Theron Schmidt | Utrecht University (original) (raw)
Papers by Theron Schmidt
The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, 2020
How might we think about darkness as the condition for thinking itself, just as darkness in the t... more How might we think about darkness as the condition for thinking itself, just as darkness in the theatre is the condition for appearance? As a performance effect, it is a representational black-hole: how does one make darkness appear except as a lighting effect? And it is a limit case for phenomenology; as Husserl wrote, in a dark room ‘things no longer “appear” in the authentic sense’ but are there only ‘in bodily emptiness’. For Levinas, the darkness of the night makes present the idea of a world without beings, the nothingness that is not nothing but the insistent ‘there is’, his ‘il y a’. This collaboratively written piece is an attempt to think with darkness, and to use performance-writing as a way for two collaborators to meet in the dark. It is also an encounter between Western phenomenology and Māori cosmology, in relation to the embodied actions of writing and making.
Performance Research, 2024
When we gather to or for something, the first thing we make is the gathering itself. How can we a... more When we gather to or for something, the first thing we make is the gathering itself. How can we approach that making of gathering as a creative and expansive endeavour? From diverse perspectives, the artists here offer new shapes, forms, maps, diagrams, rituals, scores, and protocols of attending to the conditions within which we meet – and the conditions that we make in meeting. When we are in attendance with others, how can we broaden not only what we are attending to, but also how we are attending? How can we arrive together, in ways that recognize and invite the diversity of experiences from which we come together, that name and acknowledge place and relation, that identify and de-invisibilize power relations, that bring creativity and intentionality to our actions, and that de-individualize and re-distribute relationship? As a mix of practical and poetic suggestions, they are offerings for readers to take and to try in future meetings of their own.
Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice, 2022
This case study is based on my experience designing and teaching a course titled Art and Social C... more This case study is based on my experience designing and teaching a course titled Art and Social Change for a mixed group of undergraduate students, including those studying theatre and performance, media and communication, and fine arts. The content of my course nominally offers a survey of what artistic and activist forms of mobilisation might have to offer for 'innovation' in communication, awareness-raising, and social campaigns, but, importantly, it is also designed as itself a form of self-reflective creative activism. The course is structured as a variation on the 'flipped classroom' model; in its typical implementation, the flipped classroom transposes the weekly structure of homework and lecture, such that students encounter lecture content independently, freeing face-to-face time to be used for working through problems under the supervision of the teacher. In my variation, this flip happens halfway through the course, when the entire course pivots to become oriented around open-ended group work, with small groups devising, researching (through primary and secondary methods), and reporting back on their experiments and findings. It is in the second half of the course, in which the learning is led by student enquiry in small groups,
Things that go through your mind when falling: The work of Forced Entertainment, 2023
Global Performance Studies, 2022
Global Performance Studies, 2021
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2020
This article proposes 'planetary performance pedagogy' as a theoretical and practical framework f... more This article proposes 'planetary performance pedagogy' as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.
In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multiuser , and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.
Blind Spot: Staring down the void, ed. by Ric Allsopp and Karen Kipphoff, 2020
The classical critique of theatre, from Plato to Rousseau to Debord, is that it only offers a wor... more The classical critique of theatre, from Plato to Rousseau to Debord, is that it only offers a world of appearances, a spectacle of ‘mere representation’ that distracts the viewer from seeing things as they really are. Indeed, in everyday commentary, machinations in the political realm that seem devoid of any substance are often derided as ‘pure theatre’ or ‘only theatre’. But rather than opposing ‘reality’ and ‘appearances’, a lineage of political thinkers have described politics as the domain of appearances – from Hannah Arendt’s description of ‘spaces of appearance’ that ‘come into being whenever [persons] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (Arendt [1958] 1998, 199), to Judith Butler’s explicit invocation of Arendt in relation to the ‘movement of the squares’ and arguments for agency in plurality (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; Butler 2015). Making an appearance is a political act, revolving around ‘what is seen and what can be said about it’, according to Jacques Rancière ([2000] 2004, 13), such that ‘The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear’ (Agamben [1995] 2000, 95). One of the lessons to be drawn from various social movements is that so long as the underlying conditions—the conditions that allow certain things to appear and others to remain hidden—are themselves hidden, then the possibility of politics will fail to appear. If theatre is the art of appearances, then, such an art might be useful for showing us ‘appearance itself’, to show us the act of showing, as Brecht and others have elaborated. That is, theatre might try to show itself, to see its own blind spot.
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 2020
This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of dif... more This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.
Performance Philosophy, 2019
This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Ha... more This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt’s work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. Arendt’s relevance to our times is ubiquitous: from the near constant citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism in relation to the recent rise in strong-man politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism, to her diagnosis of the plight of refugees, denied even the rights belonging to those that have broken the law, but instead placed outside the law. Contemporary political philosophy also bears numerous influences, in the thinking of Mouffe, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Brown, Butler, and more. For performance philosophy, we might engage with Arendt’s performative notion of politics itself, as exemplified in her idea of ‘spaces of appearance’, but also the performativity of thought, as well as the implications of Arendt’s work for phenomenology, governmentality, rights, and ecology. Contributors to this special issue also think through the relevance of Arendt’s work for an anti-colonial and anti-racist political praxis, and for post and non-human political ethics, judgment, and thinking.
