Putting Rehearsals to the Test : Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics

Abstract

Although the format of the rehearsal is used across a number of disciplines — film and theater as well as fine arts — it has been scarcely considered in historical and contemporary art discourses. With this in mind, Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic production. As the contributions in this book show, practices of rehearsal put those procedures — sometimes joyful, sometimes troublesome but structurally productive — into the foreground to replace given conventions and regulations with new forms and rules. Shaping working processes (the in-the-making) and products (the making-of) without defined aims and ends, artists, activists, and theorists working with strategies of rehearsal focus on moments of contingency, interruption, recommencement, irregular repetition, uncertainty, and failure within existing systems. Practices of rehearsal, in attempting to transform asymmetric labor divisions, appear as links between aesthetic judgment and social or institutional critique. This book is a critical and timely reappraisal of the methodologies of the rehearsal, and makes a claim for the aesthetic and political potential in the unfinished project.