Being on Stage

Being-On-Stage is a play about a philosopher who reads Heideggers Being And Time ad infinitum.

What does it mean to be a student? What does it mean to love wisdom, to Act Academia? Who is the Harold Lloydian Glasses Character? What is “the behaviour of a questioner?” Being-On-Stage is a philosopher play. It is the story of a perpetual student, one who studies ontology and temporality, one who reads Being And Time. Being-On-Stage contains the drama of study, particularly that of Martin Heidegger’s work. Where uncontainable, it bleeds the tragedy of Heidegger’s hypocrisy. The play asks, enacts how one might stare down the bore of a constant canon. Bureaucratic, it emphasizes le bureau, the desk. The play process posits stage as world, desk as stage, stage as desk, stage as studio, studio as sanctuary where and when an Actress re-reads, re-hearses, re-peats Being and Being’s questioning. As in Jerry N. Uelsmann’s 1976 silver gelatin print, the philosopher’s desk is space on, off of, and in which one can and does fall, stand, walk, act, look up, see sky in ceiling’s stead.

What does it mean to be an Actress? Being-On-Stage experiments with Acting as excavation, Actor as ground, Reading as excavatory action. In the archaeological act, dusting off is a dance. Through the text, you meet René Descartes, Gaius Julius Hyginus… You translate with John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson… You correspond with Wilhelm Dilthey and Count Yorck De Wartenburg… You poetize and are poetized. You sing. Ella Fitzgerald, Tracy Chapman, and Cécile McLorin Salvant sing through you. Ontology opens. Being embodies itself. You find yourself in a rhizomatic discourse of thought, of thinkers, of breath, of questions, of acts, in a story of Being, a continuum of everything that was, is, and will be. The play is a pedagogical tool for engaging with both theatre and philosophy. Theatre and philosophy inspire one another in the respiratory and other senses of inspiration, deepening inhalations, deeply affecting that study, that song which occurs on the out-breath.

Vortragende(r)
Tara Turnbull

Tara Turnbull is an Actress. Bachelor Of Arts in Theatre & Philosophy Bard College At Simon’s Rock. Master Of Fine Arts The University Of California Los Angeles’ School Of Theatre, Film & Television. Doctor Of Philosophy student with The Transart Institute For Creative Research & Western Sydney University’s Writing And Society Research Centre. Being-On-Stage will have its New York première next month-

Kontakt
Prof.Dr. Alice Pechriggl (alice [dot] pechriggl [at] aau [dot] at)