Beginners on Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children’s appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt’s work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children’s relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child’s potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt’s gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded

On Children (Editorial)

So, what does it mean to compose a journal issue that attempts to look at our relationships with children under the problematic title ‘On Children’? The writing between these pages undoubtedly carries with it an attendant anxiety about objectifying, naming and otherwise categorizing children. Yet, at the same time, the focus of the title ‘on’ children deliberately sets out to occupy agap in theatre and performance scholarship that Nicholas Ridout called to our attention over a decade ago: ‘the question of children as theatrical performers is atopic in its own right, and awaits further study’ (2006:98‑9). Extending Ridout’s invitation to take seriously the appearance of children in a theatrical setting, ‘On Children’ hopes to foreground this problem of writing about children without reducing them to research objects. It does this by exploring the multiple roles that children occupy in relation to performance: children as collaborators, researchers, philosophers, activists, artists and political agents. In naming children as such, the contributions presented here cannot escape the violence of categorization. However, the process of creating this issue puts into practice the tension at the heart of performance research ‘on’ children, pushing back at the very boundaries of academic practice by actively including children as co‑editors, contributors, designers and ‘peer’ reviewer

On the Dialectics of Charisma in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present

While ‘charisma’ can be found in dramatic and theatrical parlance, the term enjoys only minimal critical attention in theatre and performance studies, with scholarly work on presence and actor training methods taking the lead in defining charisma’s supposed ‘undefinable’ quality. Within this context, the article examines the appearance of the term ‘charismatic space’ in relation to Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Here Abramovic uses this term to describe the shared space in which performer and spectator connect bodily, psychically, and spiritually through a shared sense of presence and energy in the moment of performance. Yet this is a space arguably constituted through a number of dialectical tensions and contradictions which, in dialogue with existing theatre scholarship on charisma, can be further understood by drawing on insights into charismatic leaders and charismatic authority in leadership studies. By examining the performance and its documentary traces in terms of dialectics we consider the political and ethical implications for how we think about power relations between artist/spectator in a neoliberal, market-driven art context. Here an alternative approach to conceiving of and facilitating a charismatic space is proposed which instead foregrounds what Bracha L. Ettinger calls a ‘matrixial encounter-event’: A relation of coexistence and compassion rather than dominance of self over other; performer over spectator; leader over follower. By illustrating the dialectical tensions in The Artist is Present, we consider the potential of the charismatic space not as generated through the seductive power or charm of an individual whose authority is tied to his/her ‘presence’, but as something co-produced within an ethical and relational space of trans-subjectivity