Research Plan

Artistic Research/Doctorate of Arts

Candidate Selection Process/Application/Third and Last Round

Tutke-Performing Arts Research Centre/Theatre Academy/Uniarts Helsinki

WORKING TITLE

On (other) theatre-time: How to (un)stage heterochronic theatre?

A practice-based attempt to destabilize the paradigm of theatrical unitary co-presence.

This that the thing seen and the thing felt

about the thing seen not going on at the same tempo

is what makes the being at the theatre something

that makes anybody nervous

Gertrude Stein – Plays (1935)

(…) vient me toucher comme les rayons différés d'une étoile

Roland Barthes – La Chambre Claire (1980)

No, that's not it.

Nina, The Seagull (act 4), Anton Chekhov (1896)

(…) what it could mean to live at the epoch of the Anthropocene

when what was until now a mere décor for human history

is becoming the principal actor.

Bruno Latour - Facing Gaia,

Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature (2013)

The here and now is a prison house.

 José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia:

The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

We should be on by now.

David Bowie, Time. (1973)

A. General orientation

My research proposal is somehow coming from Gertrud Stein's nervousness as lived experience and artistic discomfort. As a spectator, actor, and director. And also, maybe, from calming this disquiet down by welcoming (after Roland Barthes, after Susan Sontag) the delayed touch of dead stars' light. It might also take roots in the fact of having been born in a cut country, with a troubled sense of identity, and also from the institutional obligation to lose my southern Basque accent and to learn ‘right’ French phonetics during my years in the French Theatre Academy, and therefore to deal with, as an actor, a second-nature-like way to speak. But this is maybe too intimately biographic to start with here. More pragmatically, this plan surfaces from two confluent streams: firstly from the recent, and necessary, re-routing of my artistic activity as professional theatre director out of the (lived as) alienating economy and ecology of the theatre production-machine, doubled with the aesthetic dissatisfaction of still operating on and within “given” scenic spatiotemporal conventions, and building the intuitive understanding that these spatiotemporal conditions are no longer operative to grasp the world I am living in (if one still considers theatre as a set of acts that generate a distance, or a separation, that allow in return for such a grasp, or an uncertain fleeting glitched glimpse) - and simultaneously (the first reason generated the second) from an ongoing academic Masters degree research, based on my current “deviant” theatre practice, and its subsequent thesis entitled, “Introduction to a Practice of Heterochronic Theatre: Historical and Theoretical Issues at Stake and at Work”, currently in its final stages of writing (delivery planned in one month from now), in the department of theatre studies (arts de la scène) at the French University of Lyon Lumière 2. This double movement corresponds therefore to a radical process to critically reset my practice of directing into new strategies and regimes of art-making, based on my interest in entering a zone of experimentality and durational rethinking of my relation to what is called a stage, and the relationship of this term with the transformations of the planet and society.

After the last theatre play I directed on a proper “stage”, in the Théâtre de la Croix-Rousse in Lyon, I indeed decided to drift away from the institutional French theatre endogamic microcosmos, considering this distance-taking as a necessary ecological movement into “something else”, which took the promising name of research. After discovering the existence of artistic research doctoral and postdoctoral platforms, especially those in Scandinavian countries, and after studying the history of this fairly new discipline (and considering also the suspicion to define it as such), I was interested in trying to find shelter and experimental, peer-shared ground in the field for this rerouting process. That is the reason why I have undertaken the aforementioned Masters, to catch up with the academic graduation logic and requirements, and I have also chosen to do it as a theoretical preparation for the doctoral project. Entering the program in the Performing Arts Research Centre would, therefore, be a way for me:

1. to host the last six years of rather isolated research in a structured and collegiate space for support and feedback, and,

2. to continue with the movement of research with new experimentations, contextualized in the ecology of artistic research, in the wish to put together, as a temporary synthesis, this moment of reconfiguring of my practice of directing and proposing it as a contribution to the field of theatre/scenic arts; at the same time to develop a professional practice within what is called (and I am not sure to really understand what it is yet, which is quite stimulating) artistic research.

What is it about?

