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The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction
Abstract
Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources offers a comprehensive collection of key writings on a subject which has come to permeate fields as diverse as theatre, comparative literature, philosophy, geography, history, English, science and technology studies, in what has been termed the transdisciplinary ‘performative turn’. The collected essays draw upon writing from these diverse disciplines, together illustrating how performance has become an ever more vibrant and plastic discursive practice. It includes perspectives from regions and disciplines less well-represented in performance theory up to now, including from East Asia and the Middle East, as well as from material sciences and engineering, physics, and education theory. Selections also include indigenous and otherwise politically marginalized perspectives from within and outside the academic field of Performance Studies.
Each volume is introduced by the editor and arranged thematically, with writings in chronological sequence so that the development of ideas can be traced within a theme. The set includes 90 essays covering the following major areas: discipline, method, documentation, and body politic.
Together the four volumes of Theories of Performance present a major scholarly resource for the field.
... One of the cornerstones of the performance studies field is the discussion of the status of the unmediated body vis-à-vis technological tools of recording like the ones constituting the archive. Peggy Phelan (1993) famously established that performance ontology escapes the reductionist rendering that digital technologies can make of it. This differentiation between the live and throbbing unmediated presence of the performing body as distinct from devices for its capture, spawned generous debates (FISCHER-LICHTE, 2008;PHELAN, 1993;PRITCHARD and MAWDSLEY, 2010). ...
... Peggy Phelan (1993) famously established that performance ontology escapes the reductionist rendering that digital technologies can make of it. This differentiation between the live and throbbing unmediated presence of the performing body as distinct from devices for its capture, spawned generous debates (FISCHER-LICHTE, 2008;PHELAN, 1993;PRITCHARD and MAWDSLEY, 2010). In contrast, Philip Auslander (1999) challenged the very notion of "liveness" by revealing how it is constantly renegotiated in close relation to the evolution of mechanical devices such as lighting systems in theater or electric microphones for the stage and their affordances, and not necessarily in contradiction with them. ...
The NPC (non-player character) movement invites users to embody machinic gestures, conceptualized as a “dispassionate disposition of the posthuman condition.” This study combines a bibliographic review on the body in technology and dance archives with an analysis of TikTok profiles showcasing NPC aesthetics. It situates the phenomenon within ecological and cultural contexts, exploring organic archives such as trees, reefs, ice caps, and humans refining machinic gestures as a form of embodied memory.
... 6 Phelan (1996), Auslander (1999), Taylor (2003, 2009), Schneider (2011. ...
... En el primer caso, el capítulo séptimo del texto de Peggy Phelan (1996) Unmaked, "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" representa el ejemplo más explícito. En éste, las formas del archivo, por ejemplo, la grabación de una performance, son consideradas como la antítesis de la performance, pues la performance es pensada como lo inaprensible, lo evanescente, lo que resiste a la circulación de bienes dentro de la economía capitalista. ...
... também o corpo do público em performances relacionais, contratam atores, delegam funções a grupos específicos ou são apenas virtualmente realizadas (BISHOP, 2012). A crescente flexibilização e porosidade das práticas em performance parece contestar -ou ao menos alargar -a máxima de que "a única vida da performance se dá no presente" ou de que "a performance aparece como a arte do eu", como afirmaram respectivamente Peggy Phelan (2003: 155) e Josette Feral (2015, teóricas centrais no campo da arte da performance e do teatro contemporâneo. ...
... ISSN 2238-5436 Assim, por um lado há a afirmação de que a arte da performance é compromissada com o "aqui e agora" (DE DUVE, 1983). Também como coloca Peggy Phelan (2003), sua única vida se dá no presente, sugerindo que há na performance uma força ontológica de resistência à economia de reprodução capitalista, em um dos mais paradigmáticos ensaios sobre a linguagem. Por outro lado, ainda quando a arte da performance se encontrava em suas primeiras décadas, "os artistas da performance que se interessavam em preservar seus trabalhos rapidamente tomaram consciência da necessidade de encenar para as câmeras (AUSLANDER, 2013), promovendo uma série de práticas orientadas para a foto e para o vídeo. ...
A partir de autores como Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander, Amelia Jones e Rebecca Schneider, o artigo aproxima o termo performance da noção de repetição, lançando luz sobre alguns dos principais debates suscitados pela arte da performance em relação à s suas possibilidades de documentação e arquivo. Busca-se deslocar a usual relação da performance com o tempo presente, justapondo posições antagônicas que evidenciem a relação complexa que a performance tem com documentos e arquivos.
... 6 Phelan (1996), Auslander (1999), Taylor (2003, 2009), Schneider (2011. ...
... En el primer caso, el capítulo séptimo del texto de Peggy Phelan (1996) Unmaked, "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" representa el ejemplo más explícito. En éste, las formas del archivo, por ejemplo, la grabación de una performance, son consideradas como la antítesis de la performance, pues la performance es pensada como lo inaprensible, lo evanescente, lo que resiste a la circulación de bienes dentro de la economía capitalista. ...
A partir de la performance de Coco Fusco intitulada "Words May Not Be Found" (Berlin, 2017) y desde el concepto de "campo expandido" (expanded field) de Rosalind Krauss (1979) y de la crítica de Rebecca Schneider a la noción de inmediatez de la performance, este texto pretende mostrar algunos de los componentes que permiten pensar "la documentación" de la performance en video como ese medio donde se expande el campo de la performance a partir del del teatro y del video.
