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SHIFT TITLE

Abandoned Practices

SHIFT DATE       25.6    SHIFT TIME      17:00 - 20:00    SHIFT VENUE      Zagreb Youth Theater ISTRA

SHIFT CURATOR LIN HIXSON and MATTHEW GOULISH (Every house has a door)

SHIFT PARTICIPANTS CAROL BECKER and ALAN READ; BRANISLAV JAKOVLJEVIĆ; Every house has a door: LIN HIXSON, MATTHEW GOULISH, SELMA BANICH, MISLAV ČAVAJDA, STEPHEN FIEHN

SHIFT ABSTRACT

Abandoned practices constitutes an emerging field of inquiry pioneered by Alan Read of King’s College, London, recently detailed as Abandoned Practices & Endangered Uses: Performance & the Recovery of Disciplinary Diversity and introduced by Read as follows:

Performance research can, among those disciplines that constitute the humanities and social sciences, claim a rigorous, historicized approach to the study of ‘practices’. In recognition of this facility, fields as diverse as legal studies, material sciences and medicine have joined the established academic disciplines of anthropology, sociology and psychology in their deployment of performance research paradigms. It is the nuanced vocabulary of making, doing and showing, drawing on critical theory and continental philosophy that has established performance study at the centre of 21^st century intellectual engagement, from political theory to historical re-staging, from the metaphoric representations of nano-physics to forensic reconstructions of crime-scenes.

What has been heralded from within the emerging discipline of performance research as the ‘performative turn’ has, on closer scrutiny, always been definitional to each of these border fields and their means of operation. Defence theories, practices and technologies were always ‘demonstrated’ (a term popularized by Clausewitz) in ‘theatres of operation’ and ‘theatres of war’, laboratory sciences always had to ‘test’ their outcomes within ‘control groups’, criminal legal cases were always determined by ‘advocacy’ and ‘defence’ and medical case notes always narrated symptoms and cures within ward ’rounds’ and ‘operating theatres’.

The ubiquity of performance measures within a diverse range of disciplines and fields is no longer contested, if it ever was. But the precise definition of the role of ‘practices’ in these operations remains vague and largely unaccounted for. This is partly because most research into practices, such as that conducted in theatre itself, but also much more widely across the material and social sciences, has been disproportionately interested in those practices which have ’survived’, continued or been successful in impacting upon contemporary operational modes. This is understandable given one of the principal interests of historical recovery is the better understanding of how such pasts shape our presents. Such enquiry informs the vast majority of current research across disciplines, especially in areas of ‘practice as research’ (such as theatre studies) for whom the re-invigoration of art forms now is a declared intention of many of the best and most relevant researchers in the field.

The proposed research project ‘Abandoned Practices & Endangered Uses’ takes a quite different approach to the same problem. Equally committed to the advancement of contemporary performing practices and their relation with disciplines, across the academy as well as associated professional cultural and public fields, this research seeks to identify, recover and examine examples of those practices which have been abandoned for economic, political or disciplinary reason. Rather than privilege those practices that ‘endure’, the research focus here will be on those that are eliminated. By shifting attention in this way to the lost, the redundant and the marginalized, the initiation of an alternative history of practices will be possible – one that will throw a properly critical light on those practices that have temporarily won their place in the pantheon at the expense of others. The objective here will be to gauge what has been gained in the rejection of what has been lost and to measure what would be gained in recovering what has been abandoned.

EVENT STRUCTURE:

Part One: Alan Read and Carol Becker dialogue

Taking as starting points the contention of Isabelle Stengers, (Free University of Brussels) that ‘the invention of modern science’ has drawn our attention to the elimination of practices in the name of scientific ‘progress’, and Giorgio Agamben’s proposal in Profanations, that “The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely play,” Alan Read and Carol Becker engage in a composed dialogue circulating, among other subjects, abandoned beliefs and concepts, utopian teleology, and the sacred. The dialogue will incorporate texts extracted from Part Two (below).

Part Two: Every house has a door – work-in-progress performance, with Selma Banich, Mislav Čavajda, Stephen Fiehn, and Matthew Goulish.

Lecture notes by director Lin Hixson

Lin Hixson directs the first public work-in-progress showing of the first performance by Every house has a door, a performance company initiated by herself and Matthew Goulish for project-specific international collaborations, “seeking to retain Goat Island’s narrow thematic focus and rigorous presentation, but to broaden the canvas to include careful intercultural collaboration, and its unfamiliar, even awkward, spectrum.

“This first piece, Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never, with artists Selma Banich and Mislav Čavajda from Zagreb, and Chicagoan Stephen Fiehn of Cupola Bobber, proposes an encounter between Croatia and the US, through responses to an unlikely, “equidistant” third entity, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The performance extracts texts from an essay by Stanley Cavell, and re-enacts, by way of the performers copying the film in real time off computer screens, a scene captured in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie of a grotesque feast in the commune overseen by Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl in 1974.

Part Three: Branislav Jakovljević response

Branislav Jakovljević will deliver a composed response to the combined efforts of the dialogue and the performance. A transition into a conversation with the audience will follow.