"What is the meaning of contemporary?"

"Immaterial performance suggests that performance consists of particular scripts that engage, involve and empower individuals, groups or even objects to perform their existence as becoming. Performance thus is constituted by engagements in defined typologies of scripting and contexts, and not by anything engaged in the action of performing. Performance appears through a precision in naming a context, in accounting an environment or a frame, and through those processes manifests something as performance.

Performance in this sense is manifested in relationship to intention rather than through conventions of recognition.

Immaterial performance, following George Dickies, claims that the existence of the work as "performance" is due to its being appointed to the status as a "candidate for performance" by agents who are situated inside the "performance world".

What performance is can therefore no longer be understood on the basis of tradicional aesthetics, or through any idea of an experience of form, sense, etc. The question is not: what is performance, but: when is performance.

This shift implies a passage that can open the stage to capacities of performance emerging through performance intensive, however foreign discouses such as marketing, management, economics, post-colonialism, architecture, geopolitics etc. Immaterial performance pro-actively suggests that anything can be performance, but is not by definition, independent of its ontology and sustained by capacities of activation.

Immaterial performance proposes a shift towards performance as activity, shared through multiplicities of relations, rather than performance as representation. Immaterial performance engages through activation, not in performance, i.e., participation, but as an emancipated spectator through intensities of performance.

Immaterial performance expands the notion of the stage towards being able to frame situations where the performer and the audience can merge into one entity, not through conventions of participation, but through the opportunity to charge social interaction and thus politicize everyday behavior.

Immaterial performance performs the performance of the already there, through minimal reconfigurations of the spatio-temporal coordination.

Immaterial performance implies a prolific expansive modality of the theatre's framework, detached from deconstruction or detournement, as a plug-in of radical enthusiasm into existing frames of social production. Immaterial performance bypasses narrative, plot or dramatic consistency, in favor of an open heterogeneous production of narratives, and a complexification produced by user interaction and the canceling of drama towards production and actualization processes.

Immaterial performance expand the understanding of the stage which production is contractual, emphasizing multiplicity and identitarian regimes, into processes of individuation and multitude, and is productive of conventions set into motion.

Immaterial performance short-circuits illusion through an affirmative gesture where illusion is no longer an issue. Immaterial performance performs the illusions of everyday life, between individuals and individuals and spatial-temporal frames in a manner where the production of illusion becomes visible in a dinamic and heterogeneous manner. Illusion instead of being the unfaithful veiling of theatre, becomes a possibility of the production of event.

Immaterial performance is a salutation of theatre come situation, where the lights have been turned on, the doors opened and the actors work in the bar. What is there is a performance that canot be seen or interpreted, but must be experienced, a performance in which performing and spectating are interchangeable. A performance that dissolves skill and perfection (generality), and emphasizes difference and precision (specificity), as a set of terms that are necessarily producing an emancipated spectator. This performance passes from concepts of action to time-image-in cinematic terms.

Immaterial performance annunciates as a first instance in order to pass from "what is being said in what is being said" to what can be said here and now and only through the particular frame offered. It is thatre as ready made, however not in the sense of staging the everyday as peculiar but staging the peculiar as everyday, or better the everyday as everyday, and it is in this minimal addition, that withdraws from the position of "telling", i.e. cancealing a conventional concept of outside, that immaterial performance produces criticality, and where its topography always is contemporaneity.

Marten Spangberg,

In-Presentable 03-07