Diana González Martín, Aesthetics of Effect: How to Research What Theatre Provokes in Us and What We Do to Theatre. On Activist Theatre and Clown Interventions

Aesthetic Seminar are organized by Anika Marschall (Post.Doc, Dramaturgy), Peter M. Boenisch (Professor, Dramaturgy) and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (Associate Professor, Comparative Literature) for the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.

Oplysninger om arrangementet

Tidspunkt

Torsdag 18. november 2021, kl. 14:15 - 16:00

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Sted

School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Langelandsgade 139, Building 1584, Room 126, 8000 Aarhus C

Af Web Katrinebjerg Kasernen, CC

Diana González Martín, Aesthetics of Effect: How to Research What Theatre Provokes in Us and What We Do to Theatre. On Activist Theatre and Clown Interventions

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Please register here: https://events.au.dk/dianagonzalezmartin/signup
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Since Plato and Aristotle Western theatre theory has widely focused on the aesthetics of effect. The former was critical with the mimetic behaviour that tragedy would provoke on citizens, unsettling the identity that the state had attributed to them. The latter considered catharsis as an opportunity for audiences to manage affect in a virtuous, ethical way. Relational aesthetics and performance art has pushed this approach to the effects of aesthetic experience over the edge. Contemporary theatre includes lots of strategies to make audiences react, not by means of insulting the bourgeois audiences like the theatre directors of the historical avant-gardes, but perhaps in order to recover social bounds and bring back a forgotten community. Based on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre and Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, I want to, on the one hand, dig into the question of what an aesthetics of effect can enlighten us or, on the contrary, blind us to the understanding of contemporary theatre practices. On the other hand, I would like to discuss if the traditional separation between stage and audience is a misinterpretation that equally separates eyes and hands, thought and action, subject and object, knowledge and ignorance. I aim that this exercise will lead me (us) to rethink the analysis of theatre audiences, in particular with the activist research I carried out on cultural memory in three locations in Europe, as well as clown interventions in the framework of the peace process in Colombia.

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