Contemporary Performance

One of the most powerful ways to remedy the forgetfulness that obscures ancient fragmentary drama, in other words to “establish remedies for forgetfulness” as Palamedes claims to have done for the Greeks in the fr. 578 from the homonymous but lost tragedy by Euripides, is to expose the ancient material to the circumstances of contemporary performance. The surviving fragments of ancient Greek dramas are pieces of text which by definition are out of context since they are dislocated parts of a traumatised ancient play: the connection between text and Trauma is considered to be both literal and metaphorical. Yet, there are elements of theatricality inherent to these fragments and this is why they have been used in contemporary performances in various ways and approaches. Theodoros Terzopoulos has used fragments of lost tragedies by Aeschylus to create the performance Epigonoi in 2003 which was first presented in Germany and then toured internationally. From a chorus of five men the suffering bodies of Achilles, Actaeon, Ajax, Heracles and Philoctetes stand out and expose the tragic fate of those who collide with the divine, while the female character of Europe watches the consequences of war, herself a victim of it. In this paper the use of ancient tragic fragments for the creation of contemporary performances will be discussed and evaluated whether it is an appropriate pathway to follow against letting ancient fragmentary drama be forgotten. After presenting and analysing Terzopoulos' Epigonoi, the performativity of fragments will be argued along with their suitability as theatrical material for contemporary dramaturgy that explores the issue of fragmentation in life and in the narrative and also the issue of Trauma itself.

The history of puppetry is full of supernatural bodies on stage that dramatically or subtextually represent their quest of coming to life and gaining autonomy from their masters. A puppet’s performance often reflects on its condition of existence: How does a random object become an animated body on stage? This practical and theoretical question energizes South Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong’s (b. 1980) body of work. Jeong extends the possibilities of puppetry by choreographing her entire body as her animation technique. Moreover, she explores the various dimensions of the object’s liveliness by way of sexuality. In fact, in Jeong’s exploration of animacy, this stage life of the object always already involves intimacy and sensuality. She crafts and manipulates her performing objects that range from simple masks to dummies to machines, embraced carnally with them in the double entendre of playing with control. Reflecting on the six performances Jeong created between 2008 and 2019, I am repeatedly reminded that there is no anima, no life, and no agency for objects devoid of sexual being.

Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research is the follow-up to Ben Spatz's 2015 book What a Body Can Do, charting a course through more than twenty years of embodied, artistic, and scholarly research.

Emerging from the confluence of theory and practice, this book combines full-length critical essays with a kaleidoscopic selection of fragments from journal entries, performance texts, and other unpublished materials to offer a series of entry points organized by seven keywords: city, song, movement, theater, sex, document, politics. Brimming with thoughtful and sometimes provocative takes on embodiment, technology, decoloniality, the university, and the politics of knowledge, the work shared here models the integration of artistic and embodied research with critical thought, opening new avenues for transformative action and experimentation.

Invaluable to scholars and practitioners working through and beyond performance, Blue Sky Body is both an unconventional introduction to embodied research and a methodological intervention at the edges of contemporary theory.

https://www.routledge.com/Blue-Sky-Body-Thresholds-for-Embodied-Research/Spatz/p/book/9781138608559

In this essay, entanglement is proposed as a conceptual idiom for the understanding of contemporary Manila theater where pista (f iesta) is used as model and Rizal X as example. Contemporary Manila theater via Rizal X is argued to be part of an intricate entanglement: representations, shared histories, relationships and genres, which are all activated during a pista. Rizal X is used as an example because it strategically puts entanglement in an affirmative position. More specif ically, Rizal X is treated as a microcosm of the pista because it has entangled representations, histories, relationships, and genres in the same way that the pista performs such entanglement. Nonetheless, the idea of entanglement often carries a negative connotation. Despite the promise of entanglement as a possible idiom towards the identif ication of an ontology of contemporary Manila theater, entanglement has its own limitations, especially since many artists unintentionally overuse entanglement (i.e. , pastiche, fragments) in their theater. Because of such complication, there is a tendency for theater works to unintentionally editorialize their chosen subjects. In conducting a close reading of Rizal X, it is envisioned to illustrate the limitations of entanglement as a discursive concept for the understanding of contemporary Manila theater.