My research question from, with(in) and on theatre (and possibly out and away of a certain understanding of it too – I will develop this further), is the following: How to think and implement an artistic act of mise-en-scene that can trigger a perceptive experience through which the notion of theatrical co-presence - seen as the cornerstone of our Western theatre aesthetical system (and which generates thus, when conceptualized and produced as a reparative mono-temporal whole, a sceno-anxious Steinian type of “nervousness”) - is destabilized? And, as a complementary question, given that artistic phenomenon cannot escape necessary present/ation (that means a compulsory inscription in “some” present): what could be the operations of altering the setting temporalities of the different components of so-called presentation in order to trigger such a destabilization and therefore to challenge theatre time boundaries of and for the conditions of a “scenic event/encounter”? Under what kind of conditions such an experience of destabilised or expanded mise-en-scene can still be called theatre? How can I, as a transitioning theatre director, stage this shift from unitary temporality to a speculated temporal complexity of the “co-presence” as an aesthetic experience for a (contingent/networked) audience? The answer to these questions would then be proposed as an acknowledgment of what I hereby propose to coin as heterochronic theatre and therefore assessed as a possibility of time-related paradigm shift from homochronic theatre dominant theories and practices.

This experience of shift would be based on the undermining of the triangular relationship which constitutes the traditional unitary theatrical co-presence, i.e. the intertwining of presences in between a human viewer (or several of them assembled as one community of spectators), a human actor (or a human-designed and controlled theatrical object of experience/contemplation/reflection) and the homogenous temporal logic (I use the term homochronic here) of “live” theatre - the “now” of the “here-and-now”. The hypotheses and implementations of the experimental means and correlative methods activated to trigger such an experience of undermining are therefore the challenges of this practice-based research proposal.

The activation of these means and correlative methods depends on scrutiny and questioning of the conventional triangular set of “co-present” positions and relations, the three (entangled) axes:

> How to shift from directing/staging a happening, centripetal, monofocal, monotemporal and intensified subject/object of representation to redirecting spectatorial attention towards a withdrawing, dissociating, deferring, dislocated and relocated, de-intensified subject/object of representation?

> How to reset spectatorship from compulsory (collective) presence to incidental event of perception or long-term perceptive relation/participation while developing the twofold movement: towards a “returning” viewer (un “spectateur revenant” in French, revenant for returning and for ghost) and towards “spectators' network” (expanding Bruno Latour's theory on Actors' Network, including the possibility of other-than-human spectatorship).

> How to trigger a deferred representation in which both former “presences” are no more necessary, but contingent, and possibly failed? What kind of scenic art of failure/gap might emerge from this?

> How far and to which “landscapes” do these temporal shifts away from our normative temporal regimes of "co-presencing stage in-between-human-only" reach when suspending anthropocentric and anthropogenic stage-engineering based on these internalized western temporal human-scaled patterns?

Hence these attempts of directing/staging heterochronic theatre through resetting the triangular logic of co-presences (which can be potentially turned here into a mix of co-absences-presences-ghosts) should raise the question of when, where, how and why the experience that is proposed can still be called theatre. In other words: Can a theatre piece “happen without happening here and now" and without a human exclusive copresence? If the answer is “yes”, then what happens theatrically/scenically/scenographically/dramaturgically, or what emerges as theatre/stage, when the chronological and linear past-present-future axis is messed/meshed/mazed and the considered scenic agencies and temporalities are beyond a human context? Finally, how does the practice of "directing" transform, while triggering the transformation itself within this retemporalizing, what we call a stage? What becomes then the social function of theatre in such a structural reset?

This research on the possibility of heterochronic theatre is part of a broader context of what may be called a contemporary "crisis of time" (collapse of the time of global capitalist modernity, acceleration of ice caps' melting and count-down of the "sixth extinction" (Kolbert, 2014), burst of yoga, mindfulness and urge for the ego-instant-fulfillment, big data techno-speed, to list a few chrono-techno-eco-concerns...) and intends to contribute to its thinking through a sensitizing mise-en-abyme process of revising, through retemporalizing, scenic ecologies.

Inspired by Jacques Derrida, Henri Lefebvre and, more recently - and from the same deconstructive arborescence - Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the one hand or Bernard Stiegler on techno-eco-thinking on the other; and simultaneously and without hierarchizing, by eco/cyber-feminisms (Donna Haraway, Karen Barad), queer theory on queer time (Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam), by literature from Marcel Proust and Jorge-Luis Borges to (pre-) Nouveau Roman writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Nathalie Sarraute or Alain Robbe-Grillet, by new approaches of time in visual art curating such as Nicolas Bourriaud's “Altermodern” proposal for Tate Triennale 2009, or from visual artists who've been dealing with these very issues of time-oriented site-specificity such as Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and more closely to the "discipline" in the history of theatrical (expanded toward intermedial) theories and practices which has already explored the “dissociativeness” of experimental theatre that I will refer in this text later, this research proposal intends to trigger, from and within theatre, a set of experiences that could participate in a contemporary movement of ecological revision of the stage within a poetics of plurality of time.

