Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture

Abstract

The introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben�s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture�s nexus with ethics. Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. Gestural acting-otherwise is illustrated in a number of ways: We might talk of a gestural ethics when gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where it is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen, in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. It interrupts or modifies operative continua that might be geared towards violence; it appears in situations that are suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play; and it emerges in the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings.

Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct

“…This draws on anthropological perspectives on virtue and post‐Foucauldian ethics (Faubion ; Laidlaw ), but the practices I describe concern how artists themselves query the emergence of ethical concerns, how they are institutionalised and articulated. Art has been one of the principal reference points for philosophical thinking about the constitution of the good in different cultural and social contexts with theatre and performance as persistent points of reference (Craciun ; Eaton ; Ruprecht ). This is by no means exclusive to the western philosophical and art historical tradition of aesthetics, but since the field of German public theatre was constituted by concerns over Bildung , or the German tradition of self‐cultivation and introspection, these peculiar Enlightenment traditions must be part of the picture.…”

Responsive Bodies: Towards an Ethics of Contemporary Dance

“…Responsive Bodies builds on existing approaches to dance ethics (Rothfield 2014;Ruprecht 2017;Schwan 2017;Bresnahan, Katan-Schmid, and Houston 2020;Whalen 2023). Yet, both the workshop and the present issue do not focus on propagating morally good dancing (Bannon 2018, Jackson andShapiro-Phim 2008) or a "more humane dance culture" (Jackson 2022), but rather scrutinise the fundamental ideas that underlie such projects.…”