Parasomnia: Sleep against Capitalism

Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.

ARTS-BASED ACTION RESEARCH ON ENHANCING CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY THROUGH AFFECT WITHIN PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE ART AND PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY

This article presents arts-based action research on enhancing children’s creativity through affect within participatory performance art and performance pedagogy. The study hypothesis was that children’s creativity can be enhanced by affect experienced at a performance site. The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of children’s involvement in artistic performance on their creativity at a performance site. The impact of interactions at the site, the co-participating children,and the involved artists were monitored on a daily basis to collect qualitative data, which were analyzed using a general inductive approach. Objective themes relating to the variables were retrieved from the collected data and assigned codes, concepts, and keywords extracted from photographs,video recordings, and observation notes. The case under investigation was the “Nomadic Radical Academy 2020: The Good, the Bad, and the Art”, which built on a pilot event held in 2019. This research concluded that performance art can have a social and creative impact during an art event through children’s participation and can be used by performance artists and educators.

A Shift Towards Digital and Participatory Performance Practice Post-Pandemic

This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live Magdalena:On:Live, the first online multi-platform Magdalena Festival, bringing together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet, in dialogue about current shifts in performance making with performers, writers, and directors declaring their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network – whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice – were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge, or by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but served a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of ‘disembodiment’ – as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival - and the embedded argument of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making, both live and digital. 

Stepping back: Reflecting on accessibility in integrated dance improvisation

Finding more accessible ways to train, create, perform and work is a major concern of researchers and practitioners (Ajula & Redding, 2013, 2014) of integrated and disability dance. In the spring of 2017 eight dancer/researchers from CRIPSiE, an integrated, disability and crip dance company located in Edmonton, came together to investigate their practices of timing through a participatory performance creation process. Participatory performance creation values researcher reflexivity (Heron & Reason, 1997). In this paper I reflect on the way that collaboratively building an improvisation score, a series of tasks and prompts that the dancer/researchers responded to (Gere, 2003), created inaccessibility for one of the dancers/researchers, Robert. At the time I assumed that improvisation itself was inaccessible. Upon reflecting I realized that the improvisation was accessible and that Robert was improvising in ways valued by both the integrated improvisation literature and the other dancers/researchers.

Echoes Down the Years

This chapter examines the history of human-machine assemblages used to speak for the dead, comparing the practices of the nineteenth-century American Spiritualist movement with those of present-day transhumanist mind-uploading. In both cases, forms of mediated communication give the dead a continuing voice in society through a participatory performance involving the medium—a person whose consciousness is suspended in a state of trance, or a set of algorithms—the deceased, and an audience. Mediumship becomes a theater in which audiences both desire and interrogate the capabilities of necro-communication technology. The chapter attends to these technologies’ implied models of selfhood, which disaggregate mental content—software—from the vehicle of its expression—hardware—in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. The chapter argues that the technologies in question inevitably structure, in concerning ways, political notions of possessive individualism, which become commoditized in the shift from human-performed mediumship to selfhood instantiated in proprietary software products.

Bodies Out of Time

My research into the exciting realm of participatory theatre examines the centrality of the body as a vehicle for experiencing dynamic performance events. I sought to investigate how embodied participation means in such experiences by discovering a way to study its relation to generating, recording and transmitting knowledge. To do this I generated a theory of temporal embodiment which reveals temporality as key to the affective potentiality participatory performance events can possess. I used this theory to examine various embodied participatory event case studies, including Zuppa Theatre Co’s VISTA20 and UnSpun Theatre’s Lost Together, both of which explicitly theatrical performance events. I then applied Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor and Freddie Rokem’s work on how cultural performances transmit cultural memory and enact culture itself to my theory. Due to my interests in how these cultural processes parallel what my theory of temporal embodiment reveals is at work in explicitly theatrical case studies, I then explore a final, paratheatrical example; Parque EcoAlberto’s Caminata Nocturna. Through these case studies I uncovered complex interrelations that suggest embodied participation has the potential to simultaneously recontextualize, alter or develop both memory and identity and therefore impact action a participant will take in the future. By accommodating these disparate examples, my theory gauges both efficacies and drawbacks of types of embodied participation. This insight reveals the relationship between form/content as integral to the efficacy of a performance event to use to participation to promote future action or change.

Psychological Dangers in Participatory Theatre

The emerging popularity of participatory theatre encourages audiences to immerse their senses in the art form. My research aimed to analyze how artists can make their participatory performances psychologically accessible without compromising their creative intentions. The awareness surrounding mental health and psychological safety has grown alongside audiences' and artists' desire to engage with art intimately; thus, artists are encouraged to find a creative way to implement safeguards. My research began with conducting interviews with mental health professionals and studying texts on psychology. Understanding how emotions are constructed allowed me to explore how an individual's relationship with danger can fluctuate between feelings of exhilaration or the fear of harm. I analyzed Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty theory and defined the emerging theory of Theatre of Care. I investigated where the danger lies within these theories and how audience emotions can be exploited for the sake of immersion. To provide examples, I conducted case studies of various participatory performances I have attended and researched to illustrate successful applications of audience safety and potential dangers. Finally, I highlighted dramaturgical elements to incorporate psychological safeguards in participatory performance. My results suggest that individuals construct their emotions from past experiences. Theatre of Cruelty and Theatre of Care theories represent how, although marketed as different audience experiences, they possess many opportunities for triggering psychological harm due to the immersive representation of reality. Consequently, artists must implement psychological safeguards, both dramaturgically integrated into the performance and externally available, to reduce the likelihood of psychological harm and trauma.