I’d prefer not to: Situating Acting as an Instituent Practice
Discussant: Kristina Hagström Ståhl, visiting associate professor in Theatre and Performance Studies, Stockholm University
The project examines acting in a contemporary horizontalized institutional climate in terms of a kind of lost situatedness, testing the extent to which acting can navigate institutional heteronomy by playfully incorporating the institutional imaginary as a shared experience of not-knowing, forming a new 'situation' for the practice of acting, as well as for the practice of spectatorship.
Guided by the fictional character Bartleby from Herman Melville's classic novel, artistic tactics are explored which negate the status quo to unleash heterotopic productivity of multiple alternatives to a prevailing institutional condition, both reconnecting to historical avant-gardism and outlining a future post-avant-gardist repertoire of parasitic/mutualistic tactics.
The hypothesis is that the incorporation of multiple incongruent imaginary positions within a given institutional condition as a kind of artistic material, opens up the art form's unique contribution to questions of art resistance in terms of a third generation of institutional critique and as an instituent practice. Using the stage as an ethico-political laboratory for agonistic forms of interaction, the project experiments with institutional rehabilitation and increased social resilience by producing and distributing a phronetic practical knowledge of how we can deal with polarizing antagonism without submitting to a sovereign authority.
The study primarily addresses acting as an art-making and a pedagogical practice, but the intention is to demonstrate how an embodied and performative institutional acting practice potentially, through responsiveness to the situation-specific, has wider application, especially in situations characterized by an epistemic deficit and where several incompatible discourses are in antagonistic relationship.
