Performance, Memory, Re-enactment.
o Ong Keng Sen (Singapore)
· Alternative University: Artistic Projects
· In-Transit Festival (Berlin)
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o Narrating the stories of the past
o (He started the talk by describing; telling the story of how the project started…met that old woman who was an ex-dancer….)
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o During dictatorship killing of artists. Bring those narratives onto stage. He asked her to perform herself onstage. Having both absence and presence. She was the “embodied body”.
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o Documentary on stage. Dealing with ‘disappearance’. Performance about the betrayal of death.
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o Tracing the thread of memory (Butoh)
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o Is this a document of authenticity?
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o Tino Segal: Is it important to be performed by them?
o Ong Keng Sen: Yes it is for my work.
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o The fading body. The deciding body is fading on her.
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o Political bodies.
o Year 0: Return bodies to the agricultural. Rehabilitation, re-education of bodies.
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o How to retrace?
o Performing absence.
o Performing themselves: Duality as presence and absence.
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o “ Diaspora” (Performance in Edinburgh)
o 5 visual artists with background in migration/displacement looking at family...
o Interviews: Tong- Collection of other people’s photos in order to trace the past. Photos found in antic shops.
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o Background: Videos with narratives of traveling by different means. (Train, river etc)
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o Real/Representation/fiction? After ten years of performing themselves
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o Different methods of documentary on stage/ of representing the absence.
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o In other performance: Read the script as of the performance is happening. Performative narrations through the translations themselves.
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o PERFORMING AUDITORIUM
o 1) Bringing to present.
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o Ana Longoni (Argentina)
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o 1) 1973-1983 Dictatorship
o 2) Mid ‘90s
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o A photograph that gets another meaning – Presence on missing people.
o Making silhouettes of missing people
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o 30.000 bodies. Using models to create silhuettes. Using a demonstrator (a person) who ‘gives’ his body to the missing person.
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o Take somebody on the street and put against the wall and draw the silhuette on the wall. (Plaza de Mayo) (Dictatorship)
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o 1984-‘85
o 1) Mothers take profile of peoples hands and write names and dates on them. With these they covered the demonstration.
o 2) White masks covering the faces of the demonstrators but also following the idea if missing people because they were canceling their names, their identities.
o 3) Re-lounge public actions. Scratch system. Scratch can happen anywhere. Scratch speaks about victims. They were looking for the responsible ones.
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o Street Art: Signaling art Ï Conceptual Art
o As a memory of the existence of jails etc.
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o Antonio Preto (Mexico)
o Cabaret theatre.
o Jesusa Rodrigues and Liliana Felipe – “La Soldadera Autogena, 2001”
o Las Reinas Chulas
o Lesbianas de ayer, hoy y siempre (2007)
o Las hijas de Sapfo.
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o 2) Re-enactments.
o Rebecca Schneider (Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA)
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o Protest now and again.
o Re-enactment
o Document/ Reenactment/ Document / Reenactment…
o Performance circulation.
o Cindy Sherman/ Nick Ridout
o Inter in Animation between liveness and documentation. How they undo each other..?
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o Re-document
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o In doing again, to think again.
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o Not interested in Artistic Re-interpretation like Marina Abramovic does. (Reenact 7 pieces at the Guggenheim) or Vito Acconcis piece “seedbed” by M.Abramovic. Appropriation Art.
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o BUT instead interested in being AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE to the first. Literal translation. Too close copy.
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o Threat of literal and cross-temporal translation.
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o Put themselves in the place of the past by posing as if they were soldiers etc
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o They will touch time.. .Play across their bodies of what really happened. But also accessing what the document is missing.
o Not in the past but NOW. Ex. The civil war has not finished, we are now still fighting.
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o Still photographic images. Questioning the liveness of the photograph.
Is it an evidence of liveness?
There is a space of uncertainty between those two spaces (live or not live)
To relive the still.
Looking at the photograph only as a document (as Roland Barthes was), that is only an indication of the past, of sth that has disappear means that we see time as linear.
Live performance disappears in time, it troubles linear temporality.
Reenactment has to do with time.
Narratives of progress. Narratives of development are narratives of certain capitalist time.
Trouble of mimesis (the face, the copy) its relationship to time is composed by temporal lug or temporal drug.
Gertrude Stein: “Trouble with theatre is liquidated time.”
Extreme mimesis.
Elizabeth Freeman Packing History. History 2007
1967 - Shulie - 1997
o The dialectic of Sex. 1970
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o One time passing as another time…. but also … Time passing and not passing.
o “The bygone is not gone by!”
o “The live, not entirely or not only live”
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o NOW: National Organization of Women.
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o Live reenactments of speeches without being able to locate in space and time.
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o Compose the sense again of the past. Not only how to protest but when to protest. We are not starting now or our now is not the only now.
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o Repetition. What happens to linear history if the second becomes first?
o What are the limits of this future?
o What are the limits of now?
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o Revolution is over, it can’t happen.
o Raymond Williams.
o Revolution is to turn around.
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o The celebrated substance of performance.
o Now it doesn’t remain.
o The ephemerality of performance.
o Political possibility of reprotest.
o Temporal drug.
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o Janez Janša
o How to deal with history in the context of performance.
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o 1960’s - Contemporary Art.
o History of contemporary art.
o Existing performances or artistic works. Not all of his works he calls ‘reenactments’ but some of them he calls ‘reconstructions’.
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o Fragment, Dramaturgy. Elements of everyday life. Playing – ironizing authorities. Not in direct confrontation but anti-authorization. Not only external terms but also aesthetical authorities.
o Not in relation to the mainstream performances.
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o 1) Why to reconstruct
· ‘80s Reconstructions of historical avant-garde of the ‘20s. (Surrealist, Bauhaus etc)
· 2000 Reenactment of historical events or performances. Every act of historising a construction.
· Always we perform past for the future.
o 2) Why reconstruct if we have a good recording?
· Authenticity.
· What is performance as a live event?
· Edited audience.
· Fidelity, copying and doing as close as you can.
· Always miss the target, the point.
· The only true act would be reconstruction of the audience!
· We can never have the same context.
o Pupilija : How would MTV look like in 1969? Collage principle.
· Relationship between two different times.
· Bring back voices that have been erased or forgotten. When you reconstruct there is interest in bringing back voices that are not heard! (Political act of reconstruction)
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o Scandalisation of a performance.
· The history of art by works which stayed only because its scandalous dimension and not or not only its quality!
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o Creating show that deals with historical event. Why not to construct instead of one, two histories?
o Ex. With Pupilija: Not being allowed to kill chicken on stage. So we won’t kill the chicken on stage but we will show what is the real situation (show the real is anyway the point of killing a chicken on stage)
o Show the dimension that we live now. Þ Stage censorship or prohibition. Legal and legitimate.
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o Chapterhouse
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o Home
A. Video B. 1st hand accounts of scene
C. Regulation quotes D. Act (kill chicken)
o Decision of the audience by voting.
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o What you reconstruct and how you do it?
o Whether the original performance existed at all?
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o Media mediated society!!! Real and unreal.
o Reconstruction:
· Confrontation between real and performed.
· Paradigmatic performances of media cultures!!!
o Search for the real (killing an animal in a performance)
