Erika Fischer-Leichte

Text: Performative Spaces and Imagined Spaces How Bodily Movement Sets the Imagination in Motion.

Focus point of the text: - Questions the particular aesthetic experience provided by a performance in which the spectators imaginations are set in motion by making them move in and through the performative space.
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Merging theatre and museum

The performative space

Performative space = a space that comes into being when people move in and through it. An architectoral/geometrical space in which a performance takes place is more or less stable, whereas the: The performative space changes with each movement of an actor, object, lights etc. Therefore, a performative space is unstable, fluid and ever changing. The different spaces come into being in the course of the performance, as it is mostly the movements of the performers in and through the space, which transform the performative space and produce a new space.

The spectators
When watching performances, spectators must perceive the performative space as fluid and always changing. = The performers create performative spaces when moving in and through a given place, whilst the spectators, who watch and perceive the performative spaces that are hereby created, create imagined spaces in their minds. This happens because the imagination of the spectators is set in motion by the movements of the actors/performers. (This is opposite of what happened in the performance Rudi)

The performance Rudi

Took place in several rooms, different scenes of acting in each room. Interesting: The spectators were not restricted to one stage/room, but could move through and between many rooms. The spectators thus become more integrated in the play The relationship between performative spaces and imagined spaces was fundamentally different from other performances. In Rudi the actor/spectatorrelationship are turned up side down: The spectators are moving in and through space and thereby transforming them into performative spaces. The spectators themselves created the performative spaces, by moving between the room. = Their own movements that set their imagination in motion.

The merging of theatre and museum in Rudi transferred the visitors/spectators into a situation of in-betweeness. Neither fully museum, nor theatre. The spectators were invited to act as visitors in a museum, moving through the rooms, looking at them as well as the objects that were exhibited. No itinerary, but bits and pieces of history, a ruin. Transferred the moving person into a situation of betwixt and between, into a state of liminality. There used to be a story, but bo coherence anymore. No stable frame of which to perceive it within, no coherence offered. Thus the route through the hotel tended to destabilise the visitors/spectators. = Aesthetic experience, which can be characterised as a liminal experience (An experience of irritation, of destabilising of the self, of the incapabilty to make sense of what is perceived and to place it in coherent order)

Museums: Normal practice in a Museum: Look at the different things according to a plan/guide. The visitors are in control, decide themselves of how much time to spend in each room/on each object, but they are nonetheless guided. Tony Bennet: The Museum equals Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Objects are displayed in chronoligical order Often ends with the spectators present. Thus the spectator becomes more active. Doing + seeing. = The museums embody or exemplify ideologies of progress.

Museums, continued...

Whilst the visitors move through the rooms of the museum, their imagination is inspired, if not guided and controlled by the underlying narrative structure. = Repeating the actions of something past, e.g. the evolutionary story of progress, starting from a primitive beginning, moving towards an inevitably near-perfect ending.

In Rudi: spectators did not follow a linear narrative structure, but made up their own. When moving through the rooms and re-creating them as performative spaces, the visitors transformed them into spaces open to their own imagination and memory (+ in their minds...)

The performance Staged Spaces

In

separate rooms associative, meditative, hyperreal spaces were created, but there were no actors. The spectators themselves made the specially designed spaces into performative spaces which, in the imagination of the spectators, were transformed into particular imagined spaces, into sites where imagined scenes took place.

Hygiene Heute
Audio-tours in and through different towns. The listeners are gradually dragged into the story the spectators became involved in both his/hers imagination, but also physically. They became the protagonists of the story. The line between actors/spectators/passers-by disappears. = By moving through the citys space the spectator turned it into everchanging performatove spaces that evoked particular imagined spaces. The spectator are in a state of in-betweenness: theatre > < museum, the real >< the imagined, the performative >< the imaginary.

Hygiene Heute and Rudi

Despite big differences between the two performances, both challenged the spectators, by demanding them to move through given spaces in order to set their imagination in motion and thereby transform performative spaces into imagined spaces. = the spectators movement made liminal spaces. Here aesthetic experience as liminal experience destabilise the perception of oneself, of other people and of the spatial environment.