| Curtains, Islands and Intervals addresses, through a series of theoretical explorations of performance, theater, subjectivity, affectivity, ontology, ecology, capitalism, architecture, and art, the disparate comings and goings mediated by performative curtaining. The project explores the theoretical complexities of candid, theatrical stage curtaining, while addressing the no less theatrical, and arguably more powerful, curtaining refrains performed and experienced in everyday life, that is, concealment and revelation performed and experienced outside the jurisdiction of the proscenium theater's contract of physical, if not psychical, safety. Accordingly, the familiar red drape over the western proscenium stage is just as much a focus of the project as, for example, the profoundly complex and pervasive practice of curtaining and veiling in religious or capitalist contexts, or even the concealment and revelation paradigm deployed within the infant Peekaboo game. The project explores what the performance of concealment and revelation does in radically diverse contexts, and how it operates within culture metaphorically, theatrically, and materially. Inescapably, the explorations of various paradigms of performative curtaining reveal just as much about the curtain as they do about the contexts that evidently demand its intervention. Accordingly, the project attends both to the ontological circumstances under which the performance of curtaining—both within and outside of artistic contexts—manipulates primary, "earthly" movement and to the ethical and artistic priorities evidenced in the subjective stance one adopts concerning this earthly movement. |
