The Threefold Topography of performance : Drawing, Action, and video in María Evelia Marmolejo’s Anónimo 4 (ask me for a personal copy of the full chapter) (original) (raw)
Acta Ethnographica Hungaricum, 2020
The final version of this paper has been officially included in the Volume 65 (2020): Issue 1 of the Journal “Acta Ethnographica Hungarica” (Jun 2020). https://doi.org/10.1556/022.2020.00012 Extract: In the framework of the cross-disciplinary project “Aesthetic machinations, symbolic machinations” (2016), Ecuadorian artists from different fields found a common space for creativity. The performances “Alina.06” and “La Señorita Wang soy yo” were the two resulting experiences that merged the work of dancers and musicians while allowing them to become more aware of the way in which they assume their own disciplines. This contrasting collaboration is significant in a country whose crossbred heritage constantly requires creators to find new ways to position themselves regarding their own art. The reason for this is a postcolonial discernment which always remains in the background, suggesting destabilization and a certain disobedience, not to foreign knowledge itself, but to practices and methods that are not put to the test in the space and material context of practitioners. It is in this sense, and not necessarily through a geopolitical lens, that suspicion arises in the eyes of Ernesto Ortíz (dancer, choreographer and director) against the given knowledge, as long as it remains disembodied. To parallelize with folk dance, wherein movement and its cultural context are interwoven, the author proposes a dialogue between his own ideas and those by Le Breton. The resulting conversation revolves around contemporary performing arts (dance, theatre and performance art) and the effort to emancipate themselves from ideological alignments, but more fundamentally, from the task of producing any explanation or clear fable for the audience. Hence, the spirit of contemporary praxis in art encourages subjectivity and, at the same time, offers ambiguous discourses to an also dissimilar and diverse audience, who end up with a certain possibility to come up with their own little version of the play as curators of their own experience.
Dramatic Space and Performer ’ s Body , a Case Study (2015)
Studia Dramatica UBB, 2015
Mediated images alter the perception of the real, then again, they emphasize themselves in a dynamic manner arising critical attitude, for they compel the spectator to consider all the images entering his/her visual field, and to integrate them into his/her own reference system. As recorded images offer the possibility of simultaneous representation of parts of actors’ bodies, an interaction between virtual images and real / optical images occurs, interaction which, whether demonstrates itself compulsory, acquires a powerful dramatic finality, since the existence of a viable relation between the stage images, either virtual or real, is a sine qua non dramatic condition.
Dance and the Mediated Immersive Flux in Carlos Saura’s Musical Hybrids with Live Feed
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2023
Carlos Saura’s “pure musicals,” as he calls them, are highly based on the formal properties of the image and the expressive use of light in a minimalist scenic space. Although, they have not been declared screendance pieces (as per Rosenberg 2012), which conjoin rhythmic body movements with screen-based, technologically mediated methods of rendering, they are full-fledged screendance examples, being hybrid, symbiotic, and integral (Richard James Allen, 2006). This article concentrates on Saura’s musicals from 2005 onwards – Flamenco (1995), Iberia (2005), Fados (2007), Flamenco Flamenco (2010), Argentina (Zonda, folclore argentino, 2015) and Jota de Saura (2016) – particularly the immersive mediation operated through the use of live video feed as an intermedial sensorial device. Saura’s silky, glossy, and lustrous images form an optical-haptic continuum. The twofold bodies, the digital doubles and the flesh-and-bone act as inducers of crystallization in Gilles Deleuze’s perception of modern cinema (1985), inasmuch as they interact and alternate in a cinematic flux, forming a circuit. Thus, an image of a recorded stage performance enters into a relationship with cinema, a medium already endowed with reflective features, producing the crystallization of these screendance films in all their Saurian immersivenness and sensoriality.
Performing with Objects: Andrés Galeano in conversation with Joanna Matuszak
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (108), Volume 36, Number 3, pp. 102-111, 2014
Andrés Galeano—a Spaniard by birth and Berliner by residence—is a visual artist and philosopher. Performance, photography, and video are his main media of expression. He works solo and collaboratively with other artists and also curates performance art shows. In his early performances he worked with everyday objects and predominantly in public settings, dealing with historical, social, and ethical issues. Several of his performances have investigated the audience’s role in performance art, and he has challenged spectators to take some responsibility for the outcome of his performances. Galeano has also been interested in birds and flying, and his live performances have grown more complex by the addition of found photography, photo projections, and various audio and video presentations. He based the structure of some of his performances on the rhythms of birdsong. In his newer projects he not only uses photographs and slide projections but has begun to investigate the indexical and documentary nature of photography. His most recent series, entitled iPerf, consists of performances that incorporate found photography alongside photos and video materials from his preceding performances. It is, to use Galeano’s words, a digital performance during which the artist uses audiovisual materials and the internet, focusing on the iconography and usage of a pointing index finger and web-based communication channels. This interview was taped in the Theatre Centre, in Toronto, Canada after Galeano’s performance iPerf 1.0.1, on February 24, 2013.
