Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Theatrical potentialities"

This article, written as a puppet show, presents playfulness as a tool that can be used to formulate a new understanding of matter, following the elaboration of this concept by the philosophical movement ‘new materialism’. The relation between human and non-human, together with the boundaries that separate them, is explored through examples of contemporary art practices. The text is shaped in a theatrical and playful manner to test these concepts, considering both their potentialities and risks.

This paper focuses on highlighting the particular contribution of the recovered object in the change of artistic techniques and the aesthetic modalities of theatrical representation. It is an opportunity to emphasize this alliance between everyday materiality and the space of the scenic representation in the form of the recovery of the forgotten and an attribution of a second life which is relative to objects marked by obsolescence. Objects loaded from reality, familiar use, and social sharing acquired rhetorical functioning captivated by their use in unusual space. Our approach consists of stopping on this particularity of the recovered object from a comparative study of its different uses by the directors and the playwrights. This is done in order to highlight the artistic potentialities which it generates and the various aesthetic reports that it triggers in the theatrical field. This type of representation highlights the fight against the obsolescence in favor of a new spectacular load so as to mobilize the spectators' imagination. For this purpose, it seems to us that the recovered object is able to find the base of its aesthetic representation. It is about a reflection object which makes the usual the origin of a rhetorical expressivity in order to place it at the very center of the theatrical creation.

In the context of systemic psychotherapy, the genogram represents a model of graphical representation which the persons involved produce and comment on in order to provide information about their family of origin, from at least a three-generational perspective. This paper proposes a new variant of the genogram, focused on theatrical language: the result of a five-year experiment in the training of dramatherapists, psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors. Starting from Stanislavski's and Grotowski's research, the paper highlights the potentialities that the theatre perspective may have with the genogram. Thanks to the ‘emotive memory’ and ‘body-memory’, the theatre can enrich the genogram method with a set of operational tools that can increase the introspective potential of the genogram itself, especially through the aid of physical actions. If the act of drawing represents an expressive ‘medium’ in the traditional genogram for stimulating the affective memory of family ties, then the language of performance can even better represent this medium, centred as it is on the activation of the body as a vehicle capable of bringing into contact the individual with his identity and his deep memory, even regarding the family, in order to creatively translate this into a communicative and narrative form.

This essay interrogates Ludovico Ariosto’s theatrical poetics by charting his developing sense of the theatrical space and his embrace of the contemporary. From an initial appropriation of Roman stage models to a more nuanced appreciation of the comic possibilities afforded through a modernizing use of the contemporary city as more than a mere backdrop, Ariosto inscribed his native Ferrara in comic form, at once a subversive antithesis to the idealized courtly city and a repository for comedic potentialities. This is most evident in two of his comedies: Il Negromante (1520; 1528) and, in particular, La Lena (1528), in which Ferrara (both named and unnamed) assumes an increasingly important role in the construction of the “comic city.” Ultimately, Ariosto’s transformation of theatrical tradition may be located in his interrogation and satirization of the vices and mores of Ferrara, resulting in the creation of one of the finest plays of the Italian Commedia erudite. Cet essai examine la poétique théâtrale de l’Arioste en retraçant le développement du sens de l’espace théâtral dans son oeuvre et la manière dont il est lié à son époque. L’Arioste s’approprie d’abord les modèles romains de décors de scène, pour ensuite en explorer les possibilités comiques par une appréciation plus nuancée de la représentation de la ville, qui dépasse le fond de scène. Ainsi, il inclut sa ville d’origine, Ferrare, dans la forme comique, ce qui en fait à la fois une antithèse subversive de la ville de cour et une source de possibilités pour la comédie. Cet aspect s’observe en particulier dans deux comédies: Il Negromante (1520 et 1528) et, davantage encore, dans La Lena (1528), dans lesquelles Ferrare (nommée ou non) prend une importance croissante dans la construction de la « cité comique ». Enfin, les transformations que fait subir l’Arioste à la tradition théâtrale s’observent dans sa mise en cause et sa satire des moeurs et des vices de Ferrare, ce qui donne le jour aux meilleures pièces de théâtre de la « comédie savante » italienne.

This article shows how to account for the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity in the arts. By following the genesis of a new theatre production, we examined the sociomaterial practices involved to unpack the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity. To account for this, we draw on concepts from laboratory studies to explain creative and design work. In so doing, we considered the significance of distributed creative practices that are constituted by intermediaries which we argue, help to outline, refine and develop the creative idea. This article is especially attentive to the professional practices in the rehearsal room; what we called the ‘ creative laboratory’, the locus where material artifact and their potentialities unfold in the process of creating a work of art ‘yet to arrive’. Extracts from ethnographic observations are used to illustrate the creative process from the germination of ideas to the collectively arrived at final production. In this respect, the rehearsal room is where initiatives are trialled and tested, and specific aspects of a scene (re)created, to feed into the composition of the emergent theatrical work.

