What does it mean to “put yourself in the skin” of a character? Who becomes the subject who interprets a performance, starts singing or performs a dance movement? To answer these questions, we need to analyze the performer-work-spectator relationship in the field of performing arts. The philosopher José Gil intends to do so during his meeting devoted precisely to l corpo nelle arti sceniche, during which he will focus on the analysis of the process of the performer's becoming-other, exploring the tools available to the body to transform space and time. His project is the exploration of the "space of the body" and the "time of the body" in the becoming-other of the actor. His speech will also describe the operations through which consciousness intervenes on sensations, so that "the unconscious of the body", as well as "the unconscious of language", come to express themselves in that metamorphosis of the body which is the action of performance or dance.
Some texts from Fernando Pessoa's Libro dell’Intranquillità will be used which describe this mechanism with great clarity. In the performative act, a "plane of immanence" is formed (to use Deleuze's definition), which requires another conception of the body, different from that of medicine and phenomenology: a "mirror-body-of-forces" capable of producing a paradoxical, or rather "non-conscious" experience, which is precisely that of the performer, and which tends to be transmitted from him to the spectator.
José Gil was born in Mozambique and lives and works in Lisbon. In 1968 he graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Art of the Sorbonne University. The following year he began his PhD with a thesis on Kant and morality. In 1976 he returned to Portugal where he worked as Assistant to the Secretariat of State for Education and Scientific Research. Five years later he obtained Portuguese citizenship, becoming a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the New University of Lisbon, where he taught Aesthetics and Contemporary Philosophy. He also teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, at the New School for Dance Development in Amsterdam and at the University of Sao Paulo. He has published numerous essays, including: Un’Antropologia delle forze (Einaudi, 1983), Métamorphoses du corps (Éditions de la Différence, 1985), Fernando Pessoa ou a Metafísica das sensações (Relógio d’Água, 1988), Salazar – a Retórica da Invisibilidade (Relógio d’Água, 1995), A Imagem-nua e as Pequenas Percepções (Relógio d’Água, 1996), Movimento Total – o Corpo e a dança (Relógio d’Água, 2001), Mostri. Umanità e anormalità (Besa, 2003), A Profundidade e a Superfície (Relógio d’Água, 2003). His books have been translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and Serbian. Le nouvel Observateur included him among the twenty most important philosophers in the world. He wrote the “body” entry in the Einaudi Encyclopedia. He participated in the last edition of the Philosophy Festival holding a lectio magistralis entitled Il potere del corpo.