... From the outset, the project was oriented around a set of questions about the documentation of live art, choreography, and performance -among them a thrust against an automatic privileging of historicization in dance and performance. Objections to the belief in the necessity of eye-witnessing performance events, as well as to the conviction of the unrepeatability of performance (see Phelan 1993 ), were raised as early as the 1990s ( J ones 2012 ). Recent years have, in turn, seen much work dedicated to the problem of recalling performancevia re-enactment on the one hand, and through sophisticated curatorial concepts of exhibition on the other ( Clausen 2006 ;Knaup 2013 ;Bénichou 2015 ;Büscher 2016 ). 3 The relationship between the event and its sedimentation in memory via various kinds of documentation leads today to the question of the collectability of performance: museums are now obliged to identify how to document and preserve performance works acquired for their permanent collections ( Calonje 2014 ;Ayerbe 2017 ). 4 Such work has challenged the habitual hierarchy between the primacy of the original artwork and the secondary nature of the documentary process. ...
... Capturing Dance highlighted the productive relationship between choreography/performance and documentation. These two fi elds are usually set in opposition to one another, with ontological expectations of singularity on the one hand ( Lepecki 2016 ;Phelan 1993 ;Fourgeaud 2015), and pragmatic demands of repeatability on the other ( Auslander 2006 ; Ayerbe 2017 ). However, documentary strategies are often autonomous artistic acts, while performance-based art and dance tend to use documentary processes only as device and part of their making, ignoring their impact on the very being of performance ( Lavoie-Marcus 2015 ). ...
... Scopo di queste pagine è, anzitutto, affrontare le due diavolerie della prima cantica accostando l'approccio filologico ed ermeneutico alle possibilità offerte dai Performance Studies applicati alla letteratura (cfr. Schechner 1985aSchechner , 1985bSchechner , 1999Schechner , 2018Phelan, 1993;McKenzie, 2001; sulla loro applicazione alla letteratura cfr. Tomasello, 2015;Tomasello, Pizzimento, 2021). ...
Il presente articolo tenta di analizzare la paura e l'angoscia che emergono in due gruppi di canti della Divina Commedia: la "tragedia" alle porte di Dite (Inf. VIII-IX) e la "commedia" o "farsa" della quinta Bolgia (Inf. XXI-XXIII), nei quali le emozioni di Dante e Virgilio, che subiscono le aggressioni dei diavoli, giocano un ruolo centrale nella narrazione. Se da un punto di vista teologico l'esperienza della paura indica il rischio per l'agens di cedere a una peccaminosa disperazione della Salvezza, si può tentare di una lettura più sottile dei due episodi: su un piano più specificamente filosofico, infatti, la paura sembra costituire una situa-zione emotiva attraverso la quale l'agens può, in termini heideggeriani, aprirsi alle proprie possibilità superiori e oltrepassare se stesso. Parole chiave • Divina Commedia; Paura; Identità; Dinamiche del desiderio. Abstract • This article attempts to analyse the fear and the anguish that emerge in two groups of cantos from the Divine Comedy, the "tragedy" at the gates of Dis (Inf. VIII-IX) and the "comedy" or "farce" of the fifth Ditch (Inf. XXI-XXIII), in which the emotions of Dante and Virgil, who suffer the attacks of the devils, play a central role in the narrative. If, from a theological point of view, the experience of fear indicates the risk for the agens of giving in to a sinful desperation for Salvation, a subtler reading can be attempted: on a more specifically philosophical level, in fact, fear seems to constitute an emotional situation through which the agens can, in Heidegger's terms, open to its own superior possibilities and go beyond himself.
... Art proposes to think this "other" body outside of this identity regimes build by dualism, colonialism, orientalism, racism, etc, creating sensible contexts. Peggy Phelan (1993) reflects on the ontological nature of performance: ...
The Carandiru Massacre (1992) happened almost a hundred years after the War of Canudos (1896-1897). However, it is possible to create links between these events: both were crimes committed by the Brazilian State, originated by orders of rulers, and they involved a huge repressive apparatus; in both cases the State attempted to erase officially the memory of the harm done, by destroying the places that were stage for the massacres. This paper will discuss how important were literary works to engender the memory of said crimes. Backlands: the Canudos Campaign by Euclides da Cunha did it for the Massacre of Canudos and Diário de um detento [Convict’s diary] by the rap group Racionais MC’s did it for the Carandiru Massacre. The goal of this paper is to discuss how literature was summoned, in these cases, to take a stand about the Brazilian history, accusing state crimes that were, and still are, susceptible to being forgotten.
... Art proposes to think this "other" body outside of this identity regimes build by dualism, colonialism, orientalism, racism, etc, creating sensible contexts. Peggy Phelan (1993) reflects on the ontological nature of performance: ...
... Dance, as a discipline that relies on the artist's body (BRANNIGAN, 2015), is by definition a form of art that challenges the materiality and the authority of institutions (KAPROW 1956;SOFAER, 2018). One key argument here is Peggy Phelan's famous line of argumentation, which claims that performance is defined through disappearance, and thus resists preservation as a fleeting event (PHELAN, 1993). With that in mind, any attempt to collect and preserve choreographed performances is not only futile; it also goes against the very nature of the discipline. ...
