“(De)parting, where will this note lead me?”: otherness and contemporary performance

Abstract

The narrowing of the relationship between life and art in contemporary theater offers the opportunity for the actor to make his or her creation a journey in and of itself, discovering other ways of acting in the world. However, within a fictional context, this effort will be in vain without updating the perspectives of "character", "body", "action" and "scenic presence" formulated by the dramatic tradition. The article raises these questions through comments on a scenic experiment titled “Departures: where does this ticket lead me?”, created from a conference by Mia Couto and part of the performance “The Future by Half: Scenic Variations on the Same Conference” (2012). In it, the questions related to alterity raised by the Mozambican writer unfold in a device that challenged two actresses to find, in the same fictional matrix, always renewed logics and sensibilities. Ultimately, the experiment was an improvisation subject to ticket interference that was delivered to the actresses by an outside provocateur. The tickets contained precise and unusual tasks that should be performed on the scene, always in response to a partner's action or some casual event. Conditioning the achievement of something already established to something as yet unknown has destabilized the control relationship between the agent and the act - the mark of a logocentric subject - which created the conditions for the emergence of other and unsuspected ways of affecting and affect in that situation. It was verified that the "character" in that experiment, was only possible to be understood as the possibilities of the actress from an always renewed recognition of themselves, he other with whom they act, and the situation itself. In this context, “action” was approached as the effect and agency of a "body" that is provisionally constituted and which in turn becomes "present" only in the absence of a fixedly identified subject. This perspective of acting demanded changes, also, in the perceptive quality of the actresses, that allowed the break with the patterns established by the high excitement of our day to day, that narrow the human existence to a set of automated behavioral mechanisms. In this sense, the experiment with the tickets also points out ways for the elaboration of an ethical and political dimension for the actuation in the contemporaneity.