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Chapter investigating the legacy of Brechtian approaches to acting in contemporary political theatre-making.

Chapter investigating the differences and interconnections between theatre and theatricality.

Article written in tribute to Professor Mike Pearson (deceased), reviewing his contribution to the development of: laboratory theatre; site-specific performance; theatre/archaeology; auto-ethnographic performance; performance design; and performance studies.

This chapter seeks to set-up and investigate a key question at the heart of the inter-relation between politics and aesthetics: the inevitable gap and potential conflict between presence and representation made manifest in the internal contradictions and recurrent tensions of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2004: 12). It examines how the practice of ‘staging the people’ might be considered central to imaging and constituting ‘the people’ in an increasingly theatricalised social formation and to managing their ‘political claim’ (Rancière 1999: 87—88). If the theatrical logic of democratic representation is dependent upon the exercise of a political claim to represent ‘the people’; coextensively, the performative construct of ‘the people’ is dependent on the aesthetic logic of representation and its capacity to frame, codify and remediate the presence of people per se. Enacted through representation—recalling Marx’s dictum in the Eighteenth Brumaire that ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’—‘the people’ nonetheless remain different from, and in excess of, any particular representation or mode of representation. As Rancière insists, ‘the people’ are ‘always more or less than the people’; the locus of an ‘internal division’ and index of the unbridgeable gap between presence and representation that constitutes politics’ primary condition and site of operation (1999: 22, 87). This gap, the chapter argues, appears—and re-appears—as a tear in the very fabric of the visible; as a crisis of representation ‘in representation’ (Frank 2010: 35) that exceeds and undermines the normalising effects of politics as show. It thereby serves to re-open representation as the ground of the political as such, and as the site of its re-appearance within the otherwise bounded theatricality of the representational regime. The argument builds on comparative analysis of two contemporary theatre works explicitly concerned with ‘staging the people’, performed

The image of the disaster at sea—the shipwreck staged for the spectator—is a highly conventionalised form of aesthetic encounter with the suffering of others, whose iconic operation serves as a reminder of the inseparability of the event from its mode of representation. The drama of the image, the chapter argues, remains dependent on the visual dramaturgy of the event of representation (its ‘theatricality’), and the construction of a spectator position framing the image’s withdrawal from the world of pure presentation (its ‘authenticity’). The chapter investigates the relationship between the apparent authenticity of the scenes depicted and their reliance on the theatricality of the of the image as the locus of the spectator’s political subjectification. It argues that the image functions as a drama staged to enable the construction of world spectatorship as a privileged political standpoint, and demonstrates how this position operates within a racialized representational regime.

'Speculation in Unimagined Spaces' is a podcast series with Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes. Trig Point 51.4134° N, 0.2115° W February 3 - 23 2020 Trig Point is a research project by artists Forster and Heighes that explores perspectives on the design and use of pedagogical space and the technical and material resourcing required for innovative theatre making and performance practice across the educational, architectural and planning sectors. It used language and adapted instrumentation from the field of land surveying, combined with specialist input from the spheres of architecture, education, and environmental studies. Trig Point plotted not only how the college buildings function practically, but also how they position themselves in the minds and imagination of staff, students, and visitors. It also looked at how less tangible factors concerning atmosphere, social structures and spatial dynamics might offer up a more provocative set of coordinates from which to navigate a course of study. The researchers used film and installation, a performance lecture, bespoke map/publication, podcast and structural intervention to recalibrate visitors senses of location awareness and directional finding. A fluid, deliberately playful, reconnaissance that analysed not only benchmarks, supervision and gradation, but the value too of error, inaccuracy, slackness and variation. During the residency Forster and Heighes made a series of podcasts in which they interviewed staff. The podcasts invited responses and reflections on the main themes of the project, namely an exploration of the material and spatial resourcing of performance teaching in the contemporary creative academy. In these 2 podcasts, we hear from Professor Adrian Kear, Programme Development Director in Performance at Wimbledon College of Arts. In the first podcast he reflects on the studio and performance space. The second discusses collaboration and theatre materiality. See https://forsterandheighes.podbean.com

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks? Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us. Edited by Adrian Kear

From publisher's website: Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks? Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

From publisher's website: The field of performance studies analyses the production and impact of on-stage performance, such as in a theatre or circus, and off-stage performance, such as cultural rituals and political protests. Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories introduces students to 34 key topics seen as paramount to the future of performance studies in a series of short, engaging essays by an international team of distinguished scholars. Each essay contributes to the wide-ranging, adventurous and conscientious nature that makes performance studies such an innovative, valuable and exciting field.

In the beginning of the 21st century, European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the 20th century as the unfinished business of the contemporary. In this book, Kear argues that by thinking through the logic of the event, contemporary performance offers an affective interrogation of 'the event' of the European century.

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation. Exploring a wide range of issues including rioting, youth-driven protests, border security practices and the significance of cultural awareness in war, this text provides an accessible and cutting edge survey of the intersection of international politics and performance examining issues surrounding the politics of appearance, image, event and place; and discusses the development and deployment of innovative critical and creative research methods, from auto-ethnography to site-specific theatre-making, from philosophical aesthetics to the aesthetic thought of new securities scenario-planning. The book’s focus throughout is on the materiality of performance practices—on the politics of making, spectating, and participating in a variety of modes as political actors and audiences—whilst also seeking to explicate the performative dynamics of creative and critical thinking. Structured thematically and framed by a detailed introduction and conclusion, the focus is on producing a dialogue between contributors and providing an essential reference point in this developing field. This work is essential reading for students of politics and performance and will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR, performance studies and cultural studies. Edited by Adrian Kea

From the publisher's website: In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation.

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical.

Beginning from the conviction that appearance matters – and matters as the very ‘stuff’ and substance of the kind of things we call performance – this issue examines the materiality of appearance as a key component of theatrical and social events. Exploring the role appearance plays in a range of cultural forms – from body art to live TV, shamanic invocation to video installation, magic show to ‘non-professional’ performance – On Appearance charts the construction, circulation and contestation of some of the imagined possibilities, lived realities, political identifications, and performative opportunities opened up by thinking through the logic of appearance. As well as examining the correlation between modes of appearance and practices of disappearance, and investigating their inscription in the recuperative dynamics of power, On Appearance explicates the ways in which appearance matters in affecting and positively producing the conditions, forms and relations structuring what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’: the political organisation of sense-making activities within the intelligible framework of the visible. Edited by Adrian Kear.