Theatricality and Performativity: Writings on Texture from Plato's Cave to Urban Activism (2018) (original) (raw)

Fabric Philosophy: The "Texture" of Theatricality and Performativity (2017)

As metaphors of human existence, the idioms of theatricality and performativity both fluctuate between values of novelty and normativity: theatricality, between the essence of an art form and a cultural value variously opposed or embraced, performativity, between doing and dissimulation. To revert from drawing too sharp boundaries, either between the two phenomena or between their cognate art forms and everyday life, the article pursues to analyse them in “textural” terms specifically inspired by Tim Ingold’s ecological anthropology and Stephen C. Pepper’s philosophical pragmatism from the 1940s. Where Ingold’s ecology of lines admits to “no insides or outsides,” “trailing loose ends in every direction,” Pepper’s “contextualistic world” of events admits “no top nor bottom” to its strands and textures. After introducing Ingold’s networks of connected objects and meshworks of interwoven lines as shorthand terms for specifically theatrical and performative textures, their various dynamics are considered in terms of absorption and abstraction: on a global scale – I briefly consider the Anthropos(c)ene as theatrum mundi – seeing all the world as a stage indeed depends on something of a theatrical inversion of its lines of becoming. From the tensions of novelty and normativity, noted above, what emerges is a fabric philosophy of weaving and zooming between overlapping textures: if the performative names a dramaturgy of becoming, then the theatrical provides an optic for its analysis.

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces, 2021

In the final months of 2010, a new global cycle of protests and social movements emerged that, as the following text will argue, has forced us to critically interrogate and transform the accepted ways in which theorists and researchers perceive the relation between aesthetics and politics, performativity and critical practice, modernity and its presupposed mimetic dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. These protest movements will be examined as various instances of the general category that we can call “the Occupy form.” The following research begins with an overview of the cycle of struggles and protest that were born out of the global revolutions in 1968. After having provided the salient features of this moment of recent political history, this text moves on to considerations of the performative turn in both the arts as well as in politics, thereby allowing for a broader critique of Modernity and for a conceptualization of what one could call as altermodernities. — a category, which obliges the theorist-researcher to reconceive of the very notion of performativity in the process. The research also defines performative event and its aesthetics in contrast to other existing literature such as social performance theory, and it goes on to argue for an aesthetics whose function is to create the conditions for alternative subjectifications. As performative politics works on the social relations to envision and enact a future society in the present, the transformations in dominant spatiotemporality – a constituent part of relationality – as well as bodies – in-between which the social relationality emerges – will be examined. The processes and mechanisms of constructing and imagining collective bodies at the national level, and how performative politics disrupts such processes of homogenization will be also an important part of evaluating the impacts and effects of occupy movements as well as how these performative movements re-appropriated time and space; creating spatio-temporalities different from the established colonial and authoritarian linear progress-centered ones reproduced by the nation-state apparatuses, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa. It will be also argued that a paradigm of imitation and mimesis will come short of explaining the communication and dissemination of protests movement from Cairo to New York, from Istanbul to Madrid, thus proposing the idea of performative contagion as a model to rethink this communication. Although this research makes use of case studies, archived material, and author led interviews with artist-activists, all of which are related to the main subject of this thesis the occupy form of protests and its predecessors, it largely remains a theoretical endeavor to use performance and theatre studies in the socio-political field, drawing its insights from the tradition of the philosophers of immanence and the thinkers of community in 20th century.

Thread 1: Theatrical Metaphors, Textile Philosophies (2018)

Theatricality and Performativity: Writings on Texture from Plato's Cave to Urban Activism, 2018

This introductory chapter outlines theatricality and performativity by way of their tensions and paradoxes – between seeing and doing, novelty and normativity – and argues for a more perspectival approach with notions of ‘texture,’ derived from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen Pepper. After a section on ‘metaphor,’ those of texture and weaving are further elaborated in three extensive segments, beginning from their prior usage in dramaturgy (Eugenio Barba) and philosophy (feminism, Pepper, ecology). The third and most important section introduces Ingold’s meshwork as a key figure of plural performative becoming: the interweaving of lines, as opposed to the network as a key figure of theatrical detachment or abstraction – the connecting of points or objects into which the meshwork is simplified when we optically ‘zoom out’ from its haptic engagement. In the end, the ensuing chapters are introduced, themselves addressed as specific ‘threads’ within the book’s overall texture.

Theatricality as Protean Experience in Hybrid Forms of Contemporary Art

The paper aims to formulate a model of theatricality relevant to the hybrid forms of contemporary art which fuse not only different artistic media but also scientific, technological and political practices and discourses. The first part of the paper draws on the findings of the German art theoretician Juliane Rebentisch in order to critically analyse the traditional conception of the theatricality of art as a hierarchical relation between a human subject and non-human object (Fried). The second part goes on to engage with contemporary new materialism (Barad, DeLanda, Sabolius) to treat theatricality as a Protean experience based on the principle of continuous transformation of the ontological status of all, human and non-human participants of hybrid forms of contemporary art.

