Post-event aesthetics

What happens after the event? After the event either the actors are tired or they are itching for new adventure. If they are tired, they are tired because they have followed the director's instructions and the director has been working against their instincts. So, in fact acting has been a task for the actors. The task has drained them out and now they are looking forward to just be as they are.

Being as you are is a tricky thing to suggest, because immediately the question can be asked, "but who are you?" And to that question all answers must be postponed and resigned.

After the event, the actor's pulse is weak. Their desire lacks force. Nothing is going to happen again. Echoes are resonances of the event and do not need any further amplification. The post-event urge caters to the document, the archive and treats the event as it should be: as a necessary distraction. The event offers a tip to the iceberg of the project that flashes and plays to the gallery while allowing an entire corpus of activity that remains closed and of interest only to the historian or archivist who is examining closely.

The actors do not have any direct access to the audience. They only have access to the frame as constructed for them by the director. After the event, they withdraw even further. They only access the director now and this closed circuit feed is recorded or made available to the document in some way.

The event is the exposure, it makes an impression. In its after state, this impression often finds an expression in formulating the next event. The next event is not necessarily in sequence but it is a progression of the urge to expose.

Connection is addictive. Either the connection is to the frame of conversation or to the body to which the performance is pitched to. The performance-client-body has to be unique. Presences get weathered, in order to test a performance after a point, new bodies are needed. And this need loops the post-event back to a new event. This is not really a loop but a spiral, each event solves a different problem and each post-event enjoys a different niche opening (facilitated by the exposure of the event.
The post-event fantasies that there will never be an event again. This fantasy is fragile and is broken soon. The break-point arrives via the weaving of another fantasy. This fantasy imagines the audience to be incomplete and curious. This fantasy breaks some time before the second exposure happens when the director locates the curious and incomplete eye within himself. In the end the audience does not exist and if it does it certainly does not exist in a united form. It is fragmented and useless and shakes off any use-value projected onto it.

The post-event knows this fragmentation in a very close way. It considers the fragmented attention of a distracted audience as its material and some audiences can only be touched by this material.