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INTERMEDIAL
PERFORMANCE AND
POLITICS IN THE
PUBLIC SPHERE
EDITED BY KATIA ARFARA,
ANETA MANCEWICZ, RALF REMSHARDT
Avant-Gardes in Performance
Series Editor
Sarah Bay-Cheng
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, ME, USA
Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase
“death of the avant-garde,” interest in experimental, innovative, and
politically radical performance continues to animate theatre and perfor-
mance studies. For all their attacks upon tradition and critical institutions,
the historical and subsequent avant-gardes remain critical touchstones for
continued research in the disciplines of theatre, performance studies, film
and cinema studies, media study, art history, visual studies, dance, music,
and nearly every area of the performing arts. “Avant-Gardes in
Performance” features exciting new scholarship on radical and avant-
garde performance. By engaging with the charged term “avant-garde,”
we consider performance practices and events that are formally avant-
garde, as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional struc-
tures, practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the
global aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, including
modernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, defined
by identification with extreme political movements on the right and left
alike. The series brings together close attention to a wide range of inno-
vative performances with critical analyses that challenge conventional
academic practices.
Intermedial
Performance and
Politics in the Public
Sphere
Editors
Katia Arfara Aneta Mancewicz
Onassis Cultural Center University of Birmingham
Athens, Greece Birmingham, UK
Ralf Remshardt
School of Theatre & Dance
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL, USA
Avant-Gardes in Performance
ISBN 978-3-319-75342-3 ISBN 978-3-319-75343-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75343-0
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 259
Notes on Contributors
Katia Arfara is the Theatre and Dance Artistic Director of the Onassis
Cultural Centre in Athens (Greece) There she founded the Fast Forward
Festival, which commissions socially engaged public works, in 2014. She
holds an MA in theatre studies (Athens University) and a PhD in art his-
tory (Sorbonne University). Her essays have appeared in various journals
and critical anthologies. Dr Arfara is the author of the book Théâtralités
contemporaines (2011) and the editor of the special issue ‘Scènes en tran-
sition-Balkans et Grèce’ for Théâtre/Public (2016). She is a member of the
Prize Council for 2016–2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics.
Christopher Balme holds the chair in theatre studies at LMU Munich
(Germany). His publications include Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical
syncretism and postcolonial drama (1999); Pacific Performances:
Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (2007);
Theatricality and Cross-
Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (2008); The Theatrical Public
Sphere (2014). He is principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant
‘Developing Theatre: Building Expert Networks for Theatre in Emerging
Countries after 1945’.
BERLIN is a Belgian performance group that was founded in 2003 by
Bart Baele and Yves Degryse together with Caroline Rochlitz. They started
the series Holocene with the performances Jerusalem, Iqaluit, Bonanza,
Moscow, and Zvizdal. Currently, BERLIN is producing a new cycle, Horror
Vacui, of which Tagfish, Land’s End, and Perhaps All The Dragons are the
first three episodes. Focusing on a specific research question, the company
engages different media depending on the content of the project. In 2013,
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
attempt to create theatre beyond the physical theatre space as a new social
platform and function. In recent years he has been developing work within
a wide range of fields, including tourism, urban planning, art, literature,
fashion, and mass media, using ideas from theatre to cultivate new possi-
bilities across a variety of mediums and genres.
Kristof van Baarle is a research scholar at Ghent University (Belgium)
with a PhD fellowship from the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO).
His research focuses on critical posthumanism in the contemporary per-
forming arts, the work of theatre maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck
and the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. He also works as a dramaturg for
Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company and is an editor of the Belgian
theatre journal Etcetera.
Kurt Vanhoutte is professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the
University of Antwerp (Belgium), where he is also the director of the
Research Centre for Visual Poetics (www.visualpoetics.be), a research
group in theatre, film, and related artistic media. Vanhoutte’s research
investigates processes of intermediality emerging under the cultural and
technological conditions of modernity and late modernity. His interest
more specifically concerns the effects of science and technologies on nar-
rative and stylistic characteristics of performance art as well as the ensuing
impact on notions of theatricality, performance, and text. His most recent
publications introduce a media-archaeological approach to the study of
theatre (www.parsnetwork.org).
Kris Verdonck is the artistic director of A Two Dogs Company in
Belgium. He studied visual arts, architecture, and theatre and this training
is evident in his work. His creations are positioned in the transit zone
between visual arts and theatre, between installation and performance,
between dance and architecture. As a theatre maker and visual artist, he
can look back over a wide variety of projects, including most recently,
ISOS (2015) and CONVERSATIONS (at the end of the world) (2017).
