Editorial

Originally, the invitation to edit this issue of Performance Research was generously made in response to the symposium, ‘Making and Thinking: Performance and philosophy as participation’, which was held at Aberystwyth University in January 2009. This event was a collaboration between Aberystwyth's Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies' Centre for Theatre, Performance and Philosophy and the Performance and Philosophy Working Group, housed within Performance Studies international (PSi). In our call for contributions to the symposium, we asked researchers to reflect upon the nature of participation, but also specifically on the nature of the relationship between performance and philosophy, given Performance Studies' growing interest in philosophy (particularly, continental philosophy) as a theoretical resource for the analysis of performance. Then and now, our interest lies in the difficult task of moving beyond the conception of philosophy as simply one more methodology that might be applied to the analysis of performance, preferring to think in terms of performance and philosophy – or performing and philosophizing – as being inextricably linked. As such, the symposium also asked: what does it mean to participate in (the thought of) performance; and how might performance and our participation in/with it impact upon how we define ‘thought’? Whether or not this issue succeeds in responding to such questions or, indeed, whether it departs from ‘application’, we leave up to readers to decide. But this, at least, is an aspect both of the context and intentions of this issue.

The question of ‘participation’ has become central to artistic practice and Performance Studies over the last decade or more. Participation is a focus of interest in contemporary discourses on art (relational and dialogical aesthetics) as well as being a mantra in public art policy. During the period when ‘Making and Thinking’ took place, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted the exhibition, ‘The Art of Participation: 1950 to now’, which sought to examine ‘how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process’ (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2009). Such exhibitions perhaps served as an important reminder of the existence of participatory practices before ‘relational aesthetics’: a pre-history (which, of course, begins well before 1950) that is also helpfully documented in Claire Bishop's anthology, Participation (2006) and in Susan Kattwinkel's collection Audience Participation: Essays on inclusion in performance (2003). Kattwinkel, for instance, suggests that the idea of an audience as motionless, silent and sitting in relative darkness, really ‘only came into being in the 19th century, as theatre began its division into artistic and entertainment forms’ (Kattwinkel 2003: ix). In the eighteenth century, in contrast, both theatre-goers' expressions of pleasure and displeasure could have equally disruptive effects on performances as Judith W. Fisher's contribution to Kattwinkel's collection describes.1

Much of the existing literature on participation, however, reiterates a clear disciplinary distinction between performance that comes from a visual art context, and performance connected to theatre in a manner that we hope to avoid in this issue. That is, whilst there is clearly an argument for looking at particular participatory works in their specific disciplinary contexts (as engaging with ongoing discourses regarding the role of the ‘viewer’ of art or the theatre ‘audience’), surely there are also productive connections to be made by positioning discussions of Grotowski alongside those of Allan Kaprow, or of Augusto Boal alongside those of Group Material. Likewise, we would suggest that the existing literature often leaves the notion of participation vague and undefined, and that there is also a tendency to assume that theatre and performance are somehow ontologically equipped to allow participation to take place.

The aim of this issue of Performance Research is to instigate reflection and debate on the relationship between performance and philosophy from the perspective of the contested concept of ‘participation’. The issue examines the ways in which modes of participatory performance engage philosophical concepts, raise philosophical questions and, vice versa, how various philosophical approaches to the theme of participation have engaged art and performance. The intention has been to investigate the points of intersection, dialogue and dissonance between a wide range of participatory performances and philosophies of participation, thus facilitating encounters between concepts and discourses on the idea of participation that arise from within performance practice, performance studies and philosophy. The issue acknowledges that participation is an interdisciplinary concern and it demonstrates the extent to which participation can act as a point of connection between the often disparate discourses of art history and visual art performance, applied and social theatre, dance, activist performance and Live Art, amongst others. The idea of ‘participation’ can also be situated in a great many theoretical contexts. Claire Bishop's 2006 collection, for example, frames participation through Umberto Eco's notion of ‘the open work’, but also in relation to the work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Edouard Glissant, Jacques Rancière and Félix Guattari. While some of these figures feature here, our issue also affirms the extent to which questions of participation can be fruitfully explored in the light of the philosophies of Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gilles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno, to name but a few. Philosophy helps us to grasp what is at stake in participation, but equally participation might be seen to present a problem for philosophy – to force thought in relation to the questions of what we can take part in, and what, if anything, exceeds or eludes participation.

