Theatre as Philosophical Enquiry: Aesthetics of the Sublime

This research project explores the ways in which the aesthetic idea of the sublime is embodied, negotiated, and transformed in selected examples of contemporary European theatre practice. The research will bring philosophical accounts of the sublime into play with the art of theatre with the aim of foregrounding the philosophical significance of artistic practice and aesthetic experience. The project explores what is distinctively theatrical and performative about the concept of the sublime and it examines how the dramaturgical practices of contemporary theatre allow us to rethink the possibilities of this aesthetic experience. The hypothesis for this research is that theatre is an event of sensation and thought, and that it provides a distinctive spatio-temporal framework which enables a productive reassessment of the sublime and related questions about representation, appearance, desire and affect. Methodologically, the central aim of this project is to re-contextualise the sublime within the theatrical performing arts in an approach that examines dramaturgical practices as material forms of thought. This means that rather than conventionally philosophising about theatre, the project adopts a methodology of work-immanent aesthetic analysis (inspired by Adorno and Badiou) which wants to allow theatre to speak for itself as a kind of theory in practice. The aesthetic practices and events in question will be selected dramatic texts and performances by major European theatre makers whose avant-garde theatrical styles are concerned with the problem of the body and the possibilities of representation and expression at the limits of the theatrical frame. Specifically, the project will involve text and performance analyses and focus on the theatre of catastrophe by Howard Barker (UK), the provocative productions and directorial approaches by Romeo Castellucci (Italy), the multi-media work of theatre and performance artist Jan Fabre (Belgium), and approaches to making, thinking and writing (about) theatre which have emerged in the collaboration between Hélène Cixous and Ariane Mnouchkine (France). The focus on theatre represents a shift of attention within the discourse of the sublime (where Romantic poetry, landscape painting, and conceptual art have been identified as the traditional sites of sublime aesthetic experience) towards the performing arts. The project will explore how the art of theatre - understood as an assemblage of text, bodies, objects, space and time - is capable of offering reconsiderations of foundational aesthetic ideas. The projects methodology of grounding philosophical enquiry in innovative contemporary European theatre practice will make substantial contributions to the field of Performance Philosophy.

The project entitled "Theatre as Philosophical Enquiry: Aesthetics of the Sublime" examines the ways in which the art of theatre, in the context of contemporary European artistic practice, embodies and develops distinctive forms of aesthetic thinking which emerge through the materiality of theatre. The project argues that the aesthetic concept of the sublime is of critical relevance for a consideration of theatre's capacity not only to become an outlet for thought but to constitute itself as a theatrical form of philosophical praxis. In particular, the research concentrates on the constantly transforming problem of the sublime, which goes back to Longinus, Burke and Kant and re-emerged in postmodern aesthetics, in order to show how the sublime can enable a re-consideration of the central characteristics and dynamics involved in the praxis and aesthetic experience of theatre. For instance, notions of the sublime as a limit-experience through which the infinite, the immeasurable and the unrepresentable are evoked, or conceptions of the sublime as a sensation of formlessness, transgression, suddenness, singularity, presence or alterity, provide a fundamental challenge to cultural discourses of information, knowledge and understanding and are essential attributes of the aesthetics of contemporary experimental theatre. Understood as an experience of negative presentation, formal dissolution, dislocation and subjective dispossession, the idea of the sublime contains the very promise of performance - the promise that live performance might capture the elusive and opaque present moment which opens up a space that is resistant to conceptualisation; a space and time that are sublime because they cannot be adequately thought. In four case-study chapters, the research project argues that the works of the major European theatre artists Howard Barker (UK), Romeo Castellucci (Italy), Jan Fabre (Belgium) and Hélène Cixous (France) offer theatrical articulations of the sublime in their explorations of the limits of representation and in their artistic confrontations with the indeterminacy and incommensurability of human experience. Furthermore, their imaginative and uncompromising artistic engagements with the idea of the unpresentable and its associations with the infinite, the transcendental, the Other, the inhuman, sacred, tragic and abstract, are presented as material and immanent theatrical-dramaturgical problems affecting the development of fictional narration, characterization, the construction of images and the movement of the performing body. The overall aim of this study is thus to reconfigure the sublime towards aesthetic immanence, materiality and singularity without, however, wanting to lose sight of some of the foremost claims of the sublime, namely its power of other-directedness and its transcendental as well as ontological gesture whereby the sublime exposes human consciousness to that which lies beyond the self.