Рассматривается особый способ телесного присутствия зрителя в различных произведениях виртуальной реальности (VR). В некоторых из них зритель присутствует лишь в роли наблюдателя / свидетеля, или «призрака», не способного взаимодействовать с миром виртуальной инсталляции и влиять на происходящие в нем события. В других же элемент интерактивности проявляется ярче, роль зрителя более не сводится исключительно к наблюдению, он становится активным участником инсталляции. Произведения искусства, созданные с применением технологий виртуальной реальности, – это искусственные «миры», предлагающие зрителю новые ощущения, обычно зрительные и слуховые, потому что в большинстве проектов передача тактильных ощущений пока отсутствует. Важным аспектом при разработке VR-инсталляций для художника является определение законов «поведения» виртуальной среды, окружающей зрителя, и здесь возможны эксперименты с законами альтернативной природы – VR. Также важны «правила» присутствия в VR зрителя / пользователя. Важно определить, на каких основаниях, в каком статусе он находится в пространстве инсталляции, обладает ли механизмами реагирования, рычагами воздействия на «мир», и если нет, то чем это обусловлено, почему это может быть ценно и для зрителя, и для художника. Если же элемент интерактивности находится в центре образной структуры проекта, то какие выразительные возможности могут открыть действия пользователя и его интеракция с произведением и другими пользователями через это произведение? Как можно охарактеризовать опыт, который получает зритель, взаимодействуя с VR-работами? На эти вопросы мы и постараемся ответить в данной статье, исследуя различные произведения искусства, созданные с помощью технологии VR. Основной авторский тезис заключается в том, что развитие виртуальной реальности дает возможность выстроить опыт нового чувственного плана: альтернативной субъективности и сверхчеловеческого видения многомерных взаимосвязей между явлениями и событиями в мире, – выводя тем самым наш способ мышления на совершенно другой уровень – внеэгоцентрического состояния, формирующего новую оптику «планетарного видения». This article discusses a special way of the bodily presence of the viewer in various works designed for virtual reality. In some of them, the viewer is not able to interact with the world of a virtual installation and influence the events taking place in it (although they can, for example, move through the digital space); in others, there is a limited quality of presence at the perception (but not action) level leading to a meaningful result: when the viewer is compelled to observe events as the director/artist intended – their gaze is built into the point of view of the director or camera. Finally, there is a third type of VR projects where we find an enhancing user interaction with the digital environment. Viewer’s capacities – including the ability to move in the space of the installation and interact with it – depend on the “genealogy” of a particular VR piece. There are basically two types of VR pieces that have the same image and sound output devices, but differ significantly from each other in the way moving image is produced and in the kind of effect produced on a recipient. The first type involves the creation of real-life decoration with actors in it filmed on a panoramic camera (a device with a 360-degree view). This kind of the piece is similar to panoramic cinema: it is basically a film that provides a high-quality image and a bright immersive effect, but does not provide the viewer (just like classical cinema) with the opportunity to interact with screen reality. In these cases interactivity goes down to choosing the point of observation and following the camera. Examples reviewed in the current article include such pieces as “Caves”, “Container”, “Montegelato” (demonstrated at the Venice VR Expanded, 2021 program), etc. The second type of VR is based on creation of virtual space and 3D models of characters and objects inside it (“Goliath”, “Anandala”, “Last Worker”, “Samsara”, “Lavrinthos”, also viewed in Venice). These pieces are technically part of a game-design framework since they are constructed on game “engines” and imply a high degree of interactivity. Here the emphasis is on the interaction with an artificially created world, even though authors may limit the viewer’s ability to act within the VR space and make only limited number of choices. Observing various strategies of interaction in VR, I outline three kinds of them: (1) lack of interaction; (2) limited interaction (participation at the level of perception, but not action); (3) full-fledged interaction. Artists put the very phenomenon of interactivity into question each time eliminating certain aspects of this experience. For example, a user can be deprived of an ability to move (as in the Tree VR project offering one to “be” a tree that cannot “respond” to the violence committed against it) or, conversely, granting one such “rights” and “powers” in the virtual world that are hardly imaginable in everyday practices (flight, telekinesis, etc.). The element of interactivity may either structure the project or, on the contrary, be “bracketed”, users’ actions (participation or the lack of it) turn into means of artistic expression. What kind of expression? How can we describe the experience that a viewer gets interacting with VR pieces? The current article provides an answer to these questions in a broad sociocultural context, including issues of bio- and digital ethics. I examine the VR pieces of the first and second type (where a viewer is limited in actions and cannot influence the events taking place in the installation) and explore the difference between them, conceptualize the compelled inaction of the viewer. In this regard, based on the concept of event introduced by French philosopher A. Badiou (meaning something that changes the frame of our perception of reality), I agrue that VR technologies can be considered as a machine for producing events – an apparatus for actualizing potentialities that are converted into events for the viewer and in the future may or may not become a reality. It depends on whether the viewer decides to “embed” the opportunity offered by the virtual event into their Weltbild. For example, one could take off VR-glasses and transfer the aesthetic affect into some kind of action in reality beginning to show greater social responsibility, taking part in social assistance programs, becoming more tolerant, etc. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by experiments conducted in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University (USA). Furthermore, I focus on projects that create the possibility of communicating and interacting with nonhuman agents that populate the space of VR installations. And the emphasis is shifted from the “anthrope”, who is used to seeing oneself in the center of the world (a subjective position that has been constructed in Western culture since the Renaissance) to the play of nonhuman entities. This pulls up the paradigm of anthropocentrism, basic to European culture, and provides one with an ability to think and act on a completely different level — on extra-egocentric one. In case when the viewer has freedom of movement and interaction within the VR world, the rules and restrictions that the artist/director imposes on this interaction are important, since the quality of viewer’s experience will be shaped by it. It is the need to perform motoric actions aimed at achieving a specific goal (or the impossibility of doing so, as in case of projects of the first and second types) that shapes viewer’s identity in the field. In a VR installation of the third type (“full-fledged presence”), the viewer can, like an actor in the Stanislavsky Theater, become an actor “in the proposed circumstances”. The elements of such installation and models of user’s interaction scenarios with its interface (including motoric actions) are aimed at helping the viewer get immersed into their “role”. However, if in theatrical plays and films actors were supposed to perform for a spectator to follow the plot and transfer their emotional and cognitive projections onto it, in VR these projections are turned onto the viewer. Thus, in the field of virtual reality, languages of various arts intersect: theater, cinema, game design, etc. are giving rise to multiple hybrid formats of experience. Projects of the third type can also be seen as shattering the viewer’s habitual egocentric position. Such projects, which problematize our experience as a contingent construct, make it possible to design an experience of alternative subjectivity. I argue that the development of virtual reality makes it possible to build the experience of a new sensual plane: a re-subjectivised and superhuman vision of multidimensional relationships between phenomena and events in the world. Thereby our way of thinking is being brought to a completely different level: an extra-egocentric state that forms a new optics of “planetary vision”. ”Planetary optics” does not imply a view from afar. The precise (not abstract) way of thinking is a challenging thing; it is hard to get away from reducing reality to familiar schemes, binary oppositions and common hierarchies. That is why, while analyzing the strategies of artists working with the medium of VR throughout this article, I focus on pieces where these familiar schemes get overturned. A hunter becomes a prey, an actor becomes a non-participant, and so on. The binaries of male and female, Eurocentrism and Orientalism, nature and culture, animal and machine get blurred not to erase the boundaries between them but with the aim of offering the spectator-actor a new perspective or even a set of perspectives, points of view, positions of various stakeholders, polarities and experience of a multipolar world. “Planetary optics” does assume a multipolar world (after all, we cannot block some part of it and separate ourselves from other beings, we are too intertwined with other techno- and biological actors) — and one of the ways to achieve this multipolar way of thinking can be through the experience offered by the VR medium, an artistic image that becomes personal experience. And, in turn, existing experience will allow the viewer to attain a more flexible and tuned perception, correlating it with the Weltbild, perhaps, of social groups far from it with their own interests, which however must be taken into account. Therefore, VR as a medium has not only artistic, but also social meaning, since it may concretize and focus human thinking, prone to abstraction, it may synthesize the sensual and the rational. The further development of virtual reality will perhaps make it possible to build a visual experience of a new kind: one associated with a different scale of view, different assemblage points, the experience of a hybrid space that combines the virtual and the real (what might be called a “meta screen”), so that the user will be able to look at the world with a different vision (for example, to see multidimensional connections and networks of actors in different approximations).

This project will be an examination of the potentialities of using conceptual blending to describe the cognitive processing that occurs when audience members engage in a theatrical event. Specifically, it will frame the processes using the play White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour, which itself examines the multiplicities of mental spaces required to engage in performance. In this project, I hope to examine conceptual blending and its relation to theatre, especially metatheatre, in which audience members must balance several levels of performance and reality in one theatrical event. There has been research conducted into relating blending theories with semantics, semiotics, and literature, in particular in the realm of metaphor in which a reader must maintain both the original and analogy in the same mental space in order to draw the comparison. The move towards theatre follows logically, as it encourages audiences to view a performance of fiction or imagination while balancing the 'real' quality of the actors, set pieces, or even words and story, as in verbatim and documentary performance, respectively. Considering these ideas, my core questions can be grouped around three main ideas: How does conceptual blending function when watching theatrical performance, specifically White Rabbit Red Rabbit? What specific moments in the script, performance, or audience experience in White Rabbit Red Rabbit prompt conceptual blending, or challenge our usual conceptual blending process? What implications are there for the use of conceptual blending or cognitive science in theatre for shaping audience perception?

