The changing status of the idea of this book demonstrates its urgency and necessity. When we first proposed a collection on performance phenomenology, four short years ago in 2014, we did not blink at the prospect of the task we set ourselves of writing a comprehensive overview of the meetings of phenomenology and performance. We thought it would be sufficient to solicit a few key essays from major scholars, and write overviews ourselves on key themes, which would together amount to a reasonably thorough mapping of the main contours of the field. Today, with performers and performance scholars making snowballing numbers of claims to phenomenology, such a project seems, if not a little heroic, then at least a far more complex, significant and weighty undertaking than could be achieved in a collection of this magnitude. As Stuart Grant observes in his essay in this collection, âThe Essential Questionâ, âthe current pace of growth and change would mean that [âŚ] the study would be obsolete before it was publishedâ (p. 20).
We were and still are, however, propelled by a shared concern with an increasingly urgent central aim and purpose. When we began the project, as scholars of performance who had been practising phenomenology for more than a decade, we had been pursuing our philosophical craft in a hostile atmosphere, dominated by largely ill-informed critics of phenomenology, raising second-hand objections based on incorrect interpretations of criticisms by phenomenologists of the works of other phenomenologists. Newer phenomenologists, such as Derrida, Levinas and Butler, were simply carrying on the tradition of critique inherent in the infinite process of reduction initiated by Husserl and invigorated by Heidegger and all those who followed. The very act of performing the phenomenological reduction always reveals new and hitherto unnoticed presuppositions in previous phenomenologies. Phenomenology itself is, in essence, a process of what Heidegger termed destruktion, and which Derrida relabelled as deconstruction. Deconstruction, like its Heideggerian forerunner the Abgrund and Levinasâ âface of the otherâ, is essentially a phase of the historical development of the reduction . Because of this, one of our lesser aims has always been to point out that such criticism of phenomenologists by other phenomenologists is a necessary characteristic of the phenomenological tradition itself. It is a basic tenet of phenomenology that it continually drives towards an ever more radical fundamentalism. The greater, more pressing problem which drives this book is that the growing wave of emerging scholarship in performance studies which brands itself as phenomenological is often based in naĂŻve and misconstrued conceptions of what constitutes phenomenology. Although we have always believed that this new phenomenological wave would one day break on the shore of performance studies, and that scholars of performance would enhance the scope of the phenomenological endeavour in new ways, there is a pressing need to examine whether and how these new putative phenomenologies are and are not phenomenological. So our primary aim and purpose have always been to lay out and demonstrate the conditions of what we believe to be the parameters or basic impulses that we understand to constitute the truly phenomenological. The question is: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of phenomenology as applied to performance? The first two essays in the book take up this question explicitly, and many of the others return to it in the context of their specific investigations .
Still, although we have decided to eschew the finer details of this argument in this introduction, and to leave it to the essays themselves, it is, to some extent, foreshadowed by the structure of the book. It should be noted that the sections of the book are somewhat broad and indeterminate, and all of the articles might exhibit tendencies which could place them in any of the sections. However, we feel that the divisions of the book are necessary and meaningful in the way that they indicate the structure of the field itself. There are multiple facets of the possible relationships between phenomenology and performance. The two disciplines, with their respective objects and approaches, come together, cross paths and inform each other in many different, multidirectional, overlapping ways, practical, theoretical and metaphorical , and no doubt, as the incidence of performance phenomenology accelerates, they will come to do so in as yet unforeseen ways. Consequently, as the structure of the book suggests, the copula one uses to separate or join the two words is significant. There are three parts: Part I: Phenomenology and Performance; Part II: Phenomenology of Performance; and Part III: Phenomenology as Performance/Performance as Phenomenology. Part I examines aspects of broader issues in how the two practices come together, conceptually, thematically and historically, with an aim to demonstrate phenomenologically derived fundamental constitutive conditions of performance. The separate chapters in Part II enact specific applications of phenomenological methods , wherein some of the tools, tenets and conceptual apparatuses of phenomenology are trained on particular instances of performance. Again, while we might argue that all the chapters in this volume do this to some degree, the contributions in Part II are particularly focused on such approaches. This might be thought of as performance phenomenology in practice, but in a practice of a certain kind, where phenomenology becomes the mode of address towards specified performance phenomena and events. Finally, the chapters in Part III aim to demonstrate ways in which performance can be understood as phenomenological, and, conversely, ways in which phenomenology is performative . Clearly, as stated, a certain degree of overlap between the three parts emerges, but our goal is to lay out different possible avenues to a richer, more thorough, and more defined understanding of how phenomenology and performance might relate to one another .
