The Theatrical-Reverse. The Origin of Empathy and its Transformation in Performance Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Acting out : the pleasures of performance horror
2014
The horror genre has always been a subject of fascination, both in popular culture and in academia, and its manifestations continue to inspire monographs and papers. These studies, however, often focus only on books and movies, whilst the genre encompasses much more: art, music, theatre and games, forms which have not had as much attention. The objective of the current discussion is to move beyond this limited tradition, instead engaging with performance, or live action, horror. This study begins with the premise that, because of its often immersive format, performance horror creates an intensity that is unique to this form. This uniqueness stems from the fact that the form is live and this type of horror thus creates a confrontation between audience and performance that cannot be replicated by books or film. The focus of this thesis, then, is in the analysis of this form and its elements and to identify how these work together to create a particular narrative. In order to adequately discuss performance horror, a theoretical framework is established in the introduction, aiming to bring together a wide variety of scholarship in order to pin down the specifics of the form and its features. As such, secondary reading provides a clear context for the work presented here. In addition, case studies of a number of productions are used to show how performance horror works in practice. These case studies are informed by close readings of both play scripts (where available) and marketing materials. Interviews with many of the creators were undertaken to gain insight into the underlying ideas and thought processes when staging these productions. Each of these tools helps to build a picture of the elements which influence the narrative of this form of horror, how they are translated into performance, and how they may impact an audience. Through this process, the thesis provides a new way of looking at this particular practice, as well as a means to approach the study of popular and immersive performance.
2002
This book-length work offers a theatre-philosophy in the form of an ethics of appearing. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, such as Nancy, Derrida, Lingis, Lévinas, Blanchot, Badiou and Deleuze, it elaborates the theme of ‘becoming unaccommodated’. Within this theme, anomalous disturbances in normal ‘states of affairs’, both on and off-stage, are shown to give rise to a specifically ethical experience of audience. Pathognomy, the art of tracking the ephemeral or elusive across varied terrain, as opposed to the systematizing impulse of physiognomy and its logic of recognition, is revived as an approach to exploring this phenomenon. Its defining feature is its manifestation as an event, a key term in contemporary ‘Continental’ philosophy. Bringing together a wide variety of source material drawn from theatre and performance studies, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, the early chapters explore the experience of audience as the audience of experience. They examine particular forms of theatrical appearing and spectatorship, notions of fiasco and disaster underpinning performance, and an ethics of theatrical experience. Shifting in scale from the macro to the micro level, these concerns are then focused around an engagement with the face as the prime figure of appearance, elaborated in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and ‘disfigured’ in the garish symbol that stands for theatre – the masks of comedy and tragedy. The face and subsequently its oral/aural counterpart, the voice, are investigated via a logic of appearing or expression, a previously neglected and discredited concept. Expression is reanimated as an alternative to the tragic logic of representation. The anomalies of expression are explored via iconic images in artistic and scientific works deploying theatricalized presentations of human emotion, as well as via phenomenological consideration of other varieties of theatrical appearing, visual representation, everyday behaviour and non-linguistic utterance.
No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience
This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed "new media." The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a transdisciplinary fascination with all things visual, from "high" to "low," and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture-broadly conceived-that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications. This book has roots in a long-ago dissertation, and I owe thanks to my dissertation committee, Hal Foster, Susan Buck-Morss, and Mark Seltzer, as well as to Peter Hohendahl and David Bathrick. I remain grateful to Hal Foster that he encouraged his graduate students to find their own areas of interest and their own voices. Too many other colleagues, friends, and other commentators have subsequently informed my thinking (or fed me in various other ways), for me to name them all.
2020
I had the pleasure to present this paper at the II Conferencia científica internacional "Teatralidad - Antiteatralidad: estudios transdisciplinares y escenológicos del teatro contemporáneo" - 2nd International Scientific Conference "Theatricality - Antitheatricality: Transdisciplinary and Scenological Studies on Contemporary Theater" - The body of the spectator (16-18 December 2020). Organised by: Instytut Neofilologii / Universidad de Bielsko-Biała - University of Bielsko-Biała (POLONIA) & Instituto de Artes del Espectáculo “Dr. Raúl H. Castagnino”. ABSTRACT: The agency of the audience members develops into what I call the audience-audience relationship, which I discuss in this paper. This refers to the way in which audience members influence each other within the time-space framework of a performance, resulting in actions that affect the performer, and thus, shape and direct the development of the work. The artist's body becomes the receiver/spectator while the audience's body, as a collective body made of individual bodies, performs. I explore how the spectators, once they take agency in the performance, may direct its process and overpower the artist by acting independently from them and the initial format of the work. The presence-authority of the artist in relation to the work becomes secondary or is overshadowed. The audience-audience relationship highlights the relationality and mutuality intrinsic in the performance ecosystem, as well as the agency of the inanimate elements of space, time, and documentation in acting upon bodies, and vice versa.
