BIO

Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires, 1963) holds a doctorate in History and Art Theory from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is a professor and researcher specializing in theatre at UBA, Universidad Nacional de Rosario and Universidad Nacional de San Martín. He has been the director of the Centro de Investigación en Historia y Teoría Teatral (CIHTT) [Center for Research in Theatre History and Theory] since 1998 and the director of the Escuela de Espectadores de Buenos Aires [Buenos Aires School of Spectators] since 2001. He is also a Partenaire Privilégié of the Fondos de Archivo de la Académie Expérimentale des Théâtres (France) at the Alliance Française in Buenos Aires. His publications include Teatro Comparado. Problemas y conceptos (1995), Samuel Beckett en la Argentina (1998, comp.), El teatro jeroglífico. Herramientas de poética teatral (2002), Estudios críticos sobre Harold Pinter (2002, comp.), El convivio teatral (2003), El teatro sabe. La relación escena/conocimiento en once ensayos de Teatro Comparado (2005) and Filosofía del Teatro I. Convivio, experiencia, subjetividad (2007). In 2007 he was awarded the Konex Prize for Literary Criticism.

CLOSE

The social body and the poetic body on the Argentine stage

This essay proposes a redefinition of theater as event that employs the notions of communion, a poiesis of the body and poetic-convivial expectation, and that is derived from the perspective of living culture and its insertion in a Philosophy of Theater. It distinguishes the social body from the poetic body as a form of radical differentiation in order to conceptualize a social theatricality and a poetic theatricality. The corollaries of this redefinition are the concepts of theater as a zone of experience and subjectivity. The essay outlines different modalities of subjectivity production—macropolitical and micropolitical (with their variants)—on the basis of poetic theatricality: internal subjectivity (or the subjectivity of the poetic body); subjectivity of the ethical act, an intermediary institutional subjectivity; and the double subjectivity of the relationship between poiesis and civic life. Finally, it characterizes the artist (and the theater artist in particular) as a specific type of intellectual.

CLOSE ABSTRACT