(Dis)Concert number 1: Paradoxes of the Lecture Performance

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the play Dislocations from Nomade Company, presented in March 2016 at the Théâtre du Soleil headquarters in Paris, this paper is a transcript of a lecture presented on November 26, 2016 at the II Brazilian Symposium on Playwriting, held at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Its purpose is to establish a debate about the epistemological potential of the fictitious discourse and the performative effect of the critical discourse. We take as the focus of our discussion the lecture conference, a hybrid device inaugurated by the actions of Robert Morris, John Cage and Joseph Beuys in the 1950s and 1960s, and which today is an important modality of contemporary artistic creation and reflection. With particular characteristics, the works of Éric Duyckaerts, Joana Craveiro, Hans-Jürgen Frei, Walid Raad, JéroÌ‚me Bel and Pierre Cleitman participate in this hybrid genre that problematizes the boundaries between criticism and invention, whose actions emphasize or reveal the performative aspects already latent in any communication to an audience: the tension between discursive information and non-discursive information; the mismatch between script and execution; the uncertainty of the threefold relationship between the enunciator, the statement and the spectator.