Self or Group Technology?

Ambiguities of the workshop format

Authors

  • Stefan Hölscher Ruhr University Bochum

Keywords:

performativity and theatricality, practice-as-research

Abstract

In my contribution to this volume I would like to investigate in how far the recent spread of the workshop format in the dance field in its difference from the formats of rehearsal, training, or showing can be contrasted with the historical emergence of the workshop in the Neo-Avantgardes of the 1960s and thereby situated in the area of conflict between group technologies and technologies of the self. I am doing so by relating my own current research project to Michel Foucault´s late investigation of ascesis and different kinds of subjectivity, to Richard Schechner´s approach to the workshop, and to the research Ana Vujanovi?, Bojana Cveji?, and Marta Popivoda have been conducting under the title Performing the Self in the last years. At the end of this essay I will briefly say a few sentences about the durational event Life Forms which took place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin from April 25 till 27 (2019), since this contemporary workshop-like setting very much reflected on what I would like to call the paradox of the workshop.

Author Biography

Stefan Hölscher, Ruhr University Bochum

Dr. Stefan Hölscher is a postdoc within the framework of the Fritz Thyssen research project Collective Realization – The Workshop as an Artistic-Political Format at the Institute for Theatre Studies at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). His PhD Capable Bodies – Contemporary Dance Between Aesthetics and Biopolitics has been published by transcript in 2015.

References

Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso.

Chiapello, Eve, and Luc Boltanski. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Verso.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–228. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1997. “What is Enlightenment?” In Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 303–320. New York: The New Press.

Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Janevski, Ana, and Thomas J. Lax, eds. 2018. Judson Church Theatre : The Work is Never Done. New York: MoMA.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 2009. Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Martin, Carol. 2006. “After Paradise: The Open Theatre´s The Serpent, Terminal, and The Mutation Show.” In Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and their Legacies, edited by James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, 79–105. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203420058

Palladini, Giulia. 2017. The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv47w8w5

Ramsey, Margaret Hupp. 1991. The Grand Union (1970-1977): An Improvisational Performance Group. New York: Peter Lang.

Sarasin, Philipp. 2010. Foucault zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.

Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. London and New York: Routledge.

Downloads

Published

22-04-2022

How to Cite

“Self or Group Technology? : Ambiguities of the Workshop Format”. 2022. Performance Philosophy 7 (1): 84-96. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.71306.

How to Cite

“Self or Group Technology? : Ambiguities of the Workshop Format”. 2022. Performance Philosophy 7 (1): 84-96. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.71306.