Pedro Manuel
Portuguese theatre maker and tutor, resident in Amsterdam (NL).
Bachelor in Philosophy (FCSH-UNL); Master of Theatre Studies (FL-UL) and DasArts - Master of Theatre (AHK); PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies (Utrecht University, funded by FCT)
My current research interests associate performance studies, media and cultural studies, and post-human philosophies such as object-oriented thinking, new materialism and spectrality studies. An example is my recent PhD dissertation, through which I researched ‘theatre without actors’, such as performances with spectators, non-actors, technology or natural phenomena, focusing on how those performances enact forms of staging the real, and rehearse new relations of co-presence, perception and knowledge between humans and non-humans.
As a theatre maker, I have been moved by how making-appear entails a make-believe, exploring how we can rehearse expanded modes of acting on stage and in the world. Employing strategies of representation, participation and demonstration, I have shown work in Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Festival Temps D’Images, Festival Escrita na Paisagem, CCB, as well as in Frascati Theater, FLAM, Rozentheater, Roodkapje Rotterdam, Het Huis Utrecht.
In the higher education, I have been lecturing, tutoring on aesthetics, theatre studies, artistic research, as well as mentoring artistic work, working in institutions such as IADE and ESTAL (PT), ECA-UEM (MZ), as well as at Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, DasTheatre and DasChoreography and, regularly, with the Master of Theatre Practices/ArtEZ (NL), besides sharing research in various conferences and publications.
PhD Dissertation: search 'theatre without actors' on https://narcis.nl
Artistic work 2005-2015 on http://randomassociates.blogspot.nl/
Supervisors: Maaike Bleeker, José Gil, and Maria Helena Serôdio
Bachelor in Philosophy (FCSH-UNL); Master of Theatre Studies (FL-UL) and DasArts - Master of Theatre (AHK); PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies (Utrecht University, funded by FCT)
My current research interests associate performance studies, media and cultural studies, and post-human philosophies such as object-oriented thinking, new materialism and spectrality studies. An example is my recent PhD dissertation, through which I researched ‘theatre without actors’, such as performances with spectators, non-actors, technology or natural phenomena, focusing on how those performances enact forms of staging the real, and rehearse new relations of co-presence, perception and knowledge between humans and non-humans.
As a theatre maker, I have been moved by how making-appear entails a make-believe, exploring how we can rehearse expanded modes of acting on stage and in the world. Employing strategies of representation, participation and demonstration, I have shown work in Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Festival Temps D’Images, Festival Escrita na Paisagem, CCB, as well as in Frascati Theater, FLAM, Rozentheater, Roodkapje Rotterdam, Het Huis Utrecht.
In the higher education, I have been lecturing, tutoring on aesthetics, theatre studies, artistic research, as well as mentoring artistic work, working in institutions such as IADE and ESTAL (PT), ECA-UEM (MZ), as well as at Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, DasTheatre and DasChoreography and, regularly, with the Master of Theatre Practices/ArtEZ (NL), besides sharing research in various conferences and publications.
PhD Dissertation: search 'theatre without actors' on https://narcis.nl
Artistic work 2005-2015 on http://randomassociates.blogspot.nl/
Supervisors: Maaike Bleeker, José Gil, and Maria Helena Serôdio
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Papers by Pedro Manuel
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.
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
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
criativa e crítica da linguagem folclórica, ao mesmo tempo
que dá continuidade a uma série de pressupostos estéticos
e políticos que tem vindo a assumir.
in Sinais de Cena 5, 2006
in "Afectos e Reflexos de um Trajecto", Teatro O Bando 2006
in Questão de Crítica, 2010
in Textos e Pretextos #8, 2006
Talks by Pedro Manuel
Conference Presentations by Pedro Manuel
actors that is participatory and that appeals to a sense of being unrehearsed. In these performances, the audience is invited to be readers of a performance script, given at the moment of the performance by the theatre makers. I termed this strategy as Performances of Readership.
ISIS conference Play/ Perform/ Participate, Utrecht, 2015
Does It Matter? - Composite Bodies and Posthuman Prototypes in Contemporary Performing Arts, Ghent 2015
image of robots dreaming and that of theatre stages hallucinating with that which lives in them when they are emptied of actors: non-professional humans, non-human lives and even non-organic matter.
PSi #20 conference, Shanghai 2014
PSi #18 conference, Leeds 2012
Thesis Chapters by Pedro Manuel
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.
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
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
criativa e crítica da linguagem folclórica, ao mesmo tempo
que dá continuidade a uma série de pressupostos estéticos
e políticos que tem vindo a assumir.
in Sinais de Cena 5, 2006
in "Afectos e Reflexos de um Trajecto", Teatro O Bando 2006
in Questão de Crítica, 2010
in Textos e Pretextos #8, 2006
actors that is participatory and that appeals to a sense of being unrehearsed. In these performances, the audience is invited to be readers of a performance script, given at the moment of the performance by the theatre makers. I termed this strategy as Performances of Readership.
ISIS conference Play/ Perform/ Participate, Utrecht, 2015
Does It Matter? - Composite Bodies and Posthuman Prototypes in Contemporary Performing Arts, Ghent 2015
image of robots dreaming and that of theatre stages hallucinating with that which lives in them when they are emptied of actors: non-professional humans, non-human lives and even non-organic matter.
PSi #20 conference, Shanghai 2014
PSi #18 conference, Leeds 2012