As Carl Lavery states in the preface to his conversation with Lone Twin, ‘participation can sometimes appear to mean so much that it means virtually nothing’. Rather than attempting to disclose the ontology of participation, he addresses the specific techniques and possibilities of participation in the company's dialogic, conversational and collaborative practice. Next, an extensive preoccupation with the political dimension of participation is found in the essay by Tony Fisher who takes his cue from the post-Marxist theorization of the subject, in particular the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as well as Jacques Rancière and Etienne Balibar. He analyses why it is that new political theatre and performance must dispense with Boal's analytic of oppression, and shows how radical democratic theatre might be conceived less in terms of classical revolutionary struggle, and more in terms of the activation of democratic participation and radical citizenship. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on the spectacle and community, Theron Schmidt then analyses one of Christoph Schlingensief's most controversial public spectacles, ‘Bitte Liebt Österreich!’ (‘Please Love Austria!’) (2000), which combined elements of media manipulation, political debate and the plight of apparently ‘real’ people. Schmidt discusses how in this event participation functioned as a way to mobilize the ‘public sphere’.

The philosophical focus of Gabriella CalchiNovati's contribution is on Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical thought, which she employs in relation to the tattooing performances by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye and Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal. Here, she argues that these performances ‘can be read as artistic/political responses to the crisis of participation caused by the fractionalization of community into singularity, into individuals whose identity now happens to be performed on the “skin they live in”, rather than through the relational exchange with the other’. Maintaining this concern with the relation between participation and community, Margherita Laera examines her own participatory experience as a theatre spectator of Rimini Protokoll's Prometheus in Athens (2010) which starred untrained performers recruited among Athenian citizens. Drawing on Nancy's The Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural, Laera explores the ideas of community, participation and (trans)national identity as produced through the performance of myth.

Next, Jon Foley Sherman draws from his own experience of participating in choreographer's Felix Ruckert's piece Consulto (2003) and from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to explore the ethics of participation as ‘an ambiguous opening to others’, where the emphasis is explicitly on thinking through responsibility in terms of plurality rather than in terms of a sole ‘Other’. As well as critiquing the model of ethics provided by Lévinas's notion of the face-to-face encounter, Sherman activates Michael Warner's theory of publics to analyse the ambiguity of identity or role in the intimate, yet public exchanges of this participatory dance work. Sherman is also concerned with questions of power and control in terms of the relationship between the piece's dancers and ‘attendants’: who determines the nature of the encounter, who follows and who leads in this tactile dance between strangers? But, ultimately, Sherman seeks to convince us that ‘Consulto stages ambiguity as a founding principle of our responsibility to and experience of others’, an ethics of performance that is particularly developed in relation to the reversibility of sensation offered by the experience of touch.

In his contribution, David Fancy looks at work from Grotowski's Theatre of Sources period, such as The Mountain Project, and Andy Goldsworthy's nature installations alongside Deleuze and Guattari's ‘geophilosophy’ as part of an exploration of the ways in which performance takes part in the environment, and vice versa. Utilizing Deleuze's anti-Platonist account of participation to challenge the damaging tendency to treat nature as the mere ‘passive backdrop’ to human activity, Fancy suggests that both Grotowski and Goldsworthy foreground the immanence of people and landscape, human and non-human bodies, in a gesture he describes as ‘geoperformativity’. In this way, he also implies that both practices point to crucial new ways in which to re-think the contemporary ecological crisis. Correlatively, Natasha Lushetich is interested in the performativity of objects and the kinds of participation they elicit. Drawing on the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida's notion of ‘interexpressivity’, she explores the difference between the concept of participation as afforded by the 1960s happenings, and the notion of interaction in Fluxus work, most notably the Fluxkit. She argues that happenings adhered largely to a teleological structuring of the parts/whole logic, whilst the Fluxkits functioned interexpressively, prompting a multi-lateral structuring of the ‘one and the many’ (Nishida). Staying with the 1960s and 1970s, Laura Cull's essay transposes concepts from Deleuze and Bergson to a discussion of the participatory works that Allan Kaprow referred to as ‘Activities’ (rather than ‘Happenings’), arguing that they are best understood as attention-training exercises that affirm our ontological participation in immanence, change and movement. Attempting to move beyond any binary understanding of the relation between observation and participation, Cull makes clear that participation does not guarantee immanence whilst noting, nevertheless, the special status that Kaprow accords to attention in the midst of action.

