Dear colleagues and friends,
a new year has just begun so we can fill our calendars with a lot of new and interesting events related to performance and live art! Apart from Performer Stammtisch (...) one of those might be the Performance and Philosophy Symposium, an international symposium hosted by SFB "Performing Cultures" of Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the Performance Studies International (PSi) Performance and Philosophy working group, which will take place in Berlin on April 23rd and 24th. The symposium Performance and Philosophy will be the final conference of the philosophy project (B9) at SFB "Performing Cultures" and the 2nd inter-conference meeting of the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group, following on from the success of "Making and Thinking: Performance and Philosophy as Participation" held at Aberystwyth University in January 2009.
The growth of the PSi Performance and Philosophy Working Group, which now has over one hundred members, is only one demonstration of the increasing importance of Philosophy for Performance Studies and the growth of Performance and Philosophy as a distinct sub-field within Theatre and Performance Studies. Speakers: Martin Puchner, Freddie Rokem, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Sybille Krämer, Paul A. Kottman, Adrian Kear, Timothy Murray,Eva-Maria Gauss, Esa Kirkkopelto, Arno Böhler, Rainer Totzke, Susanne Ganzer, Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay.
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
This event is free and open to all. To book a place, please email Laura Cull:
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...continuation Performance and Philosophy Symposium
The theatrical metaphor has a long tradition within Western philosophy. As Aldo Tassi haswritten, Œuntil four hundred years ago, the theatrum mundi metaphor was the dominant image in Western thinking. God was conceived on the analogy of a playwright who had created the script of the play that was being performed on the stage called the world¹ (Tassi1998: n.p.). At the same time, as Jonas Barish and Martin Puchner have discussed, there isa long tradition of anti-theatricality within philosophy, exemplified by figures such as St Augustine and Rousseau.
But beyond metaphor and prejudice, there has also been what Puchner has called a theatrical turn¹ in philosophy, starting in the later nineteenth century when figures such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard magnetised toward theatricality in the context of a broader assault on the notion of truth (Puchner 2002: 521). As Timothy Murray¹s volume shows, theatrical philosophy would then continue to flourish in twentieth century French thought, in the work of Lyotard, Cixous, Kristeva, and Deleuze, amongst others. For Deleuze, forexample, the theatre, here, is not simply a metaphor or a communicative device, but lies atthe heart of Deleuze¹s project, determining its terms, constructions, and arguments¹ (ibid.).
If there has been a theatrical turn in philosophy, we can also say that there has been a philosophical turn¹ in theatre and performance. With figures like Artaud and Stanislavski, we can see that the theatre of the last hundred years has increasingly conceived itself in metaphysical terms. For these practitioners, the world is not merely like¹ theatre and performance; rather, performance actually performs metaphysics or ontology. Of course the nature of this ontology has been multiply understood. For Tassi, for example, theatrical performance is an enactment of the performance of being² which is taking place in nature¹; subjects and events in the world, as well as on stage, are brought to presence or come to be¹ through performance (Tassi 1998: n.p.).
Correlatively, scholars in recent Performance Studies have moved beyond the conception of philosophy as simply one more methodology that might be applied to the analysis of performance. Rather, performance and philosophy - or performing and philosophizing - are seen as inextricably linked.
This symposium seeks to outline the parameters of this sub-field by bringing together some of the key thinkers who have already done significant work to demonstrate the productivity of the conjunction of performance and philosophy such as Murray in Digital Baroque; Kottmann in A Politics of the Scene; Kear in Theatre and Event; Fischer-Lichte in The Transformative Power of Performance; or Kirkkopelto in Le théâtre de l'expérience. The symposium also wishes to celebrate and respond to the publication of two new works of central importance to this area: Martin Puchner¹s The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophyand Freddie Rokem¹s Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance.
www.lauracull.com
www.sproutart.co.uk
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