Objectives:

The sub-project aims to analyze and theorize practices of looking in artistic performances. Our investigations are based on the hypothesis that the visual mechanisms of perception in performances, defined by the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators, not only enable individual processes of reception but, in fact, represent social acts and can trigger intersubjective connections as optical movements. The gaze is constitutive for performances and opens an aisthetic as well as social dimension in the theatre by influencing one's own visual experience on the one hand and the behaviour of the other participants on the other. The presence of others for the duration of the performance means that every participant may look at another and simultaneously also be looked at or at least feel potentially observed.
In contrast to the concepts of the gaze pertaining to film, visual, and photographic theory, theatre studies focusses on those aspects of the gaze that rest upon the physical presence of the participants of a performance and define the limits of self and other, while also continually renegotiating their transgression. The gaze enables the extension of the body's volume and integrates all participants into a social structure. From the perspective of performance analysis, we must therefore discuss factors such as physicality, spatiality, mediality, power relations, emotional affect, desire, and strategies of self-staging which characterize the mutually contingent movements of the gaze in any given performative situation.
With reference to contemporary theatre productions as well as installations, video-walks, concerts, and mass events in general, the research project will, in particular, focus on interferences of liveness and the technical mediatization of the gaze; the cultural, social, and gender codification of shifting gazes; and the different modes of looking within the representational aesthetics of contemporary theatre.



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