RiDE: Research in Drama Education, 2019
Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebec... more Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebecca Hayes Laughton, and Katherine Low) have been convening working sessions at various schools and conferences that address the questions and problems animating this issue of RiDE. In this final article, a handful of our respondents from ASTR 2018 in San Diego ruminate upon, list, and remember tactics they have used, or dreamed of using, to make it through the neoliberal academic day-today. Their thoughts are accompanied here by a handful of photos that document the documentation we produced at our first symposium.
Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, ed. by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 158–70, 2019
The task of the actor has long been a subject of scepticism, and often scorn, accused of being no... more The task of the actor has long been a subject of scepticism, and often scorn, accused of being not real work: either it is ‘not real’, in that it is only pretending or simulation, or it is ‘not work’, in that it is merely the pursuit of pleasure. But in thinking through its own work, theatre can also help us to think through how work is understood and valued in culture more broadly. In this chapter I focus on two moments in which theatre seems to have been particularly interested in its relationship to work, and in which, by turn, we can track the changing nature of work itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, performance artists turned to ‘task-like’ or ‘work-like’ performance as a way to bring everyday reality to the theatrical event—and, by extension, as a remedy to the way in which wider culture was perceived as increasingly alienating and ‘theatricalized.’ Here the apparent ‘realness’ and ‘authenticity’ of work-like performance is positioned in contrast to the increasing alienation and disembodiment of everyday life. But in subsequent decades, the nature of work itself has undergone a gradual but irreversible shift, such that its paradigmatic figure is no longer the factory worker (or the craftsperson), but instead the service provider, who is a kind of ‘emotional labourer’ whose work is very similar to that of the actor. Here again, new forms of theatre, such as immersive and one-to-one theatre, emerge as a challenge to the theatricality of everyday life. I explore these themes through a comparison of how two artists from very different periods, Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s and Adrian Howells in the 2000s, used their creative practice to think through questions of work, alienation, and everyday life.
Performance Research, 2018
What’s left on the page, after the theatre is empty, and after the lights go down, and after all ... more What’s left on the page, after the theatre is empty, and after the lights go down, and after all the doors have been opened, and after these words have left their shapes behind? A performance-writing piece for the page, created for the 100th issue of Performance Research.
Performance Philosophy, 2018
This collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of q... more This collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of questions) derived from a year-long collaboration focused on the figure of the refugee. Delivered through mixed-media, the responses cover a vast range of territory, from the relation between refugees and global capitalism to the reign of bio- and necro-politics, from analytical philosophies of naming to continental philosophies of territorialized flows, and from conceptual mappings of interstitial space to concrete mappings of “refugee” movements across the globe. While the article addresses many different questions, the authors are concerned primarily with the following: How can performance philosophy conceptualize “crisis” in its methods and subjects of study? How is crisis organized, delivered and received in thought and performance? The form our response has taken is one of arranged fragments that speak to the “trailing off” of thought that so frequently occurs when faced with “big ideas.” Meanwhile, the content delivers multiple theses on the ways performance philosophy scholarship might grapple with the figure of the refugee, a figure that will surely dominate ethical discussions for years to come.
Performance Philosophy, 2018
The ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world m... more The ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world means that we do not so much write about crisis as much as we write from crisis. What type of thought is possible within crisis? If crisis extends to thought itself, insofar as we find ourselves in a crisis of thought (i.e., the crisis of not being able to think beyond the crisis of thought), then what kind of thinking is possible anymore? These are the questions raised by this special issue of Performance Philosophy , introduced here by the issue's co-editors.
Performance Research, 2018
Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first... more Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first thing we read or hear about it, which may even be more memorable than the work itself; and its work continues in the thoughts and conversations that take place afterward: dialogues and exchanges that may be responding to written accounts as much as to experiences of the work themselves. Critical writing is part of this cycle of making and imagining. It can shape the contexts in which work is made and received, playing not just a responsive role but actively shaping how and what it is possible to make, see, do, and say. And critical writing is also shaped by the circumstances in which it is written, as part of systems of production and distribution.This article gives examples of a number of initiatives by individual writers, artist collectives, and festivals that test forms of critical writing that are as experimental as the practices to which they relate. Drawing on the author's experience running workshops in critical writing practice, it takes inspiration from the expanded field of writing as theorized and practiced in performance writing, placing these ideas in relation to a writing practice that conceives itself as ‘criticism’. It is intended as a practical guide that might be used by writers or workshop leaders to cultivate their own critical writing projects, and to inspire imaginative thinking about writing and conversation as creative practices in their own right.
Performance Paradigm, 2017
This article takes as its point of departure the prevalence of performance and diverse kinds of w... more This article takes as its point of departure the prevalence of performance and diverse kinds of works on display in the 2016 Biennale of Sydney (BoS) as an opportunity to think through the different kinds of “work” that they do. These varying kinds of work are examined in relation to different theoretical frameworks that are inflections of “materialism”: cultural materialism, which helps to situate the economic and material conditions that both constrain and actively generate the kinds of available encounters, and which considers the BoS as an economic as well as aesthetic proposition; “work-like” performance or work-as-material, that foregrounds the material body of the performer, and can also position the labour of the gallery technician as a kind of performance; immaterial labour, which describes work that produces experiences and affects rather than material goods, and which can be placed in relation to participatory and relational art; and finally, shifting from human to non-human performance, new materialism, which emphasises the significance of non-human assemblages in delimiting and producing human agency.