If, as I hereby formulate the hypothesis, the actual time dominance is about producing, focusing, organizing and performing lives around an intensified unitary globalized "now", then thinking and implementing a heterochronic theatre can propose an alternative space - and of course time - for a lived sideways experience, based on these contemporary chrono-po-e/li-tical concerns. And therefore it can give some reflection on what can be new ethics of responsibility and action within a certain poetics of undecidability of lived multi-time(s) (in French the singular form of the noun temps (time) is spelt with a final, pluralizing, s...). Lived multi-time(s) which would include the dreamt time(s) to which Derrida, during his Frankfurt discourse for the reception of the Adorno Award in 2002, paid a tribute by offering the following question: “Is there an ethics or a politics of the dream which gives way neither to the imaginary nor to Utopia and thus does not make itself guilty of any abdication, lack of responsibility or escapism?”1.

B. A few precisions about the research question and some clues on the possible articulation of its theory/practice, plus a still blurry methodology forecast

What again?

What are theatre co-presence and shared experience of the nowness of representation actually about? When trying to qualify and to quantify those notions, difficult questions indeed arise. Is there such a thing as efficient theatrical co-presence, i.e. one that is homogeneous and unmediated within a compact unitary substantial « now », as the Western tradition has been relying on, or is it possible to revoke this belief through critical studies and implementations by testing alternative time-based configurations? How can I, as a theatre director, stage this shift from unitary temporality to a speculated temporal complexity of the “co-presence” as an aesthetic experience for a (contingent/networked) audience? In this sense, my research proposal can take part in the debate within theatre studies between those who advocate and affirm theatrical experience as being founded on the unity of auratic presence (for example French philosopher Alain Badiou's recent re-affirmationist theories2)  and those - and my research would aim to bolster this side - who put this seminal and dominant statement under suspicion and propose a shift for theatre paradigm on what I could call here a temporal rift (Fuchs,1996. Bourriaud, 2018). Loaded with the awareness of the latter’s alternative history of deconstruction, my research does not pretend to discover the possibility of a shift, but aims to step into the breach by fulfilling potential zones of practice still to be explored.

A theoretical background

The theoretical background of my practice is mainly based on the study of Jacques Derrida's philosophy and queer theory, and their scrutinizing of the very notion of presentness through deconstructive negotiation (in-) between time, being and language. The aim of my practice, in dialogue with this theoretical supply, is not to illustrate a certain number of philosophers' concepts as much as to resonate with them and produce an autonomous aesthetic echo back, asserted as artistic heuristics (hence the wish to incorporate this artistic project within the framework of such an artistic research program).

In my Masters paper I have specifically focused more on Derridean notions such as « hauntology » (haunted ontology) and « spectrality »3, « deferral/différance »4, « restance »5, « reserve »6, « ventriloquism »7. These constitute a bunch of key concepts to accompany and with which to reflect on my practice. Thus I detached - and have been examining for my Masters thesis - three texts by Derrida, all related to theatre, from the rest of his massive corpus of writings: two texts about Antonin Artaud and his theatre of cruelty - La parole soufflée (The Stolen Speech) and The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation- and the third, Specters of Marx, for his analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a primary conceptual leitmotiv. In these three texts, Derrida examines the original dissociation of the speaking being and criticizes Western ontological statement-making based on the authority of logocentrism. Poetically and methodologically inspired by this deconstructive strategy, my research practice would try to set up representational configurations which would emphasize and display this temporal dissociativeness as an experience of an interval in which the intertwined presences of the body and the language, and their perception from a spectator are no longer perceived as a unitary, monolithic entity, but as complex and multiple sets of traces of simultaneous embodied temporalities of a unstable – and therefore heterochronic - representation.

As I mentioned in the first part of this application, the theory accompanies the practice and somehow infuses in it. The pitfall of such an inductive approach (method) would be a didactic illustration. Hence as an artist, and not a philosopher, I will have to configure experiences that will not appear as any theoretical evidence or translation. This fundamental and challenging methodological principle of artistic research will be highly considered. While the Masters thesis would end with clear rhetorical articulation, the doctorate of artistic research would find branch away from the scholarly oriented argumentation and discursive art framing and set up a third space8 for an alternative register of address. I currently feel, at this transitional moment between an academic Masters and a desired doctoral project in artistic research, a rejection of the transplanted academic tissue and I hope to discover other means of hybridization than the non-satisfying coupling of the practice and the writing about the practice. That will manifest in the choice of the methodology.

