Actors and Performative Art. Under Exposure

The book Actors and Performative Art. Under Exposure opens with a cascade of contradictory motives for becoming an actor. But, if theatre is no longer understood as a theatre of representation, then what takes place on stage is a transformation at play with truth, in which ethics are realized by the aesthetic. Insofar the book summarizes the attempt to explore and map guidelines of acting as being under the perspective of be-coming. That may sound fairly harmless in theory, but it feels anything but harmless when you experience it on your own body. For example, for being physical under exposure actors have to learn that there exists no fundamental dualism between mind and matter. Furthermore, actors are espoused to a dynamic shifting ground in the name of creativity. They have to carry the burden that the self is no sovereign identity as we generally suppose, but rather a threshold of permanent be-coming. One could call it the outstanding gift of acting. In the German language, gift means poison, in German ears the word has the double meaning of poison and present, thus expressing the fact that a gift is disturbing and blessing at the same time. Loaded with fear and joy as the crucial point of acting, which attacks and attracts actors and spectators most. The major challenge and benefit of the book lies in crossing the fields of theatre and philosophy. Therefore its particular benefit is that it analyses acting on stage not only from the theoretical perspective of a spectator, but also from the perspective of an actress and university professor for acting out of her own experience based on philosophical knowledge. Consequently, the book appears in a specific stylein a manifold way of writing. It oscillates between philosophical reasoning and narrative forms of writing, including close readings of micro-narratives, fables and parables, inter alia by Carroll, Hoffmann and Kleist, to develop its theories. Hence the book claims that a trans-disciplinary dialogue between the art of acting and the art of philosophical thinking urges us to create a new image of thought, the act of thinking becoming a kind of artistic research practice in itself.