NEU: „Re-socializing emptied spaces: a queer-feminist performance, the theatrical apparatus and its (post)pandemic epistemology“ (IJPADM)

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 19.1, doi: 10.1080/14794713.2023.2172523 – (FREE EPRINT)

The suspension of operations during lockdowns facilitated a new perspective on performance: the absent came to appear as a determining factor of not only the pandemic, but became evident as constitutive of late modern theater cultures. Based on a description of the lockdown performance A Room of Our Own (2021) by the feminist collective Swoosh Lieu, it is shown how contemporary practice is relocating performance within its entanglement with the social spaces of reproduction. Emphasizing the realities of exclusion that the performing arts rest upon, the paper argues against a theory of performance as an enclosed event of participation based on an idealized idea of the social as a homogeneous microcosm. It calls instead for an empirics of assembly, and more generally to question a thinking of performance along the lines of interaction and communication. Adopting Karen Barad’s concept of posthuman performativity to Theater Studies, it foregrounds the mediating function of performance in its articulation of the world and proposes to reconceptualize theater as an epistemological apparatus to invigorate a strong program of theater studies that refocuses on the socio-political real of theatricality.

NEU: „Post-performance: pandemic breach experiments, big theatre data, and the ends of theory“ (TRI, open access)

Theater Research International (TRI) 48.1, S. 24-37, doi: 10.1017/S0307883322000384 (OPEN ACCESS)

Abstract

All became data during the pandemic. Lockdowns made manifest what had developed for some time: that theatre has become inextricably entangled with digital cultures, the performing arts being increasingly encountered as a growing stock of multimodal fragments, textual discourses and networked communications. And, it is argued, it is precisely this appearance of theatre as (big) data that might prove to be the game-changer post-pandemic, and that this game-changer might be solely an epistemological one: what is known about theatre, how that knowledge is organized, and who is involved in organizing this knowledge, are rapidly changing. Based on an exemplary analysis of the discourses of legitimation that compensated for the loss of presence in German theatres, and the associated imperative to innovate production, this article estimates the epistemological consequences of theatre returns as data to advocate for a reconceptualization of theatre beyond performance.