Methodology

The capacity to pose plans and procedures as research methodology (I am not sure about this term that sounds extracted from scientific rational discourse) has always already its own uncertainty, since the procedures and methods might be emerging in and through the work itself rather than being planned in advance. Therefore investigating the methodology of this specific research is already a methodological axis. Whether it is about questions of protocols and strategies or interpretative methods and outcome presentations, my artistic research project has to find and propose, invent and value, its own becoming through its own medium (stage) and topic (heterochronic theatre) and within the consistent exchanges within the artistic research program in Tutke/performing Arts Research Centre. However, even if this methodological and epistemological cautiousness in pre-formulation has to be put forward before starting, it nevertheless seems possible to trigger some minimal modus operandi to begin with through three main concerns: practice, theory, and visibility/address/exchanges. I guess the question of what is artistic research cannot be put aside, even though I can see that it is preferable to contemplate the proactive question: what does artistic research (that suspiciously embeds a prior resolution, or denial, of the ontological first question) do?

Practice first!

This research project, within this specific artistic research program, is to be carried out through practice. That is to say that all its aims - formulated as hypotheses through research questions - are set up in order to be answered through practice itself. The questioning of the valuation of the epistemic dimension of these answers through the performative material form of the practice itself is an important part of the research. This material form of the practice and its documented iterations will be considered as the very text of the research on which evaluations, dialogues, and debates will be held up.

As I said above the Masters thesis I am now finishing would serve as a prologue for the doctoral research project. It will provide a theoretical launchpad. But at the time of its actual completion, I am also aware of the obvious fact that I am not a scholar and that I do not want to become one. I am an artist willing to maintain myself as such, at the same time exposing this identity to artistic research modulations/alterations. In order to insist on this, I plan to hyperproduce art during the doctoral project, and as the doctoral project. This hyperproduction of artistic “crashtests” will always be doubled by thorough documentation. This documentation is the material to be redistributed as the epistemic supplementary mise en scène of the research through the art, and as such, as artistic research.

More Concretely: heterochronic theatre has to be continuously configured and tested artistically.

This experimental process might involve collaborators and materials.

Therefore I would like to meet, beyond the community of colleagues in the research centre, professional theatre/performing arts artists in Helsinki, and students in the different programs in the Theatre Academy (directing, acting, dramaturgy, choreography, Live art) and other art schools/university research programs in order to build co-researching relations and working collaborations to initiate and people these experimental configurations and tests.

Text(s)

I would like to align this research with the history of western theatre. Indeed, I would like to engage with a process of transformation/transition that embeds the memory of western theatre literature, rituals, constructions, etc.... Therefore dramatic authors from the canon will be chosen through a selection of their plays such as: Shakespeare (Hamlet, The Tempest, among others), Strindberg (The Ghost sonata, A dream play), Chekhov (The Seagull among others), Beckett (The Ghost trio, Endgame among others), Duras (L'Homme Atlantique among others), Fosse (I'm the wind) and Blanchot's novel (L'attente l'oubli/Awaiting Oblivion). This list is indicative and subject to modification within the research process.

Translation

Considering that logos and presence are approached in this research through hauntological perspectives, I would like to « invest » the notion of « translation » as a space-time of performativity. This concern about performing translation goes beyond the obvious issues of verbal languages (based on the use of global English as a rather problematic idiom of research), expanding towards how to translate an artwork realized in the framework of artistic research into, precisely and specifically, artistic research. In this direction, I would like to insist on the specific focus of the documentation process. Documentation is no longer considered as a secondary practice to primary artistic activity. Documents produced in the research will be generated as trans-material to be reworked/restaged/redirected over the course of the project in order to think about and act on the performativity of documentation, and the epistemic value that lies in the movement of transformation/translation.

Installation

One of the main artistic media to be explored in the research is installation (more in the field of expanded/performing scenography than in the visual art realm, even though these disciplinary spheres intersect). Looking closely into the history of installation art, I would like to develop a range of installative gestures that invite spectators to experience installation as scene and stage, offering temporalities (like e.g. duration) that exceeds the temporal framing of what is generally called a stage. Installation can be made of traces and does not depend on live performing (human) bodies. At a time when the scenographer emancipates themselves from their traditional commissioned work, dependent on the decision/vision of the director, installation or performative scenographies, seem to fit an endeavor to engage with non-human temporalities and agencies, at the same time embedding, as I said, traces and memories of western theatre (like scenographic/architecture elements/materialities). Video will be used as a medium, through which to engage with the questions: what can a videoscenic installation be and do? What is the resonance between video art and theatre? Can we speak of a scenic dimension of a video work, and what can a staged video be and do? I am not referring here to the history of multimedia theatre and “videos on stage” (before starting to deviate, ten years ago, I did this myself as a straight-contemporary-theatre director, under the influence of Flemish and German theatre-makers like Ivo van Hove or Christof Schligensief) but rather, the way stage and video can revise their structural relation, away from the mainstream theatrical norms and forms. The destabilization of the spatiotemporal qualities and mimetic variations produced by the heterochronic poetics might inevitably reexamine the relational organization of stages and screens. In this search for effective videoscenic installation, the process will relate more to contemporary art than to mainstream tech-theatre.

