Never been human I am bird: on the Shape of Love

This essay approaches the field of posthuman performance, focusing on the personification of love in the form of Eros. After focusing on the changing depictions of Erotic love across archaic and classical Greece, the essay then delves into the theatrical depiction of winged love in Aristophanes’ timeless comedy Birds. The author argues for the importance, in performance practice, of love as ethical praxis, suggesting that real erotic love is a fundamental energy driving performance. The critical takeaway of this essay is the need to perform a love that is not merely anthropomorphic or anthropocentric— a love of humans for humans— and the importance of practising more-than-human love, to tether living beings in an interspecies web of bonds and relations

"Set in Poland, that is to say Nowhere": Alfred Jarry and the Politics of Topological Space

This article is intended to shed light on philosophical considerations on the ontology of space (situation) as put forward in the prose and dramatic writings of French iconoclast Alfred Jarry, by posing that Jarry's notion of space is dynamic in a twofold sense. Firstly, Jarry's sense of space is consistently described in terms of a sense of temporality (duration), which is why Jarry's sense of space is distinctly higher-dimensional (space- time). Secondly, I argue that Jarry's reaction against conventional modalities of scientific and artistic thinking take the form of a subversive turn (which Deleuze calls the Great Turning), via the pseudoscience of pataphysics, which is directed not only against metaphysics, but also a geometric understanding of the physical and metaphysical worlds. I argue that Jarry's conception of a spatio-temporal ontology is distinctly non-geometric, or topological in nature. Topological imagery allows Jarry to present a more vital and fleshed out sense of living space-time, within which a new politics of space and time is activated by the forces of endless change and continuous deformation. I argue that through the topological corporeality of Ubu, Jarry promotes a sense of ABSTRACT theatre within which the dynamic properties of topological space become actualised in the way of a politics of the unimaginable, an Ubuesque realm where, through the power of technology and the imagination, the exceptional and unrealisable rule

Rudolf Laban and Topology: a Videographic Analysis

This article explores the somewhat neglected theory of topological movement developed by the Hungarian artist and researcher Rudolf Laban. The piece begins with an examination of Laban’s understanding of space in relation of the notion of the kinesphere. I argue that Laban’s idea of space is essentially derived from a rationalization of outer movement (geometry), which enables him to break movement down into analytical units, and rearrange these into a meaningful syntax, a language (dance, mime, or theatre). I then go on to explain Laban’s idea of a synthesis between outer movement, and another sphere of movement known as dynamospheric (which refers to more fundamental inner forces that involve psychological and emotional dynamics). Crucially, these dynamic forms are modelled by Laban through the use of topological surfaces. I further support my analysis by an investigation of Laban’s unpublished book Effort and Recovery, and also by taking a videographic approach to a number of important filmic studies of topological movement observation. The article concludes with the idea that Laban’s graphic approach to movement analysis can be further enhanced, particularly within the study of topological dynamics, with the help of vision technologies such as film, video, and computer animation. I briefly discuss William Forsythe’s reinterpretation of Laban’s analysis via moving-image technologies, before concluding with a short description of a video study entitled Labanimations, which I carried out recently with video artist Sebastian Melo, and in which I reexamine Laban’s artwork through video techniques such as long exposure photography and slit scan

Binary Coded Performance

The article explores the possibility to use a binary code as a code language that can be staged or choreographed. It mentions that numbers one and zero are performative as they can be read as indicators of failure and success. It notes the susceptibility of the numbers to the bodies that are counting and actors on whose fingers these numbers are actualised. It also emphasizes that the notion of digitality in computer technologies expresses the logic of binarism at a corporeal semiotic level

Variations on a Fugitive’s Song: The Performance of Disappearance and Forced Migration in Chile

This text could be read as if it were a four-part fugue, beginning with the exposition of a subject or motif that will be elaborated and developed in due course. The word fugue derives from the Latin fuga, which means the act of fl eeing or chasing; in the musical sense, voices may be said to chase one another in the course of a contrapuntal composition such as a fugue. The Latin term is also linked etymologically to words such as ‘refuge’ or ‘fugitive,’ all terms indicative of an act of fl ight. The conceptual fugue I am embarking on here uses the basic structure of this musical technique and the metaphor of the musical chase to take the reader through an analysis of the acts of disappearance that took place during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1988). I will argue that state-sponsored terror and disappearance during the Pinochet years did not efface the voice of the opposition, but on the contrary, it elicited a powerfully orchestrated political vocalization that was deployed performatively in the way of protest song and street chanting

Carnival post-phenomenology: mind the hump

The following article is an autoethnographic reading of carnival as an inter-cultural and interpersonal event, and one that does not always profit from anthropological models such as inversion or safety-valve theories. The radical proximity of carnival experience problematises the objectivity of the event and makes it meaningful also as a lived-in moment, a sensory affair. The following is an account of an individual experience that defines the significance of carnival as a form of kinesis, a sensation of inebriated movement shaking up of the static ethnographic "I". The essay looks in particular at the movement of humping conducted by the character of the tranga, in the Pyrenean carnival of Bielsa in Spain. My theoretical framework touches on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Judith Butler. The analysis of their concepts of dialogism and performativity lead to a series of questions concerning the transformation of the everyday kinetic experience of the body as it becomes intoxicated by carnivalesque performance

404, the Performativity of Error: with Insights into Cyber-errorism in Internacional Errorista and Electronic Disturbance Theatre

This essay expands on a novel concept for performance studies scholarhsip: errorism (combining political and technological notions of error performance). The term is central to my analysis of the performativity of error in internet communication (HTTP), and the performance of error in recent US political history (i.e. the George W. Bush Administration). Both these conceptions are interlaced in a novel theorisation of performativity, which I present in a theoretical line outside J.L Austin’s word-based theory of performativity. Instead, I link the term to Talcott Parsons ‘performance process’, and, through systems theorist Nikolas Luhmann, to the writings of Jean Francois Lyotard. From this analysis of performativity as a system of normativisation through technologically-mediated social activity, I subsequently move on to a discussion of the theatrical performativity and political use of error-coding in net art, and digital agit-prop. I elaborate on two brief case studies of how error can be used creatively in politically dissident net art: the Argentine-based Internacional Errorista movement (2005) and Ricardo Dominguez’s use of error-messaging as part of Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s INFOact ‘Stop the War in Mexico’ (1998)