Dries Verhoeven is an international theatre maker and visual artist from
the Netherlands. Verhoeven creates installations, performances and hap-
penings in museums, on location, and in the public spaces of cities. On the
boundary between performance and installation art, he critically investi-
gates the relationships between the spectators, performers, everyday real-
ity, and art, often with a special focus on the spectator as an accomplice in
the events. In recent years, the current crisis mind-set and the influence of
xvi Notes on Contributors
xvii
xviii List of Figures
We are now almost two turbulent decades into the twenty-first century,
years marked by the advance of populism and nationalism in many Western
and Eastern European countries (including Hungary, Poland, Romania,
and Ukraine). These developments have brought into sharp relief chal-
lenges to the vaunted notion of the public sphere, which was first proposed
by German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the early 1960s.
Transformations of the public sphere and its attendant politics have urged
performance artists to unlock alternative modes of expression, which has
provoked a shift in aesthetics but also in curatorial practices. This has
revealed increasingly complex interactions between performance, politics,
and the public sphere.
K. Arfara (*)
Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece
e-mail: k.arfara@sgt.gr
A. Mancewicz
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: a.mancewicz@bham.ac.uk
R. Remshardt
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
e-mail: rremshardt@arts.ufl.edu
Artists interviewed in this book, like Dries Verhoeven, Kris Verdonck, and
Akira Takayama confront this blurring of boundaries and the pluralism of
the public sphere. Moreover, they share a common interest in the reactiva-
tion of the polis (agora) through rather intimate discursive intermedial
practices, which are taking place in public spaces.
In his discussion with Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink in this book, Verhoeven
explains the multiple ways in which his public works challenge the para-
doxical and often controversial relation between analogue and digital pub-
lic spaces (where social media is still regarded as a private space). In his
conversation with Kristof van Baarle, Verdonck elaborates on the micro-
macro perspective of his performative installations, insisting on the blur-
ring of boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, and
their confusing consequences on our own lives. Takayama, in an interview
with Natsuko Odate, discusses how he inserts the Foucauldian concept of
‘heterotopia’ into artistic practices that deliberately move from theatre
spaces to public venues of ordinary encounters, such as fast food restau-
rants. All three artists are confronted with the current political turbu-
lences, openly challenging the issues of rampant nationalism and oppressive
conservative regimes, while attempting to articulate counter-narratives
and new possibilities for critical analysis within the public realm.
Performance scholars must seek to ground the account of the public
sphere again in the spaces of performative encounter, whether in theatres
or other public spaces. That means acknowledging that public space and
public sphere are distinct domains, however much they overlap, as Setha
Low and Neil Smith (2006) have argued, and that a repoliticization of
public space (think the Occupy movement) is concurrent with a ‘respa-
tialisation of our sense of the public’ (7). Performance is capable of sutur-
ing these complementary tendencies even as it exposes their contingency.
Olga Danylyuk’s chapter on the Maidan uprising in the Ukraine for exam-
ple reads the protests as a performance of sorts taking place in a repoliti-
cized public space, dramaturgically inflected and refracted by both old and
new media configurations.
If the space of politics within which the public spheres are shaped and
contested has been increasingly subject to performative interventions,
what of the theatre itself? In his book on the theatrical public sphere, Chris
Balme (another contributor to this volume) argues that the manner in
which theatre has become institutionalized in late capitalism (a ‘black
box’) has blunted even its most transgressive tendencies; it has been
transformed from ‘a rowdy, potentially explosive gathering into a place of
INTRODUCTION: IN AND OUT: INTERMEDIAL PRACTICES IN THE NEW… 7
cinematic ways in which in their Holoceen cycle gathers its material from
different countries and cultures. They transpose them from cities and
social milieus all around the world into theatrical installations that prob-
lematize the relationship between fact and fiction, reality and its mediati-
zation within an intermedial framework.
by global war conflicts and the arms trade. The moments of immersion,
however, are continuously disrupted by the visibility of the technology
and the encounters with other participants. Consequently, the players in
Situation Rooms do not function exclusively as ‘immersants’ or observers,
but instead they are self-consciously moving between these roles. While
immersed, they have to take responsibility for their position in different
stories. While watching the immersion of others, they gain awareness of
how these stories are presented. Such explicit experience of remediation in
which live performance remediates documentary material is inherently
political, since it foregrounds the perspective and the agency of the
participants.
