Thinking with performance
pp. 311-327
in: Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, Matthew Wagner (eds), Performance phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
This chapter applies the performative impulse of Heidegger's later writings to questions of how performance thinks, how phenomenology works, how the two go together, the nature of experience, and the complex intertwinements of performance as phenomenology and phenomenology of performance. It interweaves personal memoir, analyses of Heidegger, and accounts of artistic practice. It presents an analysis of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy and the lecture series, What Is Called Thinking? to ask the question of how performance might be understood to produce types of knowledge and ways of thinking that elude traditional epistemological categories dominated by calculative reason. It proposes that a Heideggerian approach to performance can teach us to think in ways that go beyond the theatrics of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, Artaudian cruelty, or free improvisation, and that we might attain to a performative kind of knowledge which is seen, felt, engaged, and encountered in embodied aesthetic practice.
