Abstract:
In How to Live Together, Roland Barthes, drawing from the monastic tradition, evokes a form of sociality ‘where each subject lives according to his own rhythm’: not, ‘an excessively negative form: solitude, eremitism’, nor ‘an excessively assimilative form’. Rather, ‘a median, utopian, Edenic, idyllic form: idiorrhythmy’ (2012: 9). Erika Vogt’s Artist Theatre Program’s Lava plus Knives (Performa 15) takes Barthes’ concept as a point of departure. The work is framed as a performed exhibition where a collective of eight artists ‘while sticking to one’s own singular voice […] must negotiate idiosyncrasies, affects, space and power relations’ (Aubin, 2015: 5). Also performed in Performa 15, Jérôme Bel’s Ballet approached the challenge of how to dance together. The short piece, as with his other work, deconstructed the aesthetic values assigned to dancing bodies, examining the interrelation of distinctive bodies and their spatial-theatrical framing. Both works are playful examples of ‘idiorrhythmic clusters’ that resist the unified rhythm of consensus. Building on Barthes’ framework, I wish to read these works as dramaturgies of communitas and to interrogate the ways in which these aesthetic communities both accommodate rely upon difference. To do this I shall draw upon Roberto Esposito’s definition of communitas as: ‘a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject.’