The ‘in and out’ perspective might encourage further political insights
when the choice of the material and the framework of the performance
work together to establish a public sphere in which the audience directly
debates current economic and social issues. In Grass Stage’s performance
World Factory (2014), examined in this volume by Zheyu Wei, the live
action includes documentary footage produced by the company. The
video material investigates the working conditions in Chinese factories
against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century British Industrial
Revolution and in the aftermath of the workers’ suicides at the Foxconn
factory in Shenzhen in 2010. The footage gives the audience a commen-
tary on the human cost of China’s industrialization and provides them
with ideas for a post-show discussion. Similarly, a production parallel to
this performance, METIS’s World Factory (2015), which draws on a
research collaboration with Grass Stage, incorporates videos documenting
working conditions in Chinese factories. During the performance, the
audience members become participants in a game, in which they act as
owners of clothing factories in China, weighing their own pursuit of
wealth against the welfare of the workers. In both these projects, a broadly
defined medium of theatre provides one possible model of the public
sphere, in which the audience engages in an actual debate that draws on
the live and mediated stimuli.
Intermedial practice might function as, interact with, or intervene in the
public sphere in a number of ways, as shown by contributions in this collec-
tion, but each case is a response to the increasing role of media in contempo-
rary society. The consequences of this process are complex and contradictory.
Douglas Kellner observed that radio, television, and computers have estab-
lished ‘new public spheres and spaces for information, debate, and participa-
tion’ that might find opposing applications—encouraging democracy and
12 K. ARFARA ET AL.
To make a Lotion.
A little of the lotion should be put into the palm of the hand and
sniffed up the bleeding nostril; or, if that does not succeed, some of
the lotion ought, by means of a syringe, to be syringed up the nose.
367. In case of a young lady Fainting, what had better be done?
Lay her flat upon her back, taking care that the head be as low as
or lower than the body; throw open the windows; do not crowd
around her;[303] unloosen her dress as quickly as possible; ascertain if
she have been guilty of tight lacing, for fainting is sometimes
produced by that reprehensible practice. Apply smelling-salts to her
nostrils; if they be not at hand, burn a piece of rag under her nose;
dash cold water upon her face; throw open the window; fan her; and
do not, as is generally done, crowd round her, and thus prevent a free
circulation of air.
As soon as she can swallow, give her either a draught of cold water,
or a glass of wine, or a teaspoonful of sal-volatile in a wineglassful of
water.
To prevent fainting for the future.—I would recommend early
hours; country air and exercise; the stays, if worn at all, to be worn
slack; attention to diet; avoidance of wine, beer, spirits, excitement,
and fashionable amusements.
Sometimes the cause of a young lady fainting is either a disordered
stomach or a constipated state of the bowels.
If the fainting have been caused by disordered stomach, it may be
necessary to stop the supplies, and give the stomach, for a day or
two, but little to do; a fast will frequently prevent the necessity of
giving medicine. Of course, if the stomach be much disordered, it will
be desirable to consult a medical man.
If your daughter’s fainting have originated from a costive state of
the bowels (another frequent cause of fainting), I beg to refer you to
a subsequent Conversation, in which I will give you a list of remedies
for the prevention and the treatment of constipation.
A young lady’s fainting occasionally arises from debility—from
downright weakness of the constitution; then the best remedies will
be change of air to the coast, good nourishing diet, and the following
strengthening mixture:
Take of—Muriated Tincture of Iron, one drachm and a half;
Tincture of Calumba, six drachms;
Distilled Water, seven ounces.
All chopped very fine. The size of a nutmeg or two to be occasionally eaten.
Or, one or two teaspoonfuls of compound confection of senna
(lenitive electuary) may occasionally, early in the morning, be taken.
Or, for a change, a teaspoonful of Henry’s magnesia, in half a
tumblerful of warm water. If this should not be sufficiently active, a
teaspoonful of Epsom salts should be given with the magnesia. A
Seidlitz powder forms another safe and mild aperient; or one or two
compound rhubarb pills may be given at bedtime. The following
prescription for a pill, where an aperient is absolutely necessary, is a
mild, gentle, and effective one for the purpose:
Take of—Extract of Socotrine Aloes, eight grains;
Compound Extract of Colocynth, forty-eight grains:
Hard Soap, twenty-four grains;
Treacle, a sufficient quantity: