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Abstract
In this article, we address the perception of sexual activities in performance within public spheres, looking at how they become aesthetic, social and cultural interventions once embodied within performative events (theater street performance, carnival, festival, rave, etc.). As part of our methodology, we study the works of two theater companies, La Fura dels Baus and Teatro Oficina. These companies’ performances in urban contexts, as well as at some festivals and particularly carnivals, become a way of staging sexual acts in public spaces, in opposition to the dominant narrative of sheltering such acts in private, domestic space. We look at how collectiveness and civic spaces become essential elements of this phenomenon, and its relevance in our contemporary reality as an element of subversion of social structures.
Notes
1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 38.
2 La Fura dels Baus, available online: www.lafura.com; and Teatro Oficina, Uzona Uzyna, available online: http://teatroficina.com.br
3 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 2.
4 Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.
5 Habermas, Structural Transformation, xvii. Politics become here the rules of the game within the public environment; they come to define behaviors and interactions of the body and its relation to the spaces where human interactions take place.
6 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 3.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 83.
10 Mikhail Bakthin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
11 Rose Weitz, The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behaviour (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3.
12 Michèle Alexandre, “Dancehalls, Masquerades, Body Protest and the Law: The Female Body as a Redemptive Tool Against Trinidad and Tobago’s Gender-Biased Laws,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14 (2006): 178.
13 UNICEF, “Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War,” available online: https://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm (accessed July 30, 2018).
14 Michel Foucault, “Des Espaces Autres” [Of Other Spaces], Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–9.
15 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 73. “[Social] space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their [relative] order and/or [relative] disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object.”
16 Foucault, “Des Espaces Autres,” 48.
17 Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 57.
18 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles, Spheres I: Microspherology (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 28.
19 Ibid., 46–8
20 Pat Califa, Public Sex. The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994), 71.
21 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, Melbourne and New York: Quartet Books, 1977), 177.
22 Califa, Public Sex, 74
23 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
24 Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto antropofago," Revista de Antropofagia 1 (1928): 3,7, available online: https://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/771303/language/en-US/Default.aspx
25 Aleksandar Dundjerovic and Luiz Fernando Ramos, “Introduction: Collaborative Theatre Practices in Brazil,” in Brazilian Collaborative Theatre, eds. Aleksandar Dundjerovic and Luis Fernando Ramos (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2017), 23.
26 Tropicalism is an artistic movement that reflected the identity of Brazilian Arts during the dictatorship period (1964–1986).
27 Miguel Ángel Trenas, “‘Suz o Suz,’ Nuevo ejercicio de La Fura dels Baus sobre la violencia,” La Vanguardia, September 1, 1985, 28.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic
Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic is professor of Performing Arts at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK. He is an award winning theater director and author with international experience working in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Iran, Russia, Colombia and Brazil. He has taught at University of London (Royal Holloway), University of Manchester, University College Cork (Ireland), University of São Paolo (Brazil) and University of Belgrade (Serbia). He has published a number of books and academic articles on contemporary theater-making and cultural production, on collaborative theater and performing arts in Brazil and on the creative practice of Canadian theater and film author Robert Lepage.
María José Martínez Sánchez
María José Martínez Sánchez is a lecturer at the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design, UK. Her work explores, through interdisciplinary methodologies, performativity in architectural and urban spaces. In 2012 she was awarded the INJUVE prize for young creators in performance for the piece entitled VACIO, which was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia (Madrid). She has presented her work at the Quadrennial of Scenography in Prague (2015), the Biennale of Dance in Venice (2016), the Biennale of Architecture in Venice (2018) and the Spanish National Theatre (CDN) (2018).