Performing Phenomenology: Negotiating Presence in Intermedial Theatre

Abstract

This paper analyzes from a pragmatic postphenomenological point of view the performative practice of CREW, a multi-disciplinary team of artists and researchers. It is our argument that this company, in its use of new immersive technologies in the context of a live stage, gives rise to a dialectics between an embodied and a disembodied perspective towards the perceived world. We will focus on W (Double U), a collaborative interactive performance, where immersive technology is used for live exchange of vision. By means of a head mounted omni-directional camera and display the fields of vision of two participants are swapped, which enables the participants to perceive the world through another person's point of view. This intermedial experience brings a classic dichotomic perception of space to falter: material reality as a 'live' condition can no longer be opposed to a virtual mediated reality. In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the 'real' and the 'virtual' to a meaningful experience. In this respect, we refer to recent neurological experiments such as the 'rubber hand illusion' in order to clarify the spectator's tendency to fuse both ontologies and to embody a coherent image-world.

Spectacular astronomy

“…We found that, like astronomical spectacles and like the modern genres of the féerie and the phantasmagoria, CREW's performance of astronomy delves its spectators into a double-consciousness as it carefully manoeuvres between immersion and contemplation, involvement and distancing, sensation and meditation. Elsewhere, with reference to the post-phenomenology of Don Ihde, we claimed that the dialectics of aesthetic thrill and critical understanding -neither reducible to the other -is at the heart of an understanding of the very concept of intermedial theatricality (Vanhoutte 2010;Vanhoutte and Wynants 2011); this dialectics has also been found to be constitutive of spectacular science past and present and future -if we listen to Maaike Bleeker and Sébastien Soubiran -, supporting our intuition that intersecting the study of science and theatre, and the practice of performance and of history can only be mutually beneficial.…”

From Doing to Performing Phenomenology: Implications and Possibilities

“…To start my argument, I would like to take a look at the title of Vanhoutte and Wynant's article: 'Performing phenomenology: negotiating presence in intermedial theatre' (Vanhoutte and Wynants 2011). It is hard not to see this title as a playful reference to Ihde's well-known phrase: doing phenomenology.…”

“…The title luckily did not withold Vanhoutte and Wynants (2011) from contributing and 'theatre' did find it's way to the title of their article quite prominently. In their article the authors take the case of W (Double U) to reflect on the interaction between art, science and technology, however, in their contribution it is the aspect of social change that, so it seems to me, is somewhat missing.…”