Materiality of Gesture

Performance as an artistic (anti)disciplinary
field is often historisized as emerging from a
will towards immateriality, grappling with art's
commodity status and situating its practice at the
threshold between theatricality and objecthood
with the body as its common denominator. This
rather young classification of post-1945
object-rejecting practices allows us to put them
in conversation with different historical
incarnations of the culturally situated movement
of bodies in space that precede this terminology.

In this seminar we will consider the different
histories of the purposeful mobilization of
gesture, thinking about the difference between
performativity and performance, the role of the
moving body in the process of identity formation,
and the relationship of these practices with the
notions of ritual and spectacle. Following the
idea that reality is constantly being built by the
fleeting citation of the past existing in every
gesture--from minuscule actions like brushing our
teeth to highly connoted ceremonies like a
handshake or a burial--I want us to think, through
readings and exercises, about the power and
potential that exists in the re-doubling and
recontextualization of specific movements into an
artistic manifestation.

Looking together at diverse incarnations of
performance and ritual we will analyze their
relations to a historical and social context,
their strategies, and we will devise our own
sequences imbued with personal meaning and
mythologies. This seminar involves readings on
performance's and performative theory, collective
watching of documentation and the realization of
exercises conceived to foster different approaches
to action and gesture in order to rethink our own
rituals, their meaning and origins, their
world-building power and their relation to the
notion of spectacle and sight as a mode of
perception.


Open Seminar is a series of seminars of special
topics chosen by the instructor.