Practices of Presence: Performing Arts and Philosophical Inquiry

1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, performance theory has flourished into a dynamic interdisciplinary discourse, drawing insights from fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political theory, cultural studies, and feminism. Yet, despite this intellectual richness, performance scholars have rarely engaged deeply with work emerging from within philosophy departments. Conversely, few professional philosophers have given sustained attention to the phenomenon of performance as a central aesthetic and conceptual concern. This mutual neglect is all the more striking in light of the considerable philosophical interest devoted in recent years to other art forms, including painting, music, and film.

One reason for this oversight may lie in the paradoxical status of the performing arts within the history of philosophical aesthetics. From their foundational role in ancient ritual and tragedy—exemplified in Greek drama—to their relative marginalization in modern theories of art, performance practices have alternately shaped and eluded philosophical frameworks. While the visual arts, literature, and music (considered from the perspective of composition) have typically been privileged as paradigms of aesthetic experience, the inherently ephemeral, embodied, and relational nature of performing arts has often sat uncomfortably with dominant theoretical models.

Performance has always troubled the boundaries of aesthetic thought. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) [1], Friedrich Nietzsche highlighted the radical power of the Dionysian—a force of collective ecstasy and embodied presence—as essential to the origins of art and culture. Much earlier, Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773) [2] questioned how actors could appear emotionally authentic while maintaining technical detachment, opening an early modern inquiry into the tensions between expression and craft, spontaneity and discipline.

However, these early reflections, though seminal, did not translate into focused philosophical engagement with performance as a distinct category.

In the twentieth century, a turning point came with the development of performance studies, particularly through the work of Richard Schechner. In Performance Theory (1988) [3], Schechner reconceived performance as a broad cultural and anthropological category, encompassing ritual, play, theatre, and everyday actions. His notions of liminality, restored behavior, and performativity paved the way for a non-reductive understanding of live, embodied acts as sites of meaning-making and identity negotiation.

Coming from a different direction, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance (2008) [4] introduced the idea of an “autopoietic feedback loop” between performer and audience, emphasizing emergence, co-presence, and transformation over representation. Performance, for Fischer-Lichte, is not simply a medium for conveying meaning—it is an event that constitutes meaning through its unfolding, always being situated and dynamic.

In analytic philosophy, the performing arts began to receive sustained attention only in the early 2000s. David Davies’ Philosophy of the Performing Arts (2011) [5] is among the most influential treatments of the topic, offering a clear and structured account of theatre, music, and dance. Crucially, Davies rejects the tendency to apply the ontology of visual or literary art to performance. He proposes instead that works of performing art should be conceived as action-tokens: processual entities whose identities depend on performance practices, contextual conventions, and interpretive constraints. This move aligns with a broader turn in aesthetics towards practice-based, processual, and action-oriented conceptions of art.

Alongside this ontological shift, recent years have also witnessed an extraordinary surge in interest in improvisation across philosophy, musicology, performance studies, and cognitive science. Improvisation is no longer seen merely as a deviation from composition or rehearsal—it is now studied as a model for creativity, intersubjectivity, and ethical engagement. Recent collective works such as The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (Bertinetto & Ruta, eds., 2021) [6], Philosophy of Improvisation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice (Høffding, Ravn, & McGuirk, eds., 2021) [7], and The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance (Midgelow, ed., 2019) [8] have cemented improvisation as a rich site of philosophical inquiry. These studies emphasize responsiveness, uncertainty, embodied knowledge, and distributed agency—concepts that resonate deeply with contemporary concerns in performance aesthetics.

1.1. An Overview of This Volume

This Special Issue of Philosophies contributes to this growing engagement by advancing sustained philosophical reflection on the performing arts. It collects fifteen original articles that engage with a wide spectrum of themes, ranging from ontology and temporality to embodied creativity, audience experience, aesthetic judgment, political ecology, and translation. Grounded in practice such as music, dance, theatre, and performance art, these contributions traverse diverse philosophical traditions—analytic, continental, pragmatist, and enactivist—reflecting the plurality and richness of contemporary performance aesthetics. Despite their disciplinary and methodological diversity, the articles remain united by a shared attentiveness to the lived, embodied, and relational dimensions of artistic experience.

