My research investigates a recent development from contemporary theatre, dance, and performance that is typically referred to by the generic notion of „practice“; the development in question is also invoked by related notions such “studio practice”, “daily practice”, “personal practice”, or “performance as practice”. We can observe a similar interest in “practice” in contemporary art overall, and indeed “practice” contributes to the post-medium condition and the historical dissolution of the boundaries of the arts; for the purpose of my research, however, I analyse the subject from the perspective of the historical ontology theatre, dance, and performance. My research asserts that (despite, but also because of its generality) “practice” formulates a significant alteration of the modern and bourgeois diagram of performance production and presentation which has been dominating theatrical activities from around 1800 to the present. It sketches out an analytics and genealogy of “practice” that focusses on selected works of contemporary practitioners from Europe such as Valentina Desideri, Myriam Lefkowitz, Alice Chauchat, Sarah Vanhee, and Lenio Kaklea, as well as genealogical references including, amongst others, the work of Bertolt Brecht, Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, and Lygia Clark. “Practice” is thus approximated in its tendency of manifesting a diagram which develops the registers of activity and subjectivity around the experience of a continuous Aus-Übung or a learning doing: a prefigurative form of exercise that acts as a device toward artistic ways of living a life. The political horizon of “practice” as an ongoing exercise in living concerns the contemporary crisis of the modern and capitalist project of infinite movement, and the (re-)production of social and biological life associated with it.