In delineating these concepts in relation to particular artworks presented in the 2016 BoS, my intention is to use them as critical lenses with which to view those works, but also to consider how those works might speak back to these concepts. That is, what is proposed here is not a hierarchy of “materialisms,” nor a privileging of concept over work (or vice versa), but instead an attempt to articulate how the works themselves might be material practices of thinking, “working through” the conditions of their own possibility, and implicating me (as spectator) within the questions of value, ethics, and agency that they raise.
Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, ed. by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, 2017
Taking its inspiration from the 21st-century protest chant, 'This is what democracy looks like!',... more Taking its inspiration from the 21st-century protest chant, 'This is what democracy looks like!', this chapter explores the interrelation between theories of representation and modes of radical democracy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and others, Schmidt analyses recent political actions that refuse to adhere to what he calls 'the politics of the count', including demonstrations against tuition fee increases in the UK, the 2011 London riots, the actions of UK Uncut, and Occupy, all of which emerged within the same twelve months. Such actions produce a representational crisis in two interrelated meanings of the idea of representation: they challenge representational democracy, but also challenge our understandings of what counts as the political—that is to say, what politics looks like.
Performance Philosophy, Apr 10, 2015
If the philosopher has an analogue in the theatre, perhaps it is not with the performer, the one ... more If the philosopher has an analogue in the theatre, perhaps it is not with the performer, the one who shows, but with the stage-hand, the one who sets the stage. This is not, as some might argue, because the stage-hand has some special access to what is behind-the-scenes, or because she knows that what is on-stage is only illusion. The stage-hand’s work is not hidden. It is exactly the opposite: the work is there for all to see. It is because it is there that all can see. It is the work that makes the seeing possible.
RIMA: reaching for a word that does not exist, Jul 30, 2016
The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, 2020
How might we think about darkness as the condition for thinking itself, just as darkness in the t... more How might we think about darkness as the condition for thinking itself, just as darkness in the theatre is the condition for appearance? As a performance effect, it is a representational black-hole: how does one make darkness appear except as a lighting effect? And it is a limit case for phenomenology; as Husserl wrote, in a dark room ‘things no longer “appear” in the authentic sense’ but are there only ‘in bodily emptiness’. For Levinas, the darkness of the night makes present the idea of a world without beings, the nothingness that is not nothing but the insistent ‘there is’, his ‘il y a’. This collaboratively written piece is an attempt to think with darkness, and to use performance-writing as a way for two collaborators to meet in the dark. It is also an encounter between Western phenomenology and Māori cosmology, in relation to the embodied actions of writing and making.
Performance Research, 2024
When we gather to or for something, the first thing we make is the gathering itself. How can we a... more When we gather to or for something, the first thing we make is the gathering itself. How can we approach that making of gathering as a creative and expansive endeavour? From diverse perspectives, the artists here offer new shapes, forms, maps, diagrams, rituals, scores, and protocols of attending to the conditions within which we meet – and the conditions that we make in meeting. When we are in attendance with others, how can we broaden not only what we are attending to, but also how we are attending? How can we arrive together, in ways that recognize and invite the diversity of experiences from which we come together, that name and acknowledge place and relation, that identify and de-invisibilize power relations, that bring creativity and intentionality to our actions, and that de-individualize and re-distribute relationship? As a mix of practical and poetic suggestions, they are offerings for readers to take and to try in future meetings of their own.
Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice, 2022
This case study is based on my experience designing and teaching a course titled Art and Social C... more This case study is based on my experience designing and teaching a course titled Art and Social Change for a mixed group of undergraduate students, including those studying theatre and performance, media and communication, and fine arts. The content of my course nominally offers a survey of what artistic and activist forms of mobilisation might have to offer for 'innovation' in communication, awareness-raising, and social campaigns, but, importantly, it is also designed as itself a form of self-reflective creative activism. The course is structured as a variation on the 'flipped classroom' model; in its typical implementation, the flipped classroom transposes the weekly structure of homework and lecture, such that students encounter lecture content independently, freeing face-to-face time to be used for working through problems under the supervision of the teacher. In my variation, this flip happens halfway through the course, when the entire course pivots to become oriented around open-ended group work, with small groups devising, researching (through primary and secondary methods), and reporting back on their experiments and findings. It is in the second half of the course, in which the learning is led by student enquiry in small groups,
Things that go through your mind when falling: The work of Forced Entertainment, 2023
Global Performance Studies, 2022
Global Performance Studies, 2021
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2020
This article proposes 'planetary performance pedagogy' as a theoretical and practical framework f... more This article proposes 'planetary performance pedagogy' as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.
In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multiuser , and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.
Blind Spot: Staring down the void, ed. by Ric Allsopp and Karen Kipphoff, 2020
The classical critique of theatre, from Plato to Rousseau to Debord, is that it only offers a wor... more The classical critique of theatre, from Plato to Rousseau to Debord, is that it only offers a world of appearances, a spectacle of ‘mere representation’ that distracts the viewer from seeing things as they really are. Indeed, in everyday commentary, machinations in the political realm that seem devoid of any substance are often derided as ‘pure theatre’ or ‘only theatre’. But rather than opposing ‘reality’ and ‘appearances’, a lineage of political thinkers have described politics as the domain of appearances – from Hannah Arendt’s description of ‘spaces of appearance’ that ‘come into being whenever [persons] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (Arendt [1958] 1998, 199), to Judith Butler’s explicit invocation of Arendt in relation to the ‘movement of the squares’ and arguments for agency in plurality (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; Butler 2015). Making an appearance is a political act, revolving around ‘what is seen and what can be said about it’, according to Jacques Rancière ([2000] 2004, 13), such that ‘The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear’ (Agamben [1995] 2000, 95). One of the lessons to be drawn from various social movements is that so long as the underlying conditions—the conditions that allow certain things to appear and others to remain hidden—are themselves hidden, then the possibility of politics will fail to appear. If theatre is the art of appearances, then, such an art might be useful for showing us ‘appearance itself’, to show us the act of showing, as Brecht and others have elaborated. That is, theatre might try to show itself, to see its own blind spot.