This paper touches upon the very sensitive issue of “experimental music,” with its absence of conventions, as it is usually defined in relation to the 20th century music. The history of such music is traced. Afterwards, the focus shifts to its non-communicative design that seems to unite all the different techniques it implements, as well as ways to tell it apart from music that is conventional and communicative. The ramifications of such non-communicative music for performers and musicologists are examined, which then raises the question of how necessary it actually is to study such works.

This study uses theological and philosophical thinking along side theatre and performance studies to investigate sacred theatre and latterly sacred performance. The study looks to theatres origins in an attempt to extrapolate that which constitutes the sacred and following from René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1979), looks for the origin of this ‘desire for being’. Man’s nature as physical (body/mind) and metaphysical (soul/spirit) alongside the impact this has on theatre and performance is explored; with the study attempting to outline the significance of man’s two/three part nature and the manifestation of this desire for a fullness of being in theatre and performance of a sacred nature. The study focuses on the quintessential ingredient of theatre and performance: the relationship between actor or performer and audience and identifies the actor and performer as a priest, an intercessor for the audience. By acknowledging the transformative power of this relationship and assessing its importance for the sacred the study dissects and identifies sacred theatre as a means to presence a fullness of being and sacred performance as an introversion of this desire for fullness in an embodied absence. One that signals towards an emptiness or void as a means to allow the audience to explore their nature and experience the sacred. Various examples of contemporary performance are used to evidence and critique the investigation and the study concludes by assessing to what extent theatre and performance laicise the sacred; asking what is required of an audience to access the sacred without the presence of an actor or performer as priest.

Carmelo Bene (1937–2002) was an Italian theatre artist who radically transformed the practice and conception of Western theatre from a series of points of view. He dramaturgically re-conceived famous plays, innovatively worked on voice, and reached to film and music, as well as engaged his theatre vision with philosophy. This introductory essay on Bene’s philosophical thought and theatrical praxis seeks to arouse interest in his work among English readers, so as to spark interdisciplinary conversations across a variety of fields including Italian studies, critical theory, European theatre, film studies, performance philosophy, and aesthetics. To elucidate some of the distinctive and exemplificatory traits of Benean anti-representational theatre, special attention is paid to one of his readings, Lectura Dantis (1981), and to one of his plays, Pinocchio, ovvero lo spettacolo della Provvidenza (1998) – both of which are among the most significant performances in Bene’s career.

The following article questions the relationship between naked
and clothed theatre performers and the resulting sexualisation of the body. Contrary to the emphasis on the genital area—which arguably constitutes the sexualised body in contemporary performance (Karl Toepfer 1996)—I argue for a more comprehensive bodily engagement (with a special focus on the human skin) when it comes to the creation and perception of nakedness. Building on Aoife Monks’ idea of nudity as a corporeal costume, this article looks at three examples of contemporary dance theatre—Dubois’ Tragédie (2014); Platel’s Out of Context: For Pina (2010); Waltz’s Körper (2000)—in order to demonstrate that the performer is not necessarily required to ‘take the pants off’ in order to appear naked. I argue for the active involvement of the performer’s skin (skin ‘openly staring’, ‘enticing’, or just ‘peeping through’) which not only constitutes the naked bodily manifestation but also the sexualisation (or lack of it) of the body in theatre. This body is never passive: on the contrary, while the “real” or “truthful” body is no longer accessible (if it ever was), the performers (with the help of the choreographers and designers) are capable of manipulating and multiplying their bodily reality, which allows them to play sexuality - to create diverse corporeal and sexual meanings.

This article focuses on the role of the stage in complex modes of gender performativity in the work of three Turkish performers: Zeki Mu ̈ren (1931–1996), Bu ̈lent Ersoy (b. 1952), and Seyfi Dursunog ̆lu (b. 1932) a.k.a. Huysuz Virjin [Cranky Virgin]. These three, I suggest, are the pioneers of contemporary Turkish queer performance. Their performances – both on- and off-stage – are validated through a reiterative absence of queerness in their everyday lives and stand in the midst of various negotiations between queers and the secular Islamic nation-state in Turkey. In the works of Mu ̈ren, Ersoy, and Huysuz, the stage is suggestive of a space where queerness can be managed. It is a contested space that does at least allow for the communication of queer ideas to a wider audience. I discuss the works of these three performers as three variations of queerness in Turkey in relation to different eras and different political climates that are directly related to the nation-state’s desire to perform modernity. While explicating complicated modes of gender performativity, I consider the stage as the primary space for a queer body to exist. Through this discussion, I aim to activate debates both within and against the context of secular Islam, on gendered political space, and on those overlooked sexualized spaces in which the nation-state produces powerful yet unstable values to manage queer subjectivity in contemporary Turkey.

