Why Do Performing Arts Need Deleuze and Guattari? A Methodological Inquiry

• Main Author: Christina Banalopoulou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2016-01-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/humanities/2016-3-1-4-Banalopoulou.pdf

Are performing arts doomed to numerous meta-interpretations that bare the masks of a first-order transcendence? Is the dramatized event imprisoned within representation? Do theoretical abstractions lack reality or they unfold lifeʼs artistic and virtual potentialities? For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari performing arts not only challenge both interpretational and representational thinking but also offer a fruitful plane for theory to grasp what has not yet been imagined. In the following pages, I am introducing performing arts as an assemblage of the force relations of performance and art. I am focusing on a 10-minute scene from Dimitris Papaiwanouʼs Medea2, in order to offer intensified ground to Deleuze and Guattariʼs conceptualization of Bodies without Organs (BwOs) and becoming-minor. I argue that their theoretical abstractions unfold revolutionary capacities of the performing arts that would otherwise remain unexplored.