These installed objects might, therefore, appear as ambivalent, at the same time “disciplinary” and “transdisciplinary” (plus the layer of hybridization once contextualized within the artistic research milieu). I am very interested in this ambivalence, again an undecidability and openness. Intermediality and multimediality, as much as multitemporality and multivocality, will be contemplated. This research plan in those matters is aware of, and wishes to hold a dialogue with, artists like Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Ed Atkins, Ragnar Kjartansson, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Rabih Mroué, Ho Tzu Nyen, to mention a few of inspiring makers producing new types of temporal experiences. In the theatre field, Heiner Goebbels would be the closest reference. Other interesting transmedial contemporary directors such as Romeo Castellucci and Philippe Quesne, or Kris Verdonck and Gisele Vienne, are also looked at despite the fact that they seem to operate in what I call the in vitro paradigm of theatre, i.e. theatre-making which equates to pouring theatrical objects on theatre stages, in the ecosystemic maintenance of the spatiotemporal conventions of the spectacle.

Strategy/dramaturgy/subjectivity.

Following Brechtian (Verfremdungseffekt) and Beckettian (post-anthropocentrim) internalised estrangement -inclinations, I wish to develop time-specific objects of art and research based on chiasmus, crisscrossing discourses, translations, and transpositions, with potential for breakdowns, gaps, delays and deferrals, elusiveness, aporias, and failures. A sense of humor, a taste for multilayered relational approaches, a penchant for minimal acts and arte povera, and an attempt to reach out to complexity without being stodgy are among the stylistic and dramaturgic lines of flight in the making. Queering, playing, deconstructing, estranging can be hereby named as the strategies. And finding a “voice” that might be personal, yet not autobiographical, intimate but with no interest in auto-ethnology, multiple and undecided, yet claiming position and responsibility... Cherishing therefore poetic potentials of aporia, glitch and counter-performance.

Visibility.

Research on heterochronic theatre has to be inscribed in the context from which it is coming and wishes to question, i.e. theatre itself as a medium, a place, an architecture, a social context, and institution. And therefore within an analysis of its inherent (inherited) chrono/politics of visibility. Thus, methodologically, heterochronic theatre can not be experimented and exchanged only in the closed milieu of research but has to be put in front of the audience. That is why I would like to proceed with both kinds of experiences, within artistic research milieu among peers and within conventional theatre spaces (and « real » audience), and observe the outcomes from these different contexts of visibility and reflect from and on them.

The question of visibility does not only refer to the specific research but also concerns the visibility of artistic research in general. So far it seems to me that artistic research has been operating on the precarious terrains between academia and art. I would like to join collegiate forces in order to consider how it is possible to get away from this uncomfortably narrow ‘between-ness’ and scaffold the emergence of a(nother) third space, more autonomous yet still interconnected with academic and art ecosystems. This expansion of the horizon of performed and performative research depends simultaneously on the experimentations of new forms of materialization of the research and on the enlargement of the audience beyond the community of peers.

This movement towards an/the audience has also to be challenged by what I mentioned above, i.e. the orientation of the research towards the expansion of what is called audience to contingent, possibly other-than-human, networks of spectators.

History/Contexts/Becomings: another via negativa of theatre and stage

a.No(n) Theatre

By no(n) theatre, I relate to aesthetic strategies that have been undermining theatre from its Western traditional definition as a live (present/now) form of manifesting. From the last century onwards, many theoreticians and practitioners have proposed to destabilize the live-paradigm by getting rid of most of its conventions and have therefore re-designed new conditions for theatre to appear, or disappear (as a performative act). Based upon observations on makers' implementations (or explorations of other disciplines, i.e. artists using theatre notions and means) new categories of theatre have emerged over the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st century, such as postdramatic theatre, theatre of absence or theatre without theatre. My theatre research aims at having a dialogue with those three occurrences of “no(n) theatre” in order to find my own specificity within them.

> Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic theatre proposed as a genre a diverse and large panorama of scenic dramaturgies exiting from the tradition of literary theatre, implying scenic actions based on dramatic narration/text. Undoubtedly my research emerged within the postdramatic momemtum, under the influence of deviant ways to relate to the conventional theatre-making, yet nevertheless, it seems to differentiate itself by rejecting the dichotomy dramatic/postdramatic and to propose instead to welcome back text and drama, but under the exclusive conditions of the heterochronic (that would probably turn the term into ghostdramatic, or maybe – to be pondered over the doctorate period - into post-theatre drama?).

