Delivery Date: 20 – 24 January 2020 | taught by: Dr. Pedro Manuel
module synopsis | The module Environments of Expanded Acting aims at conveying contemporary practices of performing without the presence and agency of professionally trained performers. Accordingly, the module will focus on forms of staging in theatre and choreography that entail forms of staging the perception of the real, recurring to agents such as non-actors, animals, technology or audiences themselves. The contents of the module will depart from the examples and terminology of Pedro Manuel’s PhD thesis.
The module will begin by looking into the absenting of the professionally trained human performer, and progress towards the including of the non-professional and non-human in environments of performative enacting. In this way, the module will aim at describing a progression from absence to presence or, to be precise, a passage from a dualist account of co-presence as a relation exclusively held between humans, to a non-dualistic view of co-presence, associating the organic and the inorganic, the living and the inanimate, the rehearsed and the unrehearsed.
“Death and other matters” | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/death-and-other-matters/
Introductory Reading
Dorsen, Annie. “On Algorithmic Theatre”. In Digital Dramaturgies. Vol 42, Issue 2 (2012). Available on: http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf
Goebbels, Heiner. “Aesthetics of Absence: Questioning Basic Assumptions in Performing Arts”. Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics. Cornell University. (9 March 2010). Available on: http://igcs.cornell.edu/files/2013/09/Goebbels-Cornell-Lecture18-1dnqe5j.pdf
Ingvartsen, Mette. “Expanded Choreography: Shifting the agency of movement in The Artificial Nature Project and 69 positions”. Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, 2016. Available on: https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/4ee35659-764e-48fe-92a6-f1167735ce37
Recomended Reading
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. “Concrete Theatre”; “Irruption of the Real”, Event/ situation” in Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006
Féral, Josette. “Theatricality: The specificity of Theatrical Language”. SubStance, Vol. 31, Nos. 2&3 (2002): 94-108. Available on: http://www.cns.brown.edu/Departments/German_Studies/media/Symposium/Texts/Specificity%20of%20Theatrical%20Language%20JF.pdf
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Available on: http://droit-public.ulb.ac.be/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Latour_Reassembling.pdf
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matters Come to Matter”. Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2003): 801-31. Available on: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/sv/sai/SOSANT4400/v14/pensumliste/barad_posthumanist-performativity.pdf
Time Plan
20.01 | introduction to the theme; lecture on the tutor’s phd dissertation with selected texts/ pieces; introducing group assignments (3h), group work (2h) collective discussion (1h) | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/environments-of-expanded-acting-day-1/
21.01 | lecture on the notion of unrehearsed, considering the staging of non-actors and animals (3h), group work (2h) collective discussion (1h) | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/environments-of-expanded-acting-day-2/
22.01 | lecture on forms of staging the real, theatricality and co-presence (3h), group work (2h) collective discussion (1h) | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/environments-of-expanded-acting-day-3/
23.01 | lecture on supporting theoretical discourses: intermediality, spectrality studies, object-oriented philosophies (3h), group work (2h) collective discussion (1h) | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/environments-of-expanded-acting-day-4/
24.01 | Group presentations, peer-feedback | https://korinakordova.wordpress.com/environments-of-expanded-acting-day-5/
