Performance and Politics
Lecture by Bojana Kunst

  • Performance and Politics

    Maja Delak, “What if”, photo by Nada Žgank

The lecture examines one of the pivotal issues through which the political aspect of the performance can be discussed, the notion of time.

Troubles with temporality arise from the paradoxical interlacing of precarious, fleeting and immanent temporal dimension of the performance on one side and reified, repetitive and reproduced temporal aspect of the performance on the other. This does not only have consequences for the ontology of performance, but it is also strongly related to the articulation of the political force of performance.

The politics of the performance can be namely approached as the conscious politicization of its manifold temporality: how the performance is offering itself as a series of temporal resonances, echoes, delays, continuations, abandonments, temporal disarrays, discoveries and ruptures. From this perspective I would especially like to address some aspects related to the performance practice from so called “Eastern Europe” and speak about some troubles with temporality which arise through the discursive and historical capture of singular practices.
 

Professor in the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies / ATW – Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft at the Justus-Liebig university in Giessen, Germany.

In her academic work she is mainly occupied with the problem of body in contemporary performance, theatre and dance, gender studies, philosophy of the body, art and technology, art and science, theatre and dance studies as well as the representation of identity in contemporary art. Kunst regularly publishes and teaches in several European countries. Among her publications are: ”Impossible Body” (Ljubljana, 1999), “Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy” and “Relation to the Artificial” (Ljubljana, 2004).

See also: