Performance Communities: An Affective Approach to Community Building through Performing Arts

Abstract: In this research I aimed for grasping an understanding of how community performance projects serve for building communities through bodily assemblies and affect. I conducted an ethnographic research based on two different performance projects in Malmö. I have used participant observation, embodied ethnography and semi-structured interviews as research methods. Doing so, I attempted to comprehend what sort of circumstances bring people together within the community performance projects and the role of affect in bringing people from different backgrounds together for a specific aim under the roof of these projects. I base my theoretical arguments on Clare Hemmings’ interpretation of affect and Judith Butler’s performative theory of assembly. I conclude that the capacity of our bodies to produce and share affect is augmented with the embodiment of different states of in-betweenness such as vulnerabilities based on migration and precarity. The potential to assembly as communities is higher where such vulnerabilities are either embodied by the performers or acknowledged and communicated. Then affective solidarities are built among the group which renders these public assemblies as actual communities while the means of community performance provides a solid basis for such solidarity. When such acknowledgment and embodiment of vulnerabilities is lacking, there is a different possibility that oppositional groups are formed and the group is not closely tied together. However, one can still observe that smaller forms of solidarities are established among those more vulnerable bodies, even when the acknowledgement by the larger group is missing.