The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

In 1973, the Trilateral Commission asked whether democracies were becoming ‘ungovernable’. Warning of the ‘rise of anomic democracy’, it identified threats that we are more than familiar with today, as we confront – once again – the ‘crisis’ of democracy: ‘the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens’. In this chapter I revisit this ‘problem’ of anomie, locating it at the very heart of democracy and the historical problem of (...) its governance. In the Laws, Plato had already used the disparaging term ‘theatrocracy’, which drew on the analogy of the theatre and its audience, to describe the unruly nature of democratic forms of life. Just as the theatre audience is an ill-disciplined rabble so, he argued, the members of a democratic society are prone to various disorders. Thus the pathologies of the democratic polis qualify it for one of Plato’s ‘diseased cities’, where popular discontentment collapses democracy into something far worse: tyranny. I pursue this ‘theatrocratic’ problem as a means of understanding democracy’s central dynamic, particularly visible in an age of popular discontentment, namely its constitutive proneness to displeasure, incivility and antagonism. The first part of the chapter re-examines the legacy of theatrocratic discourse by reframing it in relation to the discourse on play. I argue that for theatrocratic discourses ‘play’ – often understood as ‘idleness’ – constitutes the core problematic of democratic or ‘common’ forms of life, and that for Plato, and for many commentators who later followed him, democracy must be viewed as ‘dangerous play’. I show how the modern State sought to neutralise the ‘theatrocratic’ threat associated with democracy’s dangerous play by means of ‘education’, converting incivility into civility; disorder into orderly conduct; idleness and illegality into productive labour. The second part of the chapter, focusses more closely on this educational solution, arguing that it leads to a further paradox and one with which we still contend today. This paradox becomes particularly acute in Schiller’s notion of the ‘aesthetic education of man’ and in his tract on theatre as a tool for instruction. While Schiller sees ‘play’ as central to human emancipation, in advocating theatre as a tool of moral instruction, designed to reconcile the demos to the State, aesthetic education reverts to a discourse of two humanities – one civil, the other barbaric. Nonetheless, I argue Schiller’s insight that ‘man’ is ‘only wholly Man when he is playing’ remains useful to understanding the theatrocratic ‘crisis’ afflicting contemporary democracies with the rise of populism across Europe and beyond. Thus in the final part of the chapter, I turn to consider how we might understand democracy through the figure of theatrocracy today. Following the political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, I argue that the solution to the crisis of democracy is not less but more democracy. I suggest that what this involves is the need to reconstruct democratic engagement around two senses of the term ‘play’. First, that play is indeed correctly understood as a ‘subversive’ force – a productive ‘incivility’ – and that an ‘aesthetic education’ today requires ‘playful resistance’ to the total mobilisation of the social by capitalism; second, that democratic politics must be reconfigured around the notion of a radical ‘politics of rehearsal’ – where play signifies, not something subservient to an instrumental goal, but the opening of an autonomous space, emancipated from productive labour, in which new ‘identities’ can be created. (shrink)

Sheep Pig Goat is a performance-based research project, commissioned and presented publicly as a “creative research studio” by Wellcome Collection during the exhibition Making Nature. The project brought together performers from across artforms, a number of livestock animals and academic researchers from various disciplines to explore, in public, a set of interrelated questions concerned with interspecies empathy, understanding and communication. The key methodology of the research was a series of improvised performative encounters between human and non-human agents. These were framed (...) by public conversations involving visitors to the research studio and a series of panel presentations and discussions with visiting academics. Following this initial public presentation of the research, a short film was made of the project. This was screened in the galleries at Wellcome Collection as part of a follow-on exhibition, ‘A Museum of Modern Nature’. Subsequently, an extensive archive entry for Wellcome Library was commissioned and created. The project was further developed at the University of Surrey School of Veterinary Medicine in 2020. This iteration expanded the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary reach of the project, bringing the perspectives of veterinary scientists into the project for the first time. Key findings of the research concern methodological advancements in Human-Animal studies, specifically the need for multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, and multivalent perspectives, in order for non-human animals to begin to be seen as active subjects rather than passive objects. The project also impacted pedagogies and practices in a Veterinary School setting. It has led to numerous creative and scholarly outcomes and responses, including a published interview, podcast and three symposium presentations. (shrink)

