Performance, representation, event

Résumé 0

Since the late fifties, the history of performing arts has experienced aesthetic and paradigmatic changes, both in its foundations and its approaches. The emergence of performance, as the practice of a genre drawing on the avant-garde and performance art, but also as a paradigm of practices to study and theories falling within an anthropological and inter-cultural perspective, largely popularised by Schechner (Performance Studies), is at the root of a transition. It’s characterised by a shift from an Aristotelian logic of binary or bipolar representation to a processual, interactional, event-driven logic of performance in an aesthetic and post-modern system different from representation and mimêsis, which it does not necessarily involve or exclude. It is an indicator of a disturbance in representation, of the closure of its models and conventions, and a catalyst for the dialogue and conciliation between ever-evolving systems; where the destabilisation of the performance/representation opposition or analogy show fluctuating relations between the creative processes of events, to the advantage of dialogue between assimilation ofpractice and theory, while avoiding being stuck in the determination of their representations.