Dear Members,
I am delighted to announce that there will be a second inter-conference meeting of the PSi
Performance and Philosophy working group in Berlin on April 23-24th 2010.
Following on from the success of the first meeting in Aberystwyth in January 2009, I am now
collaborating with Alice Lagaay at the SFB “Performing Cultures”, Freie Universität Berlin with
the support of Freddie Rokem, to co-organise an international symposium on Performance
and Philosophy. The SFB have very kindly agreed to sponsor this event, for which I am
exceedingly grateful.
As you will see from the announcement below, we have already secured an illustrious list of
speakers including: Martin Puchner, Paul A. Kottman, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Eva-Maria Gauss,
Sybille Krämer and Freddie Rokem. We have also made a number of further invitations to
other internationally recognised figures in this field, which we very much hope will be
accepted.
I also hope that many of you will be able to join us and participate in this exciting event.
More details regarding the form and structure will follow in due course.
With best wishes,
Laura
—
Performance and Philosophy
Berlin 23rd-24th April 2010
An international symposium hosted by SFB “Performing Cultures”, Freie Universität Berlin in
collaboration with the Performance Studies International PSi Performance and Philosophy
working group.
The theatrical metaphor has a long tradition within Western philosophy. As Aldo Tassi has
written, ‘until four hundred years ago, the theatrum mundi metaphor was the dominant
image in Western thinking. God was conceived on the analogy of a playwright who had
created the script of the play that was being performed on the stage called the world’ (Tassi
1998: n.p.). At the same time, as Jonas Barish and Martin Puchner have discussed, there is
a long tradition of anti-theatricality within philosophy, exemplified by figures such as St
Augustine and Rousseau.
But beyond metaphor and prejudice, there has also been what Puchner has called a
‘theatrical turn’ in philosophy, starting in the later nineteenth century when figures such as
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard magnetised toward theatricality in the context of a broader
assault on the notion of truth (Puchner 2002: 521). As Timothy Murray’s volume shows,
theatrical philosophy would then continue to flourish in twentieth century French thought, in
the work of Lyotard, Cixous, Kristeva, and Deleuze, amongst others. For Deleuze, for
example, ‘the theatre, here, is not simply a metaphor or a communicative device, but lies at
the heart of Deleuze’s project, determining its terms, constructions, and arguments’ (ibid.).
If there has been a theatrical turn in philosophy, we can also say that there has been a
‘philosophical turn’ in theatre and performance. With figures like Artaud and Stanislavski, we
can see that the theatre of the last hundred years has increasingly conceived itself in
metaphysical terms. For these practitioners, the world is not merely ‘like’ theatre and
performance; rather, performance actually performs metaphysics or ontology. Of course the
nature of this ontology has been multiply understood. For Tassi, for example, theatrical
performance is an enactment of ‘“the performance of being” which is taking place in nature’;
subjects and events in the world, as well as on stage, are brought to presence or ‘come to
be’ through performance (Tassi 1998: n.p.).
Correlatively, scholars in recent Performance Studies have moved beyond the conception of
philosophy as simply one more methodology that might be applied to the analysis of
performance. Rather, performance and philosophy - or performing and philosophizing - are
seen as inextricably linked.
The symposium “Performance and Philosophy” will be the final conference of the philosophy
project (B9) at SFB “Performing Cultures” and the 2nd inter-conference meeting of the PSi
the 2nd inter-conference meeting of the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group,
following on from the success of Making and Thinking: Performance and Philosophy as
Participation held at Aberystwyth University in January 2009. The growth of the PSi
Performance and Philosophy Working Group, which now has over one hundred members, is
only one demonstration of the increasing importance of Philosophy for Performance Studies
and the growth of ‘Performance and Philosophy’ as a distinct sub-field within Theatre and
Performance Studies. This symposium seeks to outline the parameters of this sub-field by
bringing together some of the key thinkers who have already done significant work to
analyse the relation between performance and philosophy. The symposium also wishes to
celebrate and respond to the publication of two new works of central importance to this
area: Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy
and Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance.
Confirmed speakers:
Laura Cull (Northumbria University, UK); Erika Fischer-Lichte (Freie Universität Berlin); Eva-
Maria Gauss (Halle); Paul A. Kottman (New School, New York); Sybille Krämer (Freie
Universität Berlin); Alice Lagaay (Freie Universität Berlin); Martin Puchner (New York);
Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University)
Concept & organisation:
Alice Lagaay, SFB “Performing Cultures”, Freie Universität Berlin, moc.d4od|yaagalecila#moc.d4od|yaagalecila
Laura Cull, Chair of the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group, Lecturer in
Performing Arts (Northumbria University, UK) ku.ca.airbmuhtron|lluc.arual#ku.ca.airbmuhtron|lluc.arual
Freddie Rokem, Professor of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University
