Performance as Response

[Stefania Mylona]

I was so happy to get Laura’s email asking for the participants’ feedback mostly because the truth is that I wanted to share my thoughts on others’ thoughts. But why? What is it that makes us wanting, perhaps needing or even feeling obliged to response? Otherness. In a sense, all performance can perhaps be perceived as a response.

What’s love got to do with it? Perhaps that all life performance is generated through acts of love. In practice and literally through making love (much much fewer times rape).

Philosophy and performance as a-contextual in the sense that they respond to a context rather than being essentially contextual. Philosophy and performance are transdisciplinary since everything can be practiced or performed.

What is the difference between the terms practice and performance? Practice is what we do. Performance is what we do per-form or for form.

What cannot be practiced and what cannot be performed? (if we could think of something)

From the ‘I’ of practice-based research to the ‘we’, which suggests thinking as collective and subsequently as responsive.

The conditions of doing or not doing define how much each does or doesn’t. Negative performance, nothingness and the neutral also happen as a response to a disorienting overload of performance and information. A response also to Joe’s more-ness, to more and more and more, to more expression, to externalizing the thinking process, to externalizing the creative process, to inward movement. [In the performing arts thinking is creative – ‘the art of thought’]. As a response, sometimes doing nothing may actually do more than doing something; more than practice. But what is it that it does? What does absence do? Allowing us to think of performance as a response to what is there.  Also, bringing what is not there to existence; inclining us to think of performance beyond its political use and more towards an existentialist mode. 

What is more dramatic if not post-dramatic theatre? Is there anything more dramatic than the absence of drama?

The impossibility of being able to reject the (dis)continuity of life through rejecting ideas, practices etc. Why should we feel the need to do so?

Re-enacting rejection. Why?

Even a potential philosophy of rejection Prof Bowie, has meaning the moment it is practiced. A continuous search for meaning cannot be meaning-less despite not providing ‘the’ answer. Then why does the word meaning exist? If we cannot find meaning why does meaning exist? There is meaning in existence. Existence is meaning.

Rejection as endless: by rejecting something we always find something else.

Knowledge, learning or questioning prerequisites caring.

References in writing also happen in practices which include fragments of other practices.

Performance philosophers perform philosophy from below. The artists’ ignorance of philosophical histories might provide a positive possibility for making philosophy.

Thinking and writing about what we do not know is right. Thinking happens in order to know and because we do not know. The problem begins when we think we know (better). Knowledge and thinking become generated in the very impossibility of (knowledge as) telos.

Thinking and being as interminable, failures to question the unresolvable question of being.

Being is a response. So rather than, what moves us? Why do we perform? Why being? Perhaps the question should be: Why responding?

(If I do not respond to that in which I participate then why participate?)

How much does response have to do with an inner felt respons-ibility? What is the difference between a-bility and i-bility? “Susceptance: the imaginary component of admittance” What does the Latin ibilitās mean?

The physical, bodily reading of texts that Mullarkey examined and Bleeker’s performance of perception made me think that perhaps we could also perform a movement analysis of thinking. Don’t we all somehow choreograph thinking? How do we direct thinking, where and why? Its spacing in relation to time and speed, the dynamic qualities of thinking, how do we shape thinking? The speeding and dilating of thinking? The rhythm of thinking.  Which thinking? The weight of thinking. The effort of thinking. The weight of performance – the weight of philosophy.

In drawing together performance-and-philosophy we make performance philosophy and by bringing them together we create new gaps. Which are they?

Yes, ok, the difference between the lemon tree and its representation is not of kind but of degree. Thank you. I hope (although it is very certain), I will make more mistakes so that I will always feel the need to be with others who respond back to me. Each subject is capable of perfect thought if judgment comes from its own thinking. Perfection lies in thinking’s imperfection, in its collectiveness, in its complementarity, its responsiveness.

Excessive rationality becomes completely irrational.

Practice and performance are larger fields – as more inclusive – than theory. Everybody practices whilst not everybody theorizes.

Performance and arts practices do not form an argument as philosophy does: Why should we ‘argue’ anyway?

Performance philosophy is more critical than critical theory because it rejects criticality through affirmation (paradox 1). However, actually arguing and conflicting dynamics and bringing together conflicting dynamics lies at the very heart of performing arts performance.

Philosophy may be considered as based on common sense while artistic philosophy might enrich philosophy by including minoritarian thinking. 

Practice includes its own analysis.

Awareness reduces the effectiveness of performance yet awareness remains always incomplete.

What is it that concerns us? Others. Thinking is based on others. 

Performance is doing the opposite of what it is saying in terms of effects. In this logic of inversion, where performance has an opposite effect to its intention, rejection may be thought of as the very act of affirmation.

Philosophies of rejection – acts of affirmation. (paradox 2)

Philosophy is a withdrawal, art is a withdrawal from life and suicide could be thought as the ultimate withdrawal. But we are here, withdrawing only partially in order to maintain life, art, performance and philosophy. 

That Which Is Not There, Is Here In The Text.

Texts respond.

People respond. How can we ‘make sense of sense’? How can we sense another person’s degree of perception? By encountering as Prof Bleeker stated both an experience ‘of’ and an experience ‘from’. Perhaps also by observing the speed of perception and the speed of response. The perception of time also relates to the time of perception (space, shape, rhythm, effort, qualities etc).

Attention is at-tend and has within it a tendency towards a respond. That which provokes our response, that which makes us responsive is more likely that which will catch our attention.

Thinking as connecting thoughts of different modes. So, if I see a painted lemon, smell and touch a real lemon can I perceive the real lemon without ever seeing it? If I can, does this mean that I have seen it in my past and I am able to recollect the memory from my unconscious? That which is there is connected to that which is missing. Is it really missing? How far can imagination go? Can we imagine beyond the things we have seen? Perhaps not, but there are various degrees for imaginative thinking.

Is that which is not there that which we do not perceive? Can we sense something without being able to perceive it (yet)? Sensing something indicates its potential to be perceived.

Respond?