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 2020
This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of dif... more This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.
Performance Philosophy, 2019
This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Ha... more This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt’s work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. Arendt’s relevance to our times is ubiquitous: from the near constant citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism in relation to the recent rise in strong-man politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism, to her diagnosis of the plight of refugees, denied even the rights belonging to those that have broken the law, but instead placed outside the law. Contemporary political philosophy also bears numerous influences, in the thinking of Mouffe, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Brown, Butler, and more. For performance philosophy, we might engage with Arendt’s performative notion of politics itself, as exemplified in her idea of ‘spaces of appearance’, but also the performativity of thought, as well as the implications of Arendt’s work for phenomenology, governmentality, rights, and ecology. Contributors to this special issue also think through the relevance of Arendt’s work for an anti-colonial and anti-racist political praxis, and for post and non-human political ethics, judgment, and thinking.
RiDE: Research in Drama Education, 2019
Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebec... more Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebecca Hayes Laughton, and Katherine Low) have been convening working sessions at various schools and conferences that address the questions and problems animating this issue of RiDE. In this final article, a handful of our respondents from ASTR 2018 in San Diego ruminate upon, list, and remember tactics they have used, or dreamed of using, to make it through the neoliberal academic day-today. Their thoughts are accompanied here by a handful of photos that document the documentation we produced at our first symposium.
Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, ed. by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 158–70, 2019
The task of the actor has long been a subject of scepticism, and often scorn, accused of being no... more The task of the actor has long been a subject of scepticism, and often scorn, accused of being not real work: either it is ‘not real’, in that it is only pretending or simulation, or it is ‘not work’, in that it is merely the pursuit of pleasure. But in thinking through its own work, theatre can also help us to think through how work is understood and valued in culture more broadly. In this chapter I focus on two moments in which theatre seems to have been particularly interested in its relationship to work, and in which, by turn, we can track the changing nature of work itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, performance artists turned to ‘task-like’ or ‘work-like’ performance as a way to bring everyday reality to the theatrical event—and, by extension, as a remedy to the way in which wider culture was perceived as increasingly alienating and ‘theatricalized.’ Here the apparent ‘realness’ and ‘authenticity’ of work-like performance is positioned in contrast to the increasing alienation and disembodiment of everyday life. But in subsequent decades, the nature of work itself has undergone a gradual but irreversible shift, such that its paradigmatic figure is no longer the factory worker (or the craftsperson), but instead the service provider, who is a kind of ‘emotional labourer’ whose work is very similar to that of the actor. Here again, new forms of theatre, such as immersive and one-to-one theatre, emerge as a challenge to the theatricality of everyday life. I explore these themes through a comparison of how two artists from very different periods, Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s and Adrian Howells in the 2000s, used their creative practice to think through questions of work, alienation, and everyday life.
Performance Research, 2018
What’s left on the page, after the theatre is empty, and after the lights go down, and after all ... more What’s left on the page, after the theatre is empty, and after the lights go down, and after all the doors have been opened, and after these words have left their shapes behind? A performance-writing piece for the page, created for the 100th issue of Performance Research.
Performance Philosophy, 2018
This collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of q... more This collectively authored article is a curated response to a set of questions (or fragments of questions) derived from a year-long collaboration focused on the figure of the refugee. Delivered through mixed-media, the responses cover a vast range of territory, from the relation between refugees and global capitalism to the reign of bio- and necro-politics, from analytical philosophies of naming to continental philosophies of territorialized flows, and from conceptual mappings of interstitial space to concrete mappings of “refugee” movements across the globe. While the article addresses many different questions, the authors are concerned primarily with the following: How can performance philosophy conceptualize “crisis” in its methods and subjects of study? How is crisis organized, delivered and received in thought and performance? The form our response has taken is one of arranged fragments that speak to the “trailing off” of thought that so frequently occurs when faced with “big ideas.” Meanwhile, the content delivers multiple theses on the ways performance philosophy scholarship might grapple with the figure of the refugee, a figure that will surely dominate ethical discussions for years to come.
Performance Philosophy, 2018
The ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world m... more The ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world means that we do not so much write about crisis as much as we write from crisis. What type of thought is possible within crisis? If crisis extends to thought itself, insofar as we find ourselves in a crisis of thought (i.e., the crisis of not being able to think beyond the crisis of thought), then what kind of thinking is possible anymore? These are the questions raised by this special issue of Performance Philosophy , introduced here by the issue's co-editors.
