The essay analyses the political tactics of two innovative European theatre directors, Romeo Castellucci and Oliver Frljić, and their use of displeasure as a theatrical tool. It shows how they decentre the spectator’s vision of the world and shape theatre as a specific producer of truth as defined by Alain Badiou in Handbook of Inaesthetics: thinking about art is not extrinsic; it is art itself. Exploring their work and audience reactions to the performances of On the Concept of Face in Paris and Vilnius, The Curse in Warsaw, Our Violence and Your Violence in Vienna and Sarajevo, this essay shows how they transform theatre into a weapon of political action using the displeasure and offence of the audience as artistic tools. The actors provoke the audience in order to generate a response and their involvement. Their performances thus generate discomfort and sometimes violent responses from the audience within various theatrical, cultural, and political contexts. To achieve their goal, Castellucci and Frljić use radical means: religiously motivated image-making inciting extreme reactions, insulting the audience in a specific version of parabasis, and resurrections producing defamiliarization. They deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, convinced that the performance is the result of interaction between the performers and the audience. Thus, they destabilize the social distribution of power reflected in the theatre.
This article reappropriates Fredric Jameson’s literary theoretical concept of affect from his 2013 book The Antinomies of Realism to describe and interpret our strictly subjective experiences, as two literary scholars, of some prominent examples of contemporary Estonian performance art – Renate Keerd’s Pure Mind (Tartu New Theatre, 2013) and Karl Saks’ Planet Alexithymia (Kanuti Gildi SAAL, 2020). We sensed that the affective space and presence we experienced in these performances reduced us as spectators exclusively to a pure bodily present of impersonal consciousness, to a state that precedes language and meaning where subjectivity is temporarily dissolved to a transformative effect. We elaborate what kind of performative features make such an affective experience possible? Which mechanisms are used to create narrative interruptions and temporal discontinuities? Which strategies lead to the disruption of “meaningful” connections and the dispersal of the so-called coherent subject? We argue that the performances of these two fundamentally different artists are a good example of how the affective dimension of (performance) art decisively transforms the ways it is possible to perceive, think, say, or do.
