Theater as a live art has a peculiarly complicated relation to time, and to the present, especially because sometimes it proves to be a mimetic art, and sometimes not. Not only is it a matter of the temporality of the theater itself, and then of the time of the play, and of the performance but it is also – and this since the original Greek dispensation of theater – a question of the time of the city, of the polis, of the community, if such a thing exists. 


The object of this paper is theater as the production of contemporaneity, a temporal phenomenon which also turns out to be corporeal and political. The material consists of two theatrical performances; one by Dario Fo, titled La Fame dello Zanni (The Servant’s Hunger) and performed in what appears to be a university lecture hall in 1977 for RAI Due, Italian state television, and the other a public installation of fire by the Compagnie Carabosse on the Canal St Martin in Paris in May 2003 as part of the Festival du Printemps des rues. This investigation of contemporaneity is the continuation of a project on modern theater, the first part of which was published and then reworked under the title “An Explosive Genealogy: Theater, Philosophy and the Art of Presentation.”¹ That article employs a conceptual framework found in Alain Badiou’s philosophy to identify and trace a consistent procedure of transformation that takes place in modern theater from what I call the Meyerhold-event through both Artaud and Brecht and beyond. The result is the identification of a tenuous, almost indiscernible art of presentation that not only traverses the boundaries of theater and mass media, but also explodes the distinction between philosophy and art, two supposedly separate domains according to Badiou’s conception of philosophy. In that article I was particularly concerned with how philosophy relates to theater in the original Greek dispensation – it always does so through a third term, the polis, or education – and how that dispensation persists in what has been called modernist theater, such as Brecht’s learning plays. The question of whether there is a modern dispensation of the relation between theater and philosophy forms the horizon of the present enquiry into theater and temporality. 


Two performances. One performance is live, a one-off public spectacle, with no actors but an installation, and an enormous audience that just happens to find itself at the site...