Index

A

Anachrony:

The notion of anachrony addresses the study of the relationship between an ancient text or work and its rewritings, rememberings, translations... At what time does an artwork belong? What strata of memory can the same work deploy and how this fractality might disclose an epistemic flow? Anachrony invites us to think traces in movement, with constant remodeling, and questions the temporal modalities of art-working.

Anthropocene:

(a term proposed by limnologist Eugene Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul Josef Crutzen1)

The Anthropocene* is a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.

*acknowledging the current debate not only of the dating of the origin but of the term itself, and the problematic use of the term anthropos, which does not make any difference in between human genders, geographies, and responsibilities in the impact.

See e.g. Donna Haraway: “We need another figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthropocene into another, big-enough story.”2 #capitalocene #chthulucene #misanthropocene #psychozooikon. #hypocricene. #plasticene...

Anthroposcene:

Aesthetic reflection/diffraction (stage?) on/of the Anthropocene.

(The term was first coined in 2013 by Una Chaudhuri in her book Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook).

B

C

Chronotopias:

Utopian/queer disorganisation and re-organisation of time(s)

The term is inspired by Michel Foucault's concept of "heterotopias" (1967), a term he coined to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic, non-standardised conditions.

D

Deep(-ening the) Stage:

A speculative stage that appears under the conditions of deep time and hypertime (within a time ecology revised from the Western construction of linear, unitary, monotheist, profitable time).

(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

Deep time: (geology) The multimillion year time frame within which scientists believe the earth has existed, and which is supported by the observation of natural, mostly geological, phenomena.

E

Ecotonal piece:

An ecotone is a transitional area situated between two ecological systems or milieus, a border region where two territories and communities meet and overlap, blend or collide with more or less tension (tone comes from the Greek τόνος/tonos or tension/stress). The term appears in the subtitle of the research project as «ecotonal piece», the doctoral exposition being engaged as a transactional locus where art and research forces enter a (more or less) tense process of hybridization.

F

G

H

Heterochrony:

In the framework of the research, the term relates to the destabilization of the dominant chronologic of the production and the organization of theatre works (versus homochrony/nowness). A term borrowed from the language of evolutionary biology. In evolutionary biology, the heterochrony is the process of modification of the timing of the development of a living organism in relation to its predecessors. The changes produced by this process are the result of mutations in the development of genes that control the development and positioning of organs. Hence, significant changes from the macroscopic point of view may occur in the organization through heterochrony.

Hyperdrama:

Outcome of the non-representational dramatization of “hyperobjects”.

Hyperdrama...

… is not a stable located place and time, that is to say, is not any longer indexed to the “here and now” (cf. theatre representation, happenings, performance...)

… is not dependent on a temporality that is determined by human time framing, but exceeds it

… is not accessible to direct human perception and requires at the same time perceptive prosthetic tools and poetics of elusion

... yet manifests as the non-local zone of the paradoxical interaction between unperceivable hyper-reality and human endeavor to engage with anthopocenic asymmetry through a re-trained sensitive experience and a speculative mode of meaning-making.

Hyperdramatic theatre:

Scenic event on (or which constitutes) the deep stage.

Scenic interaction between human and more-than-human scales phenomena, such as climate change or big data flow. The term hyperdramatic relates to Timothy Morton's notion of “hyperobjects”*. Hyperdramatic theatre is a hypo-perceivable – aesthetic – phenomenon that escapes conventional spatiotemporal logic of mimesis (representation, imitation...).

(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

* Global warming and Big Data are perhaps the most “dramatic” contemporary examples of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”3—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.

Hypertime: (literature) Hypertime is a network of alternate timelines that branch off from multiverses. These timelines sometimes overlap with each other, causing alterations in reality.

I

Idiorrythmie:

The term points towards testing the potentialities of a relational reorganization in-between the stage and the spectators out of the conventional framed time of the theatrical representation. It is based on long-term iterative, plurirhythmic, process of encounter/non-encounter through fractal and protean narratives (narriteratives). The term was coined by Roland Barthes in his conferences How to live together at the Collège de France in 1977. According to the French semiotician, power is precisely what forbids any idiorrythmie because it imposes temporal frames and strict rhythms to individuals. Borrowed from the Greek orthodox monastic vocabulary, idiorrythmie refers to the distinctive organization of monks who, while administratively attached to a monastery, live alone, separated from their brothers. Its principle is to allow each member of the community to live freely according to his own rhythm. Hence Barthes proposes to reconsider societal organization by taking care of the diverse individual rhythms within the construction of a togetherness.

