Philadelphia Theatre Symposium

Although I ended up not presenting a paper, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience attending the Philadelphia Theatre Symposium (http://www.villanova.edu/artsci/theatre/academics/symposium/) at which Richard Schechner gave the keynote presentation. I hope to jot down my thoughts in regard to that experience in future posts.

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."