Zlatko Paković's Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience as an Embodied Text: The Impact of Different Types of Spaciality on Semioticity of a Performance

Abstract

This paper deals with the corporeality of a performance and its place in the process of the emergence of meaning, following a case study of a Serbian theatrical piece Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience. Performance is constituted by bodies brought together by a certain purpose and temporal and spatial coordinates, and it is more and more often now decoded by the feedback loop performers and participants form in specific kinds of spatiality. Artistic corporeality defies objectivization, therefore the relational aesthetics is needed instead of an idealistic one to investigate the materiality of these performances. Using this theoretical framework, the analysis of the two different performances of the same dramatic text from the recent Serbian political theater production will tend to examine the nature of political potential of bodily co-presence in artistically and socially different environments and its implications for the semioticity of the given embodied text.

Article received: April 5. 2019; Article accepted: June 10, 2019; Published online: September 2019; Original scholarly paper