Constants: a future perfect

This paper provides an interpretation of the play Feng šus v gledališču brez igralca (Feng Shui in the Theatre without an Actor). The play’s distinct characteristic is the absence of the performer’s phenomenal body. The author thematises, using Erika Fischer-Lichte’s typology of the performing bodies, a unique relationship between the present semiotic and the absent phenomenal body of the performer on the one hand and the present phenomenal and semiotic body of the spectator on the other hand. In addition, he also uses elements of Eviatar Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology (meaning as a social relation between signifier and signified) and Tim Dant’s theory of material culture (the significance of an artwork as the mediating object in communication process). The author describes and explains how during the play, the spectator cognitively makes a substitution of the absent performer’s phenomenal body using her own phenomenal body, which gives new connotations to Edward Gordon Craig’s visionary statement about the theatre without use of a written play or actors.

The article delivers the author’s reflections on relations among the text (speech and secondary), the performing body, performers and spectators in postdramatic theatre and performance, based on Erica Fischer-Lichte’s model of a doubled performing body (phenomenal and semiotic). The author elaborates a typology of performing bodily relations: a) divisional / semi-sensual, b) substitutional / fully sensual, and c) identical / auto-sensual bodily relations upon three different criteria: a) who is the main producer of sensations, b) how many senses are involved, and c) what is the nature of the spatial relationship between the performers and the spectators. Three examples are given as an illustration of the above typology: Dani Ploeger’s Biotope, Via Negativa’s Would Would Not and Janez Janša’s The Wailing Wall.

2013

The Comics of Hergé, 2016

This chapter considers the motif of airplanes and, more specifically, the ability to fly them that surfaces again and again in Hergé’s comics. The motif reveals not just an interest on the cartoonist’s part in airplanes, but the twentieth century’s slowly shifting understanding of what the airplane meant and what the skill to fly it signified.

Tamara: Journal of …, 2006

This text inquires in a poetic way the possibility of theatrical space by exploring the question "what space makes theatre possible?". The central argument is that threatre creates an intensive yet fragile space of possibility and the possible through creating affects. The text, written in between a prelude and an epilogue, approaches this space of desire and intensity indirectly by exploring the perspective of audience, actors and "angels" as they are seized by desire and awaiting the play in the wings. We argue through interweaving these three angles that every play presupposes a twilight zone, a connecting boundary which forms a transition into the magical where dream and desire can take over, where the virtual and the everyday can become connected and where new lines of flight might emerge. The aesthetic experience of theatre is characterised by participating in a clearing of openness where truth happens and where its practical implications might be heard. There is no change possible without engaging with the open-endedness when entering the wings of theatre. Prelude Enter: The caterpillar-Creeping up their sleeve-Looking for a space. Wrapped in expectation-Cocooning, soft and safe-Away, yet in it all. Exit: the butterfly-Feeling of being possible-Wings unfolding.

2006

and already is bound to a set of habits, expectations and embodied uncertainties. You know to read this article from left to right. You have been taught to recognise the shapes and sounds of the characters of text that coalesce to re/create these words on a page or computer screen. And perhaps you're thinking: 'Where is this going? What's this all about? What do I think and/or feel about this?' Though, possibly, some of these interior voices may not occur in the initial moments of your reading activity. You may also be so caught up in hearing the author's voice that your own self-reflection hasn't yet drawn attention to itself. I hope, then, that in this very opening paragraph, you are persuaded that there is quite a complexity about interrogating the written word as a hard technologya technology that is constantly intervening and interweaving itself through our embodied meaning-making together. As a performance practitioner and "body intellectual" (a term coined by Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter, cofounders of InterPlay® 2004), I am interested in how theatre (or play) texts intervene in the embodied experiences of human agents such as playwrights, actors, acting teachers, directors, and audiences. And, I believe, in the same moment, these human agents, each with their varying "interests", intervene in the crafting and functioning of the written word. Each agent invests and is invested in this particular field of cultural production known as the Theatre. And, in spite of appearances, this field of the performing arts, using Bourdieu's analysis, is a site of struggles over who determines the dominant understanding of necessary activities, abilities and aptitudes (1993: 42). What I want to explore in this paper is not intended as exhaustive or deterministic but rather as a provocation towards further conversations and interventions. The written theatre text, associated with various embodiments of a play or theatrical performance, is a hard technology that co-exists alongside its ephemeral othereach unique, embodied performance. One might also say that this same hard technology intervenes in the embodied experiences and actions of the actors, the director, the designer and various production personnel, culminating in the shaping of audiences, critics and the wider community. Yet there is no universal agreement as to the definition of what constitutes a theatrical text. Gerald Rabkin (1985) reviews whose interests are affected by various understandings and expectations of the intrinsic nature of the theatre text. But what he fails to acknowledge is that, however it may be defined, the written text nevertheless intervenes into embodied experience and meaning-making among those who have some vested interest in their experience of the Theatre.

In this article, I argue that the relationship between performers, audience members, electronic technologies and the wider, physical context of the performance environment may be redefined by developing the ‘concert’ model of electroacoustic performance. I propose that managing proximity between audience members and performers plays a catalytic role in a process through which the human voice may emerge from its status as an ‘instrument’ for the delivery of notated musical ideas to, simply, ‘voice’. To illustrate, I refer to As I Have Now Memoyre, my 2008 installation-performance on the relationship between music, memory and the passing of time. Accordingly, I investigate the way in which a performer is able to assert her ontological reciprocity with the total performance environment by ‘embodying’ the electronic processing, asserting continuity between the electronically mediated performance and the performance rendered by her own unaided body.