A Live Gathering: Performance and politics in contemporary Europe

A Live Gathering: Performance and politics in contemporary Europe
edited by Ana Vujanovic, with Livia Piazza,
Berlin: b_books, 2019


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people.
Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’.

ISBN 978-3-942214-29-2

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TAKE IT OR MAKE IT (2016-2017)

Artistic experiment on social choreography of democracies by Ana Vujanović

 

I set an experimental artistic process based on the premise of working together, in a group, on the issue of the democracy as a real-existing organization of social situation. The experiment takes as its point of departure the cinematic score by experimental filmmaker Heinz Emigholz for his movie Schenec-Tady I (1973).

Emigholz_score

Heinz Emingholz: score plan

Firstly, five performers interpret that score individually, creating artistic materials separated from each other and then they get together and negotiate how to create the group situation democratically, starting from the five solos.
This experiment can result in a presentation, performance or stay in a laboratory framework.
Every time the process is different, as well as its results, since the types, forms and principles of democracy which are examined and physically probed depend on the artists involved and their social contexts and concerns.
For that reason I’m especially interested in the contexts with fragile democracy, where we can see it weak and under the question.

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