PARRHĒSIASTIC PERFORMANCE

The term parrhesia comes from Ancient Greek and can be translated as “free speech”, “frank speech” or “speaking everything”. It was extensively developed by Michel Foucault in his late lectures, particularly The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth. For Foucault, parrhesia is not simply the act of expressing an opinion or telling the truth. It describes a situation in which a person chooses to articulate what they perceive as true despite the risk involved in doing so. Parrhesia therefore establishes a particular relationship between truth, exposure and courage.

What interests me is the possibility of transferring this principle from speech to performance.

A parrhesiastic performance would not necessarily be a performance in which the performer verbally “tells the truth”. Instead, the performance itself becomes an act through which something is placed at risk: the body, an identity, a belief, a social position, a relationship with the audience, or even the performer’s understanding of themselves.

In this sense, parrhesia is different from confession. I am not particularly interested in revealing private information about myself or transforming autobiography into spectacle.

The question is rather:

what truth can only emerge when something is genuinely exposed?

Looking retrospectively at my CPPM journey, I can see this question appearing progressively.

At the beginning of the programme, I was strongly concerned with the construction of images, atmospheres, symbols and theatrical situations. The body existed inside compositions that I could largely control. Through devising processes such as EMIT, this relationship drastically shift. Repetition, physical exhaustion, collective negotiation and the instability of devised structures increasingly confronted me with situations in which performance could no longer be understood only as the production of an aesthetic object.

With Voodoo Child, this shift became more explicit. The circular configuration of the audience, the use of sand and water, repetition, exposure and duration started to make the performer’s physical presence itself part of the dramaturgy. Rather than representing a fictional condition, the body was undergoing something in real time.

This distinction has become increasingly important in my work:

I am less interested in representing an experience
than in constructing the conditions in which an experience can actually occur.

The encounter with the CPPM guest artists has reinforced this development in different ways.

Marina Abramović’s practice has obviously been fundamental in understanding how duration, endurance and a simple action can radically alter the performer’s relationship to their own body and to the audience.
What I retain from this lineage, however, is not endurance as an achievement.
The important element is the removal of theatrical protection.
When an action continues long enough,
the performer cannot completely control the image they are producing.
Fatigue, hesitation, discomfort and transformation become visible.
The body begins to disclose something that cannot rehearse.

This became especially concrete during my work at the Marina Abramović Institute in Greece. In the six-hour ice-bath performances, I established a protocol, but I could not predetermine the experience produced by it. Entering and leaving the cold water, drying under the sun and gradually covering the body with green clay, red earth and cacao created a situation in which the material transformation of the body was inseparable from actual physical sensation and duration. The performance was therefore not an illustration of vulnerability or transformation: those conditions were genuinely taking place.

Other encounters during CPPM have contributed to the same trajectory from different perspectives. Practices connected to Grotowski’s lineage, physical theatre, Gecko, Ultima Vez, Viewpoint or even Song of the Goat repeatedly displaced my attention from the representation of emotion towards the physical conditions that can generate presence.

Even when their artistic languages are very different,
they have contributed to a fundamental shift in my own practice:

the body is no longer simply an instrument used to communicate an artistic idea;

it becomes a place where knowledge can be produced.

This is perhaps where parrhesia becomes most relevant to my current research.

I am increasingly interested in performance
as a situation in which the performer
cannot remain completely outside what is happening.

There must be a consequence.

The performer establishes a protocol, enters it,
and accepts that the encounter with duration, material, spectators, environment
or other bodies might transform the initial intention.

Parrhesiastic performance therefore
requires a form of risk, but this risk
does not need to mean danger.

It can be the risk of losing control of an image,
the risk of being contradicted by one’s own body,
the risk of exposing an ambiguity,
the risk of allowing an audience to witness something unresolved.

My trajectory through CPPM can consequently be understood
as a gradual movement from representation towards exposure,
from composition towards encounter,
and from controlling meaning towards creating conditions
in which meaning can emerge.

"No truth”.

Instead, a situation in which I'm willing to be affected by my own apparatus.