Esse artigo aborda a aquisição de performances coreografadas e os desafios que provoca ao mundo dos museus. O museu há algum tempo é uma instituição destinada a colecionar arte tangível (MACDONALD, 2011; SHELTON, 2013; VERGO, 1989; e outros autores). Assim, eu estava interessada em descobrir como as instituições estão se adaptando à imaterialidade da dança adquirida por museus (BISHOP, 2014b). Para tanto, me referi ao conceito de objetos de museu dóceis e indisciplinados (DOMÍNGUEZ RUBIO, 2014) e os conceitos coreográficos de Andre Lepecki: corporalidade, efemeridade, pontuação e performatividade (LEPECKI, 2017). Sobre as abordagens desenvolvidas pelos museus para incluir performances coreografadas em suas coleções são apresentados dois casos: Staging: solo de Maria Hassabi (2017), adquirida pelo Walker Art Center, em 2018; e Punt.Point de Sara Wookey em colaboração com Rennie Tang (2013), adquirida pelo Van Abbemuseum, em 2018. Esta pesquisa investiga as estratégias de aquisição implementadas por museus, a fim de tornar dóceis as performances coreografadas indisciplinadas. Por meio do estudo do processo de institucionalização de duas performances coreografadas, o trabalho fornece uma nova compreensão do colecionamento de dança nos campos de estudos de museus e estudos da performance. Uma das principais conclusões foi que a maioria das estratégias aquisitivas implementadas pelas instituições se esforça para separar a obra de arte do artista, a fim de poder controlá-la melhor. Além disso, descobri que a personalidade e a identidade da instituição desempenham um papel vital na decisão de entrar no longo processo de aquisição de uma performance coreografada. Os esforços necessários para esta decisão são potencializados pela contradição inerente à aquisição de uma obra de arte sem substância material.
... It began in earnest with an argument that live performance is ontologically different from the technologically mediated. Peggy Phelan's stance [38], at its most basic, is that live performance is only live inasmuch as it disappears, never to be fully captured. Echoes of this position can still be faintly heard in more recent, seminal works about live performance defined in part by the 'autopoietic feedback loop' [21] that creates the strongly felt but difficult to define energetic connection between performer and audience. ...
The global pandemic has driven musicians online. We report an ethnographic account of how two traditional folk clubs with little previous interest in digital platforms transitioned to online experiences. They followed very different approaches: one adapted their existing singaround format to video conferencing while the other evolved a weekly community-produced, pre-recorded show that could be watched together. However, despite their successes, participants ultimately remained unable to sing in chorus due to network constraints. We draw on theories of liveness from performance studies to explain our findings, arguing that HCI might orientate itself to online liveness as being co-produced through rich participatory structures that dissolve traditional distinctions between live and recorded and performer and audience. We discuss how participants appropriated existing platforms to achieve this, but these in turn shaped their practices in unforeseen ways. We draw out implications for the design and deployment of future live performance platforms.
... The "remains" of the performance resides in the memory, in the flesh, that disallows complete arrest, and translatability (Schneider, Performance Remains, 2012). The liminal state of performing sleep remains contingent and unstable, even not completely tameable, but does not disappear (Phelan, 1993), rather remains in ways that are incommensurable to the archive. ...
... 9 A similar account of performance is given in Gregory Bateson's "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" in Bateson (1981). 10 See for example Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1996), Loxley (2007) and Phelan (1996) for three emblematic examples of how the term has gained wide recognition within the fields of Gender Studies, Literary Theory and Performance Studies. 11 It is sometimes argued that the Austin and Derrida debate merely should be seen as the confrontation between an analytic and a continental tradition of philosophy, something that John R. Searle also has argued against (Searle 1977, 198). ...
... 5 Não retomarei a discussão sobre os limites dos documentos que relatam a dimensão viva das obras performativas, assunto que já foi bastante discutido na literatura. Entre os textos indispensáveis, não podemos deixar de mencionar: Peggy Phelan (1993), Amelia Jones (1997), Rebeca Schneider (2001) e Philip Auslander (2006). 6 Mostrei em outro momento que os documentos que os artistas produzem a respeito de suas performances dependem tanto da documentacão como da obra (Bénichou, 2010). ...
Alguns anos após a publicação de uma primeira História “Geral” da Arte da Performance em 1988, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present de RoseLee Goldberg, várias instituições museais organizaram exposições de grande importância consagradas às obras performativas de um passado recente ou mais remoto, provenientes dos centros hegemônicos, mas também locais ou periféricos. Isto porque a arte da performance desenvolveu-se em resistência às histórias hegemônicas da arte e às suas instituições, porque suas obras são efêmeras, porque elas envolvem o corpo, porque dependem do “vivo” e do “direto”, e as instituições curatoriais deparam-se com certas dificuldades e paradoxos. Elas não podem fazer a economia de uma reflexão de natureza historiográfica que questione as categorias, os métodos, os conceitos, os lugares, as fontes, as genealogias e as narrativas da história da arte. Por conseguinte, as questões levantadas são: uma reflexão de natureza historiográfica pode ser realizada no âmbito de uma exposição sobre a arte da performance? É da responsabilidade dos curadores? Que papel os artistas podem ter nesta fábrica das representações históricas? Observa-se uma reconfiguração da divisão das responsabilidades entre os historiadores e os teóricos da arte, os curadores de exposição e os artistas? A análise de quatro exposições recentes permite identificar tantas figuras experimentais que renovam de acordo com estratégias singulares, as maneiras de escrever as histórias da arte: a hipermídia, a heterotopia, o repertório e a paralaxe.
... It is important to note that many authors from other disciplines have written on the documentation of performance. Phelan (1993) famously suggested: ...
DocPerform is a multi and interdisciplinary research project based at City, University of London. Led by members of the Department of Library & Information Science, it comprises scholars and practitioners from the fields of performing arts and library & information science. The project concerns conceptual, methodological and technological innovations in the documentation of performance, and the extent to which performance may itself be considered to be a document. The collection of papers in this special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy are selected from the second DocPerform Symposium, held at City, University of London, 6–7 November 2017. This editorial introduces those papers and provides disciplinary and historical context for DocPerform.
Starting with the synovial fluid lubricating the dancer's knees at the motion capture studio, continuing with the sweat stains on gamers' couches, and culminating with the liquid income that the companies behind hit titles like Fortnite generate by selling choreographic material; there is an overarching liquidity that dance turned into data traces across bodies and devices. Different kinds of liquification can be seen throughout the digitization stages of the dancing body, demonstrating an interconnecting thread between performance and dance on the screen that is fundamentally material, chemical, and physiological. This thread fosters a juxtaposition of digital and physical corporealities that forces users' bodily schemas to be reformulated into techno-human embodiments. The mutual correspondence of the incursion of dance into the numerical field and the numerical into dance evidences the kinetic motor behind the capital accumulation of the new emergent economy of digital dance, whose hallmark is a fluidity that liquifies bodies into currency and back, for the service of an information society.
This research article examines Durga puja (Dashain) in Nepal as a fusion of ritual, cultural, and commercial performances analyzing the impact of ritual and culture on commercial behaviors. Culture is largely concerned with the human values and beliefs that have been connected with the economic and commercial conduct of the people. The study explores how cultural performance shapes consumer behaviors besides strengthening social solidarity and preserving cultural identity. How the celebration of Durga Puja increases the financial activities of the country and what pros and cons it brings to society is analyzed. The qualitative data are collected from the relevant books, journal articles, and newspapers. Schechner’s “Theory of Ritual and Performance”, and Chattopadhyaya’s “From Religion to Culture” have been used as the theoretical framework. This research finds that the celebration of ritualistic cultural festivals preserves ritual and culture, strengthens social solidarity with identity, and increases commercial activities. It concludes that cultural festivals require celebrating in such a way that they can protect ritual and cultural identity, promote social solidarity, and progress commercial activities.
The article seeks to answer the question of whether the transformation and acceleration of digital content in performing arts during the COVID-19 pandemic are determined situatively or are a naturally stable trend initiated by the development of ICT. It focuses on the theatre industry in order to understand whether theatre performances in the digital environment and the use of digital elements in performing arts do not create a confrontation with the necessary sense of physical presence.The research data showed that the practices of using digital environment elements and digital technologies in the creation of theatre performances were both 1) a short-term solution, as it allowed staging a play, working with actors remotely, as well as creating products that are available to the audience in conditions of distancing requirements, and 2) gave an acceleration to the spread of digital innovations in the theatre industry in general, which was especially manifested in the works of directors who are open to the search for new experimental forms and the ambition of artistic excellence in theatre art, thus generating a long-term development potential. On the one hand, the sense of presence, including physical presence and simultaneity, is still recognized as the most essential feature of theatre and also a certain measure of quality. On the other hand, it is recognized that the possibilities of digital solutions, including artificial intelligence and other technological resources, may also change and erase the boundaries between the real and digital environments in performing arts as well.
La performance nace como una acción compartida entre el artista y la audiencia. En sus primeros pasos nada parecía alterar este necesario hic et nunc de la práctica. Sin embargo, el empuje que el arte conceptual le confiere a la fotografía y al video como herramientas de procesos abiertos y el posterior protagonismo del arte en la red van a alterar este compromiso con lo presencial para hacer de la performance una práctica que se reproduce y visualiza hasta el infinito. Sin caer en purismos disciplinares, nuestra ponencia quiere lanzar una llamada de atención hacia la creciente virtualidad de la performance contemporánea. El inicial compromiso con la presencia, firmemente defendido por autoras como Pegy Phelan o irónicamente complejizado en las tesis de Amelia Jones, se diluye hasta perderse y la performance se consume masivamente en las distintas esferas de lo virtual. Las conclusiones principales de nuestro estudio observan una mayor expansión de la performance gracias a su creciente virtualidad, pero, como contrapartida, intuimos una mayor frivolidad en su recepción y, por consiguiente, en su posterior análisis. Aunque sostenemos que la presencialidad no tiene por qué ser una condición sine qua non para que la performance exista y permanezca, reconocemos que la vivencia compartida entre artista y audiencia aporta una experiencia diferente, en ocasiones más intensa y completa.
