Performance Philosophy (E-Journal)
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Self or Group Technology? : Ambiguities of the workshop format
Get PDFIn my contribution to this volume I would like to investigate in how far the recent spread of the workshop format in the dance field in its difference from the formats of rehearsal, training, or showing can be contrasted with the historical emergence of the workshop in the Neo-Avantgardes of the 1960s and thereby situated in the area of conflict between group technologies and technologies of the self. I am doing so by relating my own current research project to Michel Foucault´s late investigation of ascesis and different kinds of subjectivity, to Richard Schechner´s approach to the workshop, and to the research Ana Vujanovi?, Bojana Cveji?, and Marta Popivoda have been conducting under the title Performing the Self in the last years. At the end of this essay I will briefly say a few sentences about the durational event Life Forms which took place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin from April 25 till 27 (2019), since this contemporary workshop-like setting very much reflected on what I would like to call the paradox of the workshop
Staging Neoliberalism
Get PDFWhile the by now popular term "posttruth" remains, as Jayson Harsin and others argue, a contested and problematic concept, as a periodizing term it is useful in that it encapsulates collective anxieties and cognitive effects brought on by the increased commodification of knowledge, the marketization of political discourse, and the emergence of new economies and technologies of attention that fragment and destabilize relations of trust and authority across fields of inquiry (e.g. science and medicine), knowledge institutions (e.g. news and universities), and media technologies (e.g. video and photography) traditionally seen as arbiters of truth and facticity within the hegemony of Anglo-American liberalism. This paper considers the role of neoliberalism in the emergence of posttruth performance by reflecting on the work of public relations companies deployed in 2017 to promote the construction of a new power plant in New Orleans, as well as the work of the pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU in the run up to the 2016 referendum. Through these case studies the article demonstrates ways in which theater and performance studies can offer important critical tools with which to understand and dissect the structural conditions of posttruth in the twenty-first century
To the absent reader, to those who are going to arrive: On translation, radical indiscipline and epistemological care
Get PDFThe essay engages in conversation with the work of Pedro Lemebel, and attempts to articulate through its close reading a reflection on the stakes of epistemological care, language, and translation in contemporary globalised academia. This reflection is organized as a response to a series of texts, and stages a conversation between them: Pedro Lemebel’s Canción para un niño boliviano que nunca vio la mar (2004), the letter “White Colleagues Listen! An open letter to UK Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies” by the Network Revolution or Nothing (2020), Pedro Lemebel’s manifesto Hablo por mi diferencia (1986). Engaging in particular with the idea of “aesthetic education” advanced by Gayatri Spivak and with the reflections on language and decolonization articulated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the essay meditates on the political capacity that teachers and scholars, working in globalised neoliberal academia, can build together to attend to the urgent task of vigorously questioning the system of epistemological thinking that make possible the identification of any marker of difference
The Composite Incompossible: Forbidden symmetries
Get PDFThis work is a collaboration between Steve Tromans and Heidi Schmidt, and operates in the fold between sound art and philosophy. Both researchers recorded improvised monologues on themes of folding, the tesseract, space and time, and Tromans mixed these together in a composition that utilises time and pitch stretching, stereo-field panning, delay and echo-bounce effects, to provide for the listener an experience of “incompossibility” (cf. Deleuze 1988). The piece’s composite incompossibility is created through the superposition, unfolding, and enfolding of the voices – transforming their original space and time into a “forbidden” zone: the event of the piece’s tesseract. The final composition happens in the listening, rendering the listener a co-composer / compositor
On the Caesura in Dance: Reading Black Waters as history at a standstill
Get PDFThe art of dance, as a practice expressed in the body language of the dancer, addresses our bodily existence by resembling it. It has the narrative power to make us, as audiences who inhabit bodies ourselves, rediscover the body as a condition of being human that we all share. This illumination can lead us to look at each other’s bodies with more care. With this premise in mind, I call for a moment in the perception of dance that creates an awareness of the social references enacted in the performance. In my consideration, I focus on dance as evocative of imaginative thought, its stillness as dialectical, in which dance takes on an interrupting quality, and ask: How does the perception of a dancing body influence us as spectators in our thinking about the bodies of others? I read Phoenix Dance Theatre’s performance Black Waters (2020) as a representation of colonial history that sheds light on the visibility of Black identities and how they are read through the White gaze. This article particularises dance as a possibility of encounter that enhances decolonial thinking