Adair Rounthwaite's text on Democracy (1988) by the artists' collective, Group Material, also draws its theoretical inspiration from Deleuze and Spinoza, but also from Adorno and Horkheimer – providing a bridge between the immanent and dialectical philosophies of participation. This is followed by an essay by Chris Braddock, which considers an aspect of the American artist Ann Hamilton's performance/ installation Malediction (1991) as an affective force-field in which both human and inhuman, animate and (so-called) ‘inanimate’ bodies are drawn into what Braddock calls ‘contagious animism’: a form of unwitting, rather than intentional participation in which all participant bodies might disclose their power to affect and be affected. Informed by the philosophy of Brian Massumi and Jacques Derrida but also by the anthropology of Marcel Mauss and late Victorian ethnographies of magic, Braddock questions conventional assumptions around who or what has power (and over who or what) in participatory practices and thoroughly does away with any clear-cut distinction between subjects and objects. Whereas in Braddock's text, it is ritual that is inscribed as ‘the field that plays out our power to be affected’, Rounthwaite focuses on the public ‘town hall meetings’ convened by the collective as ‘a privileged case study for examining the way that an audience's affective responses become folded into the artwork itself’. In both Braddock and Rounthwaite's contributions, traditional hierarchies that would value the contribution of human over inhuman bodies, or of subjects over objects, in participatory art works are dismantled. Likewise, both pay close attention to the affective powers of the things (documents, relics, traces) the participatory event leaves behind. Likewise, Braddock's essay resonates with Cull's text on participation as attention insofar as it discusses how ‘superhuman’ sensory attentiveness might operate in modes of participation, whilst rejecting attention understood as ‘an intentionally directed mental force’ as a means to explain away magical relations or ritual exchanges between people and things.

Karoline Gritzner's essay explores the question of form, formation and formlessness in relational aesthetics, first within the theatrical framework of Live Art (Franko B) and then by drawing on examples of located performance in the work of Sophie Calle. In both cases, participation (the spectator's and the performer's) is problematized: on the one hand, participation culminates in the form of an arrest at a limit (a limit experience) where the performance denies the agency of the spectator/participant; and, on the other hand, site-based performance establishes a relational network that foregrounds the spatial and temporal dynamics of participation whilst exploring relations between action, seduction and the suspension of will. Focusing on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's walks, Her Long Black Hair (2004) and Ghost Machine (2005), Eirini Nedelkopoulou develops a concept of participation as ecstasis – a term which, etymologically, ‘refers to the idea of “standing out” (from the Greek ek-stasis which literally means standing outside oneself)’. In reference to the phenomenology of Heidegger and MerleauPonty, Nedelkopoulou frames ecstasis as a corporeal experience of ‘losing oneself in an alternate mixed-media world’, but also as that which makes way for a different kind of presence or ‘communality’. Ecstatic participation, she contends, ‘is not simply a process of standing outside one's body, but a complex reciprocal exchange’ between bodies and technology, and bodies and the world, that might be productively understood alongside Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘chiasm’.

In his contribution, Will Daddario navigates the participatory dimension of Adorno's philosophy, which, he argues, culminates in the creation of a dramaturgical practice. Daddario concentrates on Adorno's complex formulation of pseudo-activity, his critique of commitment as it pertains to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht, and his unique formulation of mimesis as an attentiveness to the shock of the unintelligible. Daddario argues that Adorno's conception of a nonrepresentational mimetic interpenetration between subject and object constitutes the driving force of his negative dialectical procedure and can be understood as a dramaturgical intervention in the performance of everyday life. The final contribution to this issue is a conversation between Karoline Gritzner and Alexander García Düttmann, which takes as its starting point a statement by the late Austrian novelist and dramatist Thomas Bernhard: ‘Each person wants to participate and at the same time to be left alone. And because it is not possible to have it both ways, there is always a conflict.’