Este artigo propõe um estudo comparativo entre o teatro e a performance que foi realizado durante a transição espanhola à democracia. Nesse sentido, faremos uma análise das principais ferramentas metodológicas e discursivas utilizadas por ambas as manifestações artísticas, identificando as analogias e diferenças mais marcantes entre as duas práticas. Em nossa conclusão, argumentamos que os caminhos entre o teatro e a performance na Espanha durante a transição geraram cartografias significativamente diferentes. Ambas as disciplinas foram estruturadas e difundidas de acordo com modos particulares de atuação que, quando comparados, revelam grandes diferenças. No entanto, a chegada das novas correntes cênicas - especialmente a partir do início do novo século - criou um terreno mais propenso à contaminação, o que nos deixou uma paisagem difusa onde as fronteiras entre a arte cênica e a performance se tornaram cada vez menos claras.
It’s fall 2021, a year and a half into the global Covid pandemic and I am returning to the studio and to teaching dance in-person. As my university students and I circulate to begin our warmup, the room becomes electric, infused with possibility. We devour space and interact without hesitation, albeit at some distance; the sensations of movement are amplified in contrast to the more limited motion of the past eighteen months. We are diverted and redirected by other bodies in the space, which act less as obstacles to avoid than supple forces that alter the trajectory of our own kinespheres. Finding momentary stillness as a group, we then scatter, traversing the floor in a series of runs, leaps, and skips, only just missing one another as we make eye contact above facemasks. Our feet make audible sounds on the floor as heels and toes land and take off and gravity acts on our bodies. We are both quick and slow as the kinetic flow of energy suspends us in this shared condition of movement’s return.
La poésie-performance peut s’envisager comme une sorte de suture sémiotique entre la poésie et l’art performance. Offrant un compte-rendu de la pratique du poète-performeur Sébastien Dulude, le livre Chambres (2013) soulève des questions sur le statut du livre et de la documentation de la performance. C’est principalement dans le sillage de Philip Auslander que s’inscrit cet article dans lequel interviennent les notions de performativité et celle de documentation. La question de l’ontologie de la performance chez Peggy Phelan, celle de l’archive chez Christophe Kihm et celle du régime ontologique chez Gérard Genette sont aussi convoquées dans cette réflexion. Les enjeux sémiotiques du document et de la documentation textuelle et photographique, de même que l’idée du livre comme performance sont ainsi abordés dans un souci de cerner un peu mieux le statut de ce « livre de poésie-performance ».
Jelen tanulmány a The Handspring Puppet Company Woyzeck on the Highveld című bábelőadását értelmezi a színházi interkulturalitás szempontjából. A különböző befogadói attitűdök, kiemelve az előadás magyar, 2011-es bemutatóját összevethetők a klasszikus dráma befogadásának történetiségével.
This paper discusses Korean artist Nam Hwayeon’s corpus of works based on her artistic research into Choi Seung-hee’s choreography since 2012, focusing on her four-channel video installation Dancer from the Peninsula (2019) and a collection of archival, essayistic, and documentation videos included in her solo exhibition Mind Stream (2020). In so doing, it argues that Nam’s approach to Choi’s idea and practice of choreography since her return in 1941 after performances in Europe and North America labels them as “inter-Asian Dance,” an unfinished project aimed to reinvent East Asian dance through the multilayered negotiation and amalgamation of its different regional (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) traditions. Nam’s intermedial exploration into the heterogeneous body of Choi’s writings, dance films, and documentation photos, then, is her method of revealing and reactivating the geopolitical and epistemological, and aesthetic contradictions of Choi’s method.
This article reads dance in Emily Holmes Coleman’s, The Shutter of Snow (1930) as a revolutionary praxis. Situating the novel as influenced by the time Coleman spent living in Paris and publishing in transition at the height of Surrealism, I argue that dance, as practiced by Coleman’s protagonist Marthe Gail, constitutes an embodied politics bent on resisting the threats posed to women’s sexual and political autonomy by the nationalist and neo-natalist rhetoric associated with the rise of fascism.
Endings take multiple forms yet remain under theorised within geography. Informed by Hannah Arendt’s assertion that action has no end, this paper argues for the resonances and elaborations of endings, providing evidence from dance choreography. As an art form, dance has been variously conceived as ephemeral but also transient, thus neither capable of being lost nor destroyed. I explore these ideas through Renail Basail’s re/staging of the choreography Out of the Box, and it’s unexpected ending in March 2020. I ask, what might dance choreography tell scholars of geography and the geohumanities about how to work with such a sense of endings as contingent and open? This paper contributes to this gap in thinking and theorising by outlining four propositions on endings drawn from dance theory and practice. These are: endings and ephemerality, endings as conditional, endings and liveness, and endings as radical. Where endings are open and congruent, two key implications emerge. First, there is need to situate endings within bodies, articulating how they are practiced and performed, whilst always subject to external forces not fully known. Second, if action has no end, there is political possibilities to creative endings.
Este texto analisa a figura performativa de Santa Rita Pintor à luz dos estudos da performance. Observa-se, neste artista, uma disposição histriónica pré-dadaísta que veio a deixar eco nas vanguardas literárias por-tuguesas do século XX. Tal reconhece-se num ímpeto performativo pela palavra no espaço público que veio a marcar o surrealismo e experimentalismo. Foca-se, este estudo, na observação de dois eixos que parecem configurar o projeto de ação estética deste artista precursor da performance em Portugal: a pose performa-tiva associada à fala.
