doing things with/out words

              with/out words

                  out words

                                   words

This text

You are probably reading this text trying to understand what I am trying to communicate, assuming that the words articulate thoughts that can clarify, raise questions, provoke debates, and even – in an ideal situation – gives rise to dialogues or conversations. In this case you will be reading the text in silence, paying attention to the literal meaning just as much as to the intentions. You will be an active reader, because all readers are active, even those who limit themselves to putting images or feelings to the situations and actions described by a hack writer. More so those readers who attempt to see, question, respond, participate.

You could read this text in silence and in relative immobility, but you could also read this text out loud, could shout, exclaim, or sing it, making gestures that accompany each sentence, interjecting sounds or your own words. This would be a theatrical reading (if someone was watching you) or a performative one (if you are not very concerned whether someone is watching you or not at this moment). But it would only be an active reading if your ways of enunciating, gesticulating, moving, or relating to the others meaningfully (not necessarily with intention) clarified, questioned, responded, or intervened in the text and in the thoughts that the words articulate. In order for your performance to succeed, you should have read the text beforehand, or at least have an idea of what the text says. The text will then be transformed into the quoted word. It will be precisely the repetition that will make possible that these propositive (but written) sentences are transformed into performative utterances.

I could try to write per formatively: […]

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Text published in the book-catalogue Per/Form. How to do things with[out] words, curated by Chantal Pontbriand, CA2M-Sternberg Press, 2014,89-118

Text published in Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, CENDEAC, Murcia, 2010, pp. 39-56

The validity of the performing arts as a medium is related to their resistance to be fixed. Contrary to what occurs with literature and cinema, per- formance practices cannot be converted into closed texts. Hence the impossibility of documenting them. Hence the frustration of semiotics in its approximation to the performance world. Hence too the interest in their study as an approach to new penomena in communications and creation derived from the network and implementation of digital technology in an artistic environment.

When speaking about dramaturgy and not about text, we think of an intermediate space between the three factors that make up the theatrical phenomenon: theatre, acting and drama. Theatre is the place of the spec- tator (social or performance space); performance («actuación»), the place of the actors (expressive or dynamisation space); drama is the place of action, whether codifiable or not in a text (formal or construction space). And we can then discover how in different epochs and contexts, from each one of these places, the other two have been submitted to criticism and transformation. And we can also understand that dramaturgy is a place somewhere in the middle of these three places and therefore at the same time nowhere. It is a space of mediation.

Download the text: Dramaturgy in the expanded field