For If I Can’t Dance’s Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016), the philosopher and essayist Peter Pál Pelbart is commissioned to produce a new research project departing from his involvement with the Ueinzz Theatre Company.

The Ueinzz Theatre Company was founded in 1997 in São Paulo, and through its schizoscenic constitution and practice crosses frontiers between art, life, madness, and subjectivity. As part of Edition VI, the group will perform their latest piece, Gravity Zero, Episode 1 (2014–ongoing), in Amsterdam. The piece is the result of a collective creation inspired by the work of the French educator Fernand Deligny (1913–1996), who is known for his pioneering and alternative approach to education for children and adolescents with autism.

Alongside the performance Ueinzz will also offer workshops on their methods, including a session with body drawings (also inspired by Deligny), have public conversations with the audience, interlocution with artists and critics, and some informal moments of conviviality with whoever may be interested in this “way of life”, including wandering through the city. The presentation in Amsterdam will follow Ueinzz’s aim to not merely present a spectacle, but rather to introduce an atmosphere and a device, with its own way of exchanging, creating, deliberating, diluting one self, to interfere in the surrounding normopathy.

Complimenting Ueinzz’s presentation, for the Performance in Residence commission, Peter Pál Pelbart will also develop new research that draws upon Ueinzz’s methods to pursue the question, “How is it possible today to sustain a mode of interruption, suspension, connexion/desconnexion in a collective assemblage?”

Of his research, Pelbart says:

Our era revolves around this pathology: market-ready modes of existence. Part of the contemporary effort is to diagnose this illness and retrace its genesis, ramifications and effects. Among them, of course, is the daily rejection of “minor” modes of life, minority ways of living that are not only more fragile, precarious and vulnerable (poor, crazy, autistic), but also more hesitant, dissident, at times traditional than others (indigenous people); that are, on the contrary, still being born, tentative, even experimental (those still to come, to be discovered, to be invented). In fact, there is a war between different modes of life or forms of life today. Perhaps this is what has led some philosophers recently to dwell on such contrasting and atypical modes of existence, even if they pertain to a bygone era. The Franciscans in Agamben, the Cynics in Foucault, the Schyzos in Deleuze-Guattari, the autistic in Deligny, but also the Araweté in Viveiros de Castro or even the fireflies of Didi-Huberman, are part of a zigzag line of inquiry that crosses the philosophical domain, as well as the anthropologic, subjective, aesthetic, in the last decades, challenging our political imagination.

Biography

Peter Pál Pelbart (b. 1956, Budapest, Hungary) is a philosopher and an essayist. He is a teacher at the Catholic Pontificale University of São Paulo. He translated books of Gilles Deleuze in Portuguese, and wrote on the relationships between madness, philosophy, and literature, and on the issue of time in the work of Deleuze, and its involvement in the clinical field, cinema and politics. He recently studied links between politics and subjectivity, in particular in relation to the bio-politic axis. His last book is Cartography of Exhaustion—Nihilism Inside Out, published by n-1 publications in 2015. He is a member of Ueinzz Theatre Company, a theatrical project with psychiatric patients in São Paulo. The group made a research project in collaboration with Alejandra Riera, São Paulo (Investigation on the/our outside) that was presented during the Documenta XII, in Kassel in 2007. Peter Pál Pelbart is also co-editor of n-1publications. Previously for If I Can’t Dance, he participated in the seminar for the tour of Guy de Cointet: Five Sisters to OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Shenzhen (2013). He is based in São Paulo, Brazil.