Abstract Considering, based on Vigotski’s reflections on the actor’s creative work, that character building can be a transformative experience in which the body and affections play a crucial role, we propose a scenic experience that transports such potentialities to social relations as a strategy for overcoming oppression at school. It is the Social Theater of Affections (TSA), the assumptions of which are based on Spinoza, Vigotski and Boal, especially on the concepts of intelligent emotion, catharsis, body, singular/universal dialectic and ethical-political suffering. As an example, we discuss a scenic intervention performed in municipal school aimed at confronting gender violence. The scenic actions place the actor as a dramatist and the audience as an actor, intertwining them in the feeling of the common and in the power to imagine and rehearse strategies to overcome oppressions crystallized in affections and social relations. Thus, in the creative act, individual suffering is transformed into collective action.

For once I want to be the car crash, Not always just the traffic jam. Hit me hard enough to wake me, And lead me wild to your dark roads. (Snow Patrol: “Headlights on Dark Roads”, Eyes Open, 2006) I didn’t know about the online dating site rsvp.com.au until a woman who I was dating at the time showed me her online profile. Apparently ‘everyone does rsvp’. Well, ‘everyone’ except me. (Before things ended I never did ask her why she listed herself as ‘single’ on her profile…) Forming relationships in our era of post-institutional modes of sociality is problematic. Some probably find such ‘romantically’ orientated ‘meet up’ sites to be a more efficient option for sampling what is available. Perhaps others want some loving on the side. In some ways these sites transform romance into the online equivalent of the logistics dock at your local shopping centre. ‘Just-in-time’ relationships rely less on social support structures of traditional institutions such as the family, workplace, and so on, including ‘love’ itself, and more on a hit and miss style of dating, organised like a series of car crashes and perhaps even commodified through an eBay-style online catalogue (see Crawford 83-88). Instead of image-commodities there are image-people and the spectacle of post-romance romance as a debauched demolition derby. Is romance still possible if it is no longer the naïve and fatalistic realisation of complementary souls? I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch-Drunk Love with the above rsvp.com.au woman. She interpreted it in a completely different manner to me. I shall argue (as I did with her) that the film captures some sense of romance in a post-romance world. The film was billed as a comedy/romance or comedy/drama, but I did not laugh either with or at the film. The story covers the trials of two people ‘falling in love’. Lena Leonard (Emma Watson) orchestrates an encounter with Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) after seeing a picture of him with his seven sisters. The trajectory of the romance is defined less by the meeting of two people, than the violence of contingency and of the world arrayed by the event of love. Contingency is central to complexity theory. Contingency is not pure chance, rather it exists as part of the processual material time of the event that defines events or a series of events as problematic (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 52-53). To problematise events and recognise the contingencies they inculcate is to refuse the tendency to colonise the future through actuarial practices, such as ‘risk management’ and insurance or the probabilistic ‘Perfect Match’ success of internet dating sites (mirroring ‘Dexter’ from the 1980s dating television game show). Therefore, through Punch-Drunk Love I shall problematise the event of love so as to resuscitate the contingencies of post-romance romance. It is not surprising Punch-Drunk Love opens with a car crash for the film takes romance on a veritable post-Crash detour. Crash – novel and film – serves as an exploration of surfaces and desire in a world at the intersection of the accident. Jean Baudrillard, in his infamous essay on Crash (novel), dwells on the repositioning of the accident: [It] is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. … Everything is reversed. It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. (113) After the SUV rolls over in Punch-Drunk Love’s opening scene, a taxi van pauses long enough for an occupant to drop off a harmonium. A harmonium is a cross between an organ and a piano, but much smaller than both. It is a harmony machine. It breathes and wheezes to gather potentiality consonant sound waves of heterogeneous frequencies to produce a unique musicality of multiplicative resonance. No reason is given for the harmonium in the workings of the film’s plot. Another accident without any explanation, like the SUV crash, but this time it is an accidental harmony-machine. The SUV accident is a disorganising eruption of excess force, while the accidental harmony-machine is a synthesising organisation of force. One produces abolition, while the other produces a multiplicative affirmation. These are two tendencies that follow two different relations to the heterogeneous materialism of contingency. Punch-Drunk Love captures the contingency at the heart of post-romance romance. Instead of the layers of expectation habituated into institutional engagements of two subjects meeting, there is the accident of the event of love within which various parties are arrayed with various affects and desires. I shall follow Alain Badiou’s definition of the event of love, but only to the point where I shall shift the perspective from love to romance. Badiou defines love by initially offering a series of negative definitions. Firstly, love is not a fusional concept, the ‘two’ that is ‘one’. That is because, as Badiou writes, “an ecstatic One can only