Hauntology, Performance and Remix: Paradise // Now?

Abstract

Drawing upon concepts of hauntology and spectrality and their applications in performance and media theory, the article investigates the relation between live performance, performative memory and technology in Komuna Warszawa’s project Paradise Now? RE//MIX Living Theatre. Premiered in 2013 as the 31st part of the remix sequence bringing together the past works of international experimental artists and theatres and present-day Polish performers and dancers, Paradise Now remix offers a critical and self-referential commentary on what is left after the demise of political theatre and the utopian dream of paradise. My main argument focuses on the technological processes by which Komuna Warszawa spectralizes both the memory of the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now and its own performance through re-mediating, digitizing and remixing fragmentary images and scenes. Their ultimate effect is a melancholic sense of disappearance, impossibility and technologically produced vacuum.

Keywords

• hauntology
• performance
• technology
• remix
• the Living Theatre
• Komuna Warszawa