The following phrases taken from my notes give some indication of what was discussed in the many presentations given at the symposium:
- wandering performance before ambiguous audience
- valid experience of peformance?
- display of hospitality
- open performance aesthetic
- comfort of actors and audience
- fear of dislocation
- homeless condition of postmodernism
- performative "home" ----------> "historical squatting"
- wandering culture
- longing for "cosmopolitan" prosperity
- question of propriety
- competing meaning systems
- question of minority status
- audience perception ... actor self-perception
- putting on costume identifies character ... "putting on Christ"
- deterratorialization = performance without regard for effect on the "audience" but the "'actor"
- "work on given role calls peformer to presence"
- "the theatre community of the actor is often other than the social community of the audience"
- living is doing
- theatre becomes filter for analysis
- your idea of life is not for me
- desiring dominance yet resisting submission
- idea of oneself formed by insight, reflection, and relationship
- conflict of voices
- I "see what I wanna see"
- relieve Christ of Biblical connotation?
- "experience achieves value through the primordial sense of community [Body of Christ?]"
- "explore masculine gender identity& performance through the lense of violence, war & power"
- can time be performed?
- music suspends time
- the specious present is not an Augustinian knife-edge, but a saddle-back upon which one may perceive what just passed and what is about to come
- remembrance ... restored behavior
- believing performer makes aesthetic choices to preserve "sacred" from "profane" performance
- theatre paradigm implicates profane intentions
- hallowed moments are framed by divine intention
- sublime acts of terror ... designed to be visible (spectacular)
- maximum effect achieved for greatest audience
- walls between real and virtual have crumbled
- U.S. military strategy of 'shock and awe' answered spectacle with spectacle
- there is no group of people that is absolutely other
- museum art vs. real-life art
- Kant's notion of "sublime" as "negative pleasure ... outrage of the imagination"
- Burke's "sublime and the beautiful" - delight in seeing things we would not like to be done
- fright is the chili pepper of imagination
- aesthetic vs anesthetic
- fear of God is the beginning of wisdom
- can we forgive is we are merely an audience?
- parabolic demand for response
- an ethics of witness
- distance from "Ground Zero"
- How can I be saved?
- Richard Schechner's grandfather told him, "My afterlife is you."
