Early bird - Payment until 15.08.2022

3 days*
General 180€
Students 90€

Late registration - Payment until 15.09.2022

3 days*
General 250€
Students 125€

On-site

3 days*
General: 300€
Students: 150€

* Workshops paid separately. See fees below.

Workshops

WS Gabriele Reuter: 15€
WS Renato Ferracini: 30€
WS Olga Mesa & João Fiadeiro: 30€
[Pack] WS Gabriele Reuter + WS Olga Mesa & João Fiadeiro: 35€

To register for the workshops please send an email to lisbon.pai@gmail.com

Questions of presence are central to the theory of performing arts and to the training of performers. Since the 60s, performance art has tried to create scenic alternatives to representative thought(realistic or symbolic) and to dualism (reality vs representation), favouring presence and interaction. This demands a redefinition of the scene but also of theory, art and culture.

Fischer-Lichte (2012) considers three degrees of presence: simple (the body as materiality); energetic (the body intensified by training); and radical (intensified by the collective presence). Presence is not an innate ability: it requires (in the body, not just in the mind)listening, attention, generosity, porosity, dispossession, dramatic and resonant multiplication. Presence is often equalled, or at least connected, to energy and breathing (prana, or koshi). How can we expand this energy in space, work on the magnetic field, transform the body’s weight into energy?

But every presence creates a distance. Derrida argued that presence, in order to be present and self present, has always to start representing itself. “Distance is in the very heart of presence” – a displaced and unstable presence created in the relation to the otherness. The performer is confronted with the often invasive co-presence of other performers, of the director and of the audience. He grows with them, in-between.

Moreover, we can actually place absence and nothingness (instead of presence) in the centre of thought, conceiving it as the first stance both on arts media discussion and social matters problematization (Foucault, Lacan, Žižek): what is not seen and not performed as a primal entrance to tensions and precarity. Hauntology (Derrida) and spectres (already present in Deleuze’s theory), as signifiers of absolute otherness, interrupt the comfortable notions of identity and history. We need to do an historical survey on ghosts, and also a critical approach on the duality visible/invisible, as images and visual mapping of reality came to appear as the other side of social opacity and individual centering on the myth of transparency.

In digital performance, which has exploded due to the new Covid forms of socialization, the concepts of presence, absence and visibility underpin the debates between virtual and real, embodiment and disembodiment, opacity and invisibility, liveness and mediation. The discussion of absence is interdisciplinarily pertinent as a follow-up to the ecologies of liveness, where reproduction enables the live category and where remediation relates to Derridean hauntologies as a means to activate pasts.

In addition, intermediality, as an in-between arena of simultaneities of present/absent, makes ambiguities visible in narratives of power and exclusion, and at the same time can activate both disappearance and what remains. Similar to past remains in the present, ephemerality is contained in identities (marginal and “invisible” performative-social practices become visible in certain communities) in a way that performance persists, and absence is made present. Absence needs to be named –even provisionally – in order to address a conflict between singularities.Presence also depends on visibility and power, as both theories and art works have been highlighting. One might consider that there is an ideology of visibility that makes an “increase in visibility” equivalent to an “increase in power”, ending up fetishizing a difference that does not take into account the real differences: “visibility” of black skin or gender cannot be a precise barometer for identifying a community of similar political, economic, sexual and artistic interests. Some of the performers who sought to inscribe this transformative component in their art used precisely this “power of the invisible”.