Performing the Precarious

In 2006, performativity is considered the basis for constituting the subject in the West its embodiment of presence is considered a veritable market-relevant factor in a Western fun society. Thus, several phenomena from the theater have made their way into reality and are now often difficult to distinguish from art. Conversely, theater, dance, and performance are regarded as real and mediatized, or as simultaneously corporeal and virtual. For, the performing arts and other realities are conflated, and are indistinguishable from one another and irretrievable, and, for this reason Dieter Mersch speaks of the performing arts as "precarious acts." I take as my starting point theater anthropology`s concept of the performative loop, which links the performing arts to other realities. Its motions are marked by overlaps, layerings, repetitions, and shifts. In the past few years, phenomena that are clearly and visibly linked to social changes and challenges have increased in circulation, particularly within the performative loop. Thus, homelessness, violence, psychoses, poverty, and child neglect have become popular themes of plays in large-scale German theaters. Theater critics have responded to these new, socially critical pieces and stagings by honoring them with awards. In this way, theater studies is confronted with a new field of study, which is the focus of this project. The phenomena of the precarious analyzed in this project will be: traumatization evoked by politically motivated forms of violence (Holocaust, oppression of minorities, war), economical precariousness (unemployment and unprotected labor conditions), and the deconstruction of gender (undoing the binary gender system). The analysis will focus on thirteen contemporary theater, dance, and performance art productions that have been on the circuit in Austrian and German contexts since the turn of the century. Thus, I propose here that theatrical (specifically dance and performance) modes of negotinging the precarious are understood as modes of acting on context-specific fears and imaginations. In this project, I will also address transnational issues, for example, the negotiations of the European Union`s borders in my analysis of a dance performance from Turkey. This project will derive its performance analysis methods from theater and dance studies and examine the aesthetic strategies that bring about the precarious. Performing the Precarious will situate theater studies in an interdisciplinary context, within the humanities. Thus, by expanding on the phenomena of the precarious, I will employ concepts and theories from trauma theory, anthropology, sociology of culture, philosophy, and rhetoric. A new translation of the "precarious" from social studies into art and cultural studies will reinstitute theater studies as interdisciplinarily informed field at the forefront of theory.