Bodies of Performance: Subversion and Technique [WiSe 2025/26]

Keti Chukhrov

BA/MA Lehramt: KW Module - BA/MA Konservierung/Restaurierung: Modul B.X.3.1 (KG 1-4)

Since the performative turn of the 1960-s, performance activities have been associated with social emancipation. What in traditional epistemologies has been considered a pathology and subversion, in the context of performance practice acquired the status of civil liberties and artistic courage. Moreover, broader discussion of clinical experiences (be it psychiatric cases or subversive sexual behaviour) implied aesthetisation of a pathology which was viewed as the performative agency of creative subjectivity. Performance understood as the critique of knowledge and reason permeates the works by Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard among other thinkers; their works became the cornerstone of the post-disciplinary critical theory, to the extent that they questioned the borders of pathology and normality. Crucial in this case was not only exposure of trauma (and subversion), but letting it exist in its natural being and temporality of daily existence, without forceful technical elaboration, as it was the case in pre-modernist performing experiences of music, theatre and dance. Indeed, numerous practices of contemporary performance-art and post-dramatic theater feature the bodies, which, according to Andre Lepecki, rather expose their own solitude in the time of daily being, than attempt to compose intensities, which would enact characters in artificial temporalities or extra-ordinary conditions.

Unlearning the discipline has traditionally been considered emancipatory in contemporary culture. However, paradoxically, the loss of performing technique, as Grotowsky, Lacan or Deleuze show, entails the loss of sensuous access to empathy, to the grief of others, and ultimately to the event. The current seminar will explore what social, institutional and ethico-aesthetic consequences stand behind performance in both cases – when it rejects performing technique and when it relies on ...