Spaces of Appearance: Writings on Contemporary Theatre and Performance

This thesis, a collection of previously published materials, reflects a plural and evolving engagement with theatre and performance over the past fifteen years or so: as researcher, writer, editor, teacher, practitioner, spectator. These have rarely been discreet categories for me, but rather different modalities of exploration and enquiry, interrelated spaces encouraging dynamic connectivities, flows and further questions. Section 1 offers critical accounts of the practices of four contemporary theatre directors: Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine. Section 2 draws on elements of contemporary philosophy and critical thinking to explore the mutable parameters of performance. lt proposes performative mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events 'in proximity of performance', to borrow Matthew Goulish's phrase: contact, fire, animals, alterity, place. Section 3 contains examples of documentation of performance practices, including a thick description of a mise en scene of a major international theatre production, reflections on process, training and dramaturgy, a performance text with a framing dramaturgical statement, and personal perspectives on particular collaborations. The external Appendix comprises a recently published collection of edited and translated materials concerning five core collaborative projects realised by Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil at their base in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris. The core concerns of this thesis include attempts to think through: • the working regimes, poetics and pedagogies of certain directors, usually in collaborative devising contexts within which the creative agency of performers is privileged; • the processes and micro-politics of collaboration, devising, and dramaturgical composition; the dramaturgical implications of trainings, narrative structures, spaces, mise en scene, and of images as multi-layered, dynamic 'fields'; • the predicament and agency of spectators in diverse performance contexts, and the ways in which spectatorial roles are posited or constructed by dramaturgies; • the imbrication of embodiment, movement and perception in performance, and the plurality of modes of perception; • the critical and political functions of theatre and theatre criticism as cultural/social practice and 'art of memory' (de Certeau), of dramaturgies as critical historiographies, and of theatre cultures (and identities) as plural, dynamic, and contested; • performance as concentrated space for inter-subjectivity and the flaring into appearance of the 'face-to-face' (Levinas); the possibility of ethical, 'response-able' encounter and exchange with another; identity as relational and in-process, alterity as productive event, the inter-personal as political; • the poetics and politics of what seems an unthinkable surplus (and constitutive 'outside') to the cognitive reach of many conventional frames and maps in theatre criticism and historiography; an exploration of acts of writing as performative propositions and provocations ('critical fictions') to think the event of meanings at/of the limits of knowledge and subjectivity. This partial listing of recurrent and evolving concerns within the thesis traces a trajectory in my evolution as a writer and thinker, a gradual displacement from the relatively 'solid ground' of theatre studies and theatre history towards more fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting 'lie of the land' in contemporary performance and philosophy. This trajectory reflects a growing fascination with present process, conditions, practices, perceptions 'in the middle', and ways of writing (about) performance as interactive and ephemeral event

Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

Fathers of a Still-born Past: Hindu Empire, Globality, and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal

Undertaking a genealogical study of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India, this dissertation demonstrates how a new, metropolitan, and largely Anglophone version of cultural Hinduization is signaling a transformative shift in postcolonialism as political and aesthetic self-representation. The primary archive for the study ranges from foundational scriptural texts of the 'canon of Hinduism' and the writings of late 19th and early 20th century Hindu nationalists to traditions to the Anglophone political journalism of new-age Hindu intellectuals like Jay Dubashi, television productions of epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and contemporary Indian writing in English. This constellation of texts reveals that if an important phase of global postcolonial culture was founded in the difference between center and periphery, then we are now witnessing new aesthetic forms which recode national peripheral space as in fact coterminous with the space of the metropolitan-center. It is precisely such a recoding that the contemporary literature of the Indian diaspora writes itself into, democratizing differences between national and imperial contexts by inducting the urban hubs of the Global South into a continuum of supranational terminals for the mobility of virtual capital. The study demonstrates how such formations overlap with the language of contemporary Hinduization, as the latter in its own way equates neo-liberal economism, militarization, and technologism with the 'holy cows of Hindu scriptures.' Deploying religion as a flexible adjustment of linguistic and visual signs, rather than a scriptural tradition, this new 'rhetoric of Hindu India' violently yokes collusive neo-liberalism and cultural Hinduization on a single plane of normalized regularities. Such a plane of regularities promises a post-postcolonial culture which is no longer debilitated by theories of difference, whether between tradition and modernity, or nation and empire. In the face of this dangerous historical shift, my dissertation concludes that the task of the anti-imperial mind in our contemporary time is to destabilize such applications of political-cultural sameness. It is to return 'difference' to its philosophical beginnings in the indeterminacies of figurative language and to demonstrate how such indeterminacies are a refracting surface for the lived histories of capitalist-imperial unevenness

Manipulador aéreo con brazos antropomórficos de articulaciones flexibles

[Resumen] Este artículo presenta el primer robot manipulador aéreo con dos brazos antropomórficos diseñado para aplicarse en tareas de inspección y mantenimiento en entornos industriales de difícil acceso para operarios humanos. El robot consiste en una plataforma aérea multirrotor equipada con dos brazos antropomórficos ultraligeros, así como el sistema de control integrado de la plataforma y los brazos. Una de las principales características del manipulador es la flexibilidad mecánica proporcionada en todas las articulaciones, lo que aumenta la seguridad en las interacciones físicas con el entorno y la protección del propio robot. Para ello se ha introducido un compacto y simple mecanismo de transmisión por muelle entre el eje del servo y el enlace de salida. La estructura en aluminio de los brazos ha sido cuidadosamente diseñada de forma que los actuadores estén aislados frente a cargas radiales y axiales que los puedan dañar. El manipulador desarrollado ha sido validado a través de experimentos en base fija y en pruebas de vuelo en exteriores.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; DPI2014-5983-C2-1-