Tracing the Essay in Contemporary Performing Arts

Abstract

Tracing the essay in contemporary performing arts explores how the characteristics of the essay appear in the current field of performing arts. In the middle of the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne developed the essay as a new literary form in order to deal with the tumultuous 16th century. ‘To essay’ means ‘to assay’, ‘to weigh’, as well as ‘to attempt’, suggesting an open-ended, evaluative search. By ‘essay’, Montaigne meant the ‘challenging of ideas’, for himself and for society. It was a wide-ranging form that reflected upon fundamental questions of life and human imperfection. Its weapons are humour, irony, satire and paradox; its atmosphere is contradiction and the collision of opposites. Montaigne’s Essai influenced and inspired and number of writers and philosophers to experiment with the essay as a (literary) form, amongst them Lukács, Adorno, Robert Musil, Max Bense and Aldous Huxley. By the 1920’s and 1930’s, the characteristics of the essay appear in film practices where we witnessed an intersection between documentaries and avant-garde cinema. In the following decades the essay becomes increasingly visible and defined as ‘Essay Film’. Within the field of contemporary performing arts, the essay is currently taking an important stance. The nature and the purpose of the essay inspires a number of artists in their artistic practice. The article Tracing the essay in contemporary performing arts maps via the work of theatre maker Thomas Bellinck and choreographer Michiel Vandevelde two essayistic modes in order to investigate how and in what kind of modalities the essay appears within contemporary performances.