The sub-project aims to explore the cultural concept of virtuosity and the virtuoso: We will look at virtuosity as the potentially excessive enhancement of artistic practice; and at the virtuoso as a new artist type who, since the seventeenth century, has influenced not only artistic concepts but also the very notion of performance in various cultural, social, and political domains. The ongoing second research phase will investigate virtuosic "performance" in the sense of accomplishment, achievement, output, capacity, proficiency, and excellence.
Following an excessive dynamic, virtuosic enhancement depends on strong, similarly excessive reactions to be confirmed as extraordinary accomplishment. This double dynamic disposition on the part of performer and recipient makes virtuosity a particularly suitable object to reflect on concepts and criteria of achievement.
Where, by whom, and in what form virtuosic performances are recognized as outstanding achievements, and where and with what arguments this recognition is denied them illuminates cultural value systems, their boundaries and lacunae, and the performative nature of evaluative practices.
By engendering the dissolution of fixed institutional structures in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the processes of liberalization removed many formal guaranties of recognition. Since then the social situation has been increasingly shaped by relationships that short-circuit the status as a full-fledged member of society, enjoying equal opportunity of participation, with the self-assertion of the individual in a competition to join the performance elites. Social life thus redetermines itself as social performance in the dual sense of acting/performance/self-representation and achievement.
The figure of the virtuoso is particularly well-suited to the historical reconstruction of these contemporary complications in the relationship between personal recognition and the evaluation of performance. In their high-strung and fragile interaction with the audience, performances by virtuoso artists represent an exemplary case of the existentialization of performance evaluation in the process of enhancement: If the virtuoso fails to excite the enthusiasm of the audience, the verdict will literally be annihilating. Already in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, virtuosic performance as "production without product" highlighted the potential and also the precariousness of outstanding achievement, which can never be objectified and therefore precludes the possibility of distinguishing between the performer and his performance.
The sub-project aims to explore how virtuosity demands and generates evaluative practices that are based on excessive reactions. In this respect, virtuosity stands in contrast to classical and modern aesthetics that refer to the solid quasi-concreteness of the artwork or creative process as evidence for achievement.
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We aim to trace the competitive engagement with the affective value economy of the audience, which gives rise to the virtuosic. At the same time, we wish to explore the disposition between the professionalism of the expert and the amateurism of the broad mass, within which the virtuoso and the virtuoso audience mutually enhance their competence and knowledge.
Sub-project 1: Dynamics of enhancement and challenge: Virtuosic achievement between performer and audience (Bettina Brandl-Risi)
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The observation that virtuosity on the one hand involves body techniques (speaking to its "artistic" moment) but on the other also connects with (media) technologies in order to present itself as a particular achievement will serve as a second starting point. In the twentieth century especially it has become increasingly difficult therefore to determine how and to whom to attribute 'virtuosity'.
Sub-project 2: Dancers and artistes: Virtuosic body techniques and media technologies from the nineteenth century until today (Gabriele Brandstetter and Hans-Friedrich Bormann)
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The third focus examines the important role played by 'the difficult' in evaluating performance. Virtuosity gains a new significance due to a shift from evaluating performance by focusing on a problem to instead focus on the challenge of difficulty in concepts of achievement in the twenty-first century.
Sub-project 3: The poetics of the difficult: Social virtuosity in today's performance-oriented society (Kai van Eikels)
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The fundamental assumption of the project – addressing virtuosity as a relational phenomenon between performers and spectators – will be further research with focus on intimacy and strategies of intimization in contemporary dance and performance.
Sub-project 4: The blank space of social virtuosity - The performativity of intimacy (Christina Deloglu)
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In cooperation with Lucia Ruprecht, University of Cambridge:
The Charisma of the Virtuoso. Patterns of Fascination
In the performing arts circa 1900, virtuosity and charisma engage in a complex relationship of mutual enhancement. As a manifestation of the heightened attentiveness resulting from an extraordinarily successful interaction between performer and public, charisma is both an effect of virtuosity and a condition of its perception as virtuoso in the first instance. Arising not only from perfect body control, but also from the masterful mise-en-scène of the media, the charismatic performer's powerful aura relies on a form of virtuosity at once real and fake, marking the shift from the virtuoso to the star. This subproject approaches the charisma of the virtuoso – and the fascination it entails – from three angles: as a technique of the body (dance and artistry, from Jules Léotard to Anna Pawlowa and Waslaw Nijinsky), as a technique of communication (literary, journalistic and theoretical texts, photography and devotional objects), and as a process of reception, materializing for instance in professional imitations (such as the fad for serpentine dancers, mimicking Loïe Fuller).
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