be supposed beyond the Two as a suppression of the multiple” (“What Is Love?” 38). Secondly, nor is love the “prostration of the Same on the alter of the Other.” Badiou argues that it is not an experience of the Other, but an “experience of the world [i.e. multiple], or of the situation, under the post-evental condition that there were Two” (“What Is Love?” 39). Lastly, the rejection of the ‘superstructural’ or illusory conception of love, that is, to the base of desire and sexual jealously (Badiou, “What Is Love?” 39). For Badiou love is the production of truth. The truth is that the Two, and not only the One, are at work in the situation. However, from the perspective of romance, there is no post-evental truth procedure for love as such. In Deleuze’s terminology, from the perspective of post-romance the Two serves an important role as the ‘quasi-cause’ of love (The Logic of Sense 33), or for Badiou it is the “noemenal possibility [virtualite]” (“What Is Love?” 51). The event of the Two, and, therefore, of love, is immanent to itself. However, this does not capture the romantic functioning of love swept up in the quasi-cause of the Two. Romance is the differential repetition of the event of love to-come and thus the repetition of the intrinsic irreducible wonder at the heart of the event. The wonder at love’s heart is the excess of potentiality, the excitement, the multiplicity, the stultifying surprise. To resuscitate the functioning of love is to disagree with Badiou’s axiom that there is an absolute disjunction between the (nominalist) Two. The Two do actually share a common dimension and that is the radical contingency at the heart of love. Love is not as a teleological destiny of the eternal quasi-cause, but the fantastic impossibility of its contingent evental site. From Badiou’s line of argument, romance is precisely the passage of this “aleatory enquiry” (“What is Love?” 45), of “the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other” (49). Romance is the insinuation of desire into this dynamic of enquiry. Therefore, the functioning of romance is to produce a virtual architecture of wonder hewn from seeming impossibility of contingency. It is not the contingency in itself that is impossible (the ‘chaosmos’ is a manifold of wonderless-contingency), but that contingency might be repeated as part of a material practice that produces love as an effect of differentiating wonder. Or, again, not that the encounter of love has happened, but that precisely it might happen again and again. Romance is the material and embodied practice of producing wonder. The materiality of romance needs to be properly outlined and to do this I turn to another of Badiou’s texts and the film itself. To explicate the materialism of romance is to begin outlining the problematic of romance where the material force of Lena and Barry’s harmony resonates in the virtuosic co-production of new potentialities. The practice of romance is evidenced in the scene where Lena and Barry are in Hawaii and Lena is speaking to Barry’s sister while Barry is watching her. A sense of wonder is produced not in the other person but of the world as multiplicity produced free from the burden of Barry’s sister, hence altering the material conditions of the differential repetition of contingency. The materialism in effect here is, to borrow from Michel Foucault, an ‘incorporeal materialism’ (169), and pertains to the virtual evental dimension of love. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou sets up dance and theatre as metaphors for thought. “The essence of dance,” writes Badiou, “is virtual, rather than actual movement” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 61), while theatre is an “assemblage” (72) which in part is “the circulation of desire between the sexes” (71). If romance is the deliberate care for the event of love and its (im)possible contingency, then the dance of love requires the theatre of romance. To include music with dance is to malign Badiou’s conception of dance by polluting it with some elements of what he calls ‘theatre’. To return to the Hawaii scene, Barry is arrayed as an example of what Badiou calls the ‘public’ of theatre because he is watching Lena lie to his sister about his whereabouts, and therefore completes the ‘idea’ of theatre-romance as a constituent element (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). There is an incorporeal (virtual) movement here of pure love in the theatre of romance that repotentialises the conditions of the event of love by producing a repeated and yet different contingency of the world. Wonder triggered by a lie manifest of a truth to-come. According to Badiou, the history of dance is “governed by the perpetual renewal of the relation between vertigo and exactitude. What will remain virtual, what will be actualized, and precisely how is the restraint going to free the infinite?” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 70). Importantly, Badiou suggests that theatrical production “is often the reasoned trial of chances” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). Another way to think the materiality of romance is as the event of love, but without Badiou’s necessary declaration of love (“What Is Love?” 45). Even though the ‘truth’ of the Two acts as quasi-cause, love as such remains a pure (‘incorporeal’) Virtuality. As a process, there is no “absolute disappearance or eclipse” that belongs to the love-encounter (“What Is Love?” 45), thus instead producing a rhythmic or, better, melodic heterogeneous tension between the love-dance and romance-theatre. The rhythm-melody of the virtual-actual cascade is distributed around aleatory contingencies as the event of love is differentially repeated and is therefore continually repotentialised and exhausted at the same time. A careful or graceful balance needs to be found between potentiality and exhaustion. The film contains many examples of this (re)potentialising