Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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The Work of Sharing: Discussing performance in the mode of performance
Full text linkThis multimedia essay is describing or rather demonstrating one attempt at dealing with the problem how to discuss performance in the mode of performance, based on the presentation at the Performance Philosophy conference in Helsinki in June 2022. There we—four members of the Artistic Research Working Group (ARWG) of Performance Studies international (PSi)—tried to present and demonstrate in a miniature form one of the methods for sharing we have explored in the working group, and to do it in a hybrid format, with two performers in the room and two performers present via zoom. The three phases of the method (perform–respond–expand) were performed by three members of the group and condensed into three minutes of prerecorded material per person at each stage. An extract of our preparatory discussions on zoom is added to the essay, as well as a link to the working group archive or blog
Community and Choreography: A Reflection on Dance’s Constitutive Outside
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to take a step backwards. The problem of community in contemporary dance cannot be accurately thought without first looking at dance’s constitutive outside, namely social dancing. This is where most dancing actually happens, but it falls outside the remit of contemporary dance as an artform. And it is a constitutive outside because dance as an artform historically emerged by separating itself off from social dancing, all while remaining bound up with it. In social dancing, the nature of dance is clearly on display: dancing always served community formation and used to be an intrinsic part of life’s most important rituals. But in order to become art, dancing was transformed into “works”, which populate an “imaginary museum” (Goehr) and which transcend the moment of performance so that they can be seen, re-seen and contemplated by an audience. Deprived of its organic embeddedness in communities, dance must now re-connect with societal and ethical issues from within the artificiality of its own medium. I discuss the choreographic strategies of two very different figures, Bronislava Nijinska and Tino Sehgal, who both show an exemplary awareness of the specificity of dance as an artistic medium
Poetics of Friction
Full text linkWhat are the problems in our current lifeworld? And how can they be addressed, worked on (or even be solved)? What are the possibilities and difficulties of Performance Philosophy to contribute to reflections on the crisis-ridden, everyday situations we are in, with our very embodied existences, and with our thoughts, fears, hopes (and even prayers), inside and outside art and academia? Called by these questions, our panel attempts to collaboratively work on corresponding responses within a poetics of friction that is rehearsed, acted out, and tried out in a setting where forces come into play that resist relative motions of solid approaches and beliefs sliding against each other: Whereas the three panelists – a multimedia artist, a cultural theorist, and a philosopher – call with their spoken words, screened images and handout materials, the members of the audience respond to these calls: Like the wheel that needs the concrete surface against its rubber to spin in movement, or the piece of wood that needs the wooden stick rotating against its bark to spark a flame, members of Performance Philosophy need frictions with which both Performance artists and Philosophy scholars slide against each other to spin, to move, to carry on, to reflect, to struggle, to doubt, to aim, to spark flames of inspiration. While the sources of such an inspiration are manifold, three of them come into movement and display during the rehearsal: (1) excavation, (2) meaning, and (3) sense
Responsive Bodies: Towards an Ethics of Contemporary Dance
Full text linkProviding an introduction to six major contributions towards an ethics of contemporary dance, the text draws on the example of Anna Halprin’s Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (1989) and raises the fundamental question: How does an ethical responsibility arise in the situation of a performance and extends beyond the moment of dancing and the experience of a dance piece? How can we understand contemporaneity beyond shared time and presence so that contemporary dance can acknowledge the fragility and incompleteness of the past and unlock the potentiality of the future? And how is this understanding of contemporaneity linked to ethical responsiveness in dance and dance reception
The Problem of Hybridity: Triangulating zones of entanglement between knowledge and embodied practice
Full text linkSpeculative Design offers a methodological toolbox with which to explore, and potentially legitimize, alternative models and modes of knowledge through world-building not based on, or not yet based on, socially normalised ‘truths’. However, a problematic dichotomy remains: whilst a neutral, transparent and universal truth may be a fantasy construct, the disturbance of such a construct through individual embodiments is no simple alternative. It requires a careful observation of the modes and assumptions, the premises and processes of different knowledge-generating practices within the confines of academia and beyond. In short, it requires actual (not simply professed) inter- and trans-disciplinarity; in other words: actual working together. So: How do we work together?
