Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Os Pássaros: [The Birds]
Full text linkThis is a text by the Brazilian theatre director, dramaturg and performer, Carolina Bianchi. As Bianchi writes, this text is: “a small reflection on working practices; and to talk about practices it is inevitable that we take into consideration the collectivisation of passions. And if I talk about passions, I talk about my anger. If, for a very long time, the word behind a lot of things in my work was eroticism or libido, I would say that now it is anger. I write with a lot of anger, punishing the keys of my borrowed computer, as if my fingers were iron hammers. In the eye of the pandemic in 2020, since I joined the University of Amsterdam to start a Master\u27s degree, what does it mean to be at a physical distance from those I’ve been working with every day for the last years?”
Cancelled Time: COVID-19 and the Power of Time in Performance and Politics
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected contemporary performing arts in several ways, not least in the form of mass cancellations of performances and production processes in many countries around the world in the year 2020. In this article, I propose to view the interruption of performative processes as the event of a time of cancellation: the transition of unrealised futures into the past, where they persist as past futures and reservoirs of what could have been. The time of cancellation from performance is juxtaposed with the cancellation of time from the politics or anti-politics of proto-fascism during the pandemic. Proto-fascist tendencies are analysed in terms of their desire for a suicidal state which signifies the will for total sovereignty over life and death and time in the moment of self-destruction. In proposing to view the time of cancellation and the cancellation of time as a political constellation of cancelled time, I argue for the politicisation of past futures from performance as a counter-measure to the destruction of the future in proto-fascism
Antigone’s Choice: Tragedy and philosophy from dialectic to aporia
Full text linkShaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre.
 
Experimental Music and the Political: Performativity in the art of John Cage
Full text linkThis text aims to explore some of the philosophical inquiries that arise from experimental music, focusing on the following question: How is music, without words, capable of producing and enacting political thought? Focusing on John Cage\u27s art an exploration of the performativity of music is proposed, understanding performativity both as the effects that music has on its audience, and its “theatrical” quality. Cage’s work is especially well suited for this objective, inasmuch as it is based upon both an explicit desire to modify the perception of its audience, and an interest in developing an art form that is closer to “theatre” (in a broad sense). As Alejandro L. Madrid has suggested, using performativity as a lens of analysis to study music shifts the question “What is music?” to “What does music do?” and “What does it allow people to do?” Through a revision and discussion of Cage’s art pieces, the author of this text argues that Cage’s work supposes a destabilization of traditional notions and roles, allowing people to listen to their surroundings with greater attention and pleasure (thus questioning Eurocentric and anthropocentric conceptual and sensorial frameworks inherited from the past), and to perform atypical social relations of an anarchist nature
To Be Powerful Without the Means of Power: aCORdo by Alice Ripoll and Azdora by Markus Öhrn
Full text linkThis article inquires into the tension between power as restriction and power as empowerment, as investigated by means of performance in two works: aCORdo by Alice Ripoll and Azdora by Markus Öhrn. These works, which offer a glimpse of the possible shifts from ‘power over’ to ‘power to,’ are put into dialogue with feminist thinkers Luisa Muraro and Rosi Braidotti. Their concepts of authority as a way ‘to be powerful without the means of power’ and of potentia as ‘the capability of enduring and resisting’ are oriented to think power as oriented to the construction of possibilities and relationships. The two performances give to these concepts a body marked by a specific identity: the poor man of colour and the industrious housewife. Yet, rather than setting at the centre the bodies themselves, the works complexify the relationships around them. Through the theatre device, they flip around a set of relations between fixed identities and open them up to often unnoticed ways of performing power and authority, embed their transformation process in a radical relationality, and set the conditions for the experience of an affirmative potentia
Power and Powerlessness in Performance: An Introduction in Three Parts