Performance Research, 2018
Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first... more Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first thing we read or hear about it, which may even be more memorable than the work itself; and its work continues in the thoughts and conversations that take place afterward: dialogues and exchanges that may be responding to written accounts as much as to experiences of the work themselves. Critical writing is part of this cycle of making and imagining. It can shape the contexts in which work is made and received, playing not just a responsive role but actively shaping how and what it is possible to make, see, do, and say. And critical writing is also shaped by the circumstances in which it is written, as part of systems of production and distribution.This article gives examples of a number of initiatives by individual writers, artist collectives, and festivals that test forms of critical writing that are as experimental as the practices to which they relate. Drawing on the author's experience running workshops in critical writing practice, it takes inspiration from the expanded field of writing as theorized and practiced in performance writing, placing these ideas in relation to a writing practice that conceives itself as ‘criticism’. It is intended as a practical guide that might be used by writers or workshop leaders to cultivate their own critical writing projects, and to inspire imaginative thinking about writing and conversation as creative practices in their own right.
Performance Paradigm, 2017
This article takes as its point of departure the prevalence of performance and diverse kinds of w... more This article takes as its point of departure the prevalence of performance and diverse kinds of works on display in the 2016 Biennale of Sydney (BoS) as an opportunity to think through the different kinds of “work” that they do. These varying kinds of work are examined in relation to different theoretical frameworks that are inflections of “materialism”: cultural materialism, which helps to situate the economic and material conditions that both constrain and actively generate the kinds of available encounters, and which considers the BoS as an economic as well as aesthetic proposition; “work-like” performance or work-as-material, that foregrounds the material body of the performer, and can also position the labour of the gallery technician as a kind of performance; immaterial labour, which describes work that produces experiences and affects rather than material goods, and which can be placed in relation to participatory and relational art; and finally, shifting from human to non-human performance, new materialism, which emphasises the significance of non-human assemblages in delimiting and producing human agency.
In delineating these concepts in relation to particular artworks presented in the 2016 BoS, my intention is to use them as critical lenses with which to view those works, but also to consider how those works might speak back to these concepts. That is, what is proposed here is not a hierarchy of “materialisms,” nor a privileging of concept over work (or vice versa), but instead an attempt to articulate how the works themselves might be material practices of thinking, “working through” the conditions of their own possibility, and implicating me (as spectator) within the questions of value, ethics, and agency that they raise.
Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, ed. by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, 2017
Taking its inspiration from the 21st-century protest chant, 'This is what democracy looks like!',... more Taking its inspiration from the 21st-century protest chant, 'This is what democracy looks like!', this chapter explores the interrelation between theories of representation and modes of radical democracy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and others, Schmidt analyses recent political actions that refuse to adhere to what he calls 'the politics of the count', including demonstrations against tuition fee increases in the UK, the 2011 London riots, the actions of UK Uncut, and Occupy, all of which emerged within the same twelve months. Such actions produce a representational crisis in two interrelated meanings of the idea of representation: they challenge representational democracy, but also challenge our understandings of what counts as the political—that is to say, what politics looks like.
Performance Philosophy, Apr 10, 2015
If the philosopher has an analogue in the theatre, perhaps it is not with the performer, the one ... more If the philosopher has an analogue in the theatre, perhaps it is not with the performer, the one who shows, but with the stage-hand, the one who sets the stage. This is not, as some might argue, because the stage-hand has some special access to what is behind-the-scenes, or because she knows that what is on-stage is only illusion. The stage-hand’s work is not hidden. It is exactly the opposite: the work is there for all to see. It is because it is there that all can see. It is the work that makes the seeing possible.
RIMA: reaching for a word that does not exist, Jul 30, 2016
The theatre is a strange place to seek an escape from alienated labour, given its long associatio... more The theatre is a strange place to seek an escape from alienated labour, given its long association with dynamics of abstraction, representation, and reproduction. One possible approach was tendered in the task-based procedures of performance in the 1960s, which sought to avoid artifice and restore a sense of reality and authenticity to performed actions as ‘real work’. But, as the lines between work and non-work become increasingly blurred in the 21st century, a more recent tendency has amplified the theatrical rather than the performative, producing not an escape from commodification but rather what Nicholas Ridout has called the ‘commodification-squared temporality of the theatrical’ (Passionate Amateurs, p. 132). In this paper, I will consider the ongoing project Life & Times by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which, rather than trying to create moments of ‘real life’ that would redeem theatre’s falseness, instead ambitiously (and impossibly) sets out to create a theatre that swallows up an entire life – including the life of its audience members – within its capacious artifice.
Who not will else let slip, a fist raised afore a fire? A dim shape, an in-between light, a tong... more Who not will else let slip, a fist raised afore a fire? A dim shape, an in-between light, a tongue too heavy to lift. In other algorithms the pixels are quantized step-wise with error correction after each step. As a continuation of my lecture-performance ‘The state of images’ (How Performance Thinks, London 2012), this talk sits unsteadily at the tipping point between stasis and movement, between feeling and critique, between image and recognition. Drawing on political events, theatrical descriptions, and daily ephemera, I ask, what is it that moves us to act? Like all performances, it is an attempt to hold that within which it is itself held.
In the US, evangelical Christian communities stage promenade-theatre Hell Houses as a way to depi... more In the US, evangelical Christian communities stage promenade-theatre Hell Houses as a way to depict the consequences of what they regard as sinful behaviour and to encourage re-affirmation of faith and fundraising. Back to Back Theatre recently staged a production of one of these plays for Melbourne’s Arts House, drawing on a volunteer cast of amateur and semi-professional performers as well as a few members of their permanent ensemble composed of performers perceived to have intellectual disabilities. The company described project as an ‘anthropological study’ in which they attempted to follow the instructions of the play as literally as possible and to avoid interpretation or critique; they also presented the theatrical event as prelude to a series of public forums featuring secular and religious commentators on faith, provocation, and morality. Both the world-view of the play’s fiction, and also of the public forums, emphasised clear distinctions between self and other and moral dimensions that arise from these distinctions. But the theatre event itself was more complicated, involving a series of leaps of identification and complex relationships of insider and outsider. Drawing on my observations of the rehearsal process as well as some of the history of evangelical Christianity, I will reflect on the figure of the outsider as a basis for moral judgement, and the possibility for ‘outsider theatre’ as a variation on ‘outsider art’.
