Description
When we think of performance in terms of ‘In Extremis’, we conjure up Dante’s Inferno, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Beckett’s The Unnamable (L’Innommable), the works of Raffaello Sanzio and Romeo Castellucci, and great Greek tragedies. We imagine dismemberment, bodily fluids, torture, pain, loss and fiery excess. If, however, we read it as arriving at the point of ‘extreme hardship or suffering’ rather than at the point of ‘death’, what acts of performance, and art practice more broadly, assist us to understand these confronting scenarios as edges rather than endings? The contributions to this issue negotiate these different understandings of ‘In Extremis’ and in doing so engage us in important considerations of the necessity of art in the current fraught global context.
READ THE EDITORIAL AND ABSTRACTS ONLINE
1 In Extremis: What to do, think and feel during times of perpetual crisis
CHARLES GREEN AND HELENA GREHAN
PART I: FRONT ROW
7 Speculative Sites and Slippery Temporalities: The expansive possibilities of binaural sound for navigating and inhabiting disaster
SARAH WALKER
15 Bad Feelings: Extreme affective dramaturgies in Alistair McDowall’s all of it
ISABEL STUART
24 Now I am Ready to Die [Artist pages]
LINDA DUVALL
PART II: OPAQUE SUBJECTS
28 Pojhian: A supplication performance-ritual in extremis
PARAMITHA DYAH FITRIASARI, BUDI IRAWANTO AND AGUSTINUS PAULUS UMBU TALI
36 Slow Scenes of Care: Exploring performance’s critical slowness
MARTINA GIMPLINGER
44 Virtual (Re)Scaling of the Wetlands In Extremis: Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s immersive installation Berl-Berl
JUSTYNA STĘPIEŃ
53 Medusa [Artist page]
DENNIS DEL FAVERO
54 Confessions of a Cannibal: In extremis performance and Theatre of the Real
SUZANNE LITTLE
63 Dual Claire: Directing digital humans in the Anthropocene
ELENI TIMPLALEXI WITH NATALIA ARSENOPOULOU, DIMITRIOS CHARITOS, PENNY PAPAGEORGOPOULOU AND CHARALAMPOS RIZOPOULOS
PART III: MARKING TIME
74 Unbounding [sic] Prometheus: Notes of an engagement
ARAVIND ENRIQUE ADYANTHAYA
83 Marking Tidetime: Mudlarking as intertidal performance [Artist pages]
SARAH BLISSETT
90 Anthropoiesis: Slow listening to scalar extremes at the Venice Biennial
ALYS DAROY, LEO MURRAY, KATHRYN TREES AND JOSHUA ZEUNERT
99 Silver Halide Crystals and Ionizing Radiation: A coordinated performance towards materially witnessing nuclear imperialism
FIONA AMUNDSEN
109 Extreme Performance Rituals at the Green New Theater Symposium: New work by Greer Sikes (SPLOSH!) and Eva Margarita (Entierro)
JOY BROOKE FAIRFIELD
121 Thoughts on the Aftermath of an Explosion [Artist pages]
ELENI TSAMADIA
127 Extremely Cute: Performance and giving in to fatal or vital weaknesses
KAI VAN EIKELS
137 Between ‘Artivism’ and ‘Actionism’: Feminist performance in postmillennial China
FABRIZIO MASSINI
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REVIEWS
147 Looking Back and Facing Forward: How to learn from pandemic theatre
KIMBERLEY MCLEOD
148 Can Stories Save Us?
WENDY ARONS
150 Witnesses of a Quantum Revolution
ANDREA BRUNELLO
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152 Notes on Contributors