As the opening chapter, âThe Essential Questionâ, makes clear, a chief aim of this book is to articulate and provide examples of what phenomenology and, of, and as performance might entail. In this respect, we intend this volume to not only join in the increasingly rich conversation about phenomenology and performance, but also to harness and focus some of the key terms of reference in that discourse. Recent publications such as Theatre Phenomenology: Manual Philosophy (Johnston 2017); Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (Home-Cook 2015); and Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (Bleeker et al. 2015) offer a strong and diverse indication of the field. The editors of Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, for example, make careful note of an historical and in some ways structural kinship between phenomenology and performativity, reminding us of Derridaâs observation comparing phenomenological reduction to a theatre stage (2), and identifying âquestions about how audiences make sense of performanceâ as specifically phenomenological in nature (4). Even more explicitly, they suggest that both performance and phenomenology are grounded in key, shared, proposition: âthat the world is fundamentally mysterious as well as the site of all that we can knowâ (1).
The contributions to that volume explore this kinship in various modes and âcornersâ of performance practice; Pannil Camp, for instance, looks to Husserlâs notion of âimage consciousnessâ to identify the way in which Husserlian phenomenology (specifically in terms of reduction) and performance practice both âset up the relationship between the mind and the world in similar waysâ (21). Joslin McKinney adopts Merleau-Pontyâs ideas about exchange to trace the âinteraction and exchange between the human and the nonhuman in scenographyâ (121); for McKinney, a phenomenological perspective helps illuminate the ways in which âobjects and materials in their performances have agencyâ (122). These contributions go a long way towards detailing how one can think about performance through phenomenological tools and perspectives. Our current volume, however, seeks to contribute a greater deal of clarity about those tools and perspectives, and consider not only the breadth of kinship between phenomenology and performance, but also the methodological and structural foundations upon which that kinship rests.
To do so requires a certain degree of didacticismâa (re-)establishing of some basic tendencies and attitudes in what makes a study phenomenological, and indeed, about what makes an event of performance performative. However, we also find it important to acknowledge that those tendencies and attitudes, although necessarily rigorous, are not a set of rigid imposed procedures. They must entail a certain degree of diversity and flexibility determined by the object and materiality of the study itself. Heidegger is clear on this. Phenomenology aims âto let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itselfâ (1962, 58). As Stuart Grant observes in this volume, â[t]his is the concrete methodological meaning of âback to the things themselvesâ. So phenomenology of performance generally or of a specific performative phenomenon must derive a significant component of the enquiry from an understating of the performative itself. The issue is well captured by Bert O. States, when he refers to phenomenological analysis as not so much of âa relentless methodology or a deep philosophical concern for the nature of consciousness than to an attitude that manifests itself with varying degrees of purityâ (2007, 26). States makes an important distinction here between âmethodâ and âattitudeâ. As many phenomenologists nowâincluding a number of the contributors to this volumeâwill contend, the genesis of phenomenology in and through the work of Husserl is methodological and scientific almost to fault, and that is as it should be. But as history shows, as soon as phenomenology becomes a dialogic tradition, with Heideggerâs response to Husserl, the means, modes and methods of phenomenology begin to splinter and vary. It is essential that the necessary clarity and rigour required for something to stand as phenomenological do not lead to an inappropriate orthodoxy. In the spirit of this caveat, some of the contributions in this collection (e.g. Redmond, or Damian Martin) are ostensibly somewhat removed from the methods and concepts of the major recognised phenomenologists. Our hope is that this does not disallow them as works which share in the fundamental impetus of phenomenology, as outlined in the first chapter, of meticulous description in the service of reduction to essence and fundamental conditions. With this gesture , we hope to offer a study that is, if not comprehensive, at least indicative of the variety of ways of apprehending and knowing phenomenologically that are clear and rigorous, yet flexible, emergent, responsive, and indeed, alive to the âthing itselfâ as that thing appears and is given .
Part I: Phenomenology and Performance
As already established, the first chapter, âThe Essential Questionâ, by Stuart Grant , seeks to lay out some essential categories which constitute phenomenology as phenomenological. Key among these is description which aims at essence. The âaims atâ is important here. Phenomenological essences are not fixed eternal Platonic forms, but ever renewable, deeper unveilings of more fundamental conditions, and unravellings of taken-for-granted presuppositions . To give an overview of the field, Grant complements his methodological and conceptual considerations with an overview of some important early works of performance phenomenology and points to a few possible future directions. He gives particular weight to the importance of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone in this overview .
Sheets-Johnstone prefigures and looms large in the world of performance phenomenology. Her Phenomenology of Dance (1966, reissued 1979; 2015) is the first explicit and exclusive application of phenomenology to a genre of aesthetic performance . Sheets-Johnstoneâs status and importance are evidenced by the number of contributors in this collection who cite her writings. Since her first pioneering work, she has continued bringing together phenomenological, evolutionary, biological, anthropological, neuroscientific and aesthetic studies devoted to the question of the grounding importance of kinaesthesia to all spheres of human activity. Her major work, The Primacy of Movement (1999, expanded and reissued 2011), and the equally important trilogy The Roots of Thinking (1990), The Roots of Power (1994), and The Roots of Morality (2008), are major philosophical treatises which are yet to receive the full recognition and impact which will un...