New Adventures in Publishing will explore recent developments around Live Art publishing and dist... more New Adventures in Publishing will explore recent developments around Live Art publishing and distribution. The context for this roundtable discussion includes recent shifts in cultural commentary and critical discourse by artists and writers; and extraordinary advances in technologies.
Panelists: CJ Mitchell, Live Art Development Agency, UK, Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency, UK, Adrian Heathfield, University of Roehampton, UK, Theron Schmidt, Kings College London, UK, Marin Blazevic, University of Zagreb, Croatia, Brian Lobel, Artist, UK, Sara Jane Bailes, University of Sussex, UK, Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Aoife Monks Birkbeck College University of London, UK, Lara Shalson, Kings College London UK, Richard Gough, Aberystwyth University, UK, Mary Paterson, Writer, UK, Yelena Gluzman, University of Tokyo, Japan, Nika Arhar, freelance publicist, Slovenia, Katja Čičigoj, freelance theoretician and researcher, Slovenia
This paper explores what might be at stake when art or performance exposes the apparently periphe... more This paper explores what might be at stake when art or performance exposes the apparently peripheral structures of labour that support the art-event. In contrast to the category of performance characterised variously as ‘troublesome amateurism’ (Kear) or ‘radical amateurism’ (Bailes), this phenomenon might be described as troublesome professionalism. Whereas such exposure could be understood as a form of institutional critique, in which the otherwise invisible labour of administrative and technical support is re-valued, it might also be seen as doubly commodifying that same labour.
For example, in the piece ‘by’ John Baldessari included in the 11 Rooms exhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival, the organisers attempted to stage a previously unrealised concept by Baldessari that centred around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. In this form, the work is partly about the normally hidden labour that underlies the production of artistic value, and the way in which celebrated artists and curators derive surplus value from the (waged) labour of those working for them. But it also reproduces the extraction of surplus value from that same labour. Indeed, the ‘work’ of art here is no longer that object or event that is produced by anonymous labour, but is in its entirety that labour itself, being put to work twice.
The Baldessari piece, and similar theatrical pieces that foreground ‘non-artistic’ labour (such as Quarantine’s Entitled), tend also to present this labour in the service of the idea of the ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. The professionals are enlisted in overcoming theatre’s artifice. Perhaps one solution to this problem of double-exploitation might be offered by an approach that instead highlights the unreality of the labour involved, and which offers an invitation to join in the construction of an artificial ‘commons’ – an altogether unreal work to which the theatre might be especially suited.
For Hans-Thies Lehmann, the political relevance of postdramatic theatre derives from its potentia... more For Hans-Thies Lehmann, the political relevance of postdramatic theatre derives from its potential opposition to spectacle and representation. Referencing Debord, Lehmann writes, ‘the task of theatre must be to create situations rather than spectacles,’ such that ‘the structural problem becomes exactly how to suspend the fundamental law of the spectacle itself.’ The work of Australian theatre company Back to Back, which for over 20 years has employed performers with intellectual disabilities, might at first glance appear to embody the kind of resistance to spectacle that Lehmann describes. The ‘realness’ of the performers’ disability might be understood to transform the theatre-event into a situation rather than a spectacle, to which audiences are witnesses rather than spectators (to borrow Tim Etchells’ distinction).
And yet, Back to Back’s most recent work, Food Court, seems to engage with questions and dynamics of theatrical spectacle and dramatic representation – not in order to overcome them, but rather as a way of engaging with the politics of appearance itself. Rather than getting to the ‘real’ politics behind these representational surfaces, the work stages the idea that disability is precisely a matter of appearance, and that, as Jacques Rancière has argued, the distribution of appearance is the domain of politics.
1967 saw two vehement attacks on spectacle: Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ with its call to... more 1967 saw two vehement attacks on spectacle: Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ with its call to ‘defeat or suspend theater’, and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. During the same period, Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966-8) and Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (German 1966, English 1970) appeared to reject spectacle. But Rainer and Handke’s relationship to spectacle is more complicated than simple refutation, and their influence is still felt in contemporary theatre and dance. The legacy of these two works reflects an ongoing interest in what might be called, in a twist on Debord, ‘the situation of the spectacle’.
• Why do we desire the real? I am thinking here of the way in which highly stylised pieces of pe... more • Why do we desire the real? I am thinking here of the way in which highly stylised pieces of performance – such as the ‘bad’ acting of Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players or the powerful visuals of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio – are seemingly valued because of their relation to a higher reality (for example, one critic suggests Maxwell’s actors reveal our ‘core’ being). In appraising these theatrical experiences, what is the appeal of describing them as being close to reality, or heightened reality, or revealing reality?
• What is the nature of the difference between the representation and the real? This seems particularly relevant with regard to the presentation of damaged, tenderised, or suffering bodies. In Regarding by Isabelle Dumont, an actress applies layers of professional stage makeup to reproduce the image of a brutalised victim of violence; what makes this kind of illusion different from the presentation of bodies which are ‘really’ bleeding or otherwise vulnerable?
