This article explores how water performs on the contemporary stage. Drawing on theorists such as ... more 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 Water (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.
How do performance and philosophy encounter one another? Where do thinking and performing overlap... more How do performance and philosophy encounter one another? Where do thinking and performing overlap? These are fundamental questions that are currently stimulating the ideas of philosophers, theatre and literature scholar and performers alike. Our international symposium offers a forum for this cross-disciplinary debate by focusing on tragedy and comedy as exemplary sites on which the tensions between theatre, philosophy, and performance are played out. Genre studies returns as a foil with which to reframe the discursive cultures that performance and philosophy offer. We seek to trace the future of genre in its philosophical and performative dimension. Our goal is to think the productive clash between generic structure and performative flow. For further information, a full list of participants, and the complete programme, please visit: www.tragedycomedy.com.
Immersion has become both a powerful metaphor and a branding strategy for a wide range of contemp... more Immersion has become both a powerful metaphor and a branding strategy for a wide range of contemporary participatory performance practices. In its current usage, immersion is used in a variety of disciplinary contexts, ranging from musical performance to site-specific theatres and computer gaming. This interaction between performing arts and digital technology is also at the heart of our collaborative practice-based research project Playing with Virtual Realities (PwVR), an interdisciplinary exploration of immersion by computer scientists, designers, philosophers, choreographer, dancers, and dramaturgs in experimenting with cognition, embodiment, and VR-technology. In this article we re- stage our collaboration as a series of interventions and interferences into each other’s practices and knowledge bases.
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2022
ABSTRACT This document offers an overview of the artistic research project Viral Theatres, which ... more ABSTRACT 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.
The tension between writing and performance lies at the core of any philosophical engagement with... more The tension between writing and performance lies at the core of any philosophical engagement with the theater. For Performance Philosophy to establish itself as a field, it needs to find new ways of casting what writing and performance may do for each other. In this article, Mosse suggests that engaging with theater’s mode of self-reflection—in other words, metatheater—offers productive avenues to reframe the writing-versus-performance debate. By analyzing, in particular, a set of metatheatrical stagings of corpses, Mosse reads the corpse as a philosophical entity that can provide an alternative to the hauntologies so prominent in current theatrical theory and thereby model instances of embodied thought.
The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple EnglishThe Red FlagSyndicalism and the Transition to ... more The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple EnglishThe Red FlagSyndicalism and the Transition to CommunismFully Automated Luxury CommunismThe Soviet World of American CommunismSocialism and CommunismCommunism: A Very Short IntroductionFascism and CommunismThe Naked CommunistThe Theory and Practice of Communism: Marxism imposed on ChileBlack Struggle, Red ScareHeyday Amern CommunismThe Origins of Chinese CommunismCommunism for KidsLandscapes of CommunismThe Roots of American CommunismComradesBolshevismThe Human Cost of Communism in ChinaCommunism and its CollapseFully Automated Luxury CommunismThe Rise and Fall of CommunismRed ChicagoCommunismThe Rise of Indonesian CommunismThe Romance of American CommunismOrganized Communism in the United StatesCommunismBrazilian Communism, 1935-1945The Black Book of CommunismCommunismAn Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism and CommunismCommunismProblems of CommunismLeft-Wing CommunismI Confess100 Things You Should Know about Communism SeriesWill to FreedomCommunism in History and TheoryCommunism
of the upstage wall having come together to form an endless, curving barrier. In desperation, Man... more of the upstage wall having come together to form an endless, curving barrier. In desperation, Mandell walks as far up the wall as the curve will allow and beats on it as though searching for a concealed exit. He is quickly defeated by gravity. Still facing away from us, he slides to the ground and ends up on all fours. The lone, feeble representative of old Russia, he has been abandoned by his masters and his fellow servants. While they set off to find their new world, he is left to witness the collapse of the old. Even as the reality of Firs’s fate dawns on Mandell’s face, he continues to mumble and stumble about, displaying elements of comedy and tragedy in the last, truly Chekhovian moments of the production.
This essay seeks to propose an alternative to the established connection between theatre and theo... more 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 The Encounter 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. I am fundamentally indebted to Anna Street, with whom I col...
This chapter critically explores the turn to virtual reality (VR) in human rights and humanitaria... more This chapter critically explores the turn to virtual reality (VR) in human rights and humanitarian campaigning, and specifically the contention that VR and allied immersive technologies enable the creation of helpful connections between distant others in the form of increased empathy. Closely analyzing and contrasting two artworks that respond to the Syrian refugee “crisis” using VR and allied immersive technologies—the VR film Clouds Over Sidra and Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s video installation Incoming (2017)—this essay argues that VR’s immersivity may most progressively enter into the humanitarian field precisely by upending the long-standing “mobilization of empathy” model. Using immersion rather than empathy as a keyword may help us to visualize a post-sovereign political agency that crosses national borders to bring relief and support human rights claims.