J

K

L

M

(Stage as) Milieu:

At the same time middle (in the middle/in medias res) and generative environment, the French concept of milieu is used here as a term that does not presuppose the categorization of the world into a binary logic like nature and culture, subject, and object, human and nonhuman, stage and backstage, director and actor, etc... In the research, the term is used in opposition to (stage as) center, with the intention to open the notion of stage to heterogeneous dynamics of emergence that do not depend on exclusive anthropocentric and anthropogenic modes of organization/production/composition of the relationship between a spectator and a theatrical object of experience. The use of the word milieu stems both from the natural sciences for which every organism is inseparable from its environment/habitat and - both are linked for the first inspires the second - from one of the branches of continental philosophy, namely geophilosophy, that resurfaced in the 1990s at the initiative of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (and via the expansion of the latter's thinking into ecosophy and chaosmosis), through the reformulation of a line of thought originating in Nietzsche, and according to which concepts cannot be studied in isolation, without taking into account the environment, therefore, which encompasses them and makes them work. Nothing in isolation, no apparatus of existence, or "machines," has the possibility of an appearance by itself, but only work in an environment where assemblages are formed and transformed. The notion of milieu associated with that of stage thus opens a potential for the revision of scenic thinking, by reshuffling the cards of agencies, perceptions, and regimes of copresence, and therefore by reestablishing the " from where and where the viewer looks". Theatre becomes a pluri-space/time for experiences and no longer an ordered observatory, but rather an enmeshed ecosystem, considering that "the world" is no longer performing outside « there », revealed as externality through mimesis on stage « there », but encompassing. In the research, (stage as) milieu, on one hand, aligns with a genealogy of artists and thinkers who have been developing the idea of autopoietic aesthetic systems based on immersion and continuum, gradually leading the viewer to change their observation position, sliding from the paradigm of the founding notion of teatron involving a scene-center and an assembly whose eyes are directed towards this center towards the paradigm of the participative network, and, on the other hand, proposes a contribution characterized by the performative contradiction of those ideas of continuous milieu, opening temporal perspectives, and disturbances, on the topic. In the research (stage as) milieu does not mean that everything is connected to everything « at the same time », without limits, and in a formless way. Milieu here, when related to stage, is not envisioned as a primordial soup where things are happening only simultaneously, but as a diffracted ecosystem in resistance to a temporal representational reduction. Thinking of the stage as a universal milieu-network where the micro and the macro are continuously linked as a whole goes with the risk of a sticky totalizing teatrum mundi, without the possibility of any separation and distance, therefore of a stage to appear, an artist to operate and a spectator to be addressed as such. This resistance with regard to new collectivizing narratives, all-inclusive interpretations of the theories of the actor-network or other pluriverses has then to be negotiated, and that is the experimental locus of the research project, with the revision of the monofocal stage-as-center paradigm mentioned earlier. This understanding of the (stage as) milieu which poetically invites scales that are not perceptible by a human spectator (from geological strata to lightspeed data), opens a speculative, possibly failed, hyperzone of experience, made of scenic temporalities which are no longer based on the conventional or "index temporality" of the "now" of a "programmed" theatre event. Hence the challenge of the practice and consequently of the research project is to participate in both network theories and poetics of temporal dislocations, by drifting away from the by-default metaphysics of presence, still embedded in most of the ecodramatic forms of participative/immersive/networked theatre. (Stage as) milieu invites us to ponder, from the practice of (re)directing, the question of thresholds between, and simultaneities of, continuums and discontinuities, controlling and letting go, aesthetic choices and contingency.

Multi (or Pluri-)temporality:

Relates to the experimentation with new theatrical arrangements in order to develop a spectatorial sensitivity to the simultaneity of manifold temporalities on and around a chosen ‘stage’ or ‘event’. This notion of multitemporality is coupled with the ecological notion of multifocality that we can find for example in Tere Vaden and Antti Salminen’s recent book « Energy and Experience: an Essay in Nafthology » under the poetic notion of forest of foci which is defined by the authors as: « a series of non-concentric overlapping durations, as if an enlarged present, containing several past and future presents. This does not mean that the past, present, and future presents causally interact, but rather that now there are several presents happening, enduring; several experiential presents with their own rhythms, cyclicalities, and gradations. »

N

Narriterative:

(for: iterative narrative).

