producing a stage on which the ‘human’ can be presented in an underdetermined mode. This allows us to achieve a non-predicative theorisation of the human that eludes Hamacher, whilst demonstrating through practice the abstract procedure by which ‘performance’ is utilised in the context of non-standard aesthetics
Crisis and the Im/possibility of Thought
Get PDFThe ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world means that we do not so much write about crisis as much as we write from crisis. What type of thought is possible within crisis? If crisis extends to thought itself, insofar as we find ourselves in a crisis of thought (i.e., the crisis of not being able to think beyond the crisis of thought), then what kind of thinking is possible anymore? These are the questions raised by this special issue of Performance Philosophy, introduced here by the issue\u27s co-editors
The Listening Theatre: A Metamodern Politics of Performance
Get PDFThis article offers a speculative analysis of emerging modalities and methods of creating within contemporary political performance made by British millennial artists that I argue have arisen in response to specific socio-economic, political and philosophical crises affecting us. By locating the term ‘millennial’ as a structure of feeling, as per Raymond Williams, I argue that, despite the inherent hypocrisy of generational research, the impact of these crises upon members of the generation has led particular artists to create empathetic dialogues between audience and performer. This article also argues that the emerging concept of metamodernism, popularised by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, is inherent in understanding this reading of the millennial, and descriptive of particular ethical and aesthetic developments within millennial, political theatre. This article argues that these developments are in a direct response to the metamodern shift towards the essence of progress and truth as acts and ideas that also necessitate and propel constant crisis, oscillation and dialogue.
Theatre at the Impasse: Political Theology and Blitz Theatre Group\u27s Late Night
Get PDFThis essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity