The Efficacy of Awkwardness in Contemporary Participatory Performance Daniel Oliver PhD Drama Queen Mary University of London Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 Required statement of originality for inclusion in research degree theses I, Daniel Oliver confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Daniel Oliver Date: 06/01/2015 Details of collaboration and publications: Oliver, Daniel, ‘Car Crashes, the Social Turn, and Glorious Glitches in David Hoyle’s Performances’ <http://liminalities.net/8-3/carcrashes.pdf> [accessed 6 January 2015] Oliver, Daniel, ‘Getting Involved with the Neighbour’s Thing: Žižek and the Participatory Performance of Reactor (UK), in Žižek and Performance, ed. by Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 154-164 Oliver, Daniel, ‘Post-Relational Paranoid Play in Reactor’s Big Lizard’s Big Idea Project, Platform, Vol.7, No. 2 ‘Staging Play, Playing Stages’, Autumn 2013 Oliver, Daniel, ‘“You’re Funnier When You’re Angry”: Affirmation, Responsibility and Commitment in David Hoyle’s Live Performance Practice’, Performance Research, 19 (2014), 109–15 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.928526 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dominic Johnson for his diligent, inspiring, and encouraging supervision throughout my research and writing. Thank you also to Jen Harvie, my second supervisor, who has been incredibly supportive. It has been a positively life-changing experience to be part of the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London. Thank you to all my fellow PhD candidates, the QMUL Drama staff and the undergraduate students that I have taught for your rigorous approach to theatre and performance and your rigorous approach to friendliness. Huge thank you also to my dyspraxia tutor Beatrice King for the patience, guidance, trust and humour that was essential to my progress. The artists and performers I have encountered during my research have been amazing. A big thank you to Reactor, a.a.s, David Hoyle, Matthew De Kersaint Giraudeau, and Bjørn Venø who have been more than generous with their time and energy, allowing me to interview them about their practice and providing insightful feedback in response to my bonkers ideas about their performances. Thank you also to Simon Casson and Jay Cloth from Duckie, and Laura Godfrey Isaacs from Home Live Art who provided very useful information, insights, and reflections in interviews. Thank you Julia Bardsley, Stacy Makishi, Lois Weaver, Katy Baird and Martin O’Brien for being inspiring performance artists and for all the feedback and support you have provided for my own participatory performance practice. A big thank you to my friend and collaborator Luke Ferris. Our work together for the past twelve years triggered many of the ideas and arguments in this thesis. Finally, I am hugely grateful to my partner Frauke Requardt who has provided a barrage of love, wisdom, encouragement and coffee. I am also grateful to my son Béla Oliver for arriving in the midst of my PhD and providing much needed distractions of unimaginable fascination and pride. This PhD was financially supported by the Queen Mary research studentship and would not have been possible without it. 3 Abstract This thesis focuses on contemporary participatory performance in which participation is facilitated awkwardly, and in which awkward modes of participation are welcomed and encouraged. My use of the term ‘awkward’ here is not so much in reference to embarrassment, uneasiness, or social faux-par, though I do observe and critically respond to such phenomena throughout. Instead, the term ‘awkward’ is predominantly employed as an adjective in line with the dictionary definition ‘causing difficulty; hard to do or deal with’ or ‘not smooth or graceful; ungainly’. Such awkwardness is framed as productive because of its disruptive relation with the smooth running of inter-relational encounters. These disruptions, I argue, in turn encourage critical reflection on our co-presence with others without removing us from that co-presence. Thus it allows for necessary affective and critical work to occur within the participatory performance itself as opposed to being delegated to those not involved and encountering the performances through secondary sources. This focus on awkwardness in contemporary participatory performance occurs in response to what art critic Claire Bishop and others have defined as the ‘Social Turn’ in art and performance. This ‘turn’ refers to the increased critical, curatorial and cultural attention given to socially engaged, participatory and relational art practices since the late 1990s. The key aim of this project is to refocus this attention onto practitioners that, in my reading, have a productively awkward relation with its rhetoric, ideologies and socio-politics. My approach to these practices is often supported by the writings of Slavoj Žižek, especially his employment and supplement of Lacanian psychoanalysis. His theories of the ‘big Other’ and its ‘super-egoic injunctions’, of over-identification, of the ‘real’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’ registers that structure our reality are worked-through as I develop my own theories of agency, reality and fantasy, desire, and socio-political efficacy through critical engagement with awkward participatory performance. 4 Table of Contents PREFACE THE ROLE OF DYSPRAXIA IN THIS THESIS ............................................................................. 8 DYSPRAXIC METHODOLOGIES ....................................................................................................................... 11 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 17 ADAM KOTSKO’S THREE TYPES OF AWKWARDNESS ................................................................................ 29 THE EFFICACY OF AWKWARDNESS .............................................................................................................. 33 METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................................................................ 36 CLAIRE BISHOP’S ‘LACANIAN ANGLE’ .......................................................................................................... 39 CHAPTER 1 THE SOCIAL TURN ......................................................................................................................... 47 RELATIONAL AESTHETICS ............................................................................................................................. 52 BOURRIAUD’S APPROACH TO THE RELATIONAL ARTWORKS OF RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA ..................... 53 CONVERSATION PIECES .................................................................................................................................. 54 KESTER’S APPROACH TO THE RELATIONAL ARTWORKS OF RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA ............................. 56 CLAIRE BISHOP ................................................................................................................................................ 58 CLAIRE BISHOP’S APPROACH TO THE RELATIONAL ARTWORKS OF RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA ............... 59 SHANNON JACKSON ......................................................................................................................................... 64 JACKSON’S APPROACH TO THE RELATIONAL ARTWORKS OF RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA ........................... 73 JEN HARVIE ....................................................................................................................................................... 76 HARVIE’S APPROACH TO THE RELATIONAL ARTWORKS OF RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA ............................. 77 RELATIONAL ART’S EXCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................. 80 MANAGEMENT AND UNEXPECTEDNESS ...................................................................................................... 81 RELATIONAL AESTHETICS AS DELEGATED LABOUR, THEATRE AS RELATIONAL AESTHETICS ........ 86 BLUFF-CALLING IN 9 FORMS ......................................................................................................................... 89 OUTSIDE IN ....................................................................................................................................................... 91 CONCLUSION: THE CONTINGENCY OF CONTINGENCY .............................................................................. 95 CHAPTER 2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PARTICIPATORY