A fractal account of a singular artwork. Narriterative is redistributed documentation in the context of artistic research. A constellation (or aggregate) of narriteratives of the same work can be proposed and construed as an epistemic claim.

(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

Neganthropocene:

The term is proposed by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler for whom the Anthropocene should be written “entropocene”, i.e., “a period of mass production of entropy due to the fact that many fields of knowledge have been abolished and liquidated because they no longer belong to human knowledge, but to closed systems of automatic reactions”4. The research aims to be a contribution to the establishment of new criteria of redistribution of scenic agencies in order to sustain this contra-era of Neganthropocene (i.e. reverse Anthropocene), which should be based on a capacity to reposition and reinvent a whole range of human operations, including artistic practices.

Neganthroposcene:

Aesthetic dimension (stage?) of the Neganthropocene.  

(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

Neganthroposcenic Chronotopias:

See and Sum up: Neganthropocene + Chronotopias

O

P

Parergonal writings:

In premodern art, theory and criticism identify a parergon with elements such as the background action in a history painting, the inclusion in a landscape of picturesque embellishments, or, as Kant writes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, as the addition of ornament to a painting, a statue, or a building. Jacques Derrida reintroduced and reoriented the term of parergon into contemporary critical theory in The Truth in Painting, after Kant and making it differ from its usual meaning i.e. something subordinate or accessory. For Derrida the parergon as edge, frame, threshold or margin and in particular, that of the border of the artwork, operates as a supplement that reopens the reading of the parergon-ed object. In the exposition of the research project, the notion of parergonal writings, present in the subtitle, is inspired by the Derridian position, and accounts, in that redirection, for the iterative aggregation of “the writing” produced during the four-year doctoral course. It is intended to play on multiple modes of enunciation of research according to different time frames and responding to different institutional contexts, demands, and conditions. These parergonal writings supplement in the manner of a multivocal cloud motif and no longer frame the artistic practice in order, on the one hand, to foil what could be a centripetality of a monovocal and monofocal reflective writing (a thesis) and, on the other hand, to play with the conventions of straight juxtaposition between practice/writing about the practice, by mirroring the latter dichotomy, with a deconstructive distortion.

Post-theatre drama:

Permutation of the term postdramatic theatre that might trigger a possibility to engage with the notion of contemporary drama from a scenic perspective which examines what kind of stage might emerge once the spatiotemporal conventions of theatre-making are transgressed.

Protoscenotype:

Experimental scenic prototype (which can always already be experienced as a stage per se).

Q

Queer(-ed/-ing) temporalities:

From a queer perspective, the concept of time itself, and not just identities, is ideological. To think history according to the arrow of progress is to subject it to the reproductive heteronormative paradigm; which in turn validates the national political narrative guaranteeing each of his subjects a secure future through insurance and biopolitical measures. Queer temporalities – or alter-temporalities or xeno-temporalities - come into play as an alternative to the Western conception of a historical, biographical, linear, profitable and monotheist time(-ed/-ing) in order to insist on the movements, fluxes, and instabilities of phenomena and definitions.

R

Reacclimating (the Stage):

Considering the new climatic techno-bio regimes and the need for a radical transformation of scenic practices in response to anthropo(s)cenic stakes, I have proposed this dynamic/concept of “reacclimating the stage”. The title can be read as a direct reference to the history of the relation between mankind and the vegetal. Indeed I am referring here to the “gardens of acclimatization”. These gardens appeared in colonialist Europe during the second half of the 19th century as a way to introduce and ‘acclimatize’ exotic vegetal species for the entertainment of park visitors and eventually for agricultural, pharmaceutical and commercial exploitation. Hence, to “reacclimate” here alludes critically to a possible resilient inversion process of this historical appropriation of the flora. The re- of reacclimating the stage can, therefore, allude to a returning process. In this first direction, the research can be put in relation to the suggestion of returning to ancient poetics of theatre-related to cosmos (ancient Greek theatre), landscape (Basque pastorale) and non-human spectators (Japanese Kagura). But this – suspiciously conservative - dynamic of return needs to be complemented by additional takes on the prefix re- that opens the expression into forward-movements (climates are ever-changing) of re-action (like in re-acting), of reciprocity (like in re-pay) or of variation-oriented repetition (like in re-phrasing/re-formulating).

