Following the inaugural symposium entitled Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy - Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre hosted by the Performance Philosophy Working Group “Genres of Dramatic ...Thought” which took place at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin in December 2014, this contribution is a series of attempts to both recapture the debates of the symposium and stake out the field of inquiry for our Working Group’s engagement within Performance Philosophy. By tracing philosophy’s dramatic heritage within the history of genre theory and pointing to its current and future developments, this piece suggests how attention to genre can work to deepen and expand the emerging landscape of Performance Philosophy.
This article explores how water performs on the contemporary stage. Drawing on theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Joanna Zylinska, we investigate water in its various dramaturgical ...functions as matter, medium, and metaphor to sketch performance alternatives that highlight nonhuman forms of agency. Focusing on the work of sound artist and geographer AM Kanngieser and their use of water to listen to the Anthropocene as well as on the Filter Theatre production of David Farr’s play
(2007/2013), we want to highlight how diffraction and resonance alternately provide ways of rethinking traditional configurations of making meaning. The sonic dimension of water, in particular, turns into a productive site for manifesting the heightened relationality of the Anthropocene world. The article thus argues that the material dramaturgies of water show how the crucial interactions between science, philosophy, and performance manage to sketch new posthuman knowledge formations.
This essay seeks to propose an alternative to the established connection between theatre and theory through the sense of sight by turning to recent developments in sound studies and analyzing ...theatrical performance that privileges an aesthetic of aurality over that of vision. In taking Complicite’s
as a primary example of aural immersion and connecting it to philosophies of listening from Jean-Luc Nancy to Hans-Georg Gadamer but also to the complex media history of sound, the essay offers a theoretical revaluation of the concept of resonance. Resonance opens up an alternative approach to performing thought and thinking in performance. Instead of championing the distance of reflection and critique alone as the core engagement shared by philosophers and theatre audiences, the listening practices in theatre return philosophy as much as cultural practice to a renewed emphasis on mutual responsiveness and dialogue.
This document offers an overview of the artistic research project Viral Theatres, which documents the radical changes in theatre aesthetics and infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic by building ...an online multimedia living archive that tracks these developments in interviews, video documentaries, rehearsal residencies, and case studies. Through a survey of five exemplary case studies we show how significantly the tools and practices of theatre have shifted during the pandemic and suggest that these examples belong to a reconceptualization of the idea of theatre per se. In creating an online Living Archive platform that makes these and other case studies and pandemic material accessible, Viral Theatres contributes to creative documentation of pandemic culture.
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Framing hybrid futures in the Anthropocene Felton-Dansky, Miriam; Ilter, Seda; Mosse, Ramona ...
International journal of performance arts and digital media,
01/2023, Volume:
19, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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Given the iconic stature and popularity of his dramas- perhaps second only to Anton Chekhov's- Ibsen's plays have been transformed into their own convention, conveying a template similar now to that ...which Scribe was working with so cleverly in his time. Hedda Gabler proved an unsolved mystery beyond academic argumentation; in Heddatron's ending, a zombie-like Jane-still bleeding from her head wound and equally obsessed with Ibsen-remains ready to accompany her family to an entirely ordinary evening at the movies.
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This chapter investigates how theatre engages with the precarity of democratic institutions and how it continues to reframe the crisis of political as much as aesthetic representation. It does so by ...using Swiss director Milo Rau's General Assembly and Storming of the Reichstag as a case study to explore the overtly political performativity with which his re-enactments examine the making and undoing of democratic institutions-courts, parliaments, NGOs, public broadcasting, and not least the theatre itself. Rau's dramaturgy is a part of the movement to counter the privatisation of theatrical experience, critiqued by Adam Alston in his assessment of contemporary immersive performances as an expression of the neoliberal experience economy. The pervasiveness and somewhat sensational appeal of thinking with, through, and around crisis also pervades Rau's own dramaturgy in General Assembly and Storming of the Reichstag.
The question of revolution lies at heart of twentieth century political theatre: its potential, its realization, its history, and ultimately its failure. In Cold War culture after 1945, revolution ...functions as the key term of political self-understanding. Its paradox lies in the fact that it is used to justify the existence of Western capitalist democracies as much as communist dictatorships. Revolution is a puzzle that playwrights and practitioners as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller, Peter Stein, Tom Stoppard, and Tony Kushner contend with. They do so by returning to tragic plots and utopian tales. Creating a new generic opposition between tragedy and utopia, this dissertation compares how these concepts reflect on the tension between violence and governance. Tragedy depicts the social breakdown we cannot bear to see; utopia glimpses a political community we cannot yet imagine. Revolutionary violence becomes the connecting thread between tragedy and utopia and the defining moment of their acts of theatrical representation. Each of the five chapters of this dissertation focuses on a different theatre production between 1948 and 2007: Brecht's Antigone (1948); Stein's Oresteia (1980); Müller's Hamlet/Machine (1990); Kushner's Angels in America (1993); Stoppard's Coast of Utopia (2007). Each production recasts the idea of revolution in relation to the surrounding political conflicts of its time, be it McCarthyism, Red Army Faction terrorism or the collapse of socialism. Historically, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides the central turning point of the argument because with it revolution loses its intrinsic tie to socialism and requires reformulation. On a formal level, the plays make a case for an alternative reading of aesthetic developments in twentieth century theatre. They do not concur with the common rejection of dramatic dialogue in favor of the physical vocabulary of performance. Instead, they stress the need for reconsidering the link between philosophy and theatre; they seek a form of dialogue that enables new departures in political art. The task of the political playwright becomes ultimately philosophical.
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