Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Jazz-Philosophy Fusion
Get PDFIn this paper I describe and provide a justification for the fusion of jazz music and philosophy which I have developed; the justification is provided from the perspectives of both jazz and philosophy. I discuss two of my compositions, based on philosophical ideas presented by Schopenhauer and Derek Parfit respectively; links to sound files are provided. The justification emerging from this discussion is that philosophy produces ‘non-argumentative effects’ which provide suitable material for artistic expression and exploration. These effects – which are often emotional – are under-recognised in philosophy, but they do important philosophical work in demarcating the kinds of truths we want to discover, and in sustaining our search for them. Jazz-Philosophy Fusion can help to increase metaphilosophical self-consciousness about these effects, while also helping to counteract any undue persuasive force they may achieve. Jazz is a particularly suitable medium because it has independently developed a concern with philosophical ideas; because of strong parallels between jazz and philosophy which explain their mutual openness to fusions, and because improvisation very effectively facilitates the direct audience engagement essential to inducing these effects
Editorial
Get PDFThis editorial introduces Volume 2, Issue 1 of Performance Philosophy, including articles that respond to an open call for submissions and the introduction of a new section, [Margins], that supports creative, non-standard approaches to the manifold relationships that may arise out of the conjunction between performance and philosophy
Philosophical Performances in Everyday Life Situations
Get PDFThe real world of everyday life with its unfailing routines, repetitions and manifold habits may be seen as a matrix for the immanent expressions of what could holistically be called ‘The Void’, ‘The Real’ or simply ‘The all-embracing presence of immanence’. Thus, everyday life situations may tell us more than we normally assume about ourselves and the chimerical vision of an existing subject within the process of self-expression. But how can we investigate such situations in an appropriate manner, so that they show us by themselves somehow pre-reflexive patterns they incorporate? There is no unique method of how to investigate such situations; however, there should be a methodological form of performative settings beyond the stage which I would like to discuss.Following some of the ideas of Julian Klein and Arno Böhler on the significance of our feelings and on the limits of conceptual thinking I propose a specific form of philosophical performances, which is based on a grounding of emotions within thinking and on postponed deliberations within networking groups of individuals who are sharing a similar background of specific experiences in a given population
Bodily Schemata and Sartre\u27s I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement
Get PDFPhilosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers ‘let go of the mirror’ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness?In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to Edmund Husserl’s pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections
Joints and Strings: Body and Object in Performance
Get PDFThis article concerns the ontological status of the performing body. What if it were not considered derivative in relation to any kind of discursive construction or any kind of pre-existent materiality or force? What if it were taken as a starting point of our attempts to understand the linguistic and material aspects of our bodily co-existence? If so, our ideas of what a body can do while performing, and what it consists of, have to change radically. The anatomy of the performing body is studied through a series of scenic experiments and practical examples, and the argumentation rests on the evidence thus provided. On the philosophical level the discussion focuses on ’object-oriented ontology’ and its representatives. The indications are that our understanding of objects, objectivity and things in general is based on our understanding of bodies as linguistic entities. Becoming a performing body means becoming a linguistic body, and vice versa. This does not take us back to ‘transcendentalism’ or ‘correlationism’, however. The equality of all things, claimed by ‘ooo’ proponents, can only be achieved via the medium of the performing body as an equalizing instance.
The Deaths of Pan
Get PDFReimagining an ancient myth through a cross-temporal metaphor of a love story, this performance philosophical piece plays with language and theatrical conventions in a meditation on (dis)connection and memory in the times of the Internet and of capitalist modernity
Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy: Some Provocations on Genre Matters
Get PDFFollowing the inaugural symposium entitled Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy - Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre hosted by the Performance Philosophy Working Group “Genres of Dramatic Thought” which took place at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin in December 2014, this contribution is a series of attempts to both recapture the debates of the symposium and stake out the field of inquiry for our Working Group’s engagement within Performance Philosophy. By tracing philosophy’s dramatic heritage within the history of genre theory and pointing to its current and future developments, this piece suggests how attention to genre can work to deepen and expand the emerging landscape of Performance Philosophy
Expression and Bodily Faith in Natalie Heller’s First Impressions
Get PDFIn this essay I place choreographer Natalie Heller in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty on issues of motor-perception, expression and bodily faith. I analyze her new work First Impressions to demonstrate how she responds to a similar impulse that drove Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, particularly in his last writing, The Visible and the Invisible. Both Heller and Merleau-Ponty seek to go beyond the representational understanding of motion and perception in order to articulate and experiment with a type of expression, which is beyond the distinctions between motion and motionlessness, activity and passivity, visibility and invisibility. While Merleau-Ponty writes about this form of expression, Heller’s performers show that beyond these binaries is a form of expression that is ambiguously situated between impressing and being impressed upon, and that to engage the world or the city as such, requires a motor-perceptual form of faith
Siting Performance Philosophy: Positions, Encounters and Reflections at Beirut: Bodies in Public
Get PDFBeirut: Bodies in Public was a three-day workshop that took place in Beirut, Lebanon from 9-11 October 2014, supported by a Performance Philosophy grant for interim conference events. The workshop integrated academic research with performances, movement workshops, film, and site-specific responses to the city, and welcomed disciplinary perspectives from a broad range of fields. In this article, the convenors Ella Parry-Davies and Eliesh S.D. reflect on the central issues and encounters foregrounded by the event, and the disciplinary or methodological implications of the project for performance philosophy. Taking as its central provocation the controversial statement: “Art in public spaces doesn’t exist anymore”, the workshop sought to address the role of embodied practice in Beirut’s precarious public sites. Insofar as philosophy can be ‘performed’, it is grounded in the particularities of its social space, an utterance shaped by its historical and geopolitical locality. As a practice of performance philosophy, then, Beirut: Bodies in Public triangulated these two forms-of-knowing with a third: the interrogation presented by the site itself - its potentialities, contingencies and challenges
From Odd Encounters to a Prospective Confluence: Dance-Philosophy
Get PDFThis text inquires into the relationship between Western philosophy and Western theatre dance from their odd encounters in modernity to the current affiliations between contemporary choreographic poetics, critical theory and contemporary philosophical thought. The point of departure for the inquiry is a discussion of the three problems that have structured the historically vexed relationship between dance and philosophy: dance’s belated acquisition of the status of an art discipline, the special ontological status of the work of dance, and the limits of dance’s meaning-production set by the theme of bodily movement’s “ephemerality” and “disappearance.” After critically examining the approaches of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in whose philosophies dance is relegated to a metaphor or, even worse, to an ahistorical conduit for a general ontology, the author makes a case for another movement of thought that arises in dance practice and is at the same time philosophical, rooted in Spinoza’s (and Deleuze’s) principle of expression. Demonstrating how choreographers, like Xavier Le Roy and Jonathan Burrows, create by “posing problems,” Cveji? presents a theory of “expressive concepts,” whereby choreography contributes to a philosophical rethinking of the relationship between the body, movement and time. This points to the new prospects of a kind of “dance-philosophy,” in which the epistemic hierarchy is reversed: the stake is no longer in what philosophy could do for dance, but how an experimental, radically pragmatic orientation in dance offers a practical framework for theorizing perception, concept-formation and other philosophical issues