No full textThis editorial is an introduction to power / powerlessness, theatre and performance conceived as an intervention piece in three parts written by each of the three editors of this issue. The first part is an extended analysis of power and powerless in performance developed by Georg Döcker. The second part, developed by Eve Katsouraki, discusses the implications of a powerless theatre, especially during times of crisis such as the recent pandemic, and urges us to consider a new resilient model of theatre. Finally, the third part, by Gerald Siegmund, focuses on the interface between powerlessness and the aesthetics of theatre and performance. All the three interventionist parts of this introduction offer a conceptual framework upon which the articles of this issue can be seen to develop their examinations. We decided against offering descriptions of the articles themselves since each author has provided an abstract of their article
Imperceptible Bodies: Haptic counter-pleasures in the work of Marcelo Evelin
Full text linkIn this article I investigate the choreographic practice and work of Marcelo Evelin as a specifically haptic mode of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call becoming-imperceptible. In times where power dynamics become ever more supple and non-localisable, the notion of becoming-imperceptible is an apt conceptual figure in naming both the conditions of power as well their modes of resistance. On this basis, I analyse Evelin’s practice of massa in its choreographic hapticality as a collective process of desubjectification, in which bodies become prismatic as they refract one another in a pluralistic field of agency. I then turn to Evelin’s group piece, A Invenção da Maldade (2019), which, in my view (and among other things) expands this haptic and prismatic field to include the audience. By doing so, the piece can be said to engender what I call haptic space. Through an in-depth analysis of the work I argue that haptic space is an asignifying and appositional mode of co-existence that has the capacity to problematize contemporary forms of power by intensifying affect-ability and virtual tactility. Finally, I contemplate the psychosocial effects of the loss of haptic spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic
sobre conexões que transcendem o controle: [about links that transcend control]
No full textThis is a text by the Brazilian artist, photographer, curator, storyteller, editor, and articulator Ana Lira, that provides a preface to the writings gathered in South Boom Boom: this special section of the Performance Philosophy journal. In the text, Lira reflects on how the texts demonstrate different layers of refusal to the "visible and symbolic violence, which gains new contours in each cycle, continues to (de)mark creative lives even in territories that claim to be revising their "colonial pasts, structures and methodologies.
Reflections on curatorial articulation practices. A collective doing: that\u27s why I don\u27t write alone
Full text linkIn this text, Brazilian artist Mario Lopes addresses how he redefines and reuses the word "curatorship" through his practices according to nine specific steps and introduces the idea of Afrotranstopia. As Lopes explains: “For a long time, the term "curator" has triggered noises and conflicts in me. I question the practices and market logics operating within our viral system, which I call PACACO-bi: Patriarchy, Capitalism and Colonialism within a binary structure. I name "PACACO-bi" this syndemic virus of our history, which affects us as humanity and governs us as a society. For this reason, considering myself a curator is a permanent conflict in each experience where I act as such. I try to exercise a curatorial practice that, on principle, combats this viral system, constantly asking myself: Is it possible to break with the logics immanent to the capitalist system, at the same time freeing myself from the patriarchal place of power? Is it possible to overcome the binary logic and colonial methods of action pervading social relations?”
Operational Choreography: Dance and logistical capitalism
Full text linkThe paper adresses dance in regard to logistical capitalism and its operational politics. Operational politics denotes the control of processes from their inside, regulated and modulated by their very own logic. Instead of subsuming processes to external regulators such as pregiven scripts, goals or acting and moving subjects, operational politics is based on the logic of process itself and its regulation via immanent techniques. In regard to movement, operational politics started to gain hold in the field of logistics in the 1960s. Over the last decades, these operational choreographies proliferated into all realms of society, creating a logistical regime that comprises modes of thinking as much as modes of existence and action. It governs the movements of economic production as much as the way we perceive, live and move. Dance – seen as a practice in which new modes of thinking, moving and acting as well as new forms of subjectivity are explored in a physical manner – became an integral part of this logistical regime: In dance, the logic of operations is exercised beyond the realm of business organization. The study of operational choreography in dance as it is proposed in the paper is therefore twofold: On the one hand, it offers an analysis of the modes of logistical power at work in performances. On the other hand, it reveals how performances investigate the logistical regime itself and its operational politics on a bodily level