Poetics of Reception: a phenomenological aesthetics of bodies and technology in performance
2012
This study examines the provocative claim by Performance Studies theorist Philip Auslander (1999) that there is no ontological distinction between live and mediatised forms because they participate in the same cultural economy. This claim has led to something of a stagnation of debate between, on the one hand, scholars who privilege the live over the mediatised and on the other those who extinguish the live in favour of mediatisation. Moving beyond the limitations of ontology, this project proposes and develops a phenomenological aesthetics in order to investigate the essential structures and modes of experienced phenomena from within audience. The phenomenological approach understands the complexity and dynamism of the relationship between bodies and technologies in performance, reorienting the investigation away from a rehearsal of established and unhelpful ontological positions. The methodology for the project draws primarily upon methods from the North-American tradition of practical phenomenology (Herbert Spiegelberg, Edward S. Casey, Don Ihde, and Anthony Steinbock), and the transcendental philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Through a series of specially designed workshops, in which audience participants are trained in phenomenological techniques of bracketing and attention, A Poetics of Reception tests the potential of practical phenomenology to break the ontological impasse set up by Auslander. The method elicits the grasping of experiences of embodiment, kinesthetic empathy, temporality, orientation, imagination and poetic language. Participants were trained and required to write their experiences of the interaction between bodies and performance technologies, creating texts that then underwent hermeneutic analysis. The results of this interpretation yielded six interactive encounters, and revealed the constituted structures and modes of the relational phenomena experienced in performance by the participants. This study's methodology has both practical and philosophical implications, including its proposed use as an audience-based dramaturgy for digital performance, and a method of inquiry into the kinesthetic dimensions of aesthetic experiences.
Performative reflections through the lens of José Ortiz Echagüe
El devenir de las civilizaciones: interacciones entre el entorno humano, natural y cultural, 2021
The Museum University of Navarra (MUN) is home to the vast photographic output of José Ortiz Echagüe. Bequeathed to the University of Navarra in 1990, the collection led to the creation of a permanent exhibition space at the MUN in 2007. Since then, the photographs of Ortiz Echagüe have directly influenced and inspired many other artistic initiatives held at the Museum, with specific impact in contemporary dance. This article reflects on the connections between the photographic output of José Ortiz Echagüe and four dance productions. How do these photographs act as visual triggers for contemporary choreographers and creators? How do still images inspire movement and other elements of scenography? What are the creative processes involved in devising movement to a bidimensional work of art? How does photography turn into performance art? How can these portrayals of 20th Century Spain be translated to our present? The goal of this chapter is threefold. On one hand, it aims to highlight the relevance of Ortiz Echagüe’s photographs at present, the timelessness of his portrayal of Spanish identity, and the relevance of this archive for modern-day creative productions in the art. On the other hand, it contributes to outlining the creative processes related to the creation of a photography-based dance production. Finally, this article will also act as an academic framework for a future artistic collaboration between the MUN and Farout, a Creative and Performative Artistic Research Collective.
Performance Paradigm, 2017
This issue of Performance Paradigm, focusing on “Performance, Choreography and the Gallery,” takes the 2016 Biennale of Sydney (BoS20) as a starting point. The Biennale featured scores of performances that ranged across of a variety of genres (one-to-one, live art, theatre, dance, opera, installations, walks, talks, and tours) and a variety of sites (libraries, galleries, post-industrial halls, inner city streets, and harbour islands). The Biennale’s artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal and two of her ‘curatorial attachés’, Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, have been working at this intersection for years, along with curators such as Pierre Bal Blanc, Catherine Wood and Mathieu Copeland. So too have scholars such as Claire Bishop (2012; 2014), Shannon Jackson (2011), Amelia Jones (1998; 2012) and Susan Bennett (2009). We will not attempt a survey of that field here, suffice to say that the research presented in what follows refers to much of this seminal work. This collection of articles and artist pages seeks to engage with the performance dimension of a sprawling, international art event and related work outside the Biennale, along with the associated field of literature. The articles proceed primarily through female case studies such as Alex Martinis Roe, Shelley Lasica, Noa Eshkol, The Brown Council, Mette Edvardsen and Julie-Anne Long, and link the work of such artists to major themes circulating in this field. Of the many themes covered in this writing—including practice, choreography, labour, ethics, discipline, collaboration, visuality, power, spectatorship—we choose materiality, attention, agency, sensation and instability to frame this introduction.
