...abstract...of sorts...
“le petit mort” – “The Little Death” (translated into English from the French)
By questioning “How does the notion of performance presence make present pasts, memories, traces and how’s this signify absences to others?”, the project asserts performance as a death.
And why not ?
Make the stakes high. Or else turn on the television or …
Although metaphorical, a live performer literally is dying before the audience’s eyes (also figuratively during a “bad” performance) through the passage of time and in this presence of being-there, present, a mirror reflection before the eyes of the audience in their own mortality might be experienced.
French artist Antonin Artaud and the events of New York City’s Twin World Trade Centre Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 became an originary point of departure.
A solo performance and materials for exposition traversed theories and practices (Sorsen Kiekergaard, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucalt, Gilles Deleuze with Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Julie Kristeva, Helen Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Charles Bataille via Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Zizek, Peggy Phelan, Bert O.States, Henry M Sayre, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Butoh, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Maria Abramovic, Heiner Muller, Wooster Group, Romeo Castelluci, Goat Island and Forced Entertainment) attempting to present performance and post-human-9/11 images as problematic relations, highlighting a repressive fear of death in contemporary culture.
Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event which has been experienced as though absent and an aesthetics of violence in the fetishized pleasure of destruction and repetition identified in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s essays on the role of art in early Greek culture underpinned the performance material developed by re-tracing (exhumed) past memories to be inhabited by the performing body in movement, words, emotional and physical experience with the psyche.
Notions of infantility, pre- Wittgensteinian language games were incorporated with extended voice explorations, Butohesque philosophies, breath work, Artaud’s concepts of the body in crisis, Theatre of the Seraphim, Affective Emotional Athleticism and hieroglyphics with text from the bible, English poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow”, Artaud’s and personal writings connected the factually-real-self-performing body as a singular subjectivity with imaginal-multiplicitous-fictional mythological relations in a mirrored reflection of the individual and the social as a being-becoming anamorphic mobius strip.
Video footage mediatised the live process with images of “9/11”, cinema, Renaissance art with the intention to not explicitly juxtapose but merely imply a presence through its very absence and thus blur that which is authentic in artifice.
Whilst challenging the complicity connected to a sense of identity in site-specific or simulated repetitions within a socio-cultural context it proposes performance as a strategically vital, absolutely relevant and necessary mode of being-becoming knowledge, understanding and meaning as a critical insightful experience and commentary on the assumptions and contradictions of a post-human-9/11 age.
By a dialogical exchange of auto-ethnographic material engaged with theoretical discourses and practices, a personal sociological analysis attempted to document in words and images a process acknowledging performance’s sacred and necessary power in its origins of ancient history, ritual and brevity of life due to its ephemeral nature reflecting the futile quest for immortality in time that is frozen in words and images.
It celebrates performance’s willingness to explore not only acts of giving (gifts of love) and life’s existence but mortality in death. In establishing the freedom and necessity of not only the sensual but spiritually sacred experience of live performing bodies as a contrast to the seductive and pervasive qualities of the images that permeate the landscape of a post-human-9/11-late-capitalist cultural age.
This is performance as an inescapable, impossible mythological subjectivity. A masculinity in abject madness searching for a radically feminized jouissance in the Real of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms.
By questioning “How does the notion of performance presence make present pasts, memories, traces and how’s this signify absences to others?”, the project asserts performance as a death.
And why not ?
Make the stakes high. Or else turn on the television or …
Although metaphorical, a live performer literally is dying before the audience’s eyes (also figuratively during a “bad” performance) through the passage of time and in this presence of being-there, present, a mirror reflection before the eyes of the audience in their own mortality might be experienced.
French artist Antonin Artaud and the events of New York City’s Twin World Trade Centre Towers terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 became an originary point of departure.
A solo performance and materials for exposition traversed theories and practices (Sorsen Kiekergaard, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucalt, Gilles Deleuze with Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Julie Kristeva, Helen Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Charles Bataille via Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Zizek, Peggy Phelan, Bert O.States, Henry M Sayre, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Butoh, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Maria Abramovic, Heiner Muller, Wooster Group, Romeo Castelluci, Goat Island and Forced Entertainment) attempting to present performance and post-human-9/11 images as problematic relations, highlighting a repressive fear of death in contemporary culture.
Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s concept of the compulsion to repeat a traumatic event which has been experienced as though absent and an aesthetics of violence in the fetishized pleasure of destruction and repetition identified in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s essays on the role of art in early Greek culture underpinned the performance material developed by re-tracing (exhumed) past memories to be inhabited by the performing body in movement, words, emotional and physical experience with the psyche.
Notions of infantility, pre- Wittgensteinian language games were incorporated with extended voice explorations, Butohesque philosophies, breath work, Artaud’s concepts of the body in crisis, Theatre of the Seraphim, Affective Emotional Athleticism and hieroglyphics with text from the bible, English poet Ted Hughes’ “Crow”, Artaud’s and personal writings connected the factually-real-self-performing body as a singular subjectivity with imaginal-multiplicitous-fictional mythological relations in a mirrored reflection of the individual and the social as a being-becoming anamorphic mobius strip.
Video footage mediatised the live process with images of “9/11”, cinema, Renaissance art with the intention to not explicitly juxtapose but merely imply a presence through its very absence and thus blur that which is authentic in artifice.
Whilst challenging the complicity connected to a sense of identity in site-specific or simulated repetitions within a socio-cultural context it proposes performance as a strategically vital, absolutely relevant and necessary mode of being-becoming knowledge, understanding and meaning as a critical insightful experience and commentary on the assumptions and contradictions of a post-human-9/11 age.
By a dialogical exchange of auto-ethnographic material engaged with theoretical discourses and practices, a personal sociological analysis attempted to document in words and images a process acknowledging performance’s sacred and necessary power in its origins of ancient history, ritual and brevity of life due to its ephemeral nature reflecting the futile quest for immortality in time that is frozen in words and images.
It celebrates performance’s willingness to explore not only acts of giving (gifts of love) and life’s existence but mortality in death. In establishing the freedom and necessity of not only the sensual but spiritually sacred experience of live performing bodies as a contrast to the seductive and pervasive qualities of the images that permeate the landscape of a post-human-9/11-late-capitalist cultural age.
This is performance as an inescapable, impossible mythological subjectivity. A masculinity in abject madness searching for a radically feminized jouissance in the Real of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms.
posted by ROARAWAR FEARTATA & PoPoCCCCaTePeTL at 5:51 AM
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