Master of Theatre

Aboriginal art practices are part of a global economy and the recent collaboration between fashion designers Rodarte and the late Papunya Tula artist Benny Tjangala is testament to the international scope and universal appeal of Australia's only authentic and original art movement. The California-based self-taught sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavey -the names behind Rodarte -are known for their beautifully tailored garments and uber cool ready to wear collections. Their Fall 2012 collection maintains their reputation as innovators on the world fashion stage, and Rodarte's collaboration with Tjangala further enhances this notoriety in a sea of structured piete dresses, blouses, high waisted pants, knits and evening gowns.

A personagem intermédia (João Brites) é uma presença recorrente nas diversas personagens desempenhadas pelo actor, um modo que lhe é particular enquanto pessoa e enquanto actor. Assim, a personagem é intermédia porque já não é quotidiana mas ainda não é uma outra.

in "Afectos e Reflexos de um Trajecto", Teatro O Bando 2006
in Questão de Crítica, 2010

In ‘Absent audiences: Circuit-bending the feedback loop’, Pedro Manuel proposes to observe contemporary performances where the agency and physical presence of an audience is questioned, destabilizing a stable process of feedback loop between stage and audience, and troubling the argument of physical co-presence as a fundament of performance.
Considering works by D. Marleau, A. Dorsen, H. Goebbels, R. Mroué, as well as by D. Verhoeven, O. Maxted, S. van Lamsweerde, Ontroerend Goed, T. Crouch and I. Muller, the article expands on examples where the audience performs to itself, on performances played to audiences distant in space and time, as well as on performances presented to nonhuman animals (Putnam, Kokkonen) and to no-one but machines and natural elements.

Drawing from E. Fischer-Lichte's description of a feedback loop between performers and audience as a fundamental aspect of theatre and performance's definition, the article proposes a critical appreciation of performance considering, instead, the mediacy of documentation (Auslander, Jones), an ontology of disappearance (Phelan) and an interpassive subjectivity (Zizek) as frameworks which question the assumption of the argument of co-presence as base and border of a stable, normative performance event, allowing for unexpected modes of spectating.

Performance Research 19:5, 2014

As this lecture is happening under the module of ‘discursive practices’ of the Master of Theatre Practices, I was led to reflect about discursive practices associated with theatre without actors, namely from the part of the artists. How do they describe their work? How do they reflect on such a crucial decision as absenting the actor? How do they argue about the affinity of their piece with theatre?

Ao substituir o actor por projecções video, o ciclo Fanstamagories
Technologiques problematiza não só as efeitos da utilização de imagens em cena, mas a forma como as imagens são documentadas ou se tornam, elas próprias, documentação. Entre imagens na cena e imagens de cena, o acto de criar imagens de imagens implica um gesto “metalinguístico” que deixa entrever aspectos da especificidade de cada meio.

in "Imagens de uma Ausência", Centro de Estudos de Teatro - Colibri, 2011

The article departs from considering how, in contemporary performances without performers, there is a rethinking of relations of co-presence between humans and nonhumans. In this framework, human acting is challenged and the agency of objects is highlighted, leading to perceiving nonhumans as animated, either by a human presence or otherwise. Considering that the animist potential in these pieces results from an entanglement of presence and absence — of both human and nonhuman agency — it is further proposed that such animism is better understood through an understanding of spectrality as a metaphor describing that entanglement. To illustrate these points, I introduce three performance pieces presented recently: Les Aveugles (2002), by Denis Marleau; 33 rpm and a few Seconds (2013) by Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué; and Sacre du Printemps (2014) by Romeo Castellucci.

The description of each piece is expanded by recurring to theoretical insights by Phillip Auslander, Elinor Fuchs, Una Chaudhuri and Bruno Latour, which allow me to demonstrate how I understand animism and spectrality to occur in stagings without human performers.

Following up, I continue with a brief historical overview of the idea of absenting of the actor in the modern and western theatre history, underlining how often the idea was associated with views on the staging of life and death. Recurring to how the absenting of the actor was approached by authors such as Kleist, Craig, Maeterlinck, Kantor, among others, it will be pointed out how that interest was suppressed from theatre history and thus marked by a mode of spectrality.

Finally, I conclude by reviewing how contemporary pieces without actors perform forms of animism that can be understood as a 'spectral metaphor' (Peeren), associating the recasting of the human's absence and the presencing of nonhumans.