ABSTRACT
Chapter two furthers discussion of the practical sense of embodiment by investigating the sense of actualisation and contingency in Live Art. There are three major topics: the sense of border between interior and exterior regarding intentionality; the aesthetic utilisation of contingency (chance, possibility and indeterminacy); and intersubjectivity. The body–proper’s possibilities are constituted by the lived experience through and as agencies, which is its cultural, gender and other identity–related determinant appearing in performative contingency. Actualisation refers to how potentials are realised and materialised from ‘inside’ to ‘outside’ in terms of incarnated subjectivity and its perception. Taking note of Schechner’s ideas and Deleuzian notions of actualisation and the phenomenological intentionality, an actualisation is the concrete mode of embodiment. Actualisation is discussed with the example of The Jump on the Bed. Then the embodied phenomenological possibility leads to a detailed investigation of how contingency is utilised in live performance with two case studies, The Lastmaker (contingency as theme) and And on the Thousandth Night (contingency as a functional device to generate both material and the performance itself). The chapter concludes that the sense of liveness in Live Art relates to the metaphor of the ‘unknown’ as an aesthetic objective in terms of the dialectic performative ‘telos.’
