A photograph of a performance is, literally, an act of interruption. Although technically it doesn't interrupt the continuity of the 'real' performance, nor the energy flow that passes between the actor and the audience, photography inevitably produces a suspension, establishing a new temporality that overlaps and interacts with the unfolding of time of performance. Based on the photographic sequence of La Meditation (1957), the highest result of the artistic collaboration between the mime Etienne Decroux and the photographer Etienne Bertrand Weill, the essay intends to emphasize the profound ontological affinities between photography and mime, and to suggest the essential performative nature of the photographic interruption, rather than the widespread idea of 'petrification' of the moment.
Picturing Meditation
Chiarelli Cosimo
2022-01-01
Abstract
A photograph of a performance is, literally, an act of interruption. Although technically it doesn't interrupt the continuity of the 'real' performance, nor the energy flow that passes between the actor and the audience, photography inevitably produces a suspension, establishing a new temporality that overlaps and interacts with the unfolding of time of performance. Based on the photographic sequence of La Meditation (1957), the highest result of the artistic collaboration between the mime Etienne Decroux and the photographer Etienne Bertrand Weill, the essay intends to emphasize the profound ontological affinities between photography and mime, and to suggest the essential performative nature of the photographic interruption, rather than the widespread idea of 'petrification' of the moment.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