tension, including when Lena achieves the wonder of the ‘encounter’ by orchestrating a meeting. Similarly, Barry feigns a ‘business trip’ to Hawaii to meet up with Lena. This is proceeded by the increased urgency of Barry’s manipulation of the frequent flyer miles reward to meet with up with Lena. The tension is affective – both anxious and exciting – and belongs to the lived duration of contingency. In the same way as an actual material dance floor (or ‘theatre’ here) is repeated across multiple incorporeal dimensions of music’s virtuality through the repotentialisation of the dancer’s body, the multiple dimensions of love are repeated across the virtuality of the lovers’ actions through the repotentialisation of the conditions of the event of love. Punch-Drunk Love frames this problematic of romance by way of a second movement that follows the trajectory of the main character Barry. Barry is a depressive with an affect regulation problem. He flies into a rage whenever a childhood incident is mentioned and becomes anxious or ‘scared’ (as one sister described him) when in proximity to Lena. He tries to escape from the oppressive intimacy of his family. He plays with ‘identity’ in a childlike manner by dressing up as a businessman and wearing the blue suit. His small business is organised around selling plungers used to unblock toilets to produce flow. Indeed, Barry is defined by the blockages and flows of desire. His seven-sister over-Oedipalised familial unit continually operates as an apparatus of capture, a phone-sex pervert scam seeks to overcode desire in libidinal economy that becomes exploited in circuits of axiomatised shame (like an online dating site?), and a consumer rewards program that offers the dream of a frequent-flyer million-miles (line of) flight out of it all. ‘Oedipal’ in the expanded sense Deleuze and Guattari give the term as a “displaced or internalised limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialisation” (266). Barry says he wants to ‘diversify’ his business, which is not the same thing as ‘expanding’ or developing an already established commercial interest. He does not have a clear idea of what domain or type of business he wants to enter into when diversifying. When he speaks to business contacts or service personnel on the phone he attempts to connect with them on a level of intimacy that is uncomfortably inappropriate for impersonal phone conversations. The inappropriate intimacy comes back to haunt him, of course, when a low-level crook attempts to extort money from him after Barry calls a phone sex line. The romance between Lena and Barry develops through a series of accident-contingencies that to a certain extent ‘unblocks’ Barry and allows him to connect with Lena (who also changes). Apparent contingencies that are not actually contingencies need to be explained as such (‘dropping car off’, ‘beat up bathrooms’, ‘no actual business in Hawaii’, ‘phone sex line’, etc.). Upon their first proper conversation a forklift in Barry’s business crashes into boxes. Barry calls the phone sex line randomly and this leads to the severe car crash towards the end of the film. The interference of Barry’s sisters occurs in an apparently random unexpected manner – either directly or indirectly through the retelling of the ‘gayboy’ story. Lastly, the climatic meeting in Hawaii where the two soon-to-be-lovers are framed by silhouette, their bodies meet not in an embrace but a collision. They emerge as if emitted from the throngs of the passing crowd. Barry has his hand extended as if they were going to shake and there is an audible grunt when their bodies collide in an embrace. To love is to endure the violence of a creative temporality, such as the production of harmony from heterogeneity. As Badiou argues, love cannot be a fusional relation between the two to make the one, nor can it be the relation of the Same to the Other, this is because the differential repetition of the conditions of love through the material practice of romance already effaces such distinctions. This is the crux of the matter: The maximum violence in the plot of Punch-Drunk Love is not born by Lena, even though she ends up in hospital, but by Barry. (Is this merely a masculinist reading of traditional male on male violence? Maybe, and perhaps why rsvp.com.au woman read it different to me.) What I am trying to get at is the positive or creative violence of the two movements within the plot – of the romance and of Barry’s depressive social incompetence – intersect in such a way to force Barry to renew himself as himself. Barry’s explosive fury belongs to the paradox of trying to ‘mind his own business’ while at the same time ‘diversifying’. The moments of violence directed against the world and the ‘glass enclosures’ of his subjectivity are transversal actualisations of the violence of love (on function of ‘glass’ in the film see King). (This raises the question, perhaps irrelevant, regarding the scale of Badiou’s conception of truth-events. After Foucault and Deleuze, why isn’t ‘life’ itself a ‘truth’ event (for Badiou’s position see Briefings on Existence 66-68)? For example, are not the singularities of Barry’s life also the singularities of the event of love? Is the post-evental ‘decision’ supposed to always axiomatically subtract the singular truth-supplement from the stream of singularities of life? Why…?) The violence of love is given literal expression in the film in the ‘pillow talk’ dialogue between Barry and Lena: Barry: I’m sorry, I forgot to shave. Lena: Your face is so adorable. Your skin and your cheek… I want to bite it. I want to bite on your cheek and chew on it, you’re so fucking cute. Barry: I’m looking at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fucking smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze you, you’re so pretty… Lena: I wanna chew your face off and scoop out your eyes. I wanna eat them and chew them and suck on them… Barry: [nodding] Ok…yes, that’s