E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 180 Seiten
Reihe: Performing Urgencies
Warsza / Aït-Touati / Malzacher EMPTY STAGES, CROWDED FLATS. PERFORMATIVITY AS CURATORIAL STRATEGY.
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-89581-469-3
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Performing Urgencies 4
E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 180 Seiten
Reihe: Performing Urgencies
ISBN: 978-3-89581-469-3
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Joanna Warsza ist eine unabhängige Kuratorin, u. a. von Public Art Munich 2018 und Leiterin des CuratorLab an der Stockholmer Kunstakademie Konstfack. Florian Malzacher studierte Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen. Er ist Künstlerischer Leiter des Impulse Theater Festivals sowie freier Dramaturg und Autor. Von 2006 bis 2012 war er Leitender Dramaturg des Festivals steirischer herbst in Graz. Er war u.a. (Ko)Kurator der Internationalen Sommerakademie am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (2002 & 2004), der Reihe Performing Lectures in Frankfurt, von Truth is Concrete in Graz (2012) sowie der performativen Konferenz Aneignungen im Ethnologischen Museum Berlin/Humboldt Lab (2015) und von Artist Organisations International am HAU Berlin in 2015. Florian Malzacher ist Herausgeber der englischsprachigen Buchreihe Performing Urgency.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The concept of curating has arrived in the field of performing arts, and with it the understanding that programming performances, theatre works, dance pieces, or music can be more than just selecting or producing shows and then inserting them into a time slot and space. There is a necessity of putting works into larger contexts, to have them interact with each other and the world that informs them. And there is a possibility of creating a collective experience not only within the performance itself, but rather turning a programme, festival, event, or venue into a larger field of communication and communing.
Even though concepts of curating within the field of visual arts are clearly more elaborated than within the performing arts, the relation between them has always been more reciprocal than is often acknowledged. After all it is no coincidence that Harald Szeemann, in many ways the prototype of a contemporary curator, compared his work to that of a theatre director, and that art theorist Beatrice von Bismarck emphasises the propinquity of an exhibition-maker’s task to that of a dramaturg.
But taking Szeemann’s idea of staging exhibitions seriously takes us even further. It raises the question of how curation not only generally borrows (and often without any awareness) the tools of theatre, performance, and choreography but rather how it could gain even more from these practices by consciously integrating their very strategies and techniques, and by understanding curation itself as performative.
Performing the Performative
The impressive (and sometimes exaggerated) career of the concept of the performative began with J. L. Austin’s ‘speech acts’, introduced in his set of lectures ‘How to Do Things with Words’ (1955). As a precursor to the idea of performativity it described verbal utterances that exercise the transformative capacity of an act that constitutes or changes reality. The mainly linguistic discourse that followed Austin was, in the early 1990s, the base for Judith Butler’s radical interpretation of gender as something that is performed and constructed via speech or physical action: reality as a social construction coming to existence by permanently repeating and quoting. Performativity for Butler is, as described in Bodies that Matter (1993), ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.’
While definitions of performativity are numerous, often contradictory, and regularly rather vague, most are connected to a constructivist belief that there are no fixed concepts of objectivity, reality, or truth, and that everything is constructed individually, influenced by context and interaction.
Influential impulses in theatre and performance studies came next to the linguist arguments from ethnographical and anthropological discourses: the term ‘cultural performance’ was introduced in 1959 by ethnologist Milton Singer’s book Traditional India: Structure and Change. Singer believed that in many cultures performances, like dances, theatre, and rituals (defined by having a dramaturgy, a division between performer and audience, a framed time, a specific reason and place etc.) enable people to reassure themselves of their traditions and identities. Anthropologist Victor Turner continued to develop the concept of cultural performance, which was picked up by theatre makers and theorists like Richard Schechner, who collaborated with Turner, applied his discoveries to theatre, and pushed them further. As different as all these concepts of the performative are they all emphasise in one way or the other its ‘reality-making capacity’, as Shannon Jackson puts it in this book.
Yet there is another strand of the use of the word ‘performative’ — equally vague and additionally rather colloquial. It describes, again in Jackson’s words, art works that are ‘theatre-like but not theatre’, mainly to ‘provide an umbrella to cluster recent cross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in relational encounters.’ Jackson calls this the ‘intermedial use of the performative vocabulary’ that often ‘foregrounds the sometimes productive, sometimes uncomfortable, relation between the performing arts and the visual arts.’
