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In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.)

For political philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is also that which inserts us into the world, makes possible our public appearance and our political participation. In performance, action is that which invites us in, marks or blurs the boundaries between public and private, theatrical gesture and its spectating. In writing about performance, I am confronted with action two-fold. In the instance in which I encounter it in the live moment, raw and incomplete; and in the textual gesture I extend in return. This paper considers the relationship between critical writing about performance and training practice, through an exploration of action. It draws on Arendt’s philosophy to examine the ways in which action operates in pedagogical approaches to critical writing. It does so by considering the plural modes of action and representation as found in a Jackson Pollock painting inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this manner a gentle confrontation is staged between the process of critical writing, mar...

Diana Damian Martin proposes in this chapter that performance criticism operates as a kind of “phenomenological poesis”—an emergence that is itself a form of creative production. Damian Martin is navigating here the channels the interlink action, perception and thought, and she draws on Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the very nature of appearance to aid in that navigation. Here, as elsewhere, the argument concerns ways of knowing that are always emergent, particularly as Damian Martin’s chief focus is on “live writing”—criticism which responds to the performative event as it unfolds, and as such not only forms part of the performance it is “perceiving”, but, in Damian Martin’s words, “marks its own eventness”.

This collection brings together reflections on, and analysis and theorisations of, contemporary experimental Portuguese theatre. Placing equal emphasis on the aesthetics and the formal, material, a...