> Theatre of Absence corresponds to a wave in the late '70s and '80s of directors and collectives such as Stuart Sherman, Daryl Chin, The Wooster Group and also, through a certain rhizomatic logic, directors working from Bob Wilson's legacy. The deconstructive restoration of textuality in my works and the search for new materialities/temporalities on stage can be related to this mainly, as far as I know, US moment.

> Theatre Without Theatre was an exhibition in MACBA Barcelona in 2007 put together by French curator Bernard Blistène. The show would offer a panorama and exegesis on mixed-media – intermedial – assemblages as forms of recycling theatre notions in order to configure new “stages” to hold the relationship with the spectator. I would say that my research is connected to this history of hybridization of theatre on other stages (visual art/art of performance/installation art) but seems to differentiate itself by its endeavor to engage with this intermedial strategy “back” on and “from” the theatre (battle?) field.

b. No(n) discipline (intermediality and transdisciplinarity)

My project finds alignment within the already long history of performing arts research on intermediality and intends to contribute to exchanges on the conceptual becoming of the entanglement in between theatre and other mediums on one hand, and in between theatre art and installation and performance art on the other hand. On those matters, Aesthetics of Installation Art by Berlin-based researcher and philosopher Juliane Rebentisch is an important bibliographic reference for the research.

At the same time, Intermedial potential is intended to be explored through crossovers with new technologies. The relationship between theatre and new technologies of information and communication focused on new staged optical strategies/stratagems and new illusory machines (when theatre meets computing, 3-D, holography, based on the 9 evenings inaugural event) will be studied, as much as the artistic history of holograms and glitches (with a special interest in Rosa Menkman and her glitch studies manifesto).

Since the notion of spectrality has been placed as a seminal notion introduced in the practice, the project heterochronic theatre is interested in the development of holographic technics. But not as new spectacular means of illusion. Holograms interest me for their potential of fractalization of time and being and tracing absence, more than for their power of fascination (special effects/immersive apparatus/sophisticated technological shows). The difficulty is to find technology researchers and providers who are interested in contemporary (and possibly failing) art research. But maybe such a research program could bring such a sustainable non-profitable (for the tech provider) partnership.

c. Non-human theatre (the Stage and/of the (post-)Anthropocene)

After referring previously to pre-existing research on crossovers between performing arts and « new technologies » to underline my interest in those issues in relation to my research orientations, I would like to juxtapose immediately another lead of research, which can seem paradoxical (if one considers artificial beings excluded from living ones' community) but which equally sparks my research desire. Indeed, I think it would be relevant to align my investigations within the actual theoretical and practical probes on timelessness through a perspective of non-human performativity (and potentially exploring the entanglement of both human and non-human performance) which appear clearly to me as a logical extension of the notion of heterochronic co-presence. By considering, on the one hand, philosophical tools on contemporary non-representational theories (which induce a reagency of both notions of time and performativity) and, on the other hand, art history signals coming from 1. histories of landscape plays (Stein, Fuchs, Chaudhuri), 2. ecosophic/ecodramaturgic turns (Guattari, Kirkkopelto, Garcin-Marrou), and 3. nonhuman-oriented contemporary artistic practices like, for example, and when it comes to Finnish context, Annette Arlander's performing approach of performing landscape and Tuija Kokkonen's choronopolitics addressed in her recent performative implementations on interactivity (in) between humans, plants and animals9, my research question may also flourish through a certain thought and practice of disruption with human normative temporal structures and thus open a sequence of research which could resonate with the « still » (but a position on an edge or in a dead-end may produce something) anthropocentric notion of heterochronic theatre. As a complementary study to this part, I would like to reconsider some historical origins of Western theatre, such as Greek theatres and Basque pastoral, and observe their architectonic relationship to the environment, from a cosmic and landscapist point of view, as well as speculate on the possibility of a long counter-history deviating from anthropocentrism. This track of thoughts and experiments could find resonance with, and hopefully propose a contribution to, the actual research on how acknowledgment of the Anthropocene is impacting human activities and agency, and therefore, artistic practices.

In this direction, I think it could be also interesting to engage with other-than-western ancestral forms of theatre in connection with animist religions, that would already posit human performance within a network of ex-centering agencies, such as the Japanese kagura for example.