This article explores how water performs on the contemporary stage. Drawing on theorists such as ... more 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 Water (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.
How do performance and philosophy encounter one another? Where do thinking and performing overlap... more How do performance and philosophy encounter one another? Where do thinking and performing overlap? These are fundamental questions that are currently stimulating the ideas of philosophers, theatre and literature scholar and performers alike. Our international symposium offers a forum for this cross-disciplinary debate by focusing on tragedy and comedy as exemplary sites on which the tensions between theatre, philosophy, and performance are played out. Genre studies returns as a foil with which to reframe the discursive cultures that performance and philosophy offer. We seek to trace the future of genre in its philosophical and performative dimension. Our goal is to think the productive clash between generic structure and performative flow. For further information, a full list of participants, and the complete programme, please visit: www.tragedycomedy.com.
Immersion has become both a powerful metaphor and a branding strategy for a wide range of contemp... more Immersion has become both a powerful metaphor and a branding strategy for a wide range of contemporary participatory performance practices. In its current usage, immersion is used in a variety of disciplinary contexts, ranging from musical performance to site-specific theatres and computer gaming. This interaction between performing arts and digital technology is also at the heart of our collaborative practice-based research project Playing with Virtual Realities (PwVR), an interdisciplinary exploration of immersion by computer scientists, designers, philosophers, choreographer, dancers, and dramaturgs in experimenting with cognition, embodiment, and VR-technology. In this article we re- stage our collaboration as a series of interventions and interferences into each other’s practices and knowledge bases.
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2022
ABSTRACT This document offers an overview of the artistic research project Viral Theatres, which ... more ABSTRACT 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.
The tension between writing and performance lies at the core of any philosophical engagement with... more The tension between writing and performance lies at the core of any philosophical engagement with the theater. For Performance Philosophy to establish itself as a field, it needs to find new ways of casting what writing and performance may do for each other. In this article, Mosse suggests that engaging with theater’s mode of self-reflection—in other words, metatheater—offers productive avenues to reframe the writing-versus-performance debate. By analyzing, in particular, a set of metatheatrical stagings of corpses, Mosse reads the corpse as a philosophical entity that can provide an alternative to the hauntologies so prominent in current theatrical theory and thereby model instances of embodied thought.
The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple EnglishThe Red FlagSyndicalism and the Transition to ... more The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple EnglishThe Red FlagSyndicalism and the Transition to CommunismFully Automated Luxury CommunismThe Soviet World of American CommunismSocialism and CommunismCommunism: A Very Short IntroductionFascism and CommunismThe Naked CommunistThe Theory and Practice of Communism: Marxism imposed on ChileBlack Struggle, Red ScareHeyday Amern CommunismThe Origins of Chinese CommunismCommunism for KidsLandscapes of CommunismThe Roots of American CommunismComradesBolshevismThe Human Cost of Communism in ChinaCommunism and its CollapseFully Automated Luxury CommunismThe Rise and Fall of CommunismRed ChicagoCommunismThe Rise of Indonesian CommunismThe Romance of American CommunismOrganized Communism in the United StatesCommunismBrazilian Communism, 1935-1945The Black Book of CommunismCommunismAn Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism and CommunismCommunismProblems of CommunismLeft-Wing CommunismI Confess100 Things You Should Know about Communism SeriesWill to FreedomCommunism in History and TheoryCommunism
of the upstage wall having come together to form an endless, curving barrier. In desperation, Man... more of the upstage wall having come together to form an endless, curving barrier. In desperation, Mandell walks as far up the wall as the curve will allow and beats on it as though searching for a concealed exit. He is quickly defeated by gravity. Still facing away from us, he slides to the ground and ends up on all fours. The lone, feeble representative of old Russia, he has been abandoned by his masters and his fellow servants. While they set off to find their new world, he is left to witness the collapse of the old. Even as the reality of Firs’s fate dawns on Mandell’s face, he continues to mumble and stumble about, displaying elements of comedy and tragedy in the last, truly Chekhovian moments of the production.
This essay seeks to propose an alternative to the established connection between theatre and theo... more 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 The Encounter 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. I am fundamentally indebted to Anna Street, with whom I col...
This chapter critically explores the turn to virtual reality (VR) in human rights and humanitaria... more This chapter critically explores the turn to virtual reality (VR) in human rights and humanitarian campaigning, and specifically the contention that VR and allied immersive technologies enable the creation of helpful connections between distant others in the form of increased empathy. Closely analyzing and contrasting two artworks that respond to the Syrian refugee “crisis” using VR and allied immersive technologies—the VR film Clouds Over Sidra and Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s video installation Incoming (2017)—this essay argues that VR’s immersivity may most progressively enter into the humanitarian field precisely by upending the long-standing “mobilization of empathy” model. Using immersion rather than empathy as a keyword may help us to visualize a post-sovereign political agency that crosses national borders to bring relief and support human rights claims.
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