1.2. Ontology and Temporality

This Special Issue opens with several contributions that explore the ontological and temporal structures of musical performance. In Types of Recording, Types of Performance and the Ontological Identity of Musical Works, Alessandro Arbo distinguishes between recordings that document pre-existing works and those that constitute autonomous musical objects, arguing that the ontological identity of music is inseparable from its media and performance contexts.

The topic of contextually shaped identity finds a counterpart in Christian Grüny’s Do It Again: Repetition, Reproduction, Reenactment in Performance and Music, which reframes repetition not as mechanical duplication but as a culturally and historically situated process of variation. Grüny questions essentialist accounts of identity and proposes a more flexible framework attuned to the lived experience of performance.

Building on the discussion on temporality and performance, Michela Garda’s Time, Risk and Control in Musical Performance Practices broadens the scope by examining how time functions in high-stakes performative contexts such as music, sports, and the circus. Her comparative analysis shows how risk, control, and transformation operate across disciplines, contributing to a performative logic that transcends art–non-art boundaries.

Claudio Rozzoni’s The Familiar Unknown: On the Essence of a Musical Idea adds a more introspective, phenomenological lens of musical ideation. Drawing on Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and Deleuze, Rozzoni challenges Platonist views of musical ideas as fixed entities, proposing instead that ideas are generated through performative temporality and bodily engagement.

1.3. Embodiment, Habit, and Improvisation

This Special Issue then turns to the role of embodiment, habit, and improvisation. In Automatism and Creativity in Contact Improvisation: Re-Inventing Habit and Opening Up to Change, Serena Massimo shows how creative improvisation emerges from well-established automatisms that enable sensitivity to relational dynamics. Her account draws on neophenomenology and affect theory to emphasize dance as an open-ended, exploratory practice.

This reframing of habit as a creative force echoes Alessandro Bertinetto’s Aesthetic Habits in Performing Arts, which challenges the opposition between habit and innovation. Habits, Bertinetto contends, are aesthetic when they become flexible, expressive, and responsive. They structure action without rigidifying it, offering a conceptual bridge between routine and invention—a core idea in recent improvisation theory.

Together, Massimo and Bertinetto’s contributions align with the emerging view of improvisation as a philosophical lens for understanding agency, creativity, and social responsiveness. They show how the body, far from being a passive instrument, becomes an active site of negotiation, adaptation, and emergence.

The theme is extended by Barbara Formis in From Spectacle to Scene: A Pragmatist Approach to Performing Live, where she reconceptualizes performance as a co-created space of aesthetic experience. Drawing from somaesthetics, pragmatism and her personal experience as a dancer, Formis contrasts the distancing logic of spectacle with the immersive potential of the “scene”, understood as a participatory and embodied aesthetic event.

1.4. Expressivity, Ethics, Communication, and the Politics of Performance

The next set of contributions shifts the focus to the ethical and expressive dimensions of performance, framing it as a site of intersubjective responsibility. In Philosophy of Musical Relationships: Care Ethics and Moral Responsibility of Musical Agency, Chiara Palazzolo applies care ethics to musical interaction, arguing that performers bear moral responsibility not only toward their co-performers but also toward past and future generations that inhabit musical traditions.

Eran Guter’s Musical Expression: From Language to Music and Back reverses the traditional analogy between music and language. Drawing on Wittgenstein, he suggests that language itself might be better understood through the structure of musical expression—affective, situated, and performative.