• What political effects might be at stake in these distinctions? In cultural critics BAVO’s collection on the idea of ‘over-identification’, they describe works by the likes of Christoph Schlingensief as being characterised by radical undecidability, what they call a ‘structural ambiguity’. I would suggest that destabilising the distinction between reality and representation might be one source of performance’s political efficacy – and perhaps the only source which is not based on the transcendence or suppression of theatricality.
Arts in the UK have taken a turn toward efficacy and politicisation – as reflected by Mark Wallin... more Arts in the UK have taken a turn toward efficacy and politicisation – as reflected by Mark Wallinger's Turner Prize winning re-enactment of Brian Haw's Parliament Square protest – and also a turn toward theatricality – as reflected by the invitation of primarily gallery-based artists to create works for the Manchester Opera House at the inaugural Manchester International Festival. In what ways are these two turns reflections of each other, and in what ways do they complicate and contradict each other?
In addressing this question, I want to propose a politics of theatricality which is at odds with the idea of theatre as public, democratic space. Instead, I will draw on theatre scholar Tracy Davis’s analysis of the ‘doubling’ mechanism of theatricality and its production of ‘a sympathetic breach’, and on Jacques Rancière’s critical account of theatre history in which theatre revolutionaries (such as Brecht and Artaud) continuously theorise a ‘good theatre’ which will overcome its status as spectacle in order that allegedly passive spectators can enter into a collective state of being.
Considering works such as Rita McBride’s Arena (the centrepiece of Tate Modern’s 2008 exhibition The World as a Stage) alongside parallel works by Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, and the Freee Art Collective, I will argue that the theatrical's interventionist potential resides exactly in its separation from the public sphere, and in its attention to and play with the conditions of that separation – a condition that, in an update to Debord, we might call ‘the situation of the spectacle’.
The politics of sincerity is a common characteristic of media-heavy democracies, as in Richard Se... more The politics of sincerity is a common characteristic of media-heavy democracies, as in Richard Sennett’s diagnosis of ‘intimate society’ in which ‘[w]hat makes an action good (that is, authentic) is the character of those who engage in it, not the action itself.’ This distinction is also important for Austin’s diagnosis of performative speech-acts: without the appropriate context, a speech-act can be infelicitous. But the performative acts studied within the discipline of performance studies include deliberately infelicitous acts, as in Tracy Davis’s definition of theatricality: ‘A spectator’s dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach […] effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to the theatre.’ What does this mean for the possible deployment of inauthenticity as a political intervention?
One perspective is offered by the tactic of over-identification, which utilises an exaggerated sincerity as part of a refusal of the idealism that is typically expected to be art’s social role. In these cases, sincerity itself is under attack. But even in official situations, a kind of over-identification is required, as in Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s three-hour apology to his country’s aboriginal peoples. Somewhere in between are actions such as Rabih Mroué’s I, the Undersigned, an apology for the Lebanese civil wars taken in the absence of any other apology, but also a work for sale at the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London. To what extent is a work like this an intervention in specific politics, or might it be understood as an intervention in the very idea of polity? What authority is asserted in the absence of sincerity? And how might (mis-)performance rework the relation between context and authority?
The arts in the UK have taken a turn toward efficacy and politicisation – as reflected by Mark Wa... more The arts in the UK have taken a turn toward efficacy and politicisation – as reflected by Mark Wallinger's Turner Prize winning re-enactment of Brian Haw's Parliament Square protest. They have also taken a turn toward theatricality – as in the invitation to primarily gallery-based artists to create works for Manchester’s Opera House at its inaugural International Festival. In what ways do these two turns reflect each other, and in what ways do they complicate and contradict each other? What connections are there between ‘relational aesthetics’, which seeks to transform gallery spaces into sites for the production of human relations, and the mechanisms of theatricality or the ‘relational economics’ of affective labour?
These questions will be addressed through consideration of the production of theatrical space: what is a theatrical space, and how is it produced? At one extreme, theatrical space is theorised as a model of the public sphere, and at the other, as a place of inauthenticity and spectacle. Taking Tracy Davis's analysis of the 'doubling' mechanism of theatricality and its production of 'a sympathetic breach', I will discuss both the restrictions on and possibilities for a characteristically theatrical mode of intervention. Looking at Rita McBride’s ‘Arena’ (recently recreated as the centrepiece of Tate Modern’s ‘The World as a Stage’), alongside performance-based works in un-curated public spaces, I will argue that the interventionist potential of the theatrical is enabled precisely by its separation from the public sphere - and its attention to and play with the conditions of that separation.
Reviewing Mark Wallinger’s exhibition State Britain in the national newspaper the Guardian, Adria... more Reviewing Mark Wallinger’s exhibition State Britain in the national newspaper the Guardian, Adrian Searle asks, ‘Is State Britain a protest, a readymade, a simulation or an appropriation? It is all of these things – an installation, an institutional critique, an example of relational aesthetics. […] It makes us think of the mores of recent installation art, about the “public” nature of a space such as Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries and about the Britishness of the gallery itself – what is and is not exhibited here?’ Searle’s catalogue of twentieth century modes by which art has cast itself as political agent – readymade, institutional critique, etc. – ends with relational aesthetics. To his list I want to explore the possibility of adding theatricality, and to consider the ways in which it has and might be considered a mode of politicisation. In this paper, I will address and dispute arguments that the political potential of theatricality derives from its status as public space in which to model sociability; instead, following Rancière, I will argue that sensibility (rather than sociability) is theatre’s critical intervention.