This Grief Thing is a participatory arts project that encourages people to talk, think and learn about grief, by creating new public spaces, physical objects, visual materials and mechanisms for interpersonal engagement. Historically articulated and experienced in social, relational ways, grief has been rendered largely absent from public, social settings by shifts in societal attitudes as a consequence of two World Wars, developments in medical technologies and consequent disengagement with death. This has resulted in a lack of developed skills for (...) communicating about grief, with recognised impacts on health and wellbeing. This Grief Thing renders grief visible, through material cultures, through social encounters and by interventions in public space, and develops new partnership and participation models for engaging diverse publics with grief, helping build resilience in individuals, families and communities. At the heart of the project is a collection of clothing and accessories that incorporate words and phrases about grief, proposing new strategies to think about it and communicate it. These objects are distributed via temporary shops which also function as spaces for meetings and exchange, through which people engage with the subject of grief. A billboard campaign and a free leaflet, distributed through spaces such as libraries, cafes and print distribution channels, make grief even more visible in public spaces. In a context where the social invisibility of grief diminishes opportunities for engagement with it, research and creative projects which offer mechanisms for learning and exchange are increasingly necessary. In development since 2015, the project appeared in UK towns and cities from 2018–20. During this time, over 3569 participants directly engaged with the project by visiting temporary shops, 351 people participated in structured conversations about grief, over 1400 free leaflets were distributed and over 535,000 people encountered the billboard campaign. (shrink)

was a live critical writing project that took the form of dedications as moments of critical attention, unfolding as part of WAKE Festival in Folkestone. This book is a document of that process and an exploration of the gesture of dedicating performance.

This editorial introduces this special issue on the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt’s work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. Arendt’s relevance to our times is ubiquitous: from the near constant citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism in relation to the recent rise in strong-man politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism, to her diagnosis of the plight of refugees, denied even the rights belonging to those that have broken the law, but instead (...) placed outside the law. Contemporary political philosophy also bears numerous influences, in the thinking of Mouffe, Rancière, Nancy, Agamben, Brown, Butler, and more. For performance philosophy, we might engage with Arendt’s performative notion of politics itself, as exemplified in her idea of ‘spaces of appearance’, but also the performativity of thought, as well as the implications of Arendt’s work for phenomenology, governmentality, rights, and ecology. Contributors to this special issue also think through the relevance of Arendt’s work for an anti-colonial and anti-racist political praxis, and for post and non-human political ethics, judgment, and thinking. (shrink)

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’, 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’ under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake. (shrink)

In modern naturalistic drama, the feeling is often more important than the form. – Peter Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players The style of the play requires a different kind of expression, but the reality of feeling remains the same. – Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion Truth is that in which we can sincerely believe. – Stanislavsky In Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players, Peter Hall repeatedly critiques Stanislavskyan acting approaches as both useless and indeed harmful when applied to Shakespearean (...) performance. His criticisms coalesce around the idea of ‘Stanislavski’ rather than particular Stanislavskyan practices; he conflates differing interpretations of Stanislavsky – particularly the American Method as taught by Lee Strasberg – with the work of the Russian master. Where he is specific about the elements of Stanislavsky’s work he particularly abhors, it is either the supposed Stanislavskyan predominance of feeling over form, or else the rather numinous practice of ‘improvisation’. While neither Hall’s magisterial grasp of Shakespeare, nor his importance in setting a style of Shakespearean acting for several decades, can be denied, his understanding of Stanislavskyan principles seems both muddled and attenuated. Hall’s insistent anti-Stanislavsky rhetoric created something of an orthodoxy, outside of specialist circles, that Stanislavskyan principles are inapplicable to Shakespearean performance; he also weaponised traditional British antipathy to Method acting to support his argument. In this, I believe he fundamentally misunderstood or misrepresented not only Stanislavsky and the Method, but also the performance concerns of Early Modern actors. (shrink)

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”. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine UK performance practices that involve people in recovery from addiction. I offer a theorising of such practices as recovery-engaged. By this, I refer to applied performance activity that is imbricated with an understanding of lived experiences of addiction and the particular practices used to maintain a recovery-orientated way of life. My research intervenes in the contemporary context in which advocacy for ‘arts on prescription’ has gained momentum in UK public health discussion, yet a cohesive network (...) of recovery arts practices does not yet exist. Supporting the development of a network, I identify the distinctness of this arts practice. Specifically, by drawing on posthumanist concepts of addiction, I identify recovery from addiction and performance practices with people in recovery as contingent on the varied assemblages comprising particular interactions with people, objects, space and socio-political systems. Building upon Manning’s discussion of the body as ‘an ecology of processes’, I offer the term bodies-in-process to frame recovery as an ongoing ecology of survival and regeneration. Connection with supportive others and atmospheres is considered vital for the continued development of recovery-orientated ways of being. I apply my discussion of the ecology of recovery to my analysis of recovery-engaged performance practices and theorise these as systems of messy connections. Performance activity is thereby conceived as bodily encounters with other bodies-in-process, objects and their surroundings. These encounters are driven by the sensorial force, or affect, instigated through interaction with others, objects, space and socio-political environment. Through these layers of interaction, I offer what I consider to be the ethical and political priorities of recovery-engaged practice and indicate where further development might emerge. In particular, I consider the political potential of this performance activity to generate ‘atmospheres of recovery’ by instigating collaborative communities of recovery that facilitate active citizenship and, thus, become a potential site of ‘radical democracy’. (shrink)

