Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Performativity of Death in Post-Soviet Russia: The Party of the Dead\u27s growing membership
Full text linkOur research group AGITATSIA unites researchers connected with post-Soviet history (from Belarus/Germany, Russia, USA/Estonia and France), and with interest in collectivity and multidisciplinary approach. Our areas of study include philosophy, cultural studies, art criticism, linguistics, artistic performative activity, sociology; we are united by an interest in the most radical line in contemporary Russian art, which is actionism and political performance.
We believe that the theme of performativity of death brings together two important lines of an involved, independent art—death and performance—which constitute the “burning and smouldering” problems of the contemporary cultural process in Russia. The COVID-19 pandemic became a pretext for artists and activists to resurrect the problem of death and methods of working with it. Now after the beginning of full-scale Russian military invasion throughout the whole territory of Ukraine it became clear that artists anticipated reality in many ways. The question of death in Russia is haunted by a question of justice—both philosophically and in relation to the perceived failures of the system of law. The necro-performances of the collective Party of the Dead from Saint-Petersburg manifest the importance of performance as a ritual of mourning in days of pandemic and war
Drama and Desire: Theorising entangled performance practice
Full text linkFrom Plato’s erotic symposium, through sex and death on Early Modern British stages, to Freud’s venture beyond pleasure, the ludic practice of plays and playing has long been associated with desire. This paper theorises that association for the first time, to propose an affiliation between stage and psyche. If we think of Freud’s obsession with Oedipus it is obvious that psychoanalysis has always leaned on drama; but when we read drama through the lens of desire, the relationship between drama and psychoanalysis becomes more structurally precise. It is as if Freud had modelled his topology of the psyche, directly upon the three carefully curated spaces at the Theatre of Dionysus. Reading stage-as-psyche allows us to explore the complex psycho-social connexions that take place in dramatized space in new ways. The paper maps Lacan’s reading of Borromean knots onto the stage to explore how the auditorial gaze, staged voice, and obscene backstage soundscape interconnect; and how they can be activated and suppressed in various dramatic and applied performance practices to generate startlingly different states of subjectivity. The paper offers fresh insight into how performance can position us to be creative, or receptive, in relation to culture, with important implications for artists who want to challenge anthropocentric practices
Performance Philosophy 7(2) (2022): Imagining the open
No full textThis is the editorial for Performance Philosophy 7(2) (2022
Being and Showtime: ReView
Full text linkIn the ReView I will re-experience notions of time explored in “The About Time Show” (Chapter 6 of Being And Showtime) which repeats and extends Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness. I first became interested in using common language to disorient the audience in a 2015 iteration of my traveling one-man show called “MR. MDWST.” From 2017-2019 I further explored how language can dislocate time through guttural chanting, repetition, and call and response in “Wild American Dogs Big Time Traveling Tent Revival,” another performance project. Reading Steeves’ chapter on time revived and deepened my interest in the potential of vocal performance to confuse time and space and inspired me to compose “Ode to H. Peter Steeves” and to resurrect my own examination of time through a newly created series of multi-modal, multi-dimensional performances re-presenting Steeves’ investigation in new forms of action. This ReView will lead Performance Philosophy audiences to re-experience notions of time by intentionally disorientating through an expanded ReView format and the performance of language thus disrupting our shared experiences of time
champurrias
Full text linkThis is a text by the Chilean artist, Paula Montecinos Oliva. The text is a confluence of written streams, influenced by conversations, practices and creative processes shared with Johan Mijail, Flavia Pinheiro, Pedro Matias, Devika Chotoe, Veza Fernandez, Papaya Kuir Collective and accompanied by the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Edouard Glissant, Fred Moten and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, among others.
El pensamiento selvage: [The Savage Mind / La Penseìe sauvage]
No full textThis is a text by the Brazilian artist Flavia Pinheiro. For Pinheiro, “This essay is an attempt to ask—in a frustrated and submerged, tear-sunken technology of wording and on behalf of the ones who never had the right to live or who do not belong, or those who have never been here, for those who died right after birth—what it could be if we dream and act together, towards indiscipline and disruption of macrostructures”.
Hacia Helsinki / Helsinki Bound
Full text linkThis provocation responds to Lagunaries\u27 participation as a keygroup in Philosophy Performance Problems 2022. Using our constantly evolving methodology to work with texts and stories, we set out to think together through a coral writing exercise, the different meanings to the words key and group. In Spanish key is both a llave and a clave, which in turns unlock different meanings. We also use the word grupa to propose breaking away from established non-feminist ways of being together
whiteness
Full text linkThis “illuminated” video essay works through the juxtaposition of textual and audiovisual material to interrogate the cultural and philosophical whiteness of bodies and institutions. It demonstrates a reciprocal and circular relationship between textuality and audiovisuality insofar as the documented practice responds to a textual object — a physical copy of Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Man and Animal — while another layer of critical poetic text interrupts, critiques, analyzes, and illuminates the video. Agamben’s treatment of Heidegger is taken as a reference point to deconstruct the racialized human/animal binary, while the productively ambiguous perspective on whiteness found in contemporary Black studies and critical race theory is invoked as a possible alternative. At the same time, the tactile and sensory qualities of the documented practice — hovering between song and speech, gesture and action — emphasize the embodied, material, and affective dimensions of both whiteness and our attempts to escape it. The video asks: Can the white body be decolonized without killing it? Its multimedial form implies that answers to such a question can only be found through forms of thought that displace the tyranny of writing, or logocentrism, as is also suggested by Fred Moten in the video’s closing epigraph
Powerlessness as Potential: Gigi Argyropoulou on artistic self-organisation in times of crisis, the micro-physics of power in theatre occupations, and how performance can learn from children. An interview by Eve Katsouraki and Georg Döcker
Full text linkIn this interview piece, the theorist, practitioner and curator Gigi Argyropoulou discusses current forms of political theatre in public spaces that she’s been involved with. She focuses particularly on her work with Eight (Το Οχτώ), the Green Park and the Embros Theatre, all of which are theatre projects situated in central Athens, in Greece. She analyses the dynamics of creating work collectively as a group of practitioners that share similar political and artistic objectives. The interview took place during the Covid pandemic which Argyropoulou discusses in relation to how it has affected her practice and the practice of performance projects she was currently running. Her analysis of the problematics and aspirations of a collective aesthetic in performance-making, discussed in relation to the occupy movement and the future of political performance in public spaces, offers us a sobering yet optimistic view of theatre in times of crisis as well as of the potential of theatre-making in future radical projects of protest, collectivity, and resistance
Diary of a Colonial Diarrhea: Trying to justify the unjustifiable
Full text linkThis is a text by the Brazilian theatre maker and educator, Rodrigo Batista. For Batista: this is an essay “resulting from a process of artistic reflection condemned by the neoliberal ties of individualism and the boycott of collective and decentralized thoughts. It is a diary of colonial diarrhea, generated by centuries-old bad meals, seasoned with Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and the maintenance of hegemonies that continue to explode entire digestive systems, killing cultures and exposing rotten intestines on hygenic screens for consumption 24/7”.