funny… Lena: Yeah… Barry: [still nodding] This’s nice. What dismayed or perhaps intrigued Baudrillard about Crash was its mixing of bodies and technologies in a kind of violent eroticism where “everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex” (112). On the surface this exchange between Barry and Lena is apparently an example of such violent eroticism. For Baudrillard the accident is a product of the violence of technology in the logistics of bodies and signs which intervene in relations in such a way to render perversity impossible (as a threshold structuration of the Symbolic) because ‘everything’ becomes perverse. However, writer and director of Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Anderson, produces a sense of the wondrous (‘Punch-Drunk’) violence that is at the heart of love. This is not because of the actual violence of individual characters; in the film this only serves as a canvas of action to illustrate the intrinsic violence of contingency. Lena and Barry’s ‘pillow talk’ not so much as a dance but a case of the necessary theatre capturing the violence and restraint of love’s virtual dance. ‘Violence’ (in the sense it is used above) also describes the harmonic marshalling of the heterogeneous materiality of sound affected by the harmonium. The ‘violence’ of the harmonium is decisively expressed through the coalescence of the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtracks at the end of the film when Barry plays the harmonium concurrently with Jon Brion’s score for the film. King notes, the “diegetic and nondiegetic music playing together is a moment of cinematic harmony; Barry, Lena, and the harmonium are now in sync” (par. 19). The notes of music connect different diegetic and nondiegetic series which pivot around new possibilities. As Deleuze writes about the notes played at a concert, they are “pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins [of playing], but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations or flux [of sound]” (The Fold 91). Following Deleuze further (The Fold 146-157), the horizontal melodic movement of romance forms a diagonal or transversal line with the differentially repeated ‘harmonic’ higher unity of love. The unity is literally ‘higher’ to the extent it escapes the diegetic confines of the film itself. For Deleuze “harmonic unity is not that of infinity, but that which allows the existent to be thought of as deriving from infinity” (The Fold 147, ital. added). While Barry is playing the harmonium in this scene Lena announces, “So here we go.” These are the final words of the film. In Badiou’s philosophy this is a declaration of the truth of love. Like the ‘higher’ non/diegetic harmony of the harmonium, the truth of love “composes, compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally. All knowledge [of romance] relative to this truth [of the Two, as quasi-cause] thus disposes itself as an anticipation” (“What is Love?” 49). Romance is therefore lived as a vertiginous state of anticipation of love’s harmony. The materiality of romance does not simply consist of two people coming together and falling in love. The ‘fall’ functions as a fatalistic myth used to inscribe bodies within the eschatological libidinal economies of ‘romantic comedies’. To anneal Baudrillard’s lament, perversity obviously still has a positive Symbolic function on the internet, especially online dating sites where anticipation can be modulated through the probabilistic manipulation of signs. In post-romance, the ‘encounter’ of love necessarily remains, but it is the contingency of this encounter that matters. The main characters in Punch-Drunk Love are continually arrayed through the contingencies of love. I have linked this to Badiou’s notion of the event of love, but have focused on what I have called the materiality of romance. The materiality of romance requires more than a ‘fall’ induced by a probabilistic encounter, and yet it is not the declaration of a truth. The post-evental truth procedure of love is impossible in post-romance romance because there is no ‘after’ or ‘supplement’ to an event of love; there is only the continual rhythm of romance and anticipation of the impossible. It is not a coincidence that the Snow Patrol lyrics that serve above as an epigraph resonate with Deleuze’s comment that a change in the situation of Leibnizian monads has occurred “between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings… [to] the new model invoked by Tony Smith [of] the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (The Fold 157). Post-Crash post-romance romance unfolds like the driving-monad in an aleatory pursuit of accidents. That is, to care for the event of love is not to announce the truth of the Two, but to pursue the differential repetition of the conditions of love’s (im)possible contingency. This exquisite and beautiful care is required for the contingency of love to be maintained. Hence, the post-romance problematic of romance thus posited as the material practice of repeating the wonder at the heart of love. References Badiou, Alain. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madrasz. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 2006. ———. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005. ———. “What Is Love?” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 37-53. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Crawford, Kate. Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood. Sydney: Macmillan, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Laster and Charles Stivale. European Perspectives. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Foucault, Michel. “Theatricum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 165-96. King, Cubie. “Punch Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur.” Senses of Cinema 35 (2005). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Jun. 2007) "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>.