Work in Progress: English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000-2019 explores how play development practices in state-subsidised English theatres functioned between 2000-2019, under conditions of neoliberal governance. By attending to both institutional and individual strategies and structures of play development, I analyse their economic rationality and co-constitution with the neoliberal statecraft of New Labour, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, and the current Conservative government in advance of the general election in December 2019. Drawing on Marx’s Capital Volume One, this thesis engages a (...) materialist mode of analysis, exposing ideological structures that contribute to making theatre what Ric Knowles calls a ‘culturally affirmative’ product. Taking up the cultural materialisms of Williams and Dollimore and Sinfield, and the bureaucratic analyses of Weber and Graeber, I show how New Labour’s neoliberal higher education and arts policies shaped English playwriting guides and dramaturgy in English theatres. The writings of Gramsci, Hall, Brown and Foucault further support an analysis of how play development in English theatres was shaped as a post-Fordist enterprise that encouraged artists to enact forms of neoliberal subjectivity. Furthermore, via the Marxist-feminist standpoint theories of Haraway and Hartsock, I argue that the coalition furnished play development with a neoliberal ‘new diversity’. Finally, using the ‘commodity chain analysis’ of Cook and Coles and Crang, I contend that ‘performances of development’ represent new ways in which artists are attempting to resist neoliberal rationality. The thesis concludes that, over this period, neoliberal capitalist hegemony has fundamentally shaped English play development. By generating a mode of production that conflates the usually distinct categories of development and performance, however, artists have begun to challenge the existent play development paradigms and their ideological underpinnings. (shrink)

An article about the UNIMA Research Commission.

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

This essay explores the discursive invocation of ‘civil war’ to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre’s production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s ‘verbatim’ play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of ‘general enculturation’, undermined the NT’s attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play’s (...) central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation. (shrink)

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives (...) of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical ‘utopian’ hypothesis designed to ‘open up’ the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself. (shrink)

Integrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance. Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift (...) how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic. Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using: Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections. A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence. This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities. (shrink)

Performing Interdisciplinarity proposes new ways of engaging with performance as it crosses, collides with, integrates and/or disturbs other disciplinary concerns. From Activism and Political Philosophy to Cognitive Science and Forensics, each chapter explores the relationships between performance and another discipline. Including cross-chapter discussions which address the intersections between fields, Performing Interdisciplinarity truly examines the making of meaning across disciplinary conventions. This is a volume for performance practitioners and scholars who are living, learning, writing, teaching, making and thinking at the edges (...) of their specialisms. (shrink)

As European theatre directors become a familiar presence on international stages and a new generation of theatre makers absorbs their impulses, this study develops fresh perspectives on Regie, the Continental European tradition of staging playtexts. Leaving behind unhelpful clichés that pit, above all, the director against the playwright, Peter M. Boenisch stages playful encounters between Continental theatre and Continental philosophy. The contemporary Regie work of Thomas Ostermeier, Frank Castorf, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, tg STAN, and others, here meets the (...) works of Friedrich Schiller and Leopold Jessner, Hegelian speculative dialectics, and the critical philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Zizek in order to explore the thinking of Regie - how to think Regie, and how Regie thinks. (shrink)

Michael Chekhov's Acting Technique: A Practitioner's Guide is a textbook for actors, directors and teachers seeking in-depth analysis and explanation of the Michael Chekhov acting technique. It provides a complete overview of the whole method, offering clear explanations of the principles, practical exercises and application of the exercises to dramatic texts. The book is both a toolkit for practitioners who have not trained in the method, as well as a comprehensive reference book for those who have. Part One explains the (...) concept of pyscho-physical acting with reference to primary texts, interviews with Chekhov practitioners and a range of sample exercises to practise on. Part Two explores the more detailed work of creating a character with a selection of examples of how to apply the psycho-physical exercises in Part One directly to character or scene work. Also included are a selection of exercises taught by other practitioners that were not developed by Chekhov himself in his book, but which follow his principles and yield great results, such as: the ghost exercise ; expanding and contracting the five senses ; the palace of beauty ; the belief closet ; and imaginative character biography on your feet. The book features the application of Michael Chekhov principles throughout to characters and scenes in Gabriel Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. (shrink)