Why do we desire the real? Even highly stylised pieces of performance, such as the ‘bad acting’ o... more Why do we desire the real? Even highly stylised pieces of performance, such as the ‘bad acting’ of Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players, are seemingly valued because of their relation to a higher reality (for example, one critic suggests Maxwell’s actors reveal our ‘core’ being). We also see this distinction in Tim Etchells’ argument that performance should create not ‘an audience to a spectacle’, but ‘witnesses to an event’. The appeal of this interpretation seems to be that it gives the theatrical experience an ethical value, a value that it can only have if we are authentically invested in the event. But, as Rancière has argued, such an interpretation requires that the theatre-event must suppress or transcend its own nature, and in particular that the spectator must first confess and then absolve his or her passivity. Can we articulate a value for the theatre-event – particularly for those events that present damaged, tenderised, or suffering bodies – which is not derived from such a model of guilt and redemption? Drawing on Rancière and Sontag, I will suggest that one argument for the value of these theatrical representations could be based precisely on their ability to destabilise the distinction between reality and representation, between the artificial and the authentic.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2020
New Theatre Quarterly, 2019
TDR/The Drama Review, 2016
TDR: The Drama Review, 59.1 (2015), 190-92, 2015
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2014
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2012
This editorial has been composed out of contributions received from an open call for writing in r... more This editorial has been composed out of contributions received from an open call for writing in response to T****’s inaugural with the constraint that responses had to be in the form of a single sentence. All submitted contributions have been included; collated by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, with individual authors listed in the endnotes below. The name T**** has been redacted whenever it appeared in the text. Thank you to everyone who contributed.
Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of politica... more Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance?
The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance.
Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others.
CONTENTS
Introduction (Jerome Carroll (University of Nottingham, UK; Steve Giles, Emeritus, University of Nottingham, UK; Karen Jürs-Munby, Lancaster University, UK)
1. Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why Post-Brechtian Does Not Mean Postdramatic (David Barnett, University of Sussex, UK)
2. Spectres of Subjectivity: On the Fetish of Identity in (Post-)Postdramatic Choreography (Peter M Boenisch, University of Surrey, UK)
3. Political Fictions and Fictionalisations: History as Material for Postdramatic Theatre (Mateusz Borowski, Jagiellonian University, Poland, and Malgorzata Sugiera, Jagiellonian University, Poland)
4. Phenomenology and the Postdramatic: A Case Study of three plays by Ewald Palmetshofer (Jerome Carroll, University of Nottingham, UK)
5. Christoph Schlingensief's 'Rocky Dutschke, '68': A reassessment of activism in theatre (Antje Dietze, University of Leipzig, Germany)
6. Postdramatic Reality Theatre and Productive Insecurity: Destabilizing Encounters with the Unfamiliar in Theatre from Sydney and Berlin (Ulrike Garde, Macquarie University, Australia, and Meg Mumford, University of New South Wales, Australia)
7. Parasitic Politics: Elfriede Jelinek's 'Secondary Dramas' and their staging (Karen Jürs-Munby, Lancaster University, UK)
8. A future for Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic (Hans-Thies Lehmann, Visiting Professor at University of Kent, UK)
9. Acting, disabled: Back to Back Theatre and the politics of appearance (Theron Schmidt, King's College London, UK)
10. Performing the Collective: Heiner Müller's 'Alone with these Bodies' ('Allein mit diesen Leibern) as a piece of Postdramatic Theatre (Michael Wood, University of Edinburgh, UK)
11. Crises of Representation: Towards a Postdramatic Politics? (Brandon Woolf, University of California, USA)
EDITORS
Dr Jerome Carroll is lecturer in German Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Steven Giles is Professor Emeritus of German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has contributed to Brecht on Art and Politics (Methuen Drama, 2003) as well as authoring books on Modern European Drama and Critical Theory.
Dr Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. She translated and wrote a critical introduction for Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre (2006).
Performance Philosophy, 2017
A brief introduction to Performance Philosophy Vol 3, No 1 (2017)
Caridad Svich: JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays, 2016
This editorial introduces Volume 2, Issue 1 of Performance Philosophy, including articles that re... more This editorial introduces Volume 2, Issue 1 of Performance Philosophy, including articles that respond to an open call for submissions and the introduction of a new section, [Margins], that supports creative, non-standard approaches to the manifold relationships that may arise out of the conjunction between performance and philosophy.
Note: In preparing this report, I thought about the etymology of the word mobility and its usage ... more Note: In preparing this report, I thought about the etymology of the word mobility and its usage in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to describe the emergence of a new social class, 'the great mobility' or 'mob', which emerged as a consequence of urbanization. I wanted to return to this use of term as a collective noun to describe a community that is defined by being in movement and by its habitation of public spaces that make possible its emergence. Its original usage carries pejorative connotations of 'fickle', 'common', and 'excitable', which we might revisit in valuing a concept of community that is provisional, transient, and without fixed form. In the context of our gathering on this continent, I would also acknowledge the meaning that the word 'mob' carries within the dialectical English spoken by members of Aboriginal communities to refer to an extended family or language group. I wish to honour and respect the deep kinship structures and connections to place that are conveyed by that usage.
