André Lepecki is full professor and chairperson in NYU's Performance Studies department. He has curated projects for Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Hayward Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Sydney Biennial 2016, among other venues in the US, Europe, and Brazil. He is winner of AICA-US Best Performance Award 2008 and editor of several books in performance and dance theory, including DANCE (Whitechapel/MIT). He is the author of Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement and Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (both by Routledge).
Testimony for the Living (Or, Metabolic Theater)
“Borborygmus is predicated on relentless narratives—personal, impersonal, fictional, true—of each actor’s lived experiences, memories, and mismemories. It is in these narratives that we can locate, actually, not merely the facts surrounding violent acts, but the effects of violence upon the entire social body, its nervous system.” With particular attention to affective and metabolic processes, scholar André Lepecki reviews Borborgymous, a new theater work about “life, death and the digestive system” by Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué, which premiered at the Walker in January.