This article encourages further discussion of certain concepts and practices for the music theatre creations by the composer Constança Capdeville (1937-92) in keeping with the time and context of her compositions. Her music theatre works incorporate by a certain hybridism as they juxtapose various artistic expressions such as dance, music, and theatre. Throughout the 1970s, the performance concept as understood today was not fully recognized, either by composers or by the performers, who collaborated with Capdeville within the context of the Portuguese music scene. In this regard, the composer António de Sousa Dias believes this stemmed from the tendency to connect the term with performance art or with certain positions linked to happenings or free improvization, which were not the main concern of Capdeville. Given the difficulty in classifying her musical works, we here discuss some etymological issues around the performance and re-performance concepts. Capdeville’s music theatre works combine different artistic expressions leading us to reflect on documentation strategies including interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as (digital) philology, computer science, archiving research and performing arts documentation, detailing here some perspectives and practices currently applied for preserving such artistic productions.
This article relates to the information ethical critique of archives in the decolonial debate for social memory appropriation and cultural knowledge production. The decolonial approach is presented as a critical literacy emergent tendency that searches for evidencing conflicts in the formation of archives, collections and common knowledge in its power relations of historic social constructions. Decolonial theory have been unfolding in many areas and bringing diverse questionings focusing on the plurality of knowledge and ethical preservation, especially on ethno-racial relations. This article tries to broad the field of information science production pointing to a fictional problematic frontier of meaning making, dispute and collective reality. Looking for support on a psychoanalysis approach to cultural trauma, Lacan's symbolic contribution helps to evidence perspectives on ways of reporting and constituting social conflict with development of archival devices, communication contends and social memory. The biographical and performance artistic aspects presented, complements decolonial perspectives in what is referred to as “neo-documentalism”, in the field of Information Science, as a poetic character intrinsic in critical literacies of information. Abstrato (pt): Relaciona a crítica dos arquivos no debate decolonial pela apropriação social da informação e produção cultural do conhecimento. A abordagem decolonial se apresenta como um letramento crítico evidenciando conflitos na formação dos arquivos, acervos e do conhecimento comum em suas relações de poder e construção histórica social. As abordagens da psicanálise de Lacan para o trauma cultural ajudam a apoiar perspectivas sobre as formas de relatar e constituir conflitos sociais com o desenvolvimento de dispositivos e conteúdos simbólicos arquivísticos. Os aspectos biográficos e performáticos apresentados complementam a perspectiva decolonial no que se denomina “neodocumentalismo”, no campo da Ciência da Informação, como caráter artístico intrínseco aos letramentos críticos da informação.
After a brief contextualization of the author's biography, I present the volume Desierto de amor (2018) by Raúl Zurita, realized with González y Los Asistentes (music) and Massimo Giacon (comic), as a significant example of a hybrid literary product that mixes poems, music and comics. The transmedial and trimodal work uses different media that merge each other. The poem, a migrant text halfway between slam poetry and poetry in music, alternates and superimposes itself on music and poetry comix. Reflecting on the potentialities of transmediality and intersemiotic translation, I analyze how transcoding into other languages brings added value to the poetic text because it creates an intertextual dialogue that produces a new reception mechanism. The visual and auditory reading takes place in a different space and time, with new expressive modalities and ways of reaching the addressee.
Entendemos el suceder y el efímero tiempo compartido como elementos indisolubles de la performance, vindicando la presencia como uno de los pilares esenciales de esta práctica. Estas afirmaciones -que podrían resultar limitadoras- no desestiman la importancia de otros soportes como la fotografía o el video que, en ocasiones, interactúan con la performance a una estrecha distancia. Sensibles a estas aproximaciones, prestaremos especial atención a la colaboración que se establece entre performance y fotografía repasando conceptos como presencialidad, subjetividad, veracidad, documento o performatividad. Dada la amplitud del tema, hemos establecido una acotación temporal centrada en el contexto español de las fecundas décadas de 1960 y 1970. Estos años trajeron consigo la aparición de una simbiosis internacional entre el medio fotográfico y la performance; un despertar que impulsó significativos cambios de valor de la fotografía y -en el caso español- la conservación de una performance escasamente investigada.
La performance es una disciplina en la que la obra y la documentación se dan la mano, existe una gran vinculación, se entrelazan y confunden en numerosas ocasiones. En este breve estudio sobre la documentación de la performance, planteamos una ampliación y actualización de conceptos, en base a las nuevas necesidades surgidas en el arte de acción actual. Proponiendo cuatro nuevas categorías o tipologías, atendiendo a sus cualidades intrínsecas (esenciales): la imagen documental, la imagen teatral, la imagen trofeo y la imagen posproducida. Esta última se divide, a su vez, en imagen publicitaria o propagandística e imagen expositiva o de mercado.
Performance is a discipline in which work and documentation go hand in hand, there is a great deal of connection, they are intertwined and confused on many occasions. In this brief study on the documentation of performance, we propose an expansion and updating of concepts, based on the new needs that have arisen in today's art of action. We propose four new categories or typologies, according to their intrinsic (essential) qualities: the documentary image, the theatrical image, the trophy image and the post-produced image. The latter is divided, in turn, into publicity or propaganda image and exhibition or market image.
The significance of IT in the context of non-digital social enterprises (SEs) and its influence on the viability of such SEs have been less studied themes in information systems research. In the era of ubiquitous IT, SEs have increasing pressures to cope with the ever-dynamic technological domain while balancing their dual objectives. Data from a single revelatory case of Jaipur Rugs (JR), an SE situated in a developing country context (India), is used to fathom the peculiarities of the SE context with a focus on the sociomaterial phenomena of IT emergence. Using the three fundamental notions of sociomateriality theory (relationality, performativity, and practice) this interpretive study understands the mechanisms underlying the SE’s attempt to balance its financial and social sustainability objectives. Through the innovative use of IT, the SE establishes and maintains shared value, yielding stability and efficiency to the business (financial viability) while simultaneously ensuring scalability and effectiveness of their social impact. This study strengthens the perspective of IT as an emergent phenomenon situated in sociomaterial practices and fills a gap in organizational literature by examining such phenomenon in the rich context of SEs where achieving the balance between dual goals is increasingly dependent on non-human (IT) agents.
Explorative play affects the root of our being, as it is generative. Often experienced as a thrill, explorative play gradually lures its players beyond their mental or physical limits. While doing so, it affects players well before they can perform intentional actions. To understand explorative play therefore means to understand what happens before intention sets in. But this is problematic: by the time this becomes experienceable it is already clouded by habit and memory. However, thought processes outlined in Deleuze’s philosophy of difference reveal important clues as to how habitual thinking patterns may be exceeded, and why explorative play might cause thrilling and vertiginous experiences: when our awareness of the present is intensified, the potential to disturb habitual patterns arises; within this there is a chance to arrive at an ‘intuitive understanding’ of events where intensities express themselves as non-intentional movement or poetic language. This notion was investigated through generative art practice. An experimental setting was prepared that allowed for explorative play with a complex system – a biofeedback instrument that sonified its wearer’s physiological data in real-time. This instrument was explored in performances as well as participative action research sessions. The insight emerging from the performances was that introspection and stillness can enhance practice. The connections to Eastern practices this suggests were followed up and, by investigating the role of stillness in performance practices like Butoh, methods that may radicalise a biofeedback performance came to light. Extending these to biofeedback composition then made listening a central focus of this research and consequently, listeners’ responses to sonified biofeedback, the disruption of habitual musical expectations and increased immersed listening became paramount aspects of the practice. Conversely, the insight emerging from the participative sessions was that explorative playing with a complex system can allow for a more intuitive understanding of the generative because the emerging play experiences can be internally transformative; producing new ideas and forms, for instance poetic language or improvised movement. Thus overall, the research underlined the benefits of a greater propagation of explorative play.
O artigo discute a relação entre arte da performance e suas lógicas de arquivo, tendo como objetivo traçar um breve panorama dos principais debates internacionais realizados a partir dos anos 1990 por teóricos como Jacques Derrida, Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider e Philip Auslander. Em um segundo momento, lanço mão de um trabalho artístico de minha autoria para pensar em como encontro na noção de tragédia um vetor para pensar sobre a documentação de arte da performance.
Often carceral studies tends to focus on the prison as a mode of stationary confinement, sometimes forgetting that its rationales and practices are based crucially in movement. This is especially true for black populations disproportionately affected by mass incarceration and intentionally disoriented to the causes and manifestations of the oscillation to which they are reduced. This article is concerned with the carceral landscape that emerges in the criminalization of black people and politics through the legal concept of vagrancy, and how, in turn, black surreptitious movement is used to contest incarceration. To do so, it argues that vagrancy paraphrases a suppression of black political practice, focusing on political prisoner Assata Shakur’s transnational escape to Cuba and its discursive omission in her autobiography. In tracing the transience of Shakur, the article forwards vagrancy as an elaboration of how anti-blackness materializes via carceral geographies by way of displacement, disorientation, and forced movement. It presents a reformulation of Shakur’s escape as disincarceration, which takes seriously the flight toward black liberation as one that is still meaningfully incomplete, elaborating the significance of a continual absconding from the field of representation that has been controlled and constituted by discursive and material hegemonies of race.
Film festivals have been investigated from a wide range of perspectives; however, there is a gap in our understanding of how festivals manage data and records, including ephemeral online materials. A holistic understanding of film festival records is important for historians and film studies scholars interested in documenting and preserving the history of festivals. This chapter explores issues and questions related to the artefacts of film festivals offering a taxonomy of the materials which can be archived and presents the collaboration of Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Duke University as a case study and possible model to follow.
Nesta investigação, temos como objetivo compreender as vivências sócio-territoriais dos estudantes da Universidade do Porto. Trata-se de refetir sobre o conjunto de atores sociais que partilham a condição comum de serem estudantes, oriundos do território nacional, designadamente do espaço regional de proximidade que poderemos apelidar de Grande Porto ou mesmo Grande Região Metropolitana do Porto. Neste âmbito, e porque a inserção no ensino superior se refete também numa inserção territorial nova em termos de vivência quotidiana do espaço da cidade, o enfoque neste grupo particular aponta-nos para um aprender da cidade e um reaprender do espaço metropolitano, operando uma descoberta de espaços novos e de formas diferentes de relacionamento. Os grupos sociais fazem emergir diferentes e subjetivas territorialidades, construídas a partir de representações territoriais heterogéneas e formas alternativas de usufruir e relacionar-se neste espaço plurinodal. As atividades coevoluem com as aspirações, no quadro da vastidão de universos possíveis, mediadas pelas redes tecnológicas e as estruturas sociais. Assim, as dinâmicas no edifcado e as atividades associam-se a novas formas de apropriação e de vivência social urbana, que se expressam em representações territoriais multiformes. Aqui, assumem particular relevância as modalidades de representação simbólica dos espaços quotidianos da cidade, materializadas nos desenhos feitos pelos jovens acerca do seu espaço vivido na cidade e na metrópole. Assim, daremos conta do desenvolvimento, desde 2011, de uma matriz teórica e metodológica de representações sociais tendo em vista a compreensão e explicação de trajetos, redes sociais, espaços de pertença e de sociabilidade, indicadores fundamentais de reinterpretação juvenil e potenciadores de estratégias de participação cívica dos estudantes na cidade e metrópole.
