The felt sense of performance: affective meaning at the edge of words

ABSTRACT

Created by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) enables the articulation of meaning implicit in embodied experience, which in turn discloses the affective meaning of words (or topics), thus, empowering one to speak and think creatively from one’s felt knowledge. In this article, I present and analyse three TAE processes undertaken by Portuguese native speaker performers – Sónia Baptista, Maria Duarte, and Andrea Maciel – who have chosen to explore and expand the terms ‘performing’, ‘presence’, and ‘play’, respectively. Considering these terms from the felt sense of each performer’s culturally and aesthetically situated experience opens new ground to build a collaborative and affectively embodied vocabulary that can illuminate different approaches or lines of enquiry into some of the core concepts of theatre practice and performance studies. Based on these three cases, I argue that TAE is a stimulating tool to access the felt sense of live performance, thus contributing to the development of research on affect from a meaningful personal standpoint.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• vocabulary
• methodology
• implicit
• presence
• performing
• play

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Performances available here: https://vimeo.com/soniabaptista.

2. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are taken from my notes and the performers’ writings in each session.

3. See http://www.projectoteatral.pt/english-projecto-teatral.

4. The translation of this term demands further explanation. The word used by Duarte in Portuguese is afectividade, which means affection, affectivity. However, in English, I think ‘affect’ is closer to what she intended – an unformed, unshaped intensification of an immersive feeling. There is a Portuguese word – afecção – used to translate ‘affect’ in the Spinozian sense, as the result of affecting and being affected by something, which is mostly used in philosophical discourse.

5. See https://citybodywritings.wordpress.com/works.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [Postdoctoral fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Ana Cristina Nunes Pais

Ana Cristina Nunes Pais is an FCT postdoctoral fellow at CET – Centro de Estudos de Teatro at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL), dramaturge and curator. She is the author of Discourse of Complicité. Contemporary Dramaturgies (Colibri 2004) and Affective Rhythms in the Performing Arts (Colibri 2018). She edited the volume Performance in the Public Sphere (2017, Orfeu Negro) and its online version in English available at www.performativa.pt. Since 2000, she has been participating in national and international conferences. Between 2003 and 2004, she worked as a theatre critic for the most distinguished Portuguese newspapers, as well as being a dramaturge in both theatre and dance projects in Portugal. From 2005 to 2010, she was assistant professor at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon). As a dramaturge, she has worked with theatre and dance professionals in Portugal (João Brites, Tiago Rodrigues, Rui Horta and Miguel Pereira). She has also curated, coordinated and produced various discursive practice events, the latest being Projecto P! Performance in the Public Sphere (Lisbon, April 10 thru14 2017) and In the Flow: Public feelings and practices of awareness, (April 3 thru 5 2019).