Keywords: stage; space; queer; gender performativity; contemporary Turkey

This article briefly describes how art and life intertwine with the dreaming of the performance of Brian Ferneyhough's Cassandra's Dream Song for solo flute. Dreams are playful and slip through the fingers of our minds, warping any sense of linear time. Logic is illogical in dream worlds. Time is reversed and nonlinear. This short essay does not provide all the details of the work. It is assumed that the reader is already familiar with the score and unusual notation. Instead, I offer a personal glimpse into one aspect of interpretation of this complicated piece. It is a glimpse into the ways my life experiences and choices have allowed me to break my own spells. The story of Cassandra comes to light at a particularly poignant moment: the dawn of the Age of "Me Too." Her story reflects mine and many other women. I cannot help but foresee the direction of this performance and feel compelled to share this with whoever might find it useful. We all have spells to break whether we see them or not.

The following article questions the relationship between naked and clothed theatre performers and the resulting sexualisation of the body. Contrary to the emphasis on the genital area—which arguably constitutes the sexualised body in contemporary performance (Karl Toepfer 1996)—I argue for a more comprehensive bodily engagement (with a special focus on the human skin) when it comes to the creation and perception of nakedness. Building on Aoife Monks’ idea of nudity as a corporeal costume, this article looks at three examples of contemporary dance theatre—Dubois’ Tragédie (2014); Platel’s Out of Context: For Pina (2010); Waltz’s Körper (2000)—in order to demonstrate that the performer is not necessarily required to ‘take the pants off’ in order to appear naked. I argue for the active involvement of the performer’s skin (skin ‘openly staring’, ‘enticing’, or just ‘peeping through’) which not only constitutes the naked bodily manifestation but also the sexualisation (or lack of it) of ...

Performance may arguably aspire to create a spontaneous communitas, to use Victor Turner’s term. 

Analyse the relationship between the performance aesthetics and the community or communities that these practices seek to create or cater for.

Written as a submission for an undergraduate module (Connections in Contemporary Performance)

Within contemporary performance and dance practices repetition emerges as an important structural and constitutive means. Repetition used in speech, movement and in structure challenges temporalities of experience and explores notions such as exhaustion, difference through repetition, becoming and the possibility of finitude, amongst others. Specifically, Lone Twin Theatre's creative process uses repetition to create a distinct performance vocabulary, which structures its choreographic practice. The present article explores repetition as generative of ways of making, experiencing and writing about performance work. It argues that performances that use repetition invite, in some cases, a repetitive encounter with the performance beyond the live event. This article uses Daniel Hit By A Train to explore Lone Twin Theatre's choreographed repetitions and returns as well as the ways in which performance remains, to use Rebecca Schneider's term, in memory and writing. In giving an account of the re-performances of the live event two kinds of writing are used here: writing as a space within which the performance event takes place again and again, and writing that theorizes the experience of performance in a useful way. The 'choreographic', in this case, is dealt with as the graphein/ writing of the choros/dance, which takes place during the creative process as the repetition in movement, speech and structures, and beyond the performance event itself as repetition's return.

