Maska - Volume 29, Issue 161-162, 2014

This issue focuses on the issues of affectivity and emotionality in contemporary theatre and on their (performative) theorisations. It draws from theorisations and/or case studies to develop diverse discussions about the mentioned aspects of the performing arts that also result from the modes of production themselves; in addition, it raises issues regarding emotions in the theatre, both in the past and today, and reflects on the manner in which theatre art is determined and driven by passions. It also addresses the phenomenon of the actor's fear of passion (convulsions, stress and the resulting burnout of artists…), the question of the (absence of) courage of theatre creators and theoreticians, which also includes a reflection on the history of stage fright, different trainings of actors' emotions, their objectives and methods; it reflects on passions from the aspect of theatre excess, the passion for prohibition and the question of conventions, on the authenticity of emotions in (contemporary) theatre and performance - doing all this in order to unfold the notion of passion as an issue of the political.

Address at the presentation of the Evergreen Crocodile Award for Lifetime Achievement to Dragan Živadinov - Slovenian theatre director and cosmonaut candidate, conceptual initiator of style formations retrogardism and telecosmism, founder of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, the Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theatre and the Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet; author of the 50 year theatre projectile 1995-2045 - Noordung, Biomechanics Noordung, postgravitational theatrical abstracts and one of the three initiators of the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies (KSEVT) in Vitanje - at the Borštnik Theatre Festival in Maribor on 19 October 2013.

The ad hoc justification of the ad hoc life's work award awarded to young Slovenian actor Klemen Janežič on 22 October 2013 on the Small Stage of the Slovenian National Theatre Maribor.

This review discusses several productions from last year's festival program (competition and additional shows) in the context of social crisis and the aesthetics of the grotesque in drama and theatre. One outstanding example is the winner of the Borštnikovo Grand Prix, Crazy Locomotive directed by Jernej Lorenci, while other shows exhibited performance aesthetics as a strong tradition in Slovenian theatre (Oliver Frljić, Dragan Živadinov, Irena Tomažin).

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the emergence of a concept of 'life itself' as living not only has an impact on the economical and political fields but deeply touches on traditional understandings of the work of art as well. The birth of aesthetics within philosophy is just a consequence of, not the reason for, new practices and procedures in the field of art. Until now, the strict rules of Poetics had governed and distributed mimesis, keeping the different arts separate whilst subsuming their subjects under the idea of an organic unity. With the aesthetic and biopolitical turn in the second half of the eighteenth century, every measure is lost.

The article takes the form of a travelogue, embodying a method of geographically and affectively situated research and writing. It is an episode of documentation of a long-term journey of 'inadequate' study focusing on affect and theory, affect and writing, affect and place (affect and displacement). Convoking the notion of 'permeable ways of being' (Brennan, 2004), the text generates a half-theoretical, half-fictional discursive movement that doesn't go straight, reporting and reflecting on a recent collective artistic residency meant to study forms of life; on the very process of writing as cross-temporal and cross-geographical; on daily economies of affect that glide into affect morals.

The article discusses the phenomenon of aversion to exaggerated emotionality, characteristic of contemporary art. At the backdrop of historical subjectivity from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, defined by the dissolution of the authenticity of the Self and the emergence of a deconstructed, mediated subject, the author addresses the causes and conditions of this phenomenon. She tackles the questions of representation and the unrepresentable, which she traces through the aesthetic of realism and its demand for authentic emotions, modernism and its denial of indication and postmodern artistic practices, which are paradoxically defined not only by a general skepticism toward the authentic, but also toward the absolute inauthenticity of the raw mediation of signs and stand-in structures.

Understanding the psychology of emotions can help an actor convincingly play a character while maintaining their presence. Emotions are not an independent entity, but a complex circular reaction composed of the processes of reflection, bodily reaction, preparation for action, experience and behaviour. An actor's emotional experience takes place at several levels: in addition to their personal emotions, they experience task-emotions, which are intense emotions related to the demands of their work. At the same time, they want to convincingly portray the emotions of the character they are playing. In order to achieve this, they use double consciousness and simultaneously experience different emotions. Actors can enter the circular emotional reaction at different points. They thus make the best use of task-emotions as the physiological basis for acted emotions, which are therefore more convincing and increase the actor's presence.

