performless: the operation of l'informe in postdramatic theatre

Abstract

This thesis discusses radical aesthetic strategies that appear in postdramatic performances, with the aim to examine how they 'work' and what their impact is. More precisely, it looks at particular strategies from recent performances by the Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and by the Flemish director Jan Fabre - considering them exemplary cases for this strand of theatre - and argues that they resist performing according to linear conceptual and perceptual patterns, and in this way resonate onto the ethical. Concentrating on scenes during which extreme, cryptic and at times disturbing uses of texts, bodies, rhythms, voice and sound appear on stage, it namely shows that these works confront their audiences with the unexpected and cannot be easily assimilated by normative grids of understanding. Even though such strategies have been mainly discussed and contextualized by theatre-scholar H.T.Lehmann (1999), it is argued that his study does not offer sufficient conceptual tools to sustain an in-depth investigation of the dramaturgical implications and the impact of radical aesthetics. Launching a prolific dialogue with Lehmann's study, this thesis therefore proposes to turn to and theorize the notions of form and the formless (l'informe), as they were conceived by G.Bataille (1929) and later on developed as conceptual tools for visual arts by Y.A.Bois and R.Krauss (1997). Through a careful examination of this notion's conceptualizations it appears that l'informe is not a static concept or idea. Instead, it should be considered as an operation, as a performative with a “task”, which is to undo the 'good' form of things from within. In this sense, the present study holds that l'informe shows a negative performativity and performs 'less' than what is expected from it, which renders it an important tool for analyzing the performances in question. The word 'performless' in the title of the thesis marks exactly this movement and introduces a play: it brings together different aspects of the formless and performance by italicizing the term 'form' and making it functional in more than one ways (perform less, formless, perform). This thesis, hence, theorizes the notion of l'informe for the context of postdramatic performance, suggesting to consider radical aesthetic strategies as “operations of formlessness” and arguing that they have an impact onto the ethical. To this end, an additional extensive focus on the work of philosophers J.Derrida and G.Agamben is conducted, examining different aspects of the performances: uses of language that resist logocentric meaning, cases of human and nonhuman animals' appearances on stage that 'lower' the humanness of western theatre, and dramaturgies of time that activate a dynamic experience of time. The thesis finally concludes that this strand of theatre triggers a radical openness to the unexpected, launching the possibility for a meta-ethical ethics, which I propose to call an 'ethics of potentiality'.