Abstract
Here we begin to delve into the true heart of the art of acting. If theater is no longer understood as a theater of representation, then what takes place on stage is a transformation at play with truth. Heiner Müller called it a symbolic death, the most central event of the theater. Its most fundamental and most intimate impact stems from the fear, shared by audience and actors, of the caesura of death and the horror of the definitive loss of ourselves as subjects.
But does the fascination of theater not draw from the pleasure of metamorphosis, from gain, surplus, and the joy of the singular rightness of conditions? This interpretation ends in an ethical expectation of theater in which the stage becomes a site that reminds us what we, qua our existence, might have become. Such a foolish fable of felicitousness seems anachronistic. But the time of theater is outside of our time, it is a time of promises.
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Notes
Fred Luks, Endlich im Endlichen. Oder: Warum die Rettung der Welt Ironie und Großzügigkeit erfordert (Marburg: Metropolis, 2010).
Hans-Dieter Bahr, Den Tod denken (Munich: Fink, 2002), 10.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Alexander Pope (South Bend: Ex Fontibus, 2012), 206.
Christoph Ransmayr, Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010), 11.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1980).
Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology. Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” in New Literary History, vol. 6(1), (August 1974): 5–74.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, trans. by Michel W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008), 23.
“Elektra means ‘the shining sun.’ A gold-silver alloy is known as electrum, which in turn comes from amber, electron the root of our electricity.” Elisabeth von Samsonow, Anti-Elektra (Zurich: diaphanes, 2007), 9.
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Valerie, S. (2016). The Gift of Death. In: Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137596345_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137596345_8
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