CORMAC POWER: PERFORMING TO FAIL: PERSPECTIVES ON FAILURE IN PERFORMANCE AND PHILOSOPHY

The new thing I am picking up here is the thoughts of Merlau- Ponty about the constant struggle to create constant one-to-one relationships within the environment and constantly faling as these relationships and changing all the time.

Cormac Says: “Merleau-Ponty focuses his attention on breaks to that circuit, where the failure of the perceiver and the object to coincide forms the basis from which to understand the complexity and fragility of subjective experience”.  Cormac then links it tp Peggy Phelans thoughts on Performance- performance is transient, fugitive, escapes the grasp… It fails to fit in with the capitalist money making apparatus… and I ask myself is this a failure or a success?

I have also got to know Mouth to Mouth- a group of performers that for one reason or another live in different parts of the world. The work  deals with the failure of being able to be all together physically in the same space to create a performance, to get around this they use Skype which of course has its own problems of connectivity breakdown.

And this is Cormac’s going home message:

Failure, as Sartre discovered at his unfulfilled rendezvous in the café, creates (at least temporally) the chance to reflect on our own orientation in the world and opens up the possibility of a “felicitous space.”

 

Nicolas Ridout- Stage Fright, Animals and other Theatrical problems:

Ridout discuses in this text  ‘The wrongness in the theatre”.  He initially talks about the difference between Performance and Theatre. He talkes about the ‘ antitheatricality of much performance art’  that we find in the works of Peter Handke, Richard Foremanand Samule Beckett. He talks about how these performance work is more concerned  with “realness” rather than ‘the representation of “the real” ‘. … but he points out that these antitheatrical practices are so theatrical that this prejudice is to be found, is born of theatre itself.

He talks about performance as the back stage of theatre… something that embraces the wrongness of theatre.  In order to do this he explores a text of Heinrich Von Kleit called ” Uber, das Marionettenhater’  … in this text Kleits suggests that ” the perfection in grace is only achieved by the puppet or god”. Why the puppet?… because like the animal the puppet has no self consciousness.

” Simple puppets are capable of more refined and graceful movement than even the most highly trained virtuoso human performer” [ ‘Because he is not capable of human affectation’] Kleit states.

Ridout also discusses  the fact that theatre is face-to face encounter with The Other. This encounter can bring a discomfort and uneasiness, queasiness because the ” act of delivery or the act of collection are always compromised”.

The uneasiness comes  from not ” not knowing where to put oneself  when things go wrongm when ineptitud strikes”.

I am not sure but I think that  what Ridout is getting at is that withing the wrogness of Theatre , withing exploring  and embracing  its wrongness there is a rightness. It brings to the fore different politics that are routed in ” Shame  rather than mutuality” and that they  emerge from the s of the face-to face encounter  with The Other.

 

My favourite quotes are already within the summary but here is an extra one:

” The theatre that I am intersted in most is a theatre that invites us perversely to enjoy our ethical discomfort and to think politically about the sources of our enjoyement”

Lauren Barri Holstein- The Cyclical cupcake.

In this text, Holstein  uses her show How to become a cupcake, the famous adaption of Frankestein to discuss theatre and the fact that it is based in representing real rather than in “realness”. She discusses her failure to stick to theatre norms and points out that is not clear in her show what is real and what is not. …. I need to reread and understand this text better in order to summarise… Im getting in a muddle.

But she talks about the real and the simbolic  and how the real stays at the border with the simbolic and sometimes is absorbed with in it  and then is expelled out ( abjected)…  In  her show The cyclical cupcake, the boundaries of what is real and what is not are constantly blurred.

She references Butler  and I think I understand that in performace when we are represented the adjected then it is sometimes possible to re organize the signifiers, reorganize the symbolic order perhaps?… is it here thet lays the political power of performance? ( I am asking myself)…

Holstein talks about the constant failure of gender to represent itself as … woman for example ‘cannot represent all the possibilities of womanhood’ because the concept of woman is in constant state of flux…. she links this failure to her failure to become a cupcake.