The Mediterranean Performance Zone. Female Gestures of Re.Action and of Re.Enactment
Fr. 12-16, an folgenden Terminen: 11.11. / 18.11. / 25.11. / 2.12. / 9.12. / 16.12.
Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 1.411
The material/symbolic construction of the Mediterranean as a ‘borderland’ makes it a real and imaginary space of intervention for the activism and experimentation of performance practitioners. The course mainly relies on the theoretical praxis advanced by Postcolonial and Postmodern Gender Theory to interpret performance-based artworks circulating in the Mediterranean area. The theoretical voices presented, will be actualized into and intersected with specific practices of Mediterranean performativity, which innerve the potentiality of ‘re’.acting against dominant discourses and of ‘re’.enacting feminine desire. The ‘re-’ prefix serves as a prop for performance analysis: ‘repetition’ endeavours alternative strategies for narrating and resisting mainstream discourses controlling the body-movement (also in term of free circulation inside/outside the borders of Euro-Mediterranean zone), and, at the same time, it critically argues for the investigation of political and aesthetic phenomenon of re-construction, re-performance and re-doing of past events.
Students are invited to reflect on issues related to bodily memory, reiteration, restored behaviour, and practices of aesthetic ‘hospitality’. They will acquire gender-critical and postcolonial theoretical assumptions, they will engage with the contingency and the urgency claimed by Global South’s aesthetics of this historical conjuncture. The course examines several ‘gestures’ of Mediterranean performance practices, selected in different theatre-dance, mixed-media and intercultural languages. The teaching plan will be divided into 6 thematic areas:
- Performing the Mediterranean
Feminist theories and Cultural and Postcolonial Critique
Revolutionary ‘movements’ - Gestures of Re.Actions
Performance analysis of artworks circulating in the Mediterranean area
Re.Acting the Arab Spring - Gestures of Re.Enactment
Antigone’s Myth Re-Exists: Antigone, The Living Theatre, 1967; TOO LATE! (antigone) contest #2, The Plot is the Revolution, Motus, 2009-2015; Antigone, Ulrike Quade Company, 2012; Antigone, Valeria Parrella, 2012. - Digital Practices of Hospitality: Archive, Visual art and Memory
Archive of Migrant Memories (Lampedusa – IT); www.archiviomemoriemigranti.net/en
Open Borders Projects (FR-EU) – www.videodansebourgogne.com ;
The Matriarchive of the Mediterranean. www.matriarchiviomediterraneo.org (IT-EU) - Thinking/Performing with Water
Performance analysis of works dealing with ‘watery’ images and liquidity - Gestures of Migration/Migration of Gestures
Théâtre du Soleil 2003-10 (H. Cixous/A. Mnouchkine); Lampedusa Beach, 2013-16 (L. Prosa)
3-10 (H. Cixous/A. Mnouchkine); Lampedusa Beach, 2013-16 (L. Prosa)