Stages of Conception: Potentiality and Performance in Contemporary Live Art.

Over the past twenty-five years the discipline of Performance Studies has theorized the meaning of a live event in a world increasingly mediated by screen, speaker, or spectacle. These theories have considered "liveness" in terms of the loss of the present into the past (i.e., Blau and Phelan) or the present reiteration of a past instance (i.e., Butler and Schechner), but have not sufficiently acknowledged the live event as a unique encounter with unexpected futurity. This dissertation, "Stages of Conception: Performance and Potentiality in Contemporary Live Art," proposes a theoretical frame for considering how live performance articulates different notions of futurity. In traditional Western dramatic theatre---a text-based theatre descended from Aristotle's Poetics---the question of how something will happen in a play comes down to a choice from amidst a set of distinct possibilities. In order to placate the anxiety provoked by the unknown, the dramatic theatre stages a future cast in recognizable terms; it gives us scripts to rehearse such encounters. The first section of this dissertation proposes a general theory of futurity as possibility at work in the dramatic theatre and its dominant mode of enactment: psychological realism. Opposed to this well-established tendency, I propose that recent Live Art practices particular to the turn of the millennium stage generative events that do not realize an identifiable form or action. I frame these performances in terms of a potentiality that suspends and displays its capacity "to do" or "to become." Inspired by the divergent philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, I distinguish two general modes of such potentiality in performance: at one extreme, a reduction to a stilled figure or body that displays its capacity "to do" without producing a definite action; at the other extreme, an overflowing excess of the ground or environment, constantly exhausting and renewing its capacity to become. Case studies range across a broad spectrum of contemporary Live Art, including a dance adaptation of Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener," the question of theatricality and anti-theatricality in minimalist art objects, and the experimental theatre of the Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Situating this contemporary tendency in relationship to 20th century theatre history, I mark significant precursors in the "impossible" theatres of visionaries Gordon Craig and Antonin Artaud, as well as writers who explore the limits of dramatic possibility such as Samuel Beckett. Ultimately, if dramatic theatre's possibility re-presents future actions according to the preconceptions of human forms and expectations, then potentiality presents a future in the process of becoming post-human, or at least putting pressure on notions of the acceptably anthropomorphic. By thus conceiving the orientation of "liveness" itself anew, I argue that Live Art conducts aesthetic experiments on the future of significance not only to the performing arts, but also to live events in the broader public and political sphere.