Memory(s) and small perceptions

• Grant number: 11/51981-6
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Technical Reserve for Institutional Research Infrastructure
• Start date: February 01, 2012
• End date: February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Theatre
• Principal Investigator: Renato Ferracini
• Grantee: Renato Ferracini
• Host Institution: Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Pesquisas Teatrais (LUME). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Let us depart from a principle which is present in contemporary thinking: the art of the agent of performing arts - an actor, a dancer or a performer - is located in the area of acting as materiality of his body. The materiality of the body strengthens the performative terrain and generates within this action possible escape routes for the relations of representation from pre-established models. We can see these issues in the powerful writings of Lehman’s post-dramatic body, in Feral’s performativity, in Lyotard’s "energetic theater". She - the materiality of the body - de-territorializes models, docile bodies (Foucault), doxes, established opinions, cast moralities. The potency of such a materiality is thus not reduced to the questions of characters, time lines, dramaticity, emotional or interpretive translation. It goes through the issue of an intelligible mental reality and also of narratives, illustrations and organized insights. Within this complex dynamics of production, our project aims to address, more specifically, the scope of action of two operators: memory and micro-perception. The usage of individual or collective group memory goes through the possible joint activation of micro-actions, micro-affects and micro-perceptions, triggered by these same memories, launching the actor into a zone of non-mimetic turbulence of the action-remembrance, but also into an intensive flow and into tabulation. This flow is organized in singular languages in the creation processes of the body-in-art, producing distinct personal statements in which each work stays as an autonomous core of expression. Moreover, the paradoxes that launch the actor into what we may call a zone of experience may lead to the activation of singular memories that also activate the zone of turbulence of micro-perceptions. This hypothetically intrinsic relationship between memory and micro-perception occurs in a liminar, a threshold area, a border of conscious-unconscious we might call an area of forces, a pre-sensitive, pre-perceptive, extraordinary zone, which would require an own creative and conceptual reflection based on practical work experience. (AU)