Keeping Szeemann in mind, it is this very notion of ‘theatre-like but not theatre’ that despite often being dismissed as too literal, opens up a whole range of possibilities when applied to the processes and products of curating: how can the understanding of dramaturgy, time management, narration, process, use of space, the co-presence of the audience, role play etc. — many of which were already important for Singer’s definition of ‘cultural performance’ — inform curatorial work?
To my belief the curatorial potential of the performative does not lie in dividing these two strands but rather in thinking about them together as different aspects of the same approach: adapting ‘theatre-like’ strategies and techniques enables the curation of ‘reality making’ situations that not only describe reality but create an awareness of their own realness. By putting the focus less on the product or the result (as Austin’s speech act still does) but on its own becoming, performative curating highlights liveness, the co-presence of all participants, the (temporary) community — all this being core aspects of most definitions of theatre and performance.
From the point of view of curatorial praxis, it is at least an unnecessary limitation to separate the more linguistic, anthropological, or philosophical (‘reality-making’) concepts of the performative from its rather literal ‘theatre-like’ use. In difference to Dorothea von Hantelmann who in ‘The Experimental Turn’ (2014) dismisses the latter definition as a mere ‘misunderstanding’, I would insist on the connection to the tools of live arts. Not only because Austin, Singer, Turner, and Butler themselves clearly referenced theatre in their writings, but because in turn their discourse was referenced again by theatre and performance makers and changed the artistic practice. One could say that by performing the performative a new reality of performative performances was created.
Theatre has always been a social and a self-reflexive art form, as much as conventional approaches have been trying to neglect it. Theatre is a paradoxical machine that allows us to observe ourselves while being part of the performance. It does not create an artificial outside of pure criticality but neither is it able to lure in mere immersive identification (even though it sometimes tries). Theatre marks a space where things are real and not real at the same time, it creates situations and practices that are symbolic and actual at once. A curatorial thinking that makes conscious use of this knowledge underlines its own relational aspects and highlights social and political implications — it creates spaces of negotiation (as several examples in this book clearly show).
The proximity to theatre can also be seen in concepts of the curatorial itself, for example, when art theorist Irit Rogoff in conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck in Cultures of the Curatorial (2012) poses the question of ‘how to instantiate [the curatorial] as a process, how to actually not allow things to harden, and how to create a public platform that allows people to take part in these processes’. The curatorial is a ‘dynamic field’ (Bismarck) of liveness, transformation, and ephemerality.
This very fear — that the work may seem too complete, too much like a finished product – is an integral part of all live arts, where the permanent possibility of failure, chance, mistakes, and loss of control are not seen as unavoidable flaws, but rather as the core of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them may be seen as a key curatorial strategy for creating a tension that emphasises the very aliveness that is inherent even in the most conventional repertory theatre, dance company, or music ensemble. Expanding, shortening, interrupting, or varying time (thus navigating the physical or mental strength, exhaustion, boredom, or enthusiasm of the collective body of the visitors) can create such an awareness, as well as creating specific densities of spatial complexities. Inventing specific dramaturgies or playing with the potential and limitations of narration or scores is another option, along with confronting works that might not be compatible at first sight, in order to create both tension and openness through their friction. The list can be extended and the possibilities are vast. The many concrete examples in this book — developed by curators as well as artists, dramaturgs, and activists — reveal how much understanding the curatorial as performative means by putting a focus on the here and now. At best it creates a temporary reality — particular but porous — that connects to many other realities, thus enabling art works to be experienced not as autonomous entities, but well within their own rights, their own lives, and in relation to others.
Empty stages, crowded flats
Theatre still is mostly bound to certain spaces reserved exclusively for its practice: proscenium stages and black boxes. But even in the most conventional settings an awareness of the specificity of the space can produce artistic or curatorial added value. How does the audience enter the space? When does the performance actually begin? At the entrance to the theatre? In the foyer, in the auditorium? What difference does it make when I have to enter a different way than usual? Is that part of the performance or mere pragmatics? What are the rules of the...
