Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

This article looks at the functioning of intimate experience in three one-on-one performances by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, grouped together as the Personal Trilogy: The Smile off Your Face (2003), Internal (2007) and A Game of You (2010). It will be argued that ‘the experience’ is rendered a site of aesthetic engagement in these performances and that this rendering encourages the participant to reflect on the terms of intimate interaction. Some potentially productive discrepancies in these performances will be discussed in addressing the production of experience, such as belief and belief under false pretences, control and being controlled, and a desire for self-fulfilment in relation to its being undermined. These discrepancies will be theorized with reference to Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and Echo and Richard Sennett’s comments on narcissism in The Fall of Public Man (1974), where a provocative model of ‘narcissistic participation’ will be proposed as being relevant to this kind of work. Perhaps the deliberate undermining of intimate experience may open up space to formulate a politics of participation premised not on a balance of power between performer and participant, but, rather, on an affective revealing of its elusiveness.

This article proposes that by focusing on the professional complications of working in one-to-one encounters outside of the nominally aesthetic realm, performance-makers and researchers might discover ways of either mimicking or rupturing the form’s potential as theatre. My position as performer-participant in this enquiry echoes the original logic of Dorothy Smith’s writing on standpoint epistemology, and responds to its critiques by articulating the visceral affect of the triangulated relations found in these (legalized) encounters and by engaging with them through their own terms of payment. The article begins by contextualizing itself in the legacy of institutional critique, especially the work of Andrea Fraser. It moves on to consider three case studies: one account of practice-as-research or ‘apprenticeship’ and two performance analyses. Each of these case studies considers the work of sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light District as performance, and seeks to uncover the spectatorial and economic relations within each encounter, most specifically through René Girard’s theory of ‘triangular desire’. The article moves on to consider how the spectatorial and economic relations within these three different sex work ‘performances’ might expand our understanding of the one-to-one performer’s working knowledge, as well as further a discussion on the subversive and ethically illuminating potential of incorporating transaction into performance. It finishes by considering the radical and metaphysical potential of using money within one-to-one practices.

The purpose of this article is to explicate the nature of micro-performance dramaturgies and the ontology of the agency that this generates for the participants, through a consideration of KeepHouse Performance’s You, Hope, Her & Me. This article presents a localized understanding of the one-to-one style micro-performance strategies through an empirically responsible cognitive materialism lens, employing notions of the liminal and liminoid to conceptualize the nature of the performance space and participative dramaturgy. This article also considers the nature of the documentation practices embedded within those liminoid acts.

In this article we explore ethical concerns, the function of promiscuity and the fuel of desire in one-to-one performance work. Looking at examples by ORLAN, Jess Dobkin and Owen G. Parry, we work to map out tentative yet tenacious versions of our experiences of this form. Employing Levinasian ethics to consider the encounter from the perspective of an audience member, Zerihan examines erotics and ethics in relation to the economies of one-to-one performance. Kartsaki’s focus is on ‘The Promiscuous Spectator’, through which she considers the insatiability of desire in performance. Reflecting on examples of performance work, Kartsaki highlights the relationship between desire, repetition and the potential efficacy in the ongoing hunt for fulfilment. Together, the authors’ contributions reflect a short critical study, offering two distinct, yet overlapping perspectives on one-to-one performance.