Peggy Phelan - the power and hubbub of scenographic writing
Day 23. Or rather, night 23. Going through notes from my old lectures on scenography. Found some notes on performance scholar Peggy Phelan's attempt at performative and also scenographic writing:
"Rather than describing the performance event in 'direct signification,' a task I believe to be impossible and not terribly interesting, I want this writing to enact the affective force of the performance event again, as it plays itself out in an ongoing temporality made vivid by the psychic process of distortion (repression, fantasy, and the general hubbub of the individual and collective unconscious), and made narrow by the muscular force of political repression in all its mutative violence." Peggy Phelan, Mourning sex. Performing Public Memories, 1997, s. 11-12.
So relevant, go do it! Write the affective force of the scenographic - I had a go at his yesterday when highlighting the raft and the drooping American flag in Madama Butterfly that so intensely inscribed my body and memory with multimodal criticism across time, place and borders. More to say, to write of course.
Picture? Well, I stick with classic Nordic Noire. Bartime, in Sweden, somewhere in the darkness...some light...