Drawing from a range of different disciplines and hybrid forms of research, including artistic research, design, philosophy, and various types of embodied practice, the team members of Spec Space, the Laboratory for Speculative Design Research at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), attempted to perform this inter- and trans-disciplinarity on the stage of the Performance Philosophy conference in Helsinki. They demonstrate different ways of knowing, approaching and triangulating the question of what can emerge, once the traditional domains of academia and science (“Wissenschaft”), are no longer regarded as exclusive sites for knowledge production
The Philosomer
Full text linkA decade on from its founding, it is the right time to take stock and consider the manner of Performance Philosophy’s constitution and its projection into and onto the world. There are questions about how it narrates itself, both inwardly to its network (though the global reach of Performance Philosophy suggests that ‘inward’ is not the right word here) and outwardly towards interlocutors nominally outside the network. One challenge concerns the “performative materialisation” of Performance Philosophy’s many practitioners. This can be unpacked with a few questions: Who witnesses events? Who intervenes materially? Who contributes to the network? Whose collaboration increases social capital? Who evaluates practitioners’ self-management? Other questions are possible. This essay considers some of these questions
Questioning ‘Man’ in Joana Tischkau’s Colonastics: Black Feminist Identity Politics in Contemporary German Theater
Full text linkIn my contribution to this volume on Responsive Bodies I want to take a closer look at recent Black feminist identity politics in German theater in order to think about what the Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls ‘Man.’ In this regard later in this text I will focus on the video clip series Colonastics (2020) by Joana Tischkau. I will do so in relation to the colonial roots of post-war racism in Germany, more precisely the time after its reunification in 1989. In front of this background my claim is that Afro-German feminist theater makers in the last couple of years have been responding to a certain white dominant culture in the country I am living in as a white German, where right-wing political parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are getting stronger again right now unfortunately. The responsiveness corresponding with the aesthetic practices of the theater makers being discussed here questions, I am claiming with Wynter, ‘Man’ as a dominant genre of being human and thereby brings forth a true pluralization of German society
By the time you read this it is already too late: The problem of the online lecture
Full text linkPerformance is that which attempts to hold that within which it itself is held. This may take the form of an explicit theatricality, foregrounding and reflecting upon the conditions of being seen and being heard, of the speech and appearance of an actor – which can have both dramatic as well as political dimensions (Arendt [1958] 1998; Schmidt 2017). Or it may take the form of an intentional or habitual performativity, generating the conditions which it purports to describe (Butler 2015; Paavolainen 2018).
Performance-writing and performance-lectures are well-developed strategies for attempting this reflexive double-hold, in which the content reshapes the container of delivery such that it becomes an instance of that which it is also describing. Performance writing foregrounds ‘the transformative play of text as performance’ (Allsopp 1999, 79), emphasizing ‘writing as doing’ as much as ‘writing as meaning’ (Pollock [1995] 1998, 75), and treating the encounter with and through writing as ‘event’ in its own right (Heathfield 2006). Putting these approaches into practice, an artist like John Hall might use the dimensions and affordances of the printed page as a space to enact, not just describe, the encounters it produces (Hall 2004), or the lecture performances of Rabih Mroué simultaneously describe the effects of representation and participate generatively within their own representational dispositifs (Mroué and Martin 2012; Mroué and Saneh [2005] 2013).
How might these strategies be engaged in relation to the ‘problems’ of online teaching? That is to say, the problems of asynchronous engagement, distraction, remoteness and spatiotemporal lag? Rather than obstacles to the apprehension of the subject of performance, could these aspects of the online experience themselves by the subject of the performative act of ‘lecturing’, taking itself as an example to be explored for its pedagogical as well as eventual potential? This online performance-lecture is about these conditions of online gathering, even as it is itself held within them
Autofictions in Co-labouring
Full text linkIn this co-authored text, the Dissonant Co-Labouring Key Group examines the difficulties, gaps, political slippages and entanglements of collaboration in its encounter with artistic and educational institutions. Engaging autofiction as a scholarly mode with different models of co-authorship, the Key Group move through critical engagements with working conditions, temporalities of labour and its instrumentalisation within and beyond universities and cultural ecologies. Dialoguing with a plurality of voices and registers, the text invokes adjacent and overlapping temporalities of working together, attends to different modalities of critical thought and collapses the distinction between the fictive and the real.