Repeat repeat: returns of performance.

PhDEMBARGOED UNTIL 01/06/2014Repetition – of speech, of movement and in structure – raises questions about the experience of performance. This thesis accounts for certain pleasures experienced in contemporary performance by means of repetition. It uses examples drawn from dance-theatre (Pina Bausch and Rosas), avant-garde theatre (Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett) and contemporary performance and writing (Lone Twin Theatre and Sophie Calle). It examines repetition as constitutive of performance and explores the ways in which repetition structures our experience of performance as well as the representations of this experience. This project investigates the enjoyment that derives from repeating, as an enjoyment that is central to the practices of performing and writing. Writing, as a process during which repetition can be experienced again and again, is significant to this project. Roland Barthes’s notions of plaisir and jouissance are central to this thesis, enabling me to examine the viewer’s experience of repetition. Drawing on critical and literary theory, performance studies, art history and visual studies, I examine examples of performance from modernism and after in order to contribute to thinking about the experience of repetition in contemporary performance. While the first chapter is a survey of historical examples that illustrate specific aspects of this project, the following chapters offer four different answers to the question of pleasure: pleasure may arise in the experiences of repetition as jouissance, in the experience of synchronicity or presence, in the process of returning to performance and the process of repetition’s ending. These four modes are valued as means of (re)experiencing performance in a space within which the desire to repeat is perpetually nurtured, but never fully satisfied. In this space, repetition becomes generative of new modes of watching and making performance