In this session, we explored:
How affect features in queer performance –
and what does gender and sexuality have to do with it?
We were very excited to have guest presenter Assoc. Prof. Alyson Campbell from the School of Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) to lead us on this curious and provocative journey.
And what a fantastic session it was!
NM SIG Session Abstract
Artist-scholar-makers: Thinking about affect work to queer performance.
My understanding of affect draws on Brian Massumi and cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert. I’ve built on this general line of thinking to explore more particularly concepts and strategies for queering performance. This all springs from working with Reza Abdoh in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where I encountered live performance in a way I never had before. Abdoh’s play Bogeyman was dealing with the AIDS pandemic and it has taken me many years to try to find ways to articulate how its queerness was based on something far beyond its content; it was the experience of it, or, in other words, its affect. I’m still trying to understand that interrelationship in my own and others’ work. One strand of this links directly back to Reza in thinking about affect as viral (Viral Dramaturgies, co-edited with Dirk Gindt, 2018) and another strand is as erotohistoriography (Freeman, 2010; e.g. Campbell 2015). As an artist-scholar the whole thing converges in trying to find specificity in language for this (e.g. through musicology/musical thinking, e.g. Campbell 2012) and rehearsal/making strategies.
My question for the session is: What are the gaps in the discourse around affect in performance?
What we did in this session…
… er… how to summarise this session … is very hard… we did so much!
It is so hard to explain all we covered and what stuck for each of us. I loved how Alyson took the time to just think-out-aloud her ideas and explain her motivations, musings, work, and connections – for me, that was so interesting and inspiring (we so rarely have those personal insights as to the process-thinking that goes into academic and performance work!).
I did capture some of what we did, discussed, thought-with, and activated in this session in a few 100-word worldings I wrote from this session. Here are my worldings:
Seek the Affect mechanism.
Freefalling with A/P Alyson Campbell’s Queer Dramaturies. Director process(es) unfolding: pertinent theatre movements, Phenomenology, Massumi’s ‘Affect’, Gormley’s ‘body’s first way of knowing’, Gilbert’s ‘affective specificity’, and Epstein’s ‘shaping affect’. More important than describing affect (as end point), is seeking the mechanism by which it is structured. Not ‘supposed’ to talk about the ‘real’ journey/process/practice. Various maker book think-throughs: Practice-as-research (Practitioners), Affect Explorations (Theory), or Queer Encounters (Personal). More on intersectionality, form and hybridity… maybe queer hybridity? How long does it take for language to move? Pondering practice-theory as contagion or miasma. A juggernaut of multiple threads.
What’s missing in Affect.
With a new artist-scholar friend, we discuss what is missing in Affect. Thoughts disperse and range from uncomfortable school-based moments, to performance making, to the inescapable hard lines of capitalism, to points of deficit in myriad forms. A strong conversational start. Body sameness and what (im)presses. Someone mentions ‘anti-lack-thinking’. I like that idea. I settle into queering beyond what I think and know – and I’m excited by new viral suggestions. We talk of the joys of popping fuchsias and what is learned from migrating bodies. The importance of ‘accepting your in-thereness’ and of (missing) laughter. ‘Not just’ embodied jerks.
Bound up with affect.
I’m leaning into intense inquiries of somatic means and translations. Being led, hand-held, through body-emotion(s) that disregard mental training. I’m ‘bound up’ with affect, constipated by shifting ‘pulling a(part)s’. I’m intrigued by In your face theatre as an attempt to synthesize smaller audiences, funding, and affective capacities – and the aesthetics of what that might mean and do. I see inchoate segregised resistance, near-Punk tendencies, and pre-queering workings (t)here. Not just relying on arguments between characters or choreographies to drive dramatic interest. Activating experiential theatrics and what that actually means when working through ideas, bodies, and hearts.
Grokking 4:48 psychosis.
Moving within/without a binarized sociality bites. Invitations to re(un)see Amelia Carvello’s extraordinary bodies. Being crossed out and knowing the marginalia is where it is at. Meeting a lang-scape for the first time. Considering body-affect as thinking-of-performative ‘affect’, or as queer dramaturgy applied to worlding and how to shape it all. The ‘roomness’ of the room stands out. Grokking 4:48 psychosis. Theories only get you so far, but new meanings and makings lead naturally into methodological spaces, processes, loops, actions, ambiguities, openness and speculations. Uncovering universal ‘truth(s)’ of research-making becomings seasoned with psychological implications and pre-intentional purpose.
Presenter Bio
Alyson’s main areas of research and supervision are in gender and queer theory/performance, directing and dramaturgy, phenomenological approaches to performance, social justice and disability in the arts. Alyson’s focus is around the representation of women and the nexus of queer theories and feminism. She is committed to developing modes of practice led/as research throughout her teaching at all levels. Alyson is a freelance director and dramaturg with an astounding 30-year career, and teaching credits that feature the School of Creative Arts, the University of Melbourne, Queen’s University Belfast and Brunel University, London.
For more of Alyson’s background, collaborations and performance work, a list of her publications here and some of her latest work like WreckedALL Prods (2020).
Readings
Gilbert, J. (2004). Signifying Nothing: “Culture”, “Discourse” and the Sociality of Affect. Culture Machine, 4. https://culturemachine.net/deconstruction-is-in-cultural-studies/signifying-nothing/
Freeman, E. (2005) Time binds, or, Erotohistography. Social Text, 23(3-4) pp. 57 – 68. (see attachment).
Campbell, A. (2016) Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies. Queer Dramaturgies, Spinger. pp. 1-26. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137411846_1
See also Sexuality Summer School blog post: Theatre and the archives: Directing as erotohistoriograph –