Affective intentionalities: practising performance with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Wilson, Harry Robert (2018) Affective intentionalities: practising performance with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis forms the complementary writing for my practice-as-research project “Affective Intentionalities: Practising Performance with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida”. Working with Barthes’s 1980 book about photography, the project goes beyond an application of Barthes’s ideas to creatively respond to Camera Lucida through performance. The project approaches this through the following research questions: What strategies might be useful for responding to Camera Lucida through performance? What new insights does this contribute to theatre and performance studies? What methodological contributions does this project make to the ways that writing and performance can be thought together in a practice-as-research context?

This thesis, provides a critical context for the project by reviewing writing on Barthes from media theory, comparative literature, art history and theatre studies; it critically reflects on three performances made over the course of the PhD project: Involuntary Memory (2015), Kairos (2016), and After Camera Lucida (2017); and it re-presents photographic documentation and audience comments in a way that self-reflexively stages them in relation to the practical work. This complementary writing gestures towards the ways that the performances explored different inflections of performance time, the ways that the live body captured a tension between semiotic meaning and materiality and the relationships between the form of the performances and their ability to produce affect.

These findings contribute to the overarching argument that a process of iterative creative response to Camera Lucida has allowed an exploration of dramaturgies of the body, time, affect and theatricality that open up the possibility of critically affective and radically compassionate relations between performance works and their audiences.
As such, this project will be of interest to theatre and performance researchers, scholars of Barthes, and performance practitioners who are interested in the relationships between affect and meaning, temporality, performance and photography, practice and theory.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: Roland Barthes, theatre, performance, photography, practice-as-research, affect, theatricality, corporeality, temporality, Camera Lucida.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Funder's Name: Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
• Supervisor's Name: Lavery, Professor Carl, Heddon, Professor Deirdre and Spence, Ms. Pernille
• Date of Award: 2018
• Depositing User: Dr Harry Robert Wilson
• Unique ID: glathesis:2018-30998
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 07 Nov 2018 14:30
• Last Modified: 11 Aug 2022 10:07
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.30998
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/30998