Restoring Gestures: Exploring Aby Warburgs Method for Theater Studies

This project will explore the relevance of Aby Warburg's (1866 – 1929) art historical method for theater studies. Warburg sought to uncover the survival of Antiquity in a plethora of images from different origins (examples of 'high art', advertisement, astrological drawings etc.), using the returning gesture as a motif to map this survival. The notion of a survival or return of the image is anti-historicist in nature and calls for a change of the image's status from historical artifact to autonomous presence. This project proposes that gesture as a reembodiment of historical memory produces a tension between representation and presencelocated in the body and that this marks a parallel between the body in the image – as Warburg analyzes it – and the body on stage.

Keywords:GESTURE, THEATRE SCIENCE

Disciplines:Curatorial and related studies, History, Other history and archaeology, Art studies and sciences, Artistic design, Audiovisual art and digital media, Heritage, Music, Theatre and performance, Visual arts, Other arts, Product development, Study of regions