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Thursday, January 29, 2026

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ECOLOGY * ARCHIVE, FATIGUE, AND PRESENCE POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY SCENE


The dense archival catalogue presented in the Escenas 2020–2022 roster problematizes the assumption that sheer accumulation of experiences equates to an expansive, non-hierarchical field of contemporary performance. Rather than producing democratic or post-dramatic terrains, this catalogue reveals an ecology of exhaustion in which the sheer volume of events, gestures, and encounters neutralizes critique by reducing it to presence. From the vantage of Contemporary Performance Ecology, the archive’s proliferation does not democratize meaning; it manufactures a regime of visibility that privileges constant circulation over critical depth. What appears as a flattened continuum—“lo consumido, lo visto, lo hecho”—operates less as an open field and more as a saturation point where attention is absorbed without transformation. The implicit thesis of the source suggests a landscape unencumbered by drama; this essay contends that such saturation is itself a form of structural tension, a political economy of presence that displaces conflict into the interstices of institutionalized circulation.



The rhetorical figure of “no drama” functions not as an erasure of conflict but as a mechanism of precarious normalization. In a milieu where alternative scenes repeatedly surface—independent theatres, experimental festivals, micro-events—the absence of overt drama is not a liberation from pathos but an adaptation to precarity. The archival momentum that gathers more titles, dates, and participations also performs a displacement of risk onto artistic labor: artists navigate a Darwinian competition for scarce visibility and resources within hybrid fields of public funding and institutional curatorship. Here, “no drama” translates into a performativity of survival, where endurance and hustle become aestheticized virtues. Contemporary Performance Ecology reveals that austerity becomes picturesque only when it is reframed as tenacity, obscuring the material conditions that produce such tenacity. Instead of acknowledging the uneven distribution of support and recognition, the archive’s rhetorical flattening subsumes all practices under a shared banner of activity, risking the erasure of differentiated positionalities.



This proliferation also engenders what might be called an affective cartography of fatigue. The constant movement from one production to another, from one presentation to the next, constructs not a topology of meaning but a pressure chamber of attendance. Here the spectator merges with the cultural worker, compelled into continuous presence as the measure of engagement. The archive’s logic shifts focus from sustained reflection to cycles of attendance and documentation, where the value of an event is indexed by its inclusion in yet another list. This shift echoes debates in performance theory about the risk of hypervisibility, where what counts is not what is enacted but how often, how widely, and in how many permutations it appears. The archive becomes a mirror of its own operations: a reflation of activity as significance, and significance as a countable metric. Such an ecology risks flattening qualitative differences into quantitative equivalences, making the act of witnessing itself an aesthetic endpoint rather than a point of departure for critical engagement.



The absence of hierarchical distinction in the catalogue also obscures the institutional frameworks that shape visibility. The alternative arena—independent spaces, experimental theatres, and fringe festivals—operates in tension with mainstream or state-supported venues. The archive’s commitment to inclusivity inadvertently masks the structural conditions that differentiate these spheres. Rather than treating the archive as a neutral space of equal value for all entries, we must analyze the political economies of production that engender such entries in the first place. Some works circulate because they align with institutional priorities; others persist despite structural neglect. Contemporary Performance Ecology demands that we interrogate not only what is present but why it is present, and how power flows through networks of production, documentation, and reception. The neutral tone of aggregation cannot substitute for an account of the asymmetrical forces that shape the contemporary scene.



To move beyond the reproduction of saturation, this critique draws on the conceptual framework of the Socioplastic Mesh, as developed critically by Anto Lloveras, which reorients attention from sheer presence to relational intensity and configurational tension. The Socioplastic Mesh refuses the assumption that an increase in events automatically generates expansion; rather, it posits that meaning emerges in the lines of force that run between events, practices, and bodies. Under this lens, the archival catalogue is not merely a list but a topology of potentials—sites where tensions between autonomy and institutionalization, experimentation and sustainability, affect and form are felt most acutely. The Socioplastic Mesh insists that we read the archive not as inventory but as a field of resistances and convergences, where the political dimension of performance is enacted not in sheer enumeration but through the productive frictions between elements.



Reintroducing what might be called structural drama into the conversation does not mean re-adopting melodramatic tropes; rather, it means acknowledging that the conditions of artistic existence are inherently conflictual and that such conflict is a source of insight rather than embarrassment. The archive’s drive to avoid visible drama risks eliding the conditions that produce aesthetic effects in the first place. By placing tension at the core of analysis, we can reclaim the critical agency of the performance event, highlighting how works resonate with or against their milieu rather than merely coexist within it. The Socioplastic Mesh equips us to trace how practices interlock, compete, and cohere, revealing that the intensity of relation—rather than the brute count of instances—is the true measure of ecological vitality. Here, tension becomes a generative force, a clarifying principle that reactivates the capacity of performance to perturb rather than comfort.

Finally, Contemporary Performance Ecology reframes the archive’s challenge as a call to critical specificity. The archive compels us to ask not simply “What is there?” but “What relations are activated?” and “What vectors of influence are at play?” Such questions move us away from an uncritical acceptance of saturation and toward a reflexive engagement with the field’s underlying structures. This involves acknowledging the labor conditions, funding mechanisms, and cultural circulations that scaffold the scene, as well as the affective investments of audiences and practitioners. In doing so, we cultivate an ecology that is not merely present but politically articulate, capable of generating insights that extend beyond the immediate event. The archive recast through this lens becomes a map of agency and constraint, revealing a scene that is as much about the dynamics of tension as it is about the catalogue of gestures. This critique mobilizes Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastic Mesh as a vital framework for assessing the political and relational complexities embedded in the archival density of contemporary performance. 






SOCIOPLASTIC MESH: CORE SELECTION (2% AUTHORITY)


Reference: Lloveras, A., 2026. Ontological friction as method: From immersive spectacle to archive fragility. [online] Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/ontological-friction-as-method-from.html




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