Audiences, choreography, publics : the politics & practice of spectatorship
2015
The question of how some bodies appear to others, and how those bodies collectively relate with each other, is central to choreography and to concerns of the state. When the role of theatre spectatorship is discussed in political discourse, it typically invokes the binary of the passive versus the active; the passive is dismissed as socially worthless and the active as invigorating community. I would like to explore more expansive experiences of spectatorship, in order to articulate in what ways bodies relate beyond the representational operations that underlie these terms. My approach is to use choreographic practice to create particular conditions of appearance and relation, as discussion and experience of spectatorial exchange. This project occurs in a context of artists' and scholars' interest in the politics of theatre's operations of appearance, and in choreography's relational productivity. It asks why, given the spectatorial relations fundamental to everyday life, we repeatedly go to performances. The original choreographic works Count Two, Practice and Assembly consider how qualities of spectatorial relation are affected by performance strategies that address the potentials of linguistic structures, theatricality, materiality and viewing conventions. Drawing on a Rancièrian notion of emancipated spectatorship, Count Two sought to discover how the content and structure of a piece might acknowledge the spectator's activity of watching. Through its repeated re-categorisation of components, the piece invoked qualities of instability as inherent to logocentric structures. The affective relations investigated through Practice's embrace of the thought, felt and materially endured, provided an opportunity to attend to the ways we might experience spectatorial exchange within unstable systems, as attention to what is present. Finally, Assembly asked what a crowd of bodies can do other than serve representational ideas of public-ness, and suggests that an impulse to gather is also an impulse to be vulnerable. These pieces provided a chance to explore how relations are experienced, as unstable relations, through our many perceptive capacities. Choreography asserts itself as the production of situations of generative relating, through spectatorial experiences of choreography as a 'being-for-others'.
Gilles Deleuze is convinced that art and philosophy go hand in hand as far as the transformative power of their concepts is concerned. After all, they can both be a crowbar in causing upheaval to the representative paradigm: 'La recherche de nouveaux moyens d'expressions philosophiques fut inaugurée par Nietzsche, et doit être aujourd'hui poursuivie en rapport avec le renouvellement de certains autres arts, par exemple le théâtre ou le cinéma' (Deleuze, 1968, p. 4). A considerable number of performers rose to meet this challenge in the twentieth century and were aiming at an active, often participatory spectator who would be forced to think, to provoke the mind to further action. It was not 'common sense'-this 'dogmatic image of thought which takes recognition as its model (Patton, 1997, p. 3)-which was addressed, but a creative or nomadic thinking 1 , aiming at a fundamental encounter with the unknown or unfamiliar. In this participatory theatre, the spectator had to be active at both a mental and even physical level. Deleuze's rhizome ontology 2 provided inspiration for the interactive theatre which would stimulate creative observation and thinking, with attention paid to corporality alongside the reasoning.
This paper will emphasize a series of negotiation and renegotiation strategies for the corporeal-cognitive relationship between the actor and the spectator in contemporary experimental theatre. To this end, I have chosen two performances with totally different narrative and performative structures (a verbal one and a nonverbal one, both staged by the same director, Eugen Jebeleanu and his team Compagnie 28: Don’t Cry Baby, starting from a play by Catinca Drăgănescu, based on the typologies/situations in Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, and Hotel, a free adaptation on F.X. Kroetz’s Wunschkonzert. The paper mixes the descriptive analysis of Jebeleanu’s performances with theoretical and applied perspectives from the fields of cognitive psychology and neurosciences, as well as of semiotics and pragmatics.: The hypothesis we are trying to establish is that experimental shows performed in small spaces combine the corporeal-empathic and the cognitive challenges exerted on the spectator, sometimes turning the experience of the latter into a participatory game that involves an enhancement of one's proprioceptive internal sensations, a stronger perception of one's own being alive and a feeling of participatory attendance.
Audience and mise-en-scène : manipulating the performative aesthetic
2014
The objective of this thesis is to examine the impact audiences have on the director?s process of creating a mise-en-sc�ne and to understand the ways in which we might begin to understand and articulate such impact. I argue that the influence audiences have on theatre directors' mise-en-scenes have been ambiguous, and therefore there is a lack in a systematic approach to theatre-making. Through a detailed investigation on the arbitrary methods employed by a selected group of theatre directors, I propose that a communicative approach in capturing audiences? expectations is necessary in shaping mise-en-scenes, directly and indirectly. More specifically, this thesis makes explicit these cognitive processes through a technical investigation, a mechanism which I propose and have graphically represented that can be used to harness the impact audiences have on theatre-making. In this thesis, the historical role and influence of the audience is discussed in Chapter One. This is followed...