Doing Phenomenology. Whose phenomenology? The trials and tribulations of doing

1. Doing Phenomenology. Whose phenomenology? The trials and tribulations of doing phenomenological analysis In performance studies By Edwin Creely April, 2009

2. The struggle to find my way in these territories has concerned finding • How I understand ‘performance’ • Of what is ‘performance’ constituted? What is its ontology? • What different phenomenological positions should I incorporate in my method? • Of what use is phenomenological analysis to performance studies?

3. I have been on a journey that is as much about the history of ideas as it is about the ideas themselves

4. A great debate in philosophy Conceptualisations/the mind/ideals/ a priori/deduction/cogito Vs Being-in-the-world Being-in-the-flesh/experience The data of the world a posteriori induction

5. What is phenomenology? • Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within. Edmund Husserl • So, phenomenology is a reaction to a lack of concern with data from the world and experience in philosophy

6. Are we doing a post-phenomenology? • We cannot separate phenomenology from it history and from the debates of the 20th Century (it has a historicity) • We are now in an era where these debates are past and have been submerged in the plurality of the postmodern • Are we not now revisiting phenomenology in performance studies for its utility value?

7. A typology of phenomenology

8. Key Phenomenologists

9. My phenomenological approach is derived from or built on • Transcendental phenomenology (especially Husserl) notion of ‘pure seeing’, of apprehending a phenomenon, of intentionality, of reduction to its essence in the structures of consciousness, the Lebensweltor Lifeworld • Levinas and the notion of the epiphany of being-together, of co-presence (note Buber’s I-Thou) • Merleau-Ponty the idea of the body-in-the-world or embodiment, the primacy of the body and of actual relation to the world • Whitehead (and his process phenomenology) a coming-into-being from the potentiality of being and the coalescence of parts • Reinach (and his realist phenomenology) the materiality of event, of certain a priori universals that exist independently of mind

10. What CONSTITUTES a performance phenomenon?Or an ontology of performance • Its materiality in event • It’s embodiment in space (both what is felt and what is seen) • It’s transcendence in consciousness • Its residual traces in memory • It states of co-corporeality and epiphany • It essentialities and contingencies

11. Applying method to text

12. Excerpt from an interview with Dominique and Miranda (2008) DOMINIQUE : There was one point, at Noble Park, and it's the one that everyone loves to talk about, but really was just ridiculous - it was this narrow, not too long room with shinny floor boards, low ceilings, gym equipment like ladders and stuff on the sides, it was about 100 metres from the train station so you get the train past, you had the speaker going off to announce injections so the entire row of people got up and left, and the entire row of people came back and sat down - it was just - the space itself was just mind blowing that this was somewhere where you would put on theatre but for me it was really amazing that performance I think everyone just kind of went "Fuck it we are good" and that was just amazing - Dan climbed the wall Grace was just scary - it was really a sense of - this is tough but we are better than the space we are in.

13. Analysis of a sample text In this more potentially chaotic context, one charged with visible emotion, not only was there a synergy with the audience but both actors spoke about being “so comfortable with each other” and developing “trust for each other” that as an acting team they were able to face any “challenge”. The actors, paradoxically, worked with a sense of co-presence without seeming to lose their individual agency, expressed so neatly by Dominique when she said, “Fuck it, we are good and that was just amazing”. The movement into an unfamiliar space, with a reactive audience and a focussed awareness of the possibilities of change created a ‘coming together’, a concrescence, that was unique and intimately felt.

14. What am I about? • A philosophy of performance and performing • A phenomenological method that is syncretic and is crafted and engineered to suit performance and experiences of performance • An approach to textual analysis built on Husserlian principles (transcendental reduction) • An awareness of the constitutive elements of performance phenomena

15. A final word on a great debate • "Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.” Jacques Derrida • In practice (in our praxis) concept and experience, deduction and induction are constantly in interplay