KUWI Graz Lecture Series: Nicole Haitzinger: "Iokaste’s daughters in the scenic arts of the present. On performative acts of dying onstage and elsewhere"
13.06.2019
Thursday June 13, 2019 | 19.00 Uhr
HS 01.22 | Universitätsplatz 3/2 | Main Building, Uni Graz
KUWI Graz Lecture Series:
“I don’t think I’m trying to commit suicide” (Chris Burden)
Performativity in the arts.
University professor Dr. Nicole Haitzinger (University of Salzburg): “Iokaste’s daughters in the scenic arts of the present. On performative acts of dying onstage and elsewhere.”
Abstract: This lecture takes the introductory quote of the lecture series – “I don’t think I’m trying to commit suicide” by Chris Burden – and addresses it seriously through an act of reversal. Two tragic yet almost entirely different stage demos are introduced: Iokaste’s hanging in Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, and Iokaste’s suicide by cutting her throat in Euripides Phoenicians. It concerns one mythical figure whose death in the Attic theater is, not accidentally, portrayed differently in drama. In closing, resonances of tragic stage deaths are examined both in the theater of modernity and in scenic arts of the present, and linked with three theses: (1) Suicidal stage deaths require specific constellations of presence and absence, of visibility and invisibility, which are decisively sociocultural, political and are aesthetically conditioned; (2) The scenic/performative presence in acts of the embodiment of dying confuses dichotomously constructed gender relations, not only in the ancient theater; (3) The distinction between the killing of a figure and the killing of a body marks a (undoubtedly always discursively and artistically balanced) border between theater and performance art.