Goudouna. Sozita. Personhood and the Allure of the Object, 1st Global Conference – Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice, Prague, Czech Republic, 11th - 13th November , 2010, (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
Abramovic, Marina and Pijnappel, Johan 1995. Marina Abramovic: cleaning the house. London: Academy Editions. Anderson, P. 2010. So much wasted: hunger, performance, and the morbidity of resistance. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Anderson, P. and Menon, J. 2009. Violence performed: local roots and global routes of conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Anker, V. 2008. Digital dance: the effects of interaction between new technologies and dance performance. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller. Anon, 2007. Marina Abramovic: 7 easy pieces. Milan: Edizioni Charta. Anon, 2010. Understanding Pina: the legacy of Pina Bausch. Anon, n.d. Activism and performance. Anon, n.d. After the fall: dance-theatre and dance-performance. In: Contemporary Theatres in Europe. [online] Routledge, pp.188–198. Available at: . Anon, n.d. Belarus Free Theatre | Theatre group. Available at: . Anon, n.d. CIRCA The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. Available at: . Anon, n.d. Coco Fusco. Available at...
Blackness as medium : body in contemporary theatre practice and theory
Theatralia, 2016
Peggy Phelan, in her famous text, 'Ontology of Performance', states: 'Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. […] Performance […] becomes itself through disappearance.' (PHELAN 1993: 146) At the same time she says that body itself cannot be saved, recorded or documented and that it becomes itself only through unmediated presence that can be experienced by other bodies. The performing body is singular and ephemeral-present and real. She explains: 'In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of "presence". But in the plenitude of their apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else-dance, movement, sound, character, "art".' (PHELAN 1993: 150) How should this be understood? What is the body on stage if it is not the 'body per se'? The answer given by Phelan is not very satisfying. Performance becomes a metaphysical category with its ephemerality that transcends the mortal body. Becoming itself through disappearance, performance is pure experience, not anchored in any kind of materiality. But looking closer at her text one can see that all the examples she analyses are not classical performances. She chooses artworks that are literally based on the use of different media and different technologies. In the very centre of every work cited by Phelan there is a problem of presence, which becomes questionable and unsure. Cindy Sherman (Film-stills) dresses in various costumes to become an image of the body photographed and hung on the wall. She is herself and not-herself at the same time, touching the classical problem of impossible dualism between the actor and the personage she embodies. Angelika Festa, in the work Untitled Dance (with fish and others)-a key example for Phelan-changes her body to a static figure, while the 'performance' is taking place on screen, where different projections enter into a complicated game with the body and its ability to endure. One screen presents the image, which is delayed in relation to the 'real time' presence of the body. Time is questioned here, so is the presence itself. But it is possible to see, through of the use of technology which becomes a tool of mediation. Unwittingly,
Moving Bodies: An Anthropological Approach to Performance Art (Contents and Introduction)
Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.
2018
Contributors: Horea Avram (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Ulrike Gerhardt (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany), Sozita Goudouna (New York University, USA Robert Lawrence (University of South Florida, USA), Liviu Malița (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Raluca Mocan (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), Rodica Mocan and Ştefana Răcorean (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Wheaton College, Illinois, USA), Georgina Ruff (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), Miruna Runcan (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Paul Sermon (University of Brighton, UK), Erandy Vergara (McGill University, Montreal, Canada). The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners of different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (that asks for a “poetics”), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the chapters in this volume is the focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual studies, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues such as: the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the body–image complex relationships, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.
Aesthetic Negotiations of Identity ‒ Between Embodied and Disembodied Performance
Ekphrasis , 1/2015, 2015
The study focuses on the aesthetic and ethical relevance of the hybrid nature of a few multimedia artworks, taking Klaus Obermaier’s performances as significant self-reflexive and also trans-artistic processes. The visual, musical, choreographic, and simultaneously digital and corporeal “stories” displayed by these artworks contain an ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of performer’s own artistic identity in-between fictional worlds, media, bodies. At the same time, by equally exposing a radical ‒ sometimes trans-human ‒ alterity, the performances call for a critical rethinking of a few aesthetic categories and of rigid theoretical dichotomies. Plus, the embodied and alternatively disembodied performances could be analyzed as an enactment of a “chaosmic” production of subjectivity (to use a formula of Guattari’s) and thus they reveal a live matrix of artistic creativity. Finally, such hybrid artworks are revealing for the ontological condition of non-captive spectators, namely those challenged to have an agency when confronted with the artistic process. The ethical value of the intermedia performance sometimes resides in the spectator’s possibility to opt, to express choices regarding the different layers of meaning, as these are embodied on stage. This is not a matter of effectively performing an option through some actual physical intervention in the stage area. It is instead an aesthetic and critical option and one pertaining to the ontology of art and to the spectator’s own paradoxical, “hypermediated” status.