Redirecting:

Literally to give another direction (hereby to the practice of directing).

But also redirecting as the job of the director that is to say redirecting attention and agency based on the understanding of the stage as milieu rather than center. From deus ex machina and omnipotent director to an uncertain reshuffler in medias res.

S

Scenic thinking:

Praxis for the production of hypotheses focusing on the history and the becoming of the notion of « stage ». Scenic thinking operates before, with and beyond the obvious realm of theatre and touches upon a wide spectrum of aesthetic/epistemic manifestations.

Scenotemporal turn(s):

Scenotemporal (echoing the adjective spatiotemporal) turns refer to a series of temporal paradigm shifts that have been conceptualized and implemented in the research based on the hypothesis that the given western organization and production of a stage is no longer adequate to seize the (hyper)reality of the world(s) we humans are living in, if based on an exclusively human and western conception of scenic time indexed to the athropocentric “now” of the human-scaled “here”. The practice has therefore gone through three “turns”: 1. Exit the phalo-logo-centered human presence as the by-default temporal measure of theatre 2. Enter biospheric nonhuman temporalities 3. Enter algorithmic temporalities.

Skenomorphoses:

The research is anchored in the observation from a lived experience of theatre-making that fundamental anthropocentrism is embedded in the very mechanism of western theatre, whom human-centered forms and perspectives, based on an exclusive idea of the "human" that does not seem to enable a sustainable "common" any longer, in a time when human activity triggers a profound biospheric and algorithmic mutation on the environment, which changes retroactively the humanness of the triggering agent. Those, therefore become inoperative, anthropocentric mechanisms are based on dominating separations and categorizations, that rely upon, and reinforce, straight dichotomies. The arbitrary division of the theatre space/time between stage and backstage which is looked at in the research project as an example of infrastructural unsustainable manifestation of this anthropocentric binary system, is challenged and undermined by being put into an experimental process of transformation through deconstruction and hybridization. Echoing the plural form of the noun metamorphoses and invoking its mythological dimension, skenomorphoses refers to these metamorphoses of the (understanding of what can be a) stage when environment, backstage, and (what we used to call) the Skene* (in ancient Greek theatrical language) has left the function of framing décor and become the main agential milieu for (hyperdramatic) theatre to appear and shapeshift sideways from anthropogenic regulation.
(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

*Skene: in ancient Greek theatre, a construction behind the performing area that was originally a hut for the changing of masks and costumes, and the storing of material, but eventually became the background before which the drama was enacted.

T

Tempo-Ecologizing dramaturgy:

The research has looked into the relationship between theatre and (the history of) (the notion of) ecology. Considering the successive ecosophic turns (Enter Guattari/Exit Guattari/Re-Enter Guattari) that have impacted the practice of the stage, the research has shown interest in works that deal with ecological and environmental issues in a frontal or applied way or through a spatial, systems theory approach. In dialogue firstly with Theresa May and Wendy Arons' ecodramaturgies, secondly with Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri regarding to the notion of landscape play, and thirdly with both techno-eco-feminist intraactions and mortonian dark ecologies, I have tried to implement my own ecologization of dramaturgy from a time-specific perspective, by attempting to show in the works how time itself is an ecological issue by looking into, and destabilzing, western theatre’s internal modes of operating, and also by speculating on new temporalities for the emergence of another form of stage.

Time ecology:

A time-specific approach to the critical study of the interactions among beings and their environment.

U
V
W

X

Xenoperformativity:

The notion emerges in the contemporary vicinity of notions such as xenoarchitecture or xenofeminism. It supplements the notion of deep stage by offering a perspective from a vantage point of performance, elaborating on the concept of scenic otherness. Therefore xenoperformativity in the research stands for “other performativity” and “performativity of the other”. It aims at developing a speculative sense with which to investigate how the stage can be understood differently through the dramaturgy of an experimental attempt to invite the “other” to perform and therefore to change the structure of the stage itself.

(a speculative term proposed in the frameworks of my doctoral research)

Y

Z