EXPERIÊNCIA DA COMOÇÃO - A NATUREZA ESTÉTICA DO EVENTO TEATRAL

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Publications

From effect to affect: narratives of passivity and modes of participation of the contemporary spectator

Publication . Pais, Ana

This article considers how dominant cultural and scientific notions of the body and emotions pervade narratives of a passive spectator in the western theatrical tradition. Two main conceptions of passivity model the idea of spectator in the West: one in Antiquity (passivity as receptivity) and the other in Modernity (passivity as inactivity). Theatre history demonstrates that these conceptions are intertwined with the development of theatre architecture and acting practices and theories set out to produce emotional effects on the spectator. Drawing upon Teresa Brennan’s theory of affect transmission, I will be looking at how the gradual enclosure of the stage – culminating in Zola’s fourth wall and Wagner’s darkened auditorium - and the emphasis on the spectator as the target of theatrical effects is in line with the validity decay of cultural notions of the transmission of affect that lead to a self-contained modern subject, that is, confined to the limits of the body. I will be suggesting that the avant-garde movements in the 20th century and post-dramatic practices reactivate affective a fluid connection between performers and spectators that value affect transmission as vital to live events, both as social process and aesthetic material.

2015Journal article

Open access

Almost imperceptible rhythms and stuff like that

Publication . Pais, Ana

Although spectators are seated in a traditional auditorium facing the performers of the production Until the Moment When God is Destroyed by the Extreme Exercise of Beauty (AQD), by Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero, what is asked from them does not follow the conventions of Western theatre according to which the stage is the place for action and the spectator a passive beholder. AQD performs a critique both of action as something to be seen and of the voyeuristic and passive role it prescribes to the spectator: there will scarcely be any action to be seen on stage. Instead, the bodies of AQD carry out a chorus of activities , choreography of words displaying their sounding materiality in playful rhythmic patterns. This performative construction invites the audience to immerse itself in a cadence of sounds, challenging it to engage with the performance from an aural and, I will argue, an affective angle. AQD summons the audience to a particular kind of engagement with the performers on stage, an engagement that equates an exchange of affect with a practice of listening, rather than a production of effects. I will be claiming that this shift - from effects to affect - is a distinctive feature of contemporary performance that gestures towards a mode of intersubjectivity in the theatre by which the performance lends itself to the affective impact of the audience.

2017Book part

Open access

Re-Affecting the Stage: Affective Resonance as the Function of the Audience

Publication . Pais, Ana

This article uses an affect theory framework to show how the audience has the power to intensify the circulation of affect in the theatrical encounter, and to impact on the unique felt quality of the performance. Assessment is made of the vital function of affect to performance through the images, sensations and expressions that performers use to describe audience engagement. Intermittently, from 2010 to 2012, the author embarked on practice-led research to find out how performers describe the experience of being on stage with regard to their engagement with an audience. Conversations were recorded with more than 50 performers (mainly actors and dancers) from the USA and Brazil, as well as Portugal and other European countries.

2016Journal article

Open access

Affective temporalities in Gob Squad’s Kitchen (you’ve never had it so good)

Publication . Pais, Ana

In this article I will be drawing upon affect theory to unpack issues of authenticity, mediation, participation in the production Gob Squads’s Kitchen, by Gob Squad. English/German collective reconstructed Andy Warhol’s early film Kitchen, shot 47 years before, in the flamboyant Factory, starring ephemeral celebrities such as Eve Sedgwick. Alongside Eat (1964), Sleep (1963) and Screen Test (1964-66). Although it premièred in Berlin, in 2007, the show has been touring in several countries and, in 2012, it received the New York Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. I will be examining how the production’s spatial dispositive creates a mediated intimacy that generates affective temporalities and how their performativity allows us to think of the audience as actively engaged in an affective resonance with the stage. Intimacy creates worlds (BERLANT, 2000). It brings audience and performer closer not only to each other but also to the shifting moment of Performance Art’s capture by institutional discourses and market value. Unleashing affective temporalities allows the audience to embody its potency, to be, again, “at the beginning”. Drawing upon André Lepecki’s notion of reenactments as activations of creative possibilities, I will be suggesting that Gob Squads’s Kitchen merges past and present by disclosing accumulated affects, promises and deceptions attached to the thrilling period of the sixties in order to reperform a possibility of a new beginning at the heart of a nowthen time. In conclusion, this article will shed new light on the performative possibilities of affect to surmount theatrical separation and weave intensive attachments.

2014-12Journal article

Open access