The empty stage was understood as the place for the actor's appearance at a time when appearing was a condition of acting. Presence, and not emptiness, constituted the central value in the conception of artistic theatricality. And the value of the presence was accentuated in the mid-twentieth century as a guarantee of authenticity and ethical or political implication. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, absence or disappearance were considered as a choice, even a necessity, by some performance artists. It was sometimes about resisting the transparency of images, which falsely represents reality and perversely builds desire; in others, about responding to the forced disappearance of bodies in a reality whose opacity challenges any claim to transparency.
This text proposes, by way of assembly, a series of thoughts and images in which political theory and performance practice are put in dialogue to discuss the paradoxes that result from the crossing of these two modes of disappearance: an active disappearing, considered as resistance tactics, and a forced disappearance, the result of the violent denial of individuality, name, life and memory. The praise of appearance in Hannah Arendt's political thought clashes with the policy of forced disappearance practiced in Mexico and other Latin American countries. The text points out first the work of some artists that aesthetically focus on absence and disappearance, such as Heiner Goebbels, La Ribot and Cuqui Jerez; and analyzes then works of other artists, such as Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie or Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden (Mapa Teatro), who explicitly resort to voluntary absence to reveal circumstances or places of disappearance.
When site-specific artists talk about their work, the physical site comes alive in radical and unexpected ways. To explain the richly interactive experiences enabled by this medium, they speak of entering into a dialogue with the site, of engaging in a complex process of reciprocal animation. The artists featured in my opening epigraphs articulate a surprising form of self–world encounter, attributing speech to the inanimate architectural site. In Houston’s description of the historic Weyburn Mental Hospital, the location of a site-specific performance in 2002, this speech is interpreted as a fully discursive form of communication. The host site becomes intelligible through the twinned rhetorics of medical reform and institutional progress. Yet Houston goes beyond a traditional semiotic decoding of site by according the hospital a certain independence from its viewer. The site speaks ‘for itself’, its dilapidated form throwing the imposed discourse of modernity into relief. Here the live presence of the thing in itself, in its self-givenness, pushes up against and resists its representation. In the words of phenomenologist Bert States, ‘the medium becomes the message: the form winks at the content’ (32). Director Landau echoes this idea of an architecture that ‘talks back’, a speech that is indistinguishable from and communicated through its material form.
Derrida et Foucault ont fourni des clefs pour comprendre les archives. Ils voient les archives comme hégémoniques, caractéristiques des façons de penser, des modes de colonisation et de contrôle des citoyens. Cependant ils montrent aussi clairement que les archives peuvent être lues de façon subversive. Avec de la patience, une contre-lecture permet la mise au jour des voix (quelque fois des noms) des subalternes et autres exclus des archives. En lisant le long et contre le grain, les chercheurs peuvent suivre le développement des idées et leurs évolutions au travers des périodes historiques. Les archives peuvent être vues comme orphelines, contenant des substituts de performances. Les archives (papier et digitales) permettent aussi l’accès aux résultats des recherches anthropologiques selon les prescriptions des codes éthiques, mais la mise au point de ces codes peut être sujet à controverse. Quelles sortes de consentement et quelles sortes d’anonymisation peuvent être proposées ? Les archives gérées par les groupes traditionnellement étudiés par les anthropologues produisent un modèle d’archives radicales qui sont très différentes des archives conçues par les archivistes traditionnels.
The purpose of this article is to explore how the components of the opera can be remediated and enhanced through augmented reality. To this end, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted that integrates studies in the areas of humanities, design technology and marketing and a framework is proposed that identifies the relevant components for the remediation of opera. Based on the framework and previous studies, the case of La Traviata is analyzed in its several declinations through early and new media to discuss the requirements for a meaningful remediation of opera and the strengths of augmented reality in this context. Based on previous research and the case analysis, it is argued that augmented reality can be a powerful medium for opera, enhancing and encompassing its multimodal structure and multiple experience dimensions.
This article is published in Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre 4. http://sht.asso.fr/revue/etudes-theatrales-et-humanites-numeriques/
The text is in French. Please contact me for the English translation. Abstract:
"After a critical presentation of the state of the art in scholarly activities at the intersection of theatre and digital humanities, in Canada and elsewhere, this paper suggests how the two disciplines might work together to articulate and facilitate new modalities of knowledge production emerging in each individually. Its aim is to make explicit the values of the inventive knowledge production characteristic of design and performance, and to propose that theatre and digital humanities might best acknowledge and enable inventive knowledge by shifting their emphasis away from production-oriented prototyping and towards experimental prototyping, provotyping, and experience design."
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