Le miroir éclaté/A dança do existir. Altérité coloniale et violence de l’identité dans un solo de Vera Mantero

Dans cet essai, je me propose d’analyser le solo A Dança do Existir (1995) de Vera Mantero, chorégraphe portugaise, en montrant qu’il est une intervention culturelle dans la mémoire postcoloniale portugaise. La lecture des usages d’immobilité, du montage sonore et des déplacements chorégraphiques dans la pièce de Mantero permet d’examiner les notions d’« anesthésie culturelle » (Allen Feldman) et d’« actions immobiles » (Nadia Seremetakis) par rapport aux formations culturelles de la violence et de l’altérité dans la modernité européenne.The essay analyzes a solo by Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero (A Dança do Existir, 1995) as a cultural intervention in contemporary Portuguese post-colonial memory. Reading Mantero’s uses of stillness, sonic montage, and choreographic displacements, enables us to discuss notions of « cultural anesthesia » (Allen Feldman) and of « still acts » (Nadia Seremetakis), in regards to the cultural formations of violence and otherness within European modernity

9 variações sobre coisas e performance

Observado uma proliferação de uso de coisas, objetos, tralha em vários trabalhos de dança experimental e performance art recentes, proponho nove teses preliminares sobre tal fenômeno. Partindo do conceito de “dispositif” em Giorgio Agamben, e da sua expansão para lá dos limites com os quais Michel Foucault o havia definido, foco em como Agamben diagnostica uma onipotência no cerne do dispositif e que determina a subjetividade contemporânea como essencialmente subjugada ao jugo de objetos-dispositifs. Extraio desta noção, por via da obra de Fred Moten em estudos da performance e estudos críticos de raça, a necessidade de um movimento de co-liberação de sujeitos e objetos desse modo de sujeição ao dispositif. Com Karl Marx e Guy Débord, associo essa liberação a uma rejeição do objeto como dispositif-mercadoria, e procuro a afirmação objetiva-subjetiva da coisa. Invocando um paralelo com o devir-animal que alguma dança e performance buscam desde os anos 1960, proponho um devir-coisa na dança e performance recente, onde tanto objetos como sujeitos se libertam do jugo do dispositif-mercadoria e de noções de instrumentalização. Neste devir-coisa na dança, as teorias de Mario Perniola e Silvia Benso são fundamentais

Representation Under Attack

"Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from different perspectives and historical frameworks." -- Publisher's website

Singularities : Danse in the Age of Performance

"André Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of ‘performance’ in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five ‘singularities’ in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity. Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jérôme Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of ‘singularity’—the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification—to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate." -- Publisher's website

Il corpo come archivio

The performance studies scholar André Lepecki has done a thorough analysis of the body as archive analyzing three contemporary dance pieces as re-enactments (Julie Tolentino’s re-enactment of Ron Athey’s Self-Obliteration #1 in her series The Sky Remains the Same [2008 and ongoing]; Martin Nachbar’s Urheben Aufheben [2008] returning to some items of the Dore Hoyer’s solo series titled Affectos Humanos; Richard Move humorous impersonation of Martha Graham). Lepecki proposes a «“will to archive” as referring to a capacity to identify in a past work still no-exhausted creative field». For Lepecki, the end of a performance is the new beginning of a dance’s afterlife, which permits the work to undergo numerous permutations and manifestations. He continues: «The archive as border becomes the vertiginous skin where all sorts of onto-political “rewritings” take place, including the re-writing of movement, including the re-writing of the archive itself». Here, Lepecki refers primarily to the notion of being able to access or enter the bodily archive through re-enactment of a choreographic work. Lepecki’s idea of porousness within the dance archive and focus on the living dancer as a carrier of the archive, which can then be shared with others is especially poignant