Psychopolitics of fear

An artistic research project undertaken during the MA Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts under the supervision of Anja Foerschner, and mentoring by Julia Dudzińska.

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“…the Latin root of the word emotion is emovere, and it is the capacity of emotion to move bodies that makes the phenomenon so politically potent.”

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Methods

Autoethnography

In my approach, I used autoethnography as a means of self-reflective mode of analysis, which through the act of writing helped me establish distance to the described events. For this project, my autoethnographic writing focused on the instances of everyday life in which I felt afraid. On my personal blog, I created a logbook where I wrote diary entries. To stay consistent, I constructed a list of questions which I consulted when making the entries, based on the similarities between the first ten entries.

Photography

Photography became a way to introduce the physical (and hence embodied) aspect of noticing and recording my fears in daily life. The weight of the camera in my pocket became a reminder to enter a more conscious state of perceiving my environment and my body, and the audible “click!” as it took a photo paired with the instant memorization of the image.

Pop-cultural analysis/Re-enactment

As part of my acting practice, I used the method of re-enactment of horror movie scenes to understand on the bodily level how fear is portrayed in pop-culture and juxtapose it with the re-enactments of the experiences I described as part of the autoethnographic practice.I understand re-enactment after director Milo Rau who talks about his own theater pieces which use re-enactment as de-construction “with a heuristic aspiration (in the sense of a critical actualization of that which is repeated)” (International Institute of Political Murder). In this sense, I use the method of re-enactment to repeat an action/behavior/scene and by performing it, visibly demonstrate, but also feel through embodiment, what of this portrayal of fear is true, what is omitted, or deliberately distorted.

Embodied acting

The autoethnographic writing paired with the photographic practice provided me with material to be analyzed in the studio-practice through acting and re-enacting, tying my experiences of “performing” fear in real life to "performing" fear in the theatrical context. The Stanislavsky method, as well as other acting methods, were applied in order to check the hypothesis that the psyche can generate affect in absence of real threat, strengthening my claim that fear is affective, real, and embodied even when the context is fictional, which has great repercussions for its political use.

Performance making

During the research process five short performances were created, and based on their use of cultural referencing, re-enactment and critical approach, almost all of them could be described as remixes.

Speculative fabulation

Bringing the real excerpts from those radio shows and contrasting them with the news about flesh-eating monsters using the strategy of speculative fiction was aimed to highlight how grotesque and absurd some of their word usage and rhetorics were, and
give them a critical lens through the theatrical context.

Findings

This research, rooted in the body, affect and experience, ultimately led to the exploration of language and embodied presence as the main contributions in exposing the psychopolitics of fear. Through the performance making practice, it employed the dramaturgical operations of re-enactment, satire and metaphor to achieve this goal and disseminate it for the wider audiences. The range of disciplines and interests covered in this research is mirrored by the ultimate turn to the idea of the re-emix as the most appropriate form to convey this finding, but by no means has it been exhaustive. I identify numerous potential directions for future development of this research: from deeper look into the implications of neuroscience for embodied performance, a further inquiry into the connections between linguistics, affect and performative texts, as well as the largely missing analysis of the fear-rhetorics employed by other than right-wing political parties.