Cette thèse propose d’étudier une expérience théâtrale menée en groupe pour explorer les potentialités du travail théâtral comme facteur de reconstruction individuelle et collective dans un cadre post-traumatique. À partir de leurs histoires individuelles souvent liées au contexte de guerre (Irak, Syrie), les participants réfugiés revivent sur scène les traumas qu’ils ont subis, parfois même ancrés dans la chair de ceux qui ont été torturés. De simples narrateurs, ils sont devenus des acteurs naissants et agissants. Ceci a donné lieu à l’élaboration de deux spectacles.Un protocole de travail a été mis en place : trainings visant à travailler sur les positions dynamiques, le contact et la plasticité du corps, et préparation au jeu théâtral, mené dans le but d’établir une distance entre les comédiens et les événements qui les ont traumatisés afin de les dépasser. L’action théâtrale a été source de découverte, de travail sur soi, un moyen efficace pour les aider à se libérer, à partager leurs sentiments, à maîtriser leur fragilité en retrouvant une capacité à agir jusqu'à présent ignorée. Ils se sont reconstruits, en retrouvant confiance en eux et en se réappropriant d’autres aptitudes et d’autres attitudes. C’est une voie qui peut mener à la résilience. Notre étude empirique allie deux dimensions intrinsèques : la théorie, permettant de penser notre démarche et de l'inscrire dans un processus réflexif ; et la pratique qui nous offre la possibilité de réaliser sur scène l'expérience d'un travail sur soi, sur l’exploration des obstacles et des inhibitions personnelles. Par la suite, les acteurs réfugiés ont pu regagner une confiance dans l’avenir et retrouver le contrôle de leur propre vie
This thesis aims to examine a group theatrical experience in order to explore the scope for using theatrical work as a means for individual and collective post-traumatic recovery. Using their individual experiences, which often took place during wars in Syria or Iraq, the refugee participants relive on the stage the traumas they lived through, sometimes part of their very flesh for those who have been tortured. They started as simple narrators but became nascent and acting performers. This work gave birth to two theatrical performances.A work schedule was devised: training sessions to teach them dynamic positions, contact and plasticity of the performing body, and preparation to theatrical performance. The purpose of the play was to distance the actors from the traumatic events they experienced and to overcome them.The act of performing is a source of discovery, of work on self. It is an effective means of helping to free themselves, to share their feelings, to overcome their own fragility, by rediscovering their power to act, so far ignored. They rebuilt themselves, rediscovering their self-confidence and their other capabilities and behaviors. This is a way to build up resilience. Our study was an empirical one, combining two intrinsic dimensions: theory, which lets us think out our approach and incorporate it into a reflexive approach; and practice, which gives us the ability to show on stage the experience of self-care, the exploration of personal obstacles and inhibitions. From being weakened by a traumatic experience, they were able to rediscover a sense of individual and collective confidence, face the future with a greater sense of serenity and take responsibility for their own lives

The disruptive transformations process in the audiovisual sector were unexpectedly accelerated after the covid-19 pandemic. This caused a rearrangement in the chain of the distribution, exhibition and circulation, thus restructuring the whole design of film festivals, once considered the launching point of this entire industry and strongly based on specific physical locations. Streaming has become the main way in which image and sound content are distributed. Entertainment became multiplatform and interactive, changing the way in which narratives are structured, and these contents are produced and consumed. The convergence of media made porous the boundaries between what are conventionally called video, cinema, theater and performance. The platformization process permanently changed the traditional model of audiovisual distribution, staffing and curation of festivals - which undergo a hybridization operation that allows the potential use of interactive resources and online delivery of movies, plays and performances to audiences all around the globe. To understand the potential of transformations, the study investigates in depth the experience of MixBrasil Festival, largest LGBTQIA+ cultural event in Latin America, created in 1993, showcasing multiple formats and techniques (cinema, theater, music, literature). With digital content being programmed since 2018, in 2020 it expanded its online exhibition to four different digital platforms. The study is carried out concurrently with the monitoring of MixBrasil and other film festivals held in Brazil, considering what strategies are being adopted and how they will stand out as innovative - or just replications of the traditional movie theater model. It also aims to identify processes, paths and perspectives for the sector considering that the old template for launching films used since the 1950´s might no longer be applicable to the current state of the industry. Facts and trends that are forcing these events to face a crisis of identity and questioning the viability of a (still) prestigious circuit. Platformization implies the adoption of online functionalities integrated at economic and infrastructure levels which fully affects the organization strategies of festivals. Therefore, a change in the way of thinking the place of film festivals in the industry chain is in progress: as a possible space for capturing data from the public to support future curatorships and permanent actions which would make them more dynamic and relevant. Associated with this process is the notion of attention economy and the reorientation of users as active producers of culture, in the way they can affect the hybrid future of festivals. Metrics recurrently used like engagement, geolocation, retention and abandon rates are necessary to identify obstacles and potentialities that the new scenario presents. The research is raising additional questions about the behavior and expectations of different age groups, the motivations of audiences for attending festivals. It also investigates why although movie theaters are closing, distributors keep restrictions on festival theatrical screenings. This is a unique opportunity to reflect on perspectives for audiovisual festivals in order to capture viewers' attention, reposition their relevance to society, get the (re)cognition of different audiences and forge new experiences.