Finally and in relation to the previous point on stage and technology, I would be interested in considering, after/with Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler for example, how the relationship stage/technology could be addressed not as a dialogue (about enhancing theatre with the addition of multimedia technology “on stage”, as two separate entities, and based on dialogues between theatre-makers and tech-specialists) but rather from a more (infra)structural perspective, considering for example how the techno-mutations and their own reality transform the very idea of stage in the first place. In the continuation of the expression about holograms, the shift would be to ask what if it is not about putting holograms on stage but to imagine that the stage itself would be holographic and glitched?

Geography, displacement, Theatrum Mundi.

After spending the first fifteen years of my professional theatre experience, first as an actor and then mainly as a director, in the “black box”, focusing on "representing the outside on stage indoors”, the need to change my practice based on the aforementioned destabilization of the spatiotemporal conventions of the stage was first and foremost expressed, and I would say literally, by the need to get out of this, for me, closed and suffocating environment. I, therefore, started to travel. Considering that travel was a means of deconstruction, and the theatre no longer being for me this “heterotopia” of which Foucault speaks due to the conventional repetition, and in my opinion now unable to account for the contemporary world and its manufacturing methods, a deterritorialization, first of all physical, was urgent. As I took the tangent, I luckily found on my way out thinkers and artists who helped me to double this physical displacement with alternative aesthetic perspectives and horizons. In the context of doctoral research, I would like to maintain this double dynamic of deterritorialization - i.e. complementarily geographic and aesthetic - by finding a spatiotemporal articulation between working at the research center in Helsinki, through seminars and other collegial gatherings, and the possibility of being able to circulate on the planet. To this first reason to choose physical displacement out of the black box environment, was added, as I have already mentioned, a more theoretical motivation. In the movement of a research on the scenic shift between a human and humanist theatre towards a stage opening itself to other temporalities, and considering, with a certain number of thinkers and artists, that the collective acknowledgment of the entry in the Anthropocene era poses a demand to reconsider practices and agency, I would like to work on the concept of Theatrum Mundi. As we know, during the Renaissance period this term - literally the world's a stage - i.e. all men and women, all earthly men and women, are actors - was proposed as a premodern scenic model of society. The world was then seen and thought, according to the bifurcation of nature/culture, as a setting, as décor, in front of and in which the human actors play. The opening of the stage to heterochronic performative principles will be sought in the inversion of the Theatrum Mundi representational logic, considering that the world has become the actor, that is to say that the biospheric and so-called natural elements of the setting have entered the stage. It will no longer be a question here of transposing the methods of theatre-making outside (in open-air theatre for example) but of reflecting in practice on how these elements can be viewed, welcomed, perhaps partnered towards regenerating scenic forces. This will involve, in concrete terms, going to meet winds, tides, stars, forests, ice processes, and storms. To listen and feel their manifestations, planetarily differentiated, in and through multiple skies, plains, mountains, and oceans. Theatre Academy/Tutke would, therefore, be a base-camp for the research and the practice will possibly be displaced to other environments and contexts. Therefore, residencies will be applied in Finland and other Scandinavian countries, but also in Southern Europe (French Basque Country, Spain, and Portugal), North-America (Canada, California), South-America (Argentina) and Asia (Japan, Korea).  Links, woven over the past five years, pre-exist to this program, notably with European countries, Canada, Argentina, and Japan. I will take care of the ecological, economical and ethical dimensions of such a plan by trying to push forward the personal and aesthetic motivations over the risk of an image of a privileged artist traveling all over the world and hopping, arbitrarily, from one residence to another. Being aware of the global mechanisms of the contemporary art world, the post and neo-colonial critique, the recent debates on cultural appropriation and residences market, I will root and disseminate this methodical choice as a programmatic ethos, in relation to my research topic on alternative chrono-ethics of the stage.

C. WORKING PLAN

This plan is, needless to say, indicative and subject to modifications within the research process.

Practice forecast over 4 years when the object of the research is time of heterochronic theatre is rather complicated to pose as a strategy based on successive acts. It has to be thus thought through and launched according to interest in notions such as duration, repetition, discontinuity, circularity, distortion, dislocation, and relocation, which can be proposed as alternative parameters for time-based research. Therefore I propose here not to set any temporal agenda in terms of « projects » but to list some of the orientations/experimentations that I would like to trigger during the « non-linear time » of my doctorate in Tutke.

>>> Heterochronics 1 / Scenotemporal turn one / Exit the metaphysics of presence

Carried out in the continuation of the MA process and the practice engaged since 2012

This is about continuing to design and implement exercises and the scenic forms that exit from the paradigm of the human live presence on stage. It is about contemplating and performing spectrality, deviating from theatre habits and rituals of learning, rehearsing, performing, and perturbing their formal outcome through alternative temporizing. It is about reconsidering the materiality of the “black box” itself in the light of new materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, for example, as well as the performativity of the materials used for the scenographic constructions (decors), of their primary function and temporalities of use and efficiency.

These experiments would aim to inscribe the research within its context of the Theatre Academy (TeaK). This means that the research would start with an observation of this context in order to set up relevant interactions between TeaK « ready-mades » (teaching methods, plays, sets...) and the question of my research when it comes to alternative ecologies of theatre production. These implementations, albeit triggered as autonomous meta-artistic matters, can also be seen and held as a pedagogical link to the community of the TeaK acting and directing students.

- Disruption, dissociation, disjunction, repetition, emptying procedures on ready-made theatre plays: How to destabilize the co-presence of a pre-existing theatre play by proceeding to make variations on the temporal conditions of its display?

- Bringing the usually processual « before-matters » of the theatrical representation into autonomous forms of experience: How the « translating », the « learning », the « rehearsing », the « ventriloquizing » of a dramatic text can proceed to experiential phenomena? How the habits and gestures of « directing » can be autotelically performed as such?

- Experience of the « after(s) »: What can be experienced from an « after-play » by a spectator?

- Experience of remembering: What kind of theatricality can generate practices of remembering of the acting (immediately after playing, months after, years after...)?

- Experimentation on « sets »  under-construction, on stage, under-deconstruction and storages (constructions, displacements, latencies / performative installations).

>>> Heterochronics 2 / Scenotemporal turn two / Enter nonhuman biospheric actors

This second series of experiments will be about reconsidering the exit of the “black box” towards the “outside”, or what we used to call "nature", but not as a way to transplant the spatiotemporal conventions of theatre-making from indoor to outdoor, but by rerouting these gestures of directing theatre in the “open” from a “postnatural” perspective, that is to say by deviating them from the conventional cultural settings and procedures in response to the manifold other-than-human environmental temporalities (vegetal, geological, animal...). Particular attention will be paid to the agency of weather and the varying meteorological/seasonal temporalities and materialities. Working in medias res and “with-in the weather" will be part of these experiments on the question: what could a postnatural, neoclimatic and weathered theatre be and do in the face of the increasing global warming? What holds, what breaks, what transforms from the given temporal regimes of theatre-making once exposed to the conventions to the untamable nonhuman agencies?

>>> Heterochronics 3 / Scenotemporal turn three / Enter nonhuman artificial actors

After working from and on what I call the given constructions/regimes of the indoor and outdoor theatre-making from a “deconstructive” strategy, I might consider shifting to a more “generative” experimentation, involving the speculation on the emergence of new scenic/scenographic forms of stage. Perhaps I could orientate the project here towards an architectonic entanglement of the biospheric nonhuman and of digitalities (compuational/algoritmic/artificial entities). In addition to a first movement towards a postnatural stage, this last series of experiments could “double”, within a Kittlerian inspiration, the inscription of the emerging stage, embracing and co-produced by a heterogeneous environment that enmeshes biospheric and artificial/algorithmic agencies and temporalities.

>>> Heterochronics 4 / Time, Tempi, Temporizing of the artistic research project itself

This is about a research within the research, on how these experiments will appear in the field, and how this expositional gesture may account for the primary research topic on multi-temporal/agential stage, not through rhetorical means, but through the performative redistribution of their documentation; each presentation, publication finding its specificity in a staging and writing repeating the poetics of the work, namely the destabilization of the temporal conventions of the forms and contexts in which and through which the Academy operates. This research is therefore divided into two intraconnected stages, that of the artistic practice, and that of its exhibition in the field of artistic research in an academic context through the aesthetic regime tested in the practice. This double-stage/staging should generate differentiated objects, and the spacing between these objects will perhaps be acknowledged as epistemic meaning-making.

Taking into accounts/Keywords/Hashtags:

humor, tragicomedy, farce, playfulness, indeterminacy, unpredictability, undecidability, author status, responsibility, recalibrations, dislocation, relocation, cosmic scales, metanarrative, different level of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, becoming story of the work, changing narratives, transformations over time, transfictions, (im)permanence of acting/spectating, mujo, invitation, expectation, disappointment, imagination, potentialities, prototype, theatre parameters and registers, spatial dimensions of temporizations, singularity/plurality of encounter, objects status, image status, tightness, neatness, sharpness, elegance, style, pleasurable formality, or not, causality system theory, resonance, distance, simplicity, minimalism, complexity, elusiveness, feelings, taking care of, structures of scenic and theatre production, hierarchies, conventions break, disconnections of the joints, theatre as an ecological organism, anticipation, expectation, aftermath, weather as media, loss of scenographic control, emancipat-ed/ing scenography, waves, cliffs, clouds, nothing, un-named yet...