In this article the author explores affect within the representational framework, which is questioned as the paradigm of the theatrical convention. In relation to affective labour, physical presence and the real, being the core of theatrical illusion, it explores the emancipatory potential of performing arts conceived through the presence of affect. Actual virtuality becomes the key term with which to signify possibility, constituted within the creative act, as operative in the symbolic (field). The implications of the presence of affect within the performance are examined through its analytical introduction into the Slovenian theatrical performance Mandićmachine.

In this article, the author connects affects with Lygia Clark's resonant body, with a story about Suely Rolnik and with the performing art piece Fissure no. 3: txoriak by Basque artist Idoia Zabaleta. In these three vignettes, the three authors and creators activate affects in a double movement: centripetal and centrifugal. To affect somebody, we first affect ourselves. And by doing so we change and alter others, according to Brian Massumi's theory of affects as something transindividual that goes beyond us. In this twofold movement, we can also make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, a condition that Kaja Silverman believes to be essential in creative work that considers itself political in today's context.

In this interview with Annika Tudeer, we pursue the question of possibility and the place of emotionality in contemporary theatre. At the forefront of the interview is the process-oriented practice of the Finnish theatre company OBLIVIA, which oriented itself very heavily around conceptual approaches of the 1970s through the 1990s but which in recent times has increasingly opened itself up by incorporating chance as a constructive principle for using affects and emotions as a medium of communication with the audience. In its more recent works, the company has allocated more room to that which one might call the pathos of acting. This serves a new performative aesthetics that endeavours to overcome the analytical approach to the theatre dispositive.

This article explores the idiosyncrasy that lies behind the performances of Jordi Galí. It analyzes statements made by the artist in an epistolary exchange with the author and draws comparisons with some key concepts in the field of affect theory. It concludes that Galí's approach to performance is in accordance with many views put forward by affect theory, especially in relation to the blurring between object and subject. At the same time, it examines the mode of thinking and the political implications of affect theory in order to identify its main contributions and boundaries.

One major topic of the European performance/avant-garde scene of the last century was 'reality', mostly accompanied by the contentious catchword 'post-dramatic' and work with lay people or 'experts'. However, productions that seemed political or revolutionary often revealed themselves to be nothing more than part of a marketing strategy by theatres aimed at unlocking new spaces of spectatorship. However, alongside these attempts, an alternative practice has emerged amongst young artists, who once again emphasise the artistic, subjective and ritual character of theatre, in order to bring it back to its origins. Using the example of three current productions, this article aims to show the means these artists work with and why this theatre is in its own way significantly more political than many alleged 'reality' productions.

The newest production of the controversial artistic collective SIGNA, entitled Schwarze Augen, Maria/Black Eyes, Maria and produced by the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg theatre, with its approach of having fictive characters populate an abandoned real space where they create a parallel world of unknown place and time, confronts the viewer with the world of a closed mental institution, one in which six families participate voluntarily. They are taking part in the research of the 'Tiresias syndrome' because twenty years before, following a road accident in which all of them were involved, they gave birth to black-eyed kids. The viewer in the role of a visitor sets out on the journey across the memory-scape of individual residents and their caretakers, who explain, from different perspectives, the events from twenty years ago and their present life. A fictive world, constructed in detail, warns of constructed reality, posing through various perspectives the question as to what the truth is.

This article aims at introducing the extraordinary talent of South African director Brett Bailey by recreating the second installment of his Exhibit Series - a unique art-and-politics event that has been stunning and disconcerting European audiences - and by presenting a firsthand account of the main developments in his work, from his first show Zombie until now.

This article focuses on the relation of women artists toward the problem of the body and woman as Other in performance art practices. It addresses the changes in corporeal politics and the procedures of governmentality in contemporary society through a debut performance by the young Croatian dancer and choreographer Nataša Mihoci entitled Nobody Is Innocent. Further, it scrutinises representations of women in popular culture, the production of the image and its effects on the process of subjectivation.

The reader Reading / Feeling is the result of a two-year art-theory research programme organised by the Dutch organization If I Can't Dance. Its innovation is not reflected in the selection of texts, but in the methodological approach of opening up a different (affective, paranoid) mode of reading. The compilation offers to a reader various entry points that are not to be taken in only rationally, but also experientially, to be precise, through an affective response.