The issue emphasizes the interdependence of theatre, performance and philosophy during the transition from thinking in terms of the Cartesian notion of the subject as detached spectator, to what we might call ‘the philosophy of participation’ in which thought and theatre are reconceived as immanent productions in the world, rather than transcendent systems representing a prior presence. That is, decades (or, one could argue, centuries) before the emergence of ‘relational aesthetics’ as defined by Bourriaud (2002), artists and theatre practitioners were working to dismantle the Cartesian theatrical dichotomy, just as philosophers were reconceiving the nature of thought as a form of participation in the mutually transforming processes of an everchanging, creative world.

As such, participation can be discussed in the context of centuries old confrontations between those who espouse an ontology of ‘equivocity’ and ‘transcendence’ – such as Plato or Descartes in philosophy and dualistic models of theatre – and those who insist on ‘univocity’ and ‘immanence’ – such as Spinoza or Deleuze, Artaud or the Living Theatre. In this context, ‘participation’ might be considered as a form of dialectical mediation or communication (between part and whole, particularity and universality, the subject and the object), or it might be explored as a philosophical concept understood to signal a break with the dialectical approach to reality in favour of positing a primary relationality in which mind and matter, beings and Being, or substance and expression, participate in one another. Bergson's theory of ‘intuition’, for instance, proposes a modality of expanded perception capable of entering into the ‘flux of durée’ in which all things take part. At the same time, this context also allows us to address participation as a theatrical concept that aims to undo the strict distinction between performer and spectator, and at its most extreme pole – with practitioners like Allan Kaprow and in some instances of Forum Theatre – to erase any hierarchical distinction between the co-creators of the participatory event.

This then raises the question of the relationship between participatory performance and the philosophy of participation: Is there a difference between how performance and philosophy think (as Deleuze and Guattari argue in What is Philosophy? (1994))? Does performance raise philosophical questions of its own kind and is performance a kind of thinking in itself? What does it mean to participate in (the thought of) performance? To question the relationship between performance and philosophy is not simply about demonstrating how a performance might illustrate existing philosophical discourse. Rather, it involves an interrogation of the modes of thinking that performance itself engenders and, as such, how performance and our participation in it or with it might impact upon how we define ‘thought’. By way of response, the issue instigates a series of relays between the theory and practice of participation, between philosophies of immanence and relational art, between intuitive thought as a way of ‘taking part’ in the world and participating in performance as a kind of thinking.

At the same time, the issue engages with a theoretical context that is more explicitly critical of the idea of participation. For instance, Adorno was sceptical of ‘committed art’ and argued that the Culture Industry manufactures a false sense of participation and belonging. And Jacques Rancière recently argued that ‘spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into an activity’ and that ‘it is high time … to call into question the idea of the theatre as a specifically communitarian place’ (Rancière 2007: 279). In such a climate, we need to interrogate our definitions of participation and to question the tendency to assume that theatre and performance are somehow ontologically equipped to allow participation to take place; we need to question the promise of ‘empowerment’ that participation is often assumed to deliver, as well as the notions of ‘community’ with which it is frequently associated. Finally, in the visual arts, Claire Bishop has debated the efficacy of relational aesthetics to produce, rather than merely reflect, social relations and argued against the primacy of ethics over aesthetics in the evaluation of participatory practices – a position that stands in stark contrast to much of the scholarship on participation in applied theatre contexts.

Notes

¹ Fisher states that, in the eighteenth century, ‘[t]he town's displeasure with a manager's decision, or a dramatist's script, or a player's performance or nonappearance, could result in varying degrees of disruptive behaviour, from full-scale rioting and pelting the stage with fruit and other objects to hissing players and demanding apologies. The theatregoers' pleasure could be equally disruptive: they might call for several encores of a particular speech or song, or cheer so loudly that … the actors could not be heard’ (Fisher in Kattwinkel 2003: 56)