Another Image of Existence: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri on their practice of Poethical Readings, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for a radical reevaluation of modern politics. An interview by Eve Katsouraki and Georg Döcker
Get PDFSince 2015/2016, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri have been engaging in a joint practice of so-called Poethical Readings, a device that engages the poetic and the ethical at the limits of the epistemology and ontology of the modern Subject. In this interview, Ferreira da Silva and Desideri provide insight into the singular and theatrical dynamics of Poetical Readings, as well as The Sensing Salon, a format for the collective exercise of Poethical Readings. They consider their practice with respect to the issue of power and the image of existence that undergirds modern politics, suggesting that Poethical Readings partake in the construction of a different image of existence no longer founded on the violent operations of the Subject. Having taken place in the autumn of 2020, that is, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the interview is framed by and addresses these issues through the discussion of the social ramifications of the corona crisis
Street Smart or Smart Street? Theater and environmental power
Get PDFIn its first part the essay reflects on an ongoing transformation in the history of power relations by commenting on a short passage from Elfriede Jelinek\u27s 2013 theater text Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges: The suppliants). Reading Jelinek\u27s words as a play on Martin Heidegger\u27s essay "Die Zeit des Weltbildes" ("The Age of the World Picture") but also on his concept of the "Gestell", the essay discusses a current crisis of pictorial framing which corresponds today\u27s reshaping of the logics of production by digital network technologies. The essay argues that one of the most significant symptoms of this development is an extensive "deterritorialization of the street" and its milieus which for historical reasons has a great impact on contemporary theater. Finally, the processes at stake are described as effects of an increasing implementation of "environmental governmentality", a term which the essay traces back to its Foucauldian roots.
The second part then focusses on "Flinn Works\u27" 2017 performance Global Belly which engages the audience in semi-documentary scenes on the phenomenon of surrogate motherhood, for which today sperm and egg cells are transported, mixed, discharged and returned around the globe in global operations. As will be shown here, this performance deals in fact remarkably with all the three issues developed in the first part of the essay
The Fading of an Archimedean Point: Stage and audience reconsidered
Get PDFInstead of a new “turn” of forms, the current landscape of performing arts is dominated by an immediate demand for political relevance, as well as by a correlative feeling of powerlessness. This can, however, no longer be grasped in terms of an opposition between autonomous and politically engaged art, because the framework of this opposition can no longer apply. Drawing on a distinction between renegotiation of power and desire, and transferring it into the field of performing arts, allows me to address epistemologically the shift we are currently facing. The emergence of new forms, as well as the way they are received, testify to the fading of an Archimedean point, the fading of a point from which to cast an eye on the artistic process of the emergence of forms. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition becomes then strangely relevant. She advocates the unconditional that comes to the fore with the human condition, while criticizing harshly the utilitarian consequences of the discovery of an Archimedean point in western cultural history. I argue that reconsidering “stage” and “audience” as space of appearance, we can take a stand for that which punctuates the emergence of forms, without considering it from an Archimedean point.
With W/Ringing Ears: an audiovisual response
No full textThis work emerges from The Panacousticon, a performative response in the form of a script by Caroline Wilkins (2016, 109-118) to an original essay by Freddie Rokem on eavesdropping in classical theatre (2015). As a sequel it has developed into a co-authored digital work in collaboration with multi-media artist Leona Jones.
With W/Ringing Ears draws a link between the Panacousticon, a listening device invented in the 1600s by philosopher Athanasius Kircher, and both analogue and digital tools of surveillance emerging over the last two centuries, presented in the form of images of eavesdropping. It comprises a re-worked audio script based on the original and excerpts from sound recordings made from this new material. Emerging from the images is a contextual provocation on hearsay and virtual (mis-)information assailing our ears at this time of pandemic crisis, as well as the re-appearance of the original play script by Wilkins.
The oral event of philosophising rebounds from the aural one. The acts of speaking and listening lead to the act of philosophising. Thus an initial experience of immediacy develops into a joint audio-phonic work, an acoustic act, a live encounter between performance and philosophy
Being in Touch: A metamorphosis of Jan Fabre’s The Castles of the Hour Blue into bodies of longing
Get PDFThe writer searches for ways of not losing touch with people during the covid-19 pandemic and the rules of social distancing. She realizes that isolation from people has led to a parenthesis of time and isolation from the future. By re-viewing her experience from the exhibtion The Castles of the Hour Blue of the Belgian visual and theatre artist Jan Fabre that she has visited twice, she explores the possibility of a future as longing, through the concept of metamorphosis and Fabre\u27s creative coping with time