Abstract
Instead of studying silence as a concept or a metaphor, in this dissertation, I focus on how silence acts. As a receptive state that involves all human senses and helps to tether the body to the notion of self, silence entails a state full of perceptions, thoughts and affects that frame the communicative force of the body. I argue that the silences at play in performance art, what I call performatic silence, reinforce aesthesis (sensorial cognition), a pre-linguistic communicative force that deconstructs, displaces, and transforms meanings and identarian representations that spread quickly in our current mediatized societies. In performance and performance art studies, the analysis of silence, understood as an entry point to the body, has scarcely received critical attention. For Diana Taylor, in The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), based on the persistence of bodily practices and memories, what she calls embodied knowledge is transmitted through performance. This creates a social theater that acts beyond the filters of media. According to Taylor, in the not fully colonized/modernized western societies of the Americas, the body is a repertoire of memories, knowledge, traumas, dances, rituals that perform and are transferred to and from the archive, which is a receptacle of all other media. The repertoire provides an alternative perspective of history because it is live and includes all sorts of sensual information. Expanding Taylor’s view, this dissertation explores memories as corporeal and sensorial archives that are actualized. They do not represent fixed patterns of behavior or a performatic genealogy so much as the traces of non-conscious experiences and movement. As André Lepecki argues, the body understood as an archive does not store, but acts and brings unexplored possibilities. By linking Taylor’s and Lepecki’s visions, this study narrows the frame from performance to performance art in the Americas. It proposes a transdisciplinary examination of silence that reveals the power of sensorial cognition and communication while experiencing performance art.