After the self-abolition of this performance as an art work in the 3rd phase, we comprehend the work as an artistic means, a methodological tool which we wish to share with contemporary dance and performance artists, who are willing to reflect their contexts and public work and with all who have something to say about the structure of the global World of contemporary dance and performance.

We would like to invite you to join us in this research and to develop your own “private bio-politics” – thinking about which other stories could be told about symbolical ownership over history and concepts, about the monopolizing of the global dance and performance scene, and about the patronization of “the backward” and “the always late (comers)”.

We would usually propose to start with a discussion or an after talk moderated by a (local / present) theorist, artist or in this case by you on the spot....

• contemporary art
• performance art
• Eastern Europe
• performance
• body

Elisabeth Bronfen

Tom, our idea here was that you would give us a little insight into how you find your themes, how you use theory for your texts.

T.MC.

I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory. I don’t really know where theory stops and fiction begins. If you take someone like, for example, Derrida: half of The Post Card is basically an epistolary novel; it’s fiction, there are characters, there is a character speaking to another character—even while he’s conducting a “theoretical” analysis of Heidegger. I think it’s very hard to pin down that border-line between it being theory/fiction or not theory/fiction. So theory wouldn’t just be a reflection on something else which is somehow more integral; it’s more fluid than that.

A figure like Lévi-Strauss is just wonderful in this respect: Tristes Tropiques is one of the most brilliant books and it’s much better as literature than almost all of...

• literature
• literary studies
• Modernism
• conversation
• fiction