These insights find resonance in Pauline von Bonsdorff’s Aesthetic Communication in Infancy: A Layered Aesthetic Self, which takes this idea into early developmental contexts. von Bonsdorff proposes that infants engage in aesthetic and performative communication well before the emergence of language, suggesting that intersubjective presence and aesthetic sensitivity are foundational to human becoming.

Finally, in A Performance of “Aesthetics”, You Nakai brings this Special Issue full circle by recounting the philosophical challenges of translating the term “aesthetics” into Japanese. He proposes that translation is itself a form of philosophical performance or a performative meditation on linguistic boundaries, philosophical invention, and the politics of meaning, which reveals the instability and creativity of aesthetic categories.

1.5. Listening, Critique, and Aesthetic Relationality

Performance always presupposes an audience—but listening and response are themselves performing acts, shaping how meaning is generated and shared. Performance is not just carried out—it is watched, listened to, and evaluated. The study by Simon Høffding, Remy Haswell-Martin, and Nanette Nielsen, Absorbed Concert Listening, takes up the challenge by investigating how classical concertgoers experience music. Through in-depth phenomenological interviews, the authors uncover different modes of absorption, agency, and distraction, framed through Husserlian passive synthesis and ecological aesthetics.

Lisa Giombini’s Music Criticism Reconsidered: Bias, Expertise, and the Language of Sound further problematizes the role of reception by interrogating the precarious authority of the critic. She questions how evaluative discourse can do justice to the fleeting, affectively charged nature of musical experience while maintaining critical standards.

This investigation is extended by Matilde Carrasco-Barranco. In Artistic Aesthetic Value in Participatory Art, Carrasco explores how audience participation alters the ontology and value of artworks and develops a functionalist framework that accommodates collective authorship and context-dependent emergence, especially in participatory and interactive forms.

1.6. Ecology, Landscape, and the Aesthetics of Performance

The final contributions push performance philosophy into political and ecological contexts, questioning its role in shaping the aesthetic and political consciousness of performance. In Performance Art in the Age of Extinction, Gregorio Tenti introduces concepts such as “performative animism” and “planetarization” to describe how contemporary performance engages with planetary crisis. Tenti argues that performance can mediate between human and non-human agents, becoming a site for reimagining multispecies cohabitation and challenging anthropocentric aesthetic frameworks.

Paolo Furia, in Landscape between Representation and Performativity, complements this vision by rethinking the dominance of visual representation in landscape theory. Drawing from embodied and multisensory aesthetics, Furia proposes an alternative model suggesting that landscape is not simply seen but lived, enacted, and co-constituted through movement and perception.

1.7. Conclusions

The fifteen contributions assembled in this Special Issue do not converge on a single, unified definition of performance. Nor should they do so. What they demonstrate, instead, is that performance constitutes a philosophically generative field—a domain where ontology, ethics, perception, critique, and imagination intersect. The performing arts are not simply a subcategory of artistic practice to be interpreted through existing conceptual models; rather, they demand new aesthetic categories, new modes of thinking, and new philosophical tools.

Taken together, these essays help to consolidate a philosophical field that is no longer parasitic on the ontology of painting or the hermeneutics of literature. They affirm the performing arts as epistemic and expressive practices in their own right—practices through which we experiment with agency, reconfigure identity, rehearse ethics, and reimagine the world. At the heart of these inquiries lies the concept of presence—not as immediacy or pure expression but as something enacted, situated, and co-constituted. Performance resists reduction to object, form, or meaning. It is process, gesture, and event, where aesthetic value emerges through the interplay of structure and improvisation, habit and transformation, and rule and risk.

To take performance seriously is to challenge the idea that aesthetics is primarily about detached contemplation or static form. It is to understand art as care, vulnerability, responsiveness, and world-making. If philosophy is to remain attuned to art as it is lived and made today, it must be willing to think with the body, move with the rhythm of practice, and listen to the intensities of the situation.

The performing arts do not merely illustrate aesthetic theory; they stretch it, unsettle it, and return it—renewed—to the world.