Performing Concepts: Becoming-Minor With the Arts

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Artistic Inquiry for Reconciliation and Transformation

Abstract

In this experiment, classical theatre is transformed using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-minor as a concept-as-method, along with aesthetic and methodological precepts from Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Becoming-minor's three tenets, subversion of language and convention, political engagement, and collective expression, are used to amputate and reshape Shakespearean content to generate freedom and a line of flight from more traditional approaches to classical performance. These same principles are applied in a second loop to depart from conventions of academic research and inject artistic methods into academic writing by adapting some elements of performance ethnography, all with the goal of generating a method for productive expansion of possibilities in theatre research.

Author

• Evan Crump, Montgomery College