Guerilla Performance as Pagan Theatrics (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of “theatrical space” by examining contemporary guerilla performance practices, such as Augusto Boal's Invisible Theatre and the Recombinant Theatre proposed by Critical Art Ensemble, which take performance out of the black box and into quotidian environments. The staging of performance events amongst an unsuspecting public can be seen as a form of political activism that aims to expose the representative nature of the everyday and thereby challenge the normative order. These interventions, which perforate the audience/performer divide, are necessarily created collectively with unpredictable results. As such, they stand against the established Romantic notion of the individual artist-genius. Guerilla performance will be considered in relation to the Bakhtinian logic of carnival, understood as a turning upside-down of the established order, and Lyotard's notion of a pagan theatrics which reveals the difference between play and madness; simulacrum and truth; clowning and seriousness as being illusory. Tension arises from the incompossibility of the normative understanding of social space and the different use (or détournement)to which it is put. This intensity founds a new kind of theatrical space that effectively pierces the 4th wall of hyperreality, exposing the representational and ideological nature of everyday experience. However, just as the carnival's reversal of the established order is always contingent, so the apparent chaos caused by the appropriation and redirection of public space recedes after the event. On repetition, such theatrical interventions can take on the quality of rituals which form a rhythmic oscillation between order and disorder. Through this ritualisation the pagan theatrics are recouped by the system and become a form of new-Romanticism.

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