Maska - Volume 33, Issue 191-192, 2018

The article is a portrait discussion of the work of Slovenian choreographer Mateja Bučar. It follows the conceptual shifts in choreographic problems she poses during the creative process. It is predominantly based on an interview conducted with the artist and the viewing of accessible videos and memorial reconstructions of certain seen performances and actions. By analysing certain works, the article traces the choreographic principles that attempt to wrest the body from subjectivity and animate objects in the theatre machine in order to point to a sort of ‘affective intermediacy’ in the best possible way. This creative line has organically led the choreographer into an urban environment, where she introduces minimal discipline and short and randomly emerging synchronous choreographic situations into the all but natural and free movement of pedestrians.

This introduction to the thematic section about repetition deals with the question of why we need to rethink the relation between repetition and performing arts. We claim that it is precisely with repetition that contemporary performing arts circle their field and are inscribed in social discourses, capital mechanisms of the labour market and the mechanisms of truth production and knowledge deployment. By considering two traditional presuppositions about the connection between theatre and repetition, we unfold their problematic nature and show why it is necessary to – again – talk about repetition and performance. Continuing with the critique of the paradigm of authenticity and the idea of artistic positivism or vitalism, we show that today the connection between performance and repetition needs to be considered through a modern conception of repetition, articulated already by Kierkegaard, through which we need to grasp not only that repetition is inscribed in contemporary performance, but also that it is precisely with repetition that performing practices are inscribed in the social and thereby generate their political power.

Repetition is essentially related to routine and at the same time the transformation involved in every instance of repetition. Theatre is an art that repeats, but remains live and non-fixed, opening the possibilities of something new. Artaud’s attempt to cut repetition with something unique and unrepeatable is subject to repetition and art that wants to radicalise by being shocking, whereby it moves away from the gesture of reflection, can get caught in a similar trap. Art and culture are caught between market and state logic, with the first being a singular cut and the second a continuity of cultural politics. The power of art lies in creating universal effects out of the singular and the personal.

In this article, I question the notion of theatricality, which points to the ever-problematic encounter of philosophy and theatre. I do this in dialogue with Samuel Weber’s elaboration of this concept in his book Theatricality as Medium from 2004 as well as with his reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which can be found in Weber’s discussion with Terry Smith titled Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image. I argue that viewing the encounter of philosophy and theatre through the perspective of repetition offers a very productive reading, which can be, in general, also referred to Weber’s notion of theatricality, as far as this notion points to certain hollowness or a gap in the processes of representation. To show this, I delineate the concept of productive repetition through Kierkegaard’s concept of Gjentagelsen and link it to Weber’s general notion of theatricality. However, Weber’s elaboration of the concept of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium proves to be very open and therefore also pretty vague, which makes it harder to explicate its clear function. I further proceed by examining Weber’s thesis about theatre setting the scene of possibility in relation to Kierkegard’s theory of posse and the notion of coincidence. I conclude that, unlike Weber’s notion of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium, his suggestion of understanding theatre as the space of possibility proves to be an exact concept, which connects philosophy and theatre through the mechanism of repetition.

In the article, the author rejects Badiou’s claim that there is no space in Nietzsche’s philosophy for theatricality, pointing out that an important concept in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the mask. The main issue is the problem of representation, which is also central in Deleuze’s work. In thinking about the struggle against representation, an important reference in Deleuze’s work is Artaud. Although Deleuze did not write any monograph on theatre, the author stresses that theatre is one of the main areas of his philosophy and that it appears as such in all his books and even methods, such as the method of dramatization or the double.

The article discusses An Event in the Town of Goga (1927), an expressionistic grotesque by Slavko Grum, through the optics of touch understood in three ways. A fetishistic touch changes an object into a being and a being into an object, with a traumatic experience of the touch possibly developing on the side of the touched. In addition to fetishistic touch and traumatic touch, the author also points out metaphorical touch, also expressly present in the play, in the character of the flautist Klikot: metaphorical touch is actually a non-touch, a touch that does not take place but nevertheless touches us in a way unimaginable through mere bodily touch.

The article explores repetition and the unrepeatability of the dance event using the example of Steve Paxton’s improvisations on Goldberg Variations, referred to by Jurij Konjar’s exploration of the thinkable body and Spångberg’s ‘Deleuzian bastardy’. Similarly, Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema also look for the stuttering of dance language while also trying to avoid their own constraints.

The text repeats the repetition of a performance on repetition with repetition. The text itself consists of the repetition of several texts and of itself; as such it has been/will be repeated several times. The repetitions might be for repetition’s sake (laziness), they might be the symptom of a repetitive hyperproductive activity (workaholism), or they might point to the need of the emergence of difference in the stream of repetition of always the same categories (laziness, work) with which we think art and non-art: repetitive and non.

An interview with Róbert Lénárd, the young director from Novi Sad, about theatre as an inalienable part of public life.

In my review of Zoltán Puskas’s OFF at the Novi Sad Theatre, I considered the implementation of contemporary performing currents, especially verbatim, in an atypical, most creative albeit minority-determined theatre environment. The work, based on regulatory administrative documents, problematizes the relation of society to art and vice versa, suggesting a new – or quite old – view of such engagement.

The two edited volumes on ‘New Materialism’, entitled Power of Material/Politics of Materiality (2014) and Fragile Identities (2015), edited by Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier, are based on an ongoing lecture series organized by the CX – Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Both volumes bring together international theorists and artists alike and initiate a dialogue amongst them. They furthermore document and extend the talks that were presented at AdBK Munich, as well as the following discussions, and also include various artistic works that were created by students at the academy in the wider context of the unfolding public events of the CX. Neither of the volumes, this is explicitly made clear by the editors already in the first volume, wants to participate in the establishment of a new paradigm. What they try to do instead is to show tendencies within a diverse field that is indeed materialist but not necessarily ‘new’.

Reflecting on Blaž Lukan’s book Performative Writings (Aristej and AGRFT, 2013), the author thinks about writing, which Lukan uses not only to interpret the performative act but also to express himself as the spectator. She also follows Lukan in dividing the spectator’s position into four different types, namely, the spectator as a witness, the spectator as an accomplice, the ignorant spectator and the spectator as the one who knows. Comparing Lukan’s book and the article ‘An hour brings what time cannot’ by Danae Theodoridou, the author differentiates ways in which, through writing, the spectator is liberated from passivity and emancipated in the independent act of performative writing.