Essay on Stage: The Artistic Practice Introducing a Germ into the Cultural Matrix

Creating for the Stage and Play, Arti della Performance: orizzonti e culture, Collana diretta da Matteo Casari e Gerardo Guccini:, 2021

The chapter will take a closer look at a specific writing procedure for the stage, the essay on stage, a form of expression within a given performative system that reveals the limits of that system as inadequate, imposed. A theatrical essay or an essay on stage belongs to the tradition of the bordercrossing experimental performance-art pieces conceptualized in the 20 th century by Craig, Artaud, Meyerhold, futurist synthetic theatre, neo-avant-garde theatre, and others. I. Towards a definition of the term One can call an essay on stage any performance practice that (like the essay according to Graham Good) makes «a claim to truth, but not permanent truth. Its truths are particular, of the here and now. Nothing is carried over» (Good 1988: 9). This specific form and procedure produce particular truths and reveals the limits of artistic genres. It is far from a stable category, and it establishes its inventiveness and singularity by operating at the very unstable limits of the theatrical and by reinventing the category of theatricality itself. Among numerous possible examples of this "critical art", we will choose the following ones: 1) The 2009 performance Alice in Wonderland: A Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization, (Alice nel paese delle meraviglie-Saggio sulla fine di una civiltà) by the Italian director Armando Punzo, staged in Voltera Prison; 2) The 2012 performance Drawers (Schubladen) by the German collective She She Pop; and 3) Oliver Frljić's 2016 performance Our Violence and Your Violence (Naše nasilje in vaše nasilje) based on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (Ästhetik des Widerstands). Using these examples, we will try to map this specific textual procedure that produces what Badiou terms «a generic vacillation» (Badiou 1990: 91).

Textures of Thought: Theatricality, Performativity, and the Extended/Enactive Debate (2016)

Peter Garratt (ed.), The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, 71–92. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Navigating cognitive approaches to theatre and performance studies, this chapter claims that extended and enactive philosophies of mind bear strong rhetorical affinities with the well-worn humanistic idioms of theatricality and performativity, and that these family resemblances help to identify blind spots in both approaches. Most explicitly, versions of enaction and performativity converge in renouncing pre-given essences for acts of ‘bringing forth’ worlds and identities. However, there are differences in how the two idioms navigate ensuing paradoxes of novelty and normativity: while an enactive approach could provide the more textual/deterministic notions of performativity with a more positive account of embodied agency, it lacks as yet the tools for properly engaging the cultural and political (how the ‘natural’ may work to conceal its performative constitution)—the very prop room from where ideas of extended cognition take off. It is no accident that Andy Clark leans on resolutely theatrical language in arguing for the constitutive ‘role’ of ‘nonbiological props’ in the cognitive ‘drama’ or ‘ensemble’. Likewise, the ‘biochauvinistic prejudice’ of Clark’s opponents seems motivated along much the same lines as those traditionally pitted against theatricality, viewing the extended component of thinking as derived and artificial, secondary to and corruptive of some prior essence. As implied by their few applications to theatre and performance studies, there is a sense in which the enactive and the extended bet their stakes on the actor and the scenery, respectively. Where the former derives ‘mind’ from the specifics of biological embodiment, the multiple realisability of the latter comes close to that of theatricality: just as humans need not be depicted by humans on stage, so the functional networks of cognitive extension may well disregard the particulars in which they are realised. In the terms I will elaborate, if performative textures of thought are typically enacted over time and depend on further histories of sensorimotor experience, then more theatrical ones may recruit external scaffolding opportunistically assembled on the fly; where the performative tends to evade consciousness, theatrical manipulations may also be intuited as such and indeed heighten our sensitivity to their performative constitution.

Textures of Theatricality: Three Approaches from Canonical Theatre Directors (2016)

Tekijä – teos, esitys ja yhteiskunta. Eds Annette Arlander, Laura Gröndahl, and Marja Silde

The article argues for a “textural” understanding of “theatricality,” across three fairly distinct models: the image – deep or shallow, as for Richard Wagner and Georg Fuchs; the platform – of skill or tension, as for Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht; and the tightrope – this is Peter Brook’s metaphor for a kind of theatrical immediacy that navigates between the “holy” and “rough” aspirations of the above. Beyond such central authorities, authorship itself is seen as woven within the work; ‘texture,’ throughout, implies a dramaturgy of interweaving strands or processes, as opposed to the assemblage ofpre-existing parts or components. What marks each of the three models as specifically theatrical is how the very density or sparsity of their textures ostensibly deviates from some historically specific performative norm – be it operatic convention, stage naturalism, capitalist society, literary or “deadly” theatre.

The Discursive Formation of Theatricality as a Critical Concept1

2009

The metaphor of theatricality has, in recent years, been recuperated as a key term in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies. This scholarly “re-valuing” of the term arises, in part, as a reaction to performativity, a term that has achieved a certain discursive dominance in the field. Rather than taking sides in favour of one or the other, in this essay I argue that theatricality is critically formed by this struggle. Historically, theatrical metaphors have been employed in anti-theatricalist discourses to suggest ideas of inauthenticity and deception; most famously, in art critic Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1998). Yet, for the European avantgarde, theatricality was the “essence” of theatre. What appears to be a contradiction seems less so when it is understood that “truth” in these instances lies not in what is claimed for theatricality, but in the juxtaposition of it and another term. This essay analyses how the metaphor of theatricality is flexibly applied in the...