Jean-Luc Moriceau, Isabela dos Santos Paes. Studying performativity in performing arts through affects. 32nd EGOS Colloquium : European Group for Organizational Studies. Organizing in the shadow of power, Jul 2016, Naples, Italy.

Performative arts can be seen as an organization of performativity. However, how can we study the performativity of the aesthetic experiences brought about by performative arts in a way that could help us make sense of organizational and political aspects involved? And how then to compose an approach that tries to capture and describe the whole of experience in its aesthetic dimensions, but also think it and communicate it? We propose here to use some resources of the “turn-to-affects” to study organizational and political aspects of performativity in performing arts thanks to the study of a theatre play. An affect-led approach has the advantage of placing the researcher in a quasi unmediated contact with the aesthetic experience, of opening her or him up to a wide range of performative dimensions, and of forcing her to reflect on the organizational, political and ethical dimension of the experience.