Formless form

Some parts: Allsopp R. (2005) On Form/Yet to Come. Performance Research 10(2), pp.1-4.

The question of form – of how, where, with and for whom performance takes place, becomes visible or manifests itself as a point of resistance or a moment of slippage or connectivity.

Form and its relation to time, politics, space, cultural context is shifting from “imposition of fixed organizational frameworks on the materials and contexts of performance to “active sense of processes of formation, the sets of relational processes that reflect the intensities, differences, transformations and translations that constitute the work of performance”.

The latter view on form is “informed by a relational view of performance as a shared moment of becoming”.

Nicholas Bourriaud: form exists only in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition with other formations, artistic or otherwise’, “The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination.”

Similarly Nikolina PristaS/BAD C o.’s ‘Fleshdance’ focuses “on the intensities and f lows of energy that link each individual dancer to the energetic and literal surfaces (bodies, flesh, floor, wall), to each other, to the audience and to the moment of performance.” It draws on “Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation in its rejection of a static view of form in favour of the processeb of formation, deformation and transformation.”

Hylomorphic model: “conceived of the artistic task as the imposition of form upon matter”.

Formlessness: “Informel Art signifies a discovery of a new, unknown aspect of reality, of its elementary state. This state is matter, matter that is freed from abiding by the laws of construction.

Deleuze’s ideas of assemblage : not as a set of predetermined parts, nor a random collection, but as a whole of a sort that expresses some identity and claims a territory. If assemblages’select elements from the milieus to create territories – which are continually being made and unmade – then performance/theatre is not a pre-existing space but a continual attempt to form spaces, temporary and temporal zones, seeing-places where the unseen becomes visible, through the anangement of objects, practices, feelings an affects that, as Bojana Kunst puts it, ‘can opet develop non-servile tactics and thus critically reflect on the time yet to come, re-shifting the symbolic presentation of power and fighting for the right of imagination in various territories contemporary life.