2015
Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, written collaboratively by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, takes on the timely project of organizing a genre that, due to its emergent, rapidly expanding nature, is frequently described in list form. Intervening in the familiar catechism of terms ("multimedia performance, intermedial performance, cyborg theatre, digital performance, virtual theatre, and new media dramaturgy, among others"), they argue: "we do not require another all-encompassing term or totalizing narrative; rather, we need new tools and methods that embrace and build upon the multiplicity of issues and perspectives inherent in the field" (1). As three of the leading scholars in the field of intermedial performance, Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz are well suited to answer this need. Emerging out of several years of working group meetings that have tracked the proliferating "species" produced by the fertile intersection of media and performance, this book offers three distinct yet complementary taxonomic methods-each one developed independently by one of the authors. These insightful and user-friendly analytical frameworks, which can be used separately or in concert, will provide students, teachers, scholars, and practitioners of intermedial performance with a highly practical, thought-provoking resource for critically and creatively engaging with this growing field.
The Performative Turn in the Visual Arts
2016
The 1970s saw the emergence of the performative turn in many areas of the humanities. Although its most important representatives emphasized that it did include visual arts, specific examples were usually limited to action art phenomena, bordering on performance art, painting, or sculpture. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that the performative approach to art can be traced back to the avant-garde movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Paul Klee’s concept of painting discussed here shifts the performative aspect from the artist's activity to the elements of the image, interpreted from the point of view of their interactions. The article examines the theoretical and pedagogical writings by Klee (both published during his lifetime and posthumously), considered as the basis for the interpretation of his paintings. The artist assumed that the pictorial elements are bound by the principle of motion – a line is a trace left by a moving point, while a p...
Como resultado del desarrollo de tecnologías digitales, la producción, edición y publicación de fotografías está plenamente incorporada a nuestra vida diaria. Cotidianamente, usamos las imá- genes como lenguaje para describir, comentar, interpretar, reír, cautivar o ridiculizar a otros. Sin embargo, se ha prestado poca atención a la forma en que estas tecnologías se han incorporado a los métodos de investigación. La palabra sigue siendo la fuente hegemónica de los códigos y de las categorías usadas para analizar y debatir en la comunidad académica. Durante nuestra investigación sobre prácticas performativas descubrimos en el Desfile del Orgullo Gay de Santia- go un fenómeno visual que es imposible de describir sólo con palabras. Esto nos llevó a abordar metodológicamente nuestro campo de estudio utilizando el diseño, los medios digitales y foto- grafías. Creemos que un fenómeno eminentemente visual, como la apropiación performativa de los espacios públicos, debe ser estudiado con un método que preserve la riqueza del espectáculo y que permita la coherencia narrativa.
The Implicit Body as Performance: Analyzing Interactive Art
s installation Very Nervous System may lead one to conclude that they are dancing erratically to a strange sonic composition; they are actually creating these sounds in his real-time, response-driven environment. Here the audience moves, and is moved, to make music . Similarly, contributors' movements in Camille Utterback's Untitled 6 generate animated responses that cumulatively interact with each other over time. Their activity complexly layers space, line and color to create evocative and painterly compositions. A "continual flow of unique and fleeting moments," infolding and unfolding, sensual and contemplative, it is akin to the "experience of embodied existence itself" [2] (Color Plate D). Likewise in Mathieu Briand's series of "systems," spectator-performers literally share, swap and interfere with each other's perception. Each participant wears a custom headset outfitted with cameras, screens, microphones and earpieces. Here we see and hear what people in other times and spaces are looking at and listening to, while they simultaneously experience and respond to the sights and sounds picked up from our own body's "viewpoint." Briand's enfleshed network invites us to encounter bodiliness as interactive and relational .
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.
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.
2020
This research explores the conflicts that emerge when applying recording and registration practices to performance art. Although the ephemerality of the actions is perceived as essential for this art genre, museum professionals and artists are often not in favor of the disappearance of all aspects of these artworks. The case studies in this article demonstrate that the ephemerality of the original performance artwork becomes even more considered when the performativity of the action is preserved through specific forms of fragmented documentation. This enables the survival and continuation of a performance artwork’s activating character, the embodied experience evoked, the work’s contingent meanings, and its continuous reinterpretations, such as through re-enactments. Keywords: Performance art. Documentation. Ephemerality. Performativity. Re-enactment.
Sculpture, Video, and Dance: Thoughts About the Consistency of Gestures
In this article, space is rendered as a complex circuit of gestures, matters and perceptions. Within such a triad, dance seems to have a lot to do with cinema and sculpture, which seems to have a lot to do with dance and cinema, which seems to have a lot to do with sculpture and dance. I speculate on the consistency of the gesture in the interstice of those three artistic metaframes. Based on the video works of sculptor Richard Serra, I investigate his handling of audiovisual materiality and how this helps me delve into the performativity of the cut in the collaborative work of filmmaker Thierry de Mei and choreographer Anne Therese de Keersmaeker.
Beyond Mind-Body Duality: Merging Performance and Visual Art Practices
2008
Master of Fine Arts thesis giving an explanation and description of the creative work and process of performance and visual artist Melanie Manos: physical interventions, photographic and video work, digital collage and animation. Included are references to other visual artists and performance artists, art historical precedents, and the philosophical teachings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with regard to phenomenology and the perceptivity of the body.