Supervisors info:
Γιώργος Πεφάνης, Καθηγητής Τμήματος Θεατρικών Σπουδών
Αικατερίνη Διακουμοπούλου, Επίκουρη καθηγήτρια Τμήματος Θεατρικών Σπουδών
Θεοδούλη Αλεξιάδου, Μέλος ΕΔΙΠ Τμήματος Θεατρικών Σπουδών
Summary:
This study aimed to focus on the ruins, their effects and their relationship with the performance. The concept of ruins today is a subject of research for different fields of disciplines, from philosophy and philology to the science of history and architecture, while at the same time plays an important role in literature, from Borges to Sebald. It has also a significant presence in dramaturgy , namely from Beckett and Müller to Sarah Kane and Milo Rau's recent “Orestes in Mosul”. The engagement of the performing arts with the ruins, from performance to the smallest and performance-related hybrid arts, has increased impressively during the last years.
The artists, beyond the in situ level, work with the ruins,in multi-layered and multifaceted ways, opening up new ones semantic spaces to them, which seem to be offered as a vehicle to express themselves about contemporary crises and to move towards subversive views of time, memory and history.
Despite their significance, the theatrical studies have barely touched upon the corelation between performative arts and ruins. This gap in scientific research is highly reflected on the lack of relevant bibliography. The thesis, however, does not so much aspire to fill in this gap, as to attempt a perambulation, en flanant, a walk through the spaces that direct the modern ruins, keeping as a point of reference the Benjaminian considerations and using as a tool the aesthetic, interpretative and political approaches of Jacques Rancière.
The first chapter is developed in a theatre-philosophical field, where the approaches to the ruins and the philosophical "scenes" of the ruins in the Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, and an approach to the work of Heiner Müller's Machine-Hamlet is attempted, through multiple conceptual levels of ruins, as well as a short course to the ruins of Samuel Beckett with a major stopover at the text entitled “Capital of Ruins”.
In the second chapter our course/walk is transferred to the performative field of the urban ruins where we examine, first the "ecosystems" of the ruins, with their human and non-human relations, the performative movements in the ruins and the relationship with the urban scenes and circulations and finally the net of corelations between ruins and memory through, a performative dynamic.
Next, by examining the ruins, both digital and post-digital, I aimed at developing a "distortion surface", a space that does not refer so much to an environment but to a network of relationships
where the notions of visibility, memory, representation and of the emergence of complex spatialities and temporalities. Finally, I attempt one approach to the theatrical narrative of the ruins through Rancière's “partition of the sensible' and working at the same time on a practical application of it.
The latter concerns the production of an original artistic work in which the findings of the theoretical part are applied and it is intended to function as a "conversion surface" into which they could in the future be imported different data and produce new associations. Finally, the artistic creation retroactively affects the theoretical part, to such an extent that their relationship should not be perceived as linear but as a double vector.
Keywords:
ruins, theatre, digital ruins, postdigital ruins, ruins and representation, ruins and performance, memories of ruins, performative ruins