The four performances discussed in this chapter were presented together as part of the InOnTheAct festival produced by The Lowry Theatre, Salford, in Autumn 2012. Advertised (in the festival flyer) as ‘intimate’ and ‘risk-taking’, they can be broadly identified as immersive theatre productions. The festival took place in and around Salford Quays, and the public ‘piazzas’ outside neon-lit, glass-fronted buildings at Media City leased to national broadcasters and the University of Salford. The festival performances were located in local shops, in an abandoned factory unit, and in a listed 14th century building abutting a residential area of Salford, all within a mile of the Lowry Theatre. In preparing this chapter I interviewed producers and participants and also used feedback from audience surveys (for a summary of interview see notes). According to Quays Arts and Cultural Development Manager at the time, Kathy McArdle, bringing a diffuse and diverse cultural activity into these sites was an opportunity to ‘inject life’ into the new Quays environment, if not to trouble the corporate interests so visibly represented by the new dominant architecture and attendant security presence. Different communities can encounter a theatre festival as an equal and open event-space whether or not they are aware of any publicity, and regardless of their awareness of the work of the companies involved (Bakhtin, 1993, pg.2). In this way, immersive theatre, as a porous theatrical environment, may temporarily reconfigure the regulation of the space by powerful developers, zealous security staff, and those with cultural capital. For in the immersive environment ‘reality’ and make-believe can co-exist in subtle, disorientating or playful ways that restore power to leisure users and everyday consumers. Immersive theatre can offer temporary, alternative worlds; this is one of its charms, for artists and ‘lay participants’ alike. This chapter examines the shifting power between programmers, participants and players around a performative contract. Programmers at the Lowry Theatre who commissioned the four productions were closely involved in the process of re-locating or re-configuring the work to situate it within the festival. However, when artists and programmers ‘behind the scenes’ in these environments ‘disappear’ in order to facilitate participant agency, and slip into the crowd in urban spaces for instance, participants can feel exposed, stranded and script-less. They risk losing face, being embarrassed, humiliated or singled out without consent. Given these personal costs, programmers have carefully nurtured the audience for this work. The potential pitfalls can be offset by the appeal of creative practices that allow participants a more democratic involvement in the experiences on offer. Participants may enter an active engagement with the process of performance making, into a more collaborative relation with trained performers and in some cases into a more intimate experience of co-presence with others. When participants feel alone and unobserved they may take uninvited liberties with performers, objects and other participants. However, as the contract of engagement and the degree of risk in the immersive environment are both necessarily in the process of being en-acted, boundaries between make-believe and real tend to be contingent on the previous ‘pedigree’ and knowledge a participant has about theatre processes, perhaps more so than in the traditional dramatic theatre, often criticised for cultural elitism. Despite, or perhaps because, immersive theatre practices espouse immediacy of experience, spontaneity and innovation, they seem inclined to draw on traditional, realist characterization paradigms, as a common performance language. The terms of the contract are most visibly initiated in the appearance and manner of the performer. If it is recognisable, the performers style and language may be adopted by participants hence the parameters of performance remain relatively narrow. This is further informed by existing and ‘accepted’ determinants of everyday ‘natural’ behaviour in public spaces. The ethical problem for the artists devising such work is how to draw ‘naïve’ participants into an augmented if crude range of expressions within a real-seeming immersive environment. Under such conditions a contractual framework is erected hastily and with limited tools. Immersive performance then may derive its dramatic tension predominantly from a shared awareness of insecurity and potential collapse.

This essay considers new works by Mårten Spångberg, Dana Michel, Rabih Mroué, Philippe Quesne, and the duo of Erika Cederqvist and Julie Solberg as well as the role of Black Box Theatre's International Festival within the landscape of contemporary Norwegian performance.

Exploring performance beyond the stage
Contextualizing the techniques and methods of the incredibly rich and vital genre of site-specific performance, author Bertie Ferdman traces the evolution of that term. Originally used for experimental staging practices and then later also for engaged situational events, “site-specific” is no longer sufficient for the genre’s many contemporary variations.
Using the term “off-site,” Ferdman illustrates five distinct ways artists have challenged the disciplinary framework of site-specific theatre: blurring the traditional boundaries between the fictional and the real; changing how the audience and actor interact with each other and whether they are physically together or apart; fabricating sites from physically bound, conceptually constructed, or virtual spaces; staging live situations in real/nonreal and often mediated encounters; and challenging our preconceived notions of time and space. Tracing the genealogy of site-based work through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ferdman outlines the theoretical groundwork for her study in the introduction. Individual chapters focus on distinct types of off-sites—the interdisciplinary discourse of disciplinary sites; the spaces of audience engagement with spectator sites; the dislocation of time for temporal sites; and the historiographical spaces of mapping for urban sites.

In Lysistrata, Aristophanes depicted his critique through the women's protest of the prolonged war between Athens and Sparta that had negative impacts on the people's livelihood. In Indonesia, Ki Jlitheng Suparman, through his Wayang Climen style, adapted the idea in Lysistrata and turned it into a traditional Javanese shadow puppet (wayang) play he titled Nirasmara. It converted various aspects of the Greek epic, such as the characters and story background, into the style of wayang. Lysistrata then, both conceptually and naratologically, went through " Javanisation ". This paper examines whether this transfer of the cultural codes and the performance art styles of Nirasmara affected essential storylines of Lysistrata.

Here I’d like to  discuss three possible issues concerning the notion of the performance- the ontic creation of the very term performance, the ideological belongings of the performing actions, and finally, the notion of the autobiography in performance as experienced in the individual work of Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, Penny Arcade and Ethyl Eichelberger.

Tino Sehgal. Tra arte relazionale e performance / MA Thesis in "Arts, market and cultural heritage" - The thesis aims to understand and contextualize the work of the artist Tino Sehgal | Tesi di Laurea Magistrale in "Arti, patrimoni e mercati"- la tesi verte sul comprendere e contestualizzare l'opera dell'artista Tino Sehgal.

Barrie Kosky has been labeled Australian theatre’s enfant terrible. His adaptations of classical tragedies in the 1990s and 2000s in Australia drew radical performance modes and Aristotelian traditions into dynamic relation. This article proposes that Kosky’s 2008 production, Women of Troy, is an example of what can be called “post-tragedy.” Through
the prism of Kosky’s work, post-tragedy is posited as a particular approach to adapting the classics that, paradoxically, engages both postdramatic and Aristotelian performance modes. It is precisely through this paradoxical intersection that Kosky’s Women of Troy—as an example of post-tragedy - operates as a theatrical response to and affective critique of the production of neoliberal subjectivity.

Written for the German theater magazine Theater Heute. The Romanian independent writer-director Gianina Carbunariu's "Typographic Capital Letter" and "Solitarity" are two important docu-fiction performances which deal with the Romanian social-political past and present.

The conversation about the directorʼs changing identity, as our century gallops towards or stumbles through challenges that few could have anticipated even a few years—let alone months—ago is becoming all the more complex. Today, directing practice has crossed many disciplines, methodologies, and ecologies of theatre-making. My article sets out to explore some emergent dynamics that reflect the directorʼs role within the current performance landscape; a landscape in which directorial jurisdictions are no longer contained within the realm of pre-scripted dramatic plays and one which engages with unconventional performance environments framed by the proliferation of intermedial forms, intercultural
collaborations and a variety of human and nonhuman (im)materialities. In so doing, I will set out to locate the shift from perceiving the director commonly as the productionʼs single uncontested authority to an agent of symbiotic meaning making.

This dissertation interrogates Cristal Chanelle Truscott’s Black acting pedagogy,
SoulWork, in line with racial discourse and theories of intracultural practice, as a
prime example of a culturally relevant performance pedagogy for Black British actors
and performers. Truscott's pedagogy encourages the freedom of Black expression
and acts as a critical intervention for British performance practices. Embodying Black
cultural expression in a British social context highlights the need for training
pedagogies to explore racial discourse and identity and its implications for teaching
culturally relevant performance practices. Pertaining to the Black British identity
space in the twenty-first century, this thesis proposes that SoulWork adds a new way
of thinking about Black acting methods and mapping the African-Caribbean diaspora
in UK theatre arts. This paper suggests that intracultural practice should become an
integral part of the British actor training process, in centralising the racial and cultural
contexts of its student of colour, and notably Black students.

This is a summary of a Truax's article published on Perspectives of New Music Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1994).

Truax wants to describe a new model to which contemporary classical music should transform in order to fit the new needs of current society. This paper has been published in 1994 and can be enframed in the period where composers, performers and musicologists were starting to use the term “new complexity” referring to music. On the other end, the author speaks about “the new romanticism” as an antagonist of this new wave in classical music.

This chapter argues that contemporary performance can trouble normative scripts of ageing femininity and examines the work of veteran performer Peggy Shaw, particularly her performances A Menopausal Gentleman (1998), Must: The Inside Story (2009) and Ruff (2013), in order to illuminate the ways that Shaw disrupts the specific identity position of “old woman” and offers a multifaceted performance of the old, female body. The chapter engages concepts of “intersection” (Crenshaw 1988), and “interoception” (Leder in The Absent Body 1990) in order to analyse Shaw’s subversion of behavioural scripts to which the aged female body is subject. It also examines how interruption, as a strategy employed in Ruff, negotiates the cognitive, material and professional status of Shaw’s post-stroke body, and produces an explicitly fragile age-performance.

How can we rethink the importance of voice in performance? How can we understand voice simultaneously as music and text, as sound and body, or as both personal and political?

This book explores voice across genres, media and cultures, inviting the reader to reassess established ways of analysing, enjoying and listening to voice. Using a wide range of case studies integrated with critical and philosophical frameworks, it makes audible the multiple ways in which voice contributes to how we perform identities. From opera and musical theatre to live art and immersive audio walks, Konstantinos Thomaidis presents voice as plural, elusive and ripe for reinvention.