Week 9 Map - Ethan

Performance as a mode of political power

Not all about dances and dancers, rather about social fields generated by experimental movement/choreography

Five singularities are activated by performances and they, “express the proper name of the event they precipitate: the event of thingness, …darkness,… animality,… persistence,… solidity,” (7)

Neoliberalism acknowledges the power of performance. It requires that citizens perform but it issues and imposes its own model of performance. Neoliberalism deems performance as something to be ‘dealt with’ and does so through “surveillance of the citizenry, the privatization of cultural activities, the economization of artistic expression, and the movement of sociality as mainly the movement of Self(ie)-images disseminated through controlled and monetized cyber-platforms are the rule” (9).

Dance, or the social field it creates, is about remedying the ailment of human’s lost nature but its own practice illuminates the futility of this purpose (85).

Reminds me of quote from Wicked, “I never use the words HUMANist or HUMANitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature,”

“Searching for inorganic and non-human modes of being is not the same as embracing diminished, impoverished, humiliated, or abject forms of living… and being,”(111) it is about relating to the others of nature and earth.

“Forensic” or scientific non-experiential expert is replacing the witness, the experiential expert. Experiential expert is least qualified because they were there. (171)

Witness and storytelling is being discredited.

Witnessing addresses the entire social field because it shares experience beyond their own, encompassing others.

Delineation between audience as witness (aware of political aesthetic power) and audience as spectator