Performance after Deleuze: Creating ‘Performative’ Concepts in Contemporary Dance in Europe

In my PhD I am researching how performance creates its own concepts on the basis of the analysis of a varied but coherent selection of works (seven performances of Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Mette Ingvartsen, Eszter Salamon Jonathan Burrows et Jan Ritsema) that have been presented as ‘contemporary dance’ in Europe in the last decade. The theory of performance I am aiming to produce departs from two manoeuvering lines in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: on the one hand, concepts, problems and ideas representing the transcendental field or the virtual, and on the other, a contextual, contingent, situated in the medium of performance, conceptual practice, comparable to Deleuze’s theory of cinema. My main claim is that performance cannot be reduced to an act that reinforces the normative structure of theatrical representation or transgresses it – an act whose meaning transcends or is outside of duration. Performance is virtual, actualizing itself in making, performing and attending as the three modes of differenciation that yield to a creation of performative concepts: actual, local and situated solutions to the problems and questions arising in performances.

Part 1 is an introduction of the performative concepts thesis as well as of the ‘material’ of the research. Seven works are historically situated as performances of choreography, and are presented, first, through a research methodology developed in each and, second, through the procedures by which they critically undermine theatrical representation and denaturalize the medium ‘dance’. This part explores defining performative as ‘expressive’ concepts in a more general discussion of concept, and then proceeds to elaborate the problems of expression and the virtual as well as the performative concepts arising within the three modes in which performance actualizes (making, performing, attending). The last section supplements the main thesis by arguing for the concepts of performance and attending as opposed to spectacle in the etymology and usage of the term ‘spectacle’ in theater.

Part 2 begins by developing notions from Spinoza’s and Bergson’s theories of knowledge (adequate ideas, three kinds of knowledge, intuition, time as duration) and how they relate to Deleuze’s own interpretation of these sources in Bergsonism, Expressionism in Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, and Logic of Sense. I will argue that imagination (‘feigning’) characterizes the kind of thought creative of ideas in making, performing and attending. Next the performative concepts expressed in making, performing and attending are elaborated on the basis of the analysis of the seven works. Part 